The future's past: re-imaging the Cuban revolution

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Jeffrey Skoller

Parallel to the current flood of essays, articles and newspaper and television reports from all sectors of the political spectrum that insist on the immanent demise of a hobbled Cuban Revolution, there has been the equally hard to miss return of the image of the revolution's heroic martyr: Che Guevara. This time Guevara does not return hanging on the wall of a college dorm or painted onto a wall of an inner city mural, but as a grunge hipster ghost and motorcycle-riding Madison Avenue shill. In this incarnation, his bereted and bearded visage - an artifact of a by-gone idealistic, but certainly naively wrong-headed era - is appearing on everything from wristwatches to TV commercials. Since the ceaseless fin de siecle mass media declarations of the total defeat of twentieth-century world socialism that began with the globalizing free market push of the mid '90s, no fewer than two dozen books on or by Guevara have appeared in English. Moreover, Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging baby boomer market. Aside from the new "coffee table" edition of the Communist Manifesto, there have been endless special issues on the new "dollar Cuba" in glossy magazines from Cigar Aficionado to The New Yorker and a marketing explosion of Afro-Cuban music as corporate record labels manufacture the latest world music craze - "Dancing with the Enemy" - for those aging liberal arts grads still looking for the real thing. For the more lumpen, there is Guevara's new look as a bereted, talking Chihuahua endorsing fast food tacos or peering out from the faces of low-cost designer "Commie-sheik" watches. This kind of pop appropriation coupled with the return of other iconography of past revolutions is now visible in many American advertising campaigns in the 1990s, working to equate socialist revolutionary iconography with consumer freedom. Youth, idealistic rebellion and participation in the good life of adventure take on the proportion of political propaganda when "infotainment" becomes mixed with current events. A recent Newsweek featured a photo essay of a young and dashing Fidel Castro bounding about the globe as comfortable in tweeds in Central Park as he was in uniform in the cane fields of Oriente, hanging out with Papa Hemingway and a gorgeous long-haired Guevara. How sad it is, the accompanying text suggests, that this once young idealist has become the enfeebled aging dictator of today, further suggesting that the spirit of rebellion is lodged in the young bodies of the beautiful, while the real-politic of past socialist movements are, like impotence and wrinkles, a phenomenon of the old.(1) One wonders what the marketing possibilities might have been if Castro had been assassinated during that 25-year, $50 million CIA operation called Mongoose before his beard started to gray. Ironically in both Cuba and the United States this deep association between youth and progressive change becomes a problem in the effort to sustain the utopian impulses necessary to keep radical social movements vital as they age or become institutionalized and mainstreamed.

This type of analysis of the growing commodification of icons of the "age of revolution" and the ways they have become appropriated and reified by consumer capitalist culture is rather straightforward. Far more complicated and riddled with ambivalence is the status of such iconography and the lived experience of past radical social movements for the left as they attempt to rebuild opposition movements in the face of the globalization of free-market capitalism. If twentieth-century revolutionary socialist movements have failed, as is currently being claimed, does the iconography of this passing age of revolution continue to contain the potential for inspiration by connecting the present with an idealistic past? Or has such iconography become so much cultural baggage, exhausted, now simply nostalgic, preventing the present from rethinking the past critically and imagining the future in new and original ways? Should they be abandoned to become another emblem in the next "Just Do It" ad campaign or should this kind of iconography be integrated into the historical continuum of progressive and revolutionary struggle?

Leandro Katz's 16mm film El Dia Que Me Quieras (The Day That You'll Love Me, 1998) and Steve Fagin's videotape TropiCola (1998) are two recent works to emerge from the American avant-garde that focus on the fate of the Cuban Revolution, investigating and implicitly raising these questions. Though very different kinds of work, both aesthetically and perhaps politically, each takes up the fate of radical utopian social experiments in the twentieth century, specifically the Cuban Revolution. Katz and Fagin are media artists long associated with experimental film and video movements in the U.S. Katz, who began his career as a poet in his native Argentina and has been living and working in the U.S. for the last 30 years, has made numerous films, photographic works and installations focusing on the problem of historical memory, particularly as it relates to Latin America. Fagin, an American, has made five feature-length videos situated in the midst of current postmodern cultural debates, particularly the problems of globalization and First/Third World relations of the last 15 years. Both El Dia Que Me Quieras and TropiCola are radically unconventional films that engage the problem of representing a transitional political movement, as it is expressed in/by/through photography, film and video, whose development has been intimately entangled with the history of such vanguard cultural change.