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

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Jeffrey Skoller

The film ends with a still image of a smiling young Guevara. The title song, "The Day that You'll Love Me" sung by the Argentinian singer Carlos Gardel, tells of a love fantasy that brings about "an almost biblical transformation." Here Katz's mourning work is overtaken by a sense of moral outrage. An intertitle appears quoting a passionate Latin American text from The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia condemning the cold-blooded execution of Guevara after he was captured:

Shot, executed, murdered or finished off - whatever particular personal interpretation one gives to the facts - there is a human truth which gives rise above any subjectivism: A man, a sick and wounded prisoner, was killed without any semblance of justice when he was in the hands of those whose duty it was to rigorously guard his physical safety. Beyond any moral law and above any legal principles, the truth is that an elementary rule of war had been violated: A prisoner is always sacred.(7)

This quotation raises the specter of the brutality and the moral bankruptcy of forces of repression in the history of Latin American politics in the face of Guevara and his cohorts' mythic purity of purpose fighting for social justice. The final postscript states that in 1997, Guevara's remains were finally discovered in Bolivia and returned to Cuba, creating a sense of closure in which the final return is that of Guevara back in the country he helped to transform. One is left to wonder what Guevara might have thought of Cuba in 1997 as the last holdout of the failed international communist experiment he died trying to promote.

Fagin's 95-minute video TropiCola offers a unique window into today's Cuba and suggests a very different idea of rethinking the legacy of the Cuban Revolution. Unlike El Dia, Fagin's image of Cuba in 1997 is marked by the total absence of revolutionary iconography so central to Katz's work. As freewheeling and celebratory of the present as El Dia is deliberate and elegiac, Fagin is not so much interested in the lost promise of a revolutionary past as he is in exploring the political contradictions of the new economic reality of a post-Soviet Cuba and the ways in which Cubans have been forced to rethink their ideas about the future. In TropiCola, as with his other tapes, Fagin has devised an original video essay form that freely mixes documentary and pastiches of every movie genre from soap opera to the musical to television news. In 1997 Fagin traveled to Havana and began a collaboration with some of the most renowned actors from Cuban theater, film and television. Together they created a series of interlinked melodramatic portraits of two fictional families from different social sectors as a way to look at the complex problems facing Cubans during the current economic reconfiguration. In an effort to get Cubans to speak about the stickier elements - both politically and personally - in regard to the state of their revolution, Fagin eschewed conventional ethnographic documentary strategies of conventional tropes of observation, interviews and testimony as signs of authentic representation of people's daily lives. Rather he has gone in the opposite direction, toward a fictitious collaborative and improvisational dramatic form in which the actors, in Fagin's words, "were given abstract characters to play, [to] find a way for them to perform everyday life in more revealing and interesting ways" that are often impossible through direct questioning.(8) Through the displacement of personal testimony onto fictional situations, the actors were able to speak about issues that were much harder to articulate personally. This strategy of mutual collaboration began with Fagin writing a series of loosely structured scenarios from which the actors could improvise. It was through this process that the scenarios could be refined, the nuances of the actor's personal experiences and most importantly the authenticity of their use of language could be incorporated as a part of their performances. Even though this was an "unofficial production" it was through his producer Nina Menendez, a Cuban-American scholar with deep connections to the Cuban cultural community, that Fagin found interest among the Cuban actors in his project and his working strategies.