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

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Jeffrey Skoller

For Latin Americans who came of age in the 1950s, the summer of love wasn't San Francisco circa 1967, but rather 1959, when the dashing long-haired Castro and Los Barbudos - like rock stars from the future - marched victoriously into Havana. From the vantage point of the cynical '90s, it is hard to understand just how romantic and full of meaning the victory of the Cuban Revolution with its rhetoric was for young Latin Americans. After over a century of brutal imperialist domination, there was a sense of hope for progressive social change - not just in Latin America, but throughout the Third World.

Nearly 40 years later, artist/filmmaker Katz, who left the growing repression in Argentina soon after his fellow countryman Guevara took up residence in Havana, has produced a beautiful and moving series of artworks collectively entitled Proyecto Para El Dia Que Me Quieras/The Project for The Day That You'll Love Me (the title is taken from the famous Argentinian tango of the same name) with the image of the slain Guevara at the center of all the pieces. Katz's return to this photograph of Guevara's dead body in the late 1990s is an effort to contemplate the ways in which the hopes and promise of revolutionary social movements of the century as a whole turned out. This body of work can be seen as an elegy to a lost moment when love, youth and revolution seemed synonymous. As part of an ongoing series of artworks including gallery installations, photographic series and this 30-minute film, Katz meditates on the strong relationships between the romance of liberation struggle, violence and death that have surrounded the history of Latin American revolutionary movements. El Dia is also a work of mourning - an attempt to work through the trauma of a lost moment, the horror of ceaseless dead bodies lost in Latin America's ongoing struggles for justice and self determination, of youth, the romance of heroes and the possibility of progressive utopian transformation central to the 1960s. In keeping with the sense of infinite possibility that defined those years, Katz focuses on Guevara's final ill-fated revolutionary campaign in Bolivia. In early 1965, Guevara left Cuba and his position as hero of the Cuban Revolution for Bolivia with a group of 17 followers to organize the peasantry and overthrow the military regime of General Rene Barrientos. Two years later, in October 1967, with the help of the CIA, Guevara and his small band of guerrillas were captured in the mountains of Bolivia and executed.

In El Dia, Katz contemplates the last photograph of Guevara's body, seen surrounded by the Bolivian military officers who captured and killed him. The photograph was published in newspapers around the world to prove that Guevara's campaign to foment revolutions beyond Cuba had ended in ultimate defeat. The photograph showing his prone corpse, beatific with open eyes gazing skyward, in fact, had the opposite effect. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to familiar images of Jesus Christ, the photograph worked instead to embody Guevara as the Christ-like martyr of international liberation struggles. Throughout Latin America, it is still common to see Guevara's photograph displayed next to images of Christ or the Pope. This photograph has long fascinated the international cultural left, linking contemporary revolutionary iconography to traditional Christian religious and messianic imagery in Western art. John Berger, for example, compared it to Andrea Mantegna's Dead Christ (c. 1501) and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulip (1632).(2) More recently, the exhibition "Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message"(3) looked at the myriad ways Guevara's image has been used politically, in fine art and pop culture.