Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution
Rigoberto Romero, beginning with his tendentious 1975 series “With the Sweat of a Millionaire,” deploys an aesthetic that might be termed “sunny proletarianism” in portraits of workers at rest–of a woman beaming over her humble but substantial meal, of two field laborers grinning next to a stalk of sugarcane they’ve split open and written their names on (incidentally reminding us that literacy for all was one of the revolution’s more successful bequests). “Marucha” (Maria Eugenia Haya–one of several artists best known by a nickname) in her 1979 sequence “In the Lyceum” shows older Cuban couples frozen forever at their most frenzied, mamboing to music whose soaring brass and insinuating rhythms one can all but hear. The contrasts Marucha draws between silence and sound, stasis and motion, appear too in the photos’ setting: a grand beaux arts ballroom whose high ceilings, glassed-in portals, and marble walls serve as a glacial European counterpoint to the imagined heat of the band and the dancers.
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Making the most of what they’ve got also influences brilliant improvisations by two conceptually inclined artists, Manuel Pina and Carlos Garaicoa. Pina’s simple, haunting window on the sea over the sill of Havana’s famous Malecon boulevard is one of the show’s masterworks, but he makes his boldest statement in Manipulations, Truths, and Other Illusions (1995) using found objects: small glass-plate negatives from a forgotten 19th-century photographer. Inspired by these family portraits and landscapes, he’s juxtaposed them with his own contemporary views of Havana, which have provocative sexual and racial dimensions: for instance, a shot of a black woman in a culture that still has a racial hierarchy. Then he transforms these images into billboards with texts that propagandize not on behalf of the glorious revolution, as usual, but of tourism: the black woman becomes a symbol of the country’s “rainbow coalition.” Since the Russians pulled out and the pleasure seekers started rolling in, tossing around U.S. dollars, adjustments have been required in ideology as in everything else.
