REFLECTIONS

LUIS DUNO-GOTTBERG

Transaction & Transition

Photographing Change in Contemporary Cuba

Santiago de Cuba. 2015. A butcher shop at Mercado La Plaza. The Kingdom of This World (1949), one of Cuban
author Alejo Carpentier’s best-known novels, narrates the turmoil in Haiti following the French Revolution. Its
central character, a slave named Ti Noël, connects a series of historical events and figures, pointing to a common
thread of Caribbean rebellion through several centuries. In one of the most powerful scenes of the novel, a slave
conceives of the idea of violent transformation by establishing analogies (“amusing coincidence”) between the
head of the Master, heads of mannequins, and the chopped heads of calves at the butcher shop. My visit to a meat
market in Santiago de Cuba in 2015 triggered the memory of that passage, as well as questions abut the nature of
transition currently underway in contemporary Cuba.

“While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël could gaze
his fill at the four wax heads that adorned the counter by
the door. The curls of the wigs, opening into a pool of ring-
lets on the red baize, framed expressionless faces. Those
heads seemed as real—although their fixed stare was so
dead—as the talking head an itinerant mountebank had
brought to the Cap years before to promote the sale of an
elixir for curing toothache and rheumatism. By an amus-
ing coincidence, in the window of the tripe-shop next door
there were calves’ heads, skinned and each with a sprig of
parsley across the tongue, which possessed the same waxy
quality… The morning was rampant with heads, for next
to the tripe-shop the bookseller had hung on a wire with
clothespins the latest prints received from Paris. At least
four of them displayed the face of the King of France in a
border of suns, swords and laurels… But Ti Noël’s atten-
tion was attracted at that moment by a copper engraving,
the last of the series, which differed from the others in sub-
ject and treatment. It represented a kind of French admiral
or ambassador received by a Negro framed by feather fans
and seated upon a throne adorned with figures of monkeys
and lizards.”
-Alejo Carpentier, Kingdom of This World (1949).

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Havana. February 2015. An overturned car by the
U.S. Interests Section. In 1961, President Dwight
D. Eisenhower severed relations with Cuba,
following the Revolution of 1959. On July 1, 2015,
it was announced that, with the reestablishment of
diplomatic ties, the United States Interests Section in
Havana would resume its role as the U.S. Embassy in
Cuba. As of now, the rapprochement sounds more like
a counterpoint, although enthusiasm on the island is
high. This picture, taken early in the morning on a day
in February 2015, comes across as a puzzling sign of
the current times: an old American car overturned in
front of the then U.S. Interests Section.

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 Santiago de Cuba. March
2015. Doors Opened, Doors
Guarded. New regulations
aim to make it easier for U.S.
banks to process financial
transactions involving Cuban
entities and Cuban nationals.
Nevertheless, it appears
that many U.S. banks are
still taking a “wait-and-see”
approach toward the opening
of financial relations between
the U.S. and the island. In
this photo, Cuba’s Banco de
Crédito y Comercio (BANDEC)
in the city of Santiago de Cuba
undergoes restoration. The
guarded threshold is “open,”
but behind the guard an empty
interior is revealed.

Old Havana. March 2016. Dreaming in Cuban. The progressive liberalization of diverse
sectors of the Cuban economy has been followed by the emergence of a new entrepreneurial
and middle class on the island. In this context, the work of artists Yulier P. and Fabian (2+2=5)
has embraced street underground culture and given expression to the anxieties and aspirations
of Cuban youth, who are struggling to navigate a new social and economic landscape. It is
up to them to negotiate or balance competing theses: the erosion of the socialist model, the
gradual restoration of capitalism coexisting in the public sphere, and the official discourse
that Cuba’s socialist experiment could use capitalist tools to develop a new economic model.
This example of street art comments on the social effects of that readjustment: Might the “New
Man” dream new dreams?

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Baracoa 2016 and Havana 2015. The Damned Circumstances of Water Everywhere. On an early
morning in 2016 in Baracoa, the sea announces an arriving cold front and stormy weather, as a girl,
la pionerita, makes her way to school. In looking at the photo it’s impossible not to remember Virgilio
Piñera’s poem, “Island Burden,” and Sandra Ramos’s treatment of the iconic image of the pionerita—a
member of the children’s organization operated by the Cuban Communist Party. In the second image,
taken at sundown in Havana, an old street sweeper makes his way through El Malecón, sweeping what?
The relentless waves brought by a cold northern front?

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Havana. 2016. Resolviendo in Stagnant Water.
These photos are part of a larger series devoted
to empty pools. Such sites, characterized by
emptiness, immobility, and scarcity, resonate with
a post-utopian phase of the Cuban Revolution.
The image is recurrent in contemporary Cuban
cinema. For example, in Carlos Lechuga’s short,
Los Bañistas (2010), a swimming instructor
teaches children to swim in an empty pool, but
that does not stop the kids or the teacher from
accomplishing their goal. The Cuban film La
Piscina (Carlos Machado Quintela, 2011) is one
filled with water, but very little transpires as we
observe four teenagers with physical disabilities
lingering at the swimming pool. Lechuga goes
back to this trope in his 2012 film Melaza. The
featured images go beyond the idea of stagnation,
however; they also evoke the notion of resolver—
“to make do.” In contemporary Cuba, the word
has become a synonym for the struggle to survive.

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Guantánamo and Havana. 2016. Cuba: Open for Business? Something immodest or obscene connects a hog in
the Cuban city of Guantánamo, waiting to be roasted, and a mannequin posing in a store in Havana. The sheet
blown away by the wind exposes the corpse of the animal. The sign hanging on the also lifeless human figure
exposes and sells “Cuba: The Treasure of the Caribbean.”

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Luis Duno-Gottberg is an associate professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at Rice University. He is the author of La
humanidad como mercancía: Introducción a la esclavitud en América y el Caribe (2014) and Solventar las diferencias: La ideología
del mestizaje en Cuba (2003). He is also the editor of La Política Encarnada: Biopolítica y Cultura en la Venezuela Bolivariana (2015),
Submerged. Sumergido. Alternative Cuban Cinema (with Michael Horswell); Haiti and the Americas (with Raphael Dalleo, Carla
Calargé, and Clevis. Headley) (2013), and Miradas al margen. Cine y Subalternidad en América Latina (2008).

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