The Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies opened an exciting new exhibit of 120 photographs by Center founder Lee Lockwood. The black and white photographs cover the early years of the Cuban Revolution (1959-1970) and are the only photographs by a U.S. journalist that can compete in their sense of intimacy and immediacy with those taken by Cubans themselves.

Lockwood was a young (in his 20s) photojournalist when he first traveled to Cuba. He was in Cuba on January 1, 1959, when Batista fled Cuba and Fidel Castro’s young new government came to power. The 26th of July Movement which Fidel led could not have been more different from previous Cuban leaders. Harking back to the “intellectual father” of the revolution, José Martí, Fidel Castro brought new hopes and dreams, and actual changes, to the beleaguered island nation.

Lee Lockwood was caught up in the excitement of those moments, and in the next ten years, he returned to Cuba more than a dozen times to document the changes that the revolution was bringing to Cuba. In 1965, tucked in among a 14-week visit, he was finally able to have a seven-day marathon conversation with the leader of that revolution. Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel (1967, Knopf/Random House), the book-length version of what was first published as a Playboy interview with Castro, received the 1967 Overseas Press Club award for best foreign reporting.

Lockwood’s interview with Fidel Castro remains what is probably the best single document about the revolution’s early years. Certainly, the interview is the most penetrating and Lockwood’s questions elicit the most thoughtful responses of any interview with Castro done since.

The exhibit is organized according to the tasks the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro set for themselves: creating leadership, building a sense of community, building a new economy, and creating a revolutionary consciousness.

We see the first exuberance of those who fought for the overthrow of the corrupt Batista government, including just-released political prisoners [see attached], the first gathering of Fidel with his closest comrades as they try to figure out their first moves (how DO you run a country anyway?), the way they reach out to ordinary Cubans, talking and discussing and arguing with them, an early celebration for July 26th (still considered the “real” beginning of the revolution, the attack on Fort Moncada in Santiago de Cuba) with country folk fording a stream to get to the site, students and teachers and workers in the countryside doing voluntary work – cutting sugar cane, picking coffee, milking cows, whatever was necessary.

The consciousness-raising efforts are seen everywhere, in small signs and flags in a nursery school yard, in building-size images and words (including images of Fidel, something seldom seen in later years), in classrooms with revolutionary slogans and phrases plastered on walls and blackboards. It is heady stuff, not to be missed.

About Lee Lockwood

Lee Lockwood was born in New York in 1932 and attended Yale, Boston University and Columbia University, after which he settled in the Boston area. As a photojournalist he worked with the Black Star Photo Agency, and his photographs and articles appeared in leading magazines in the U.S. and abroad. In 1970 he and Daniel Berrigan wrote Daniel Berrigan: Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes: Conversations after Prison with Lee Lockwood, and his Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver appeared in 1973. Mr. Lockwood lives in Weston, Florida with his wife, Joyce.

For further information:
212.242.0559 or slevinson@cubanartspace.net

 

LEE LOCKWOOD REMEMBERS...

It was January 1st and Fidel Castro was now in power. But he was still in the Sierra Maestra mountains, some 800 miles away, and we were in Havana. How do you photograph a revolution from a thousand miles away? was our dilemma. Bob, who had dragged me to Cuba against my will, said that first we should go to the jails where Batista had kept the political prisoners, there was bound to be some action there. So we flagged the first taxi we saw and told the driver to take us to El Principe prison, which was reputed to house a large number.

In the streets of Havana, the news of Batista’s departure had begun to circulate, and sounds of celebration were on the rise. People were spilling out of their apartments all over the city, many waving improvised red banners with the characters “26” crudely drawn on them, in solidarity with Castro’s “26 de julio” movement, named for his daring but abortive raid on the Moncada Army Barracks on July 26, 1953 in Santiago de Cuba, at the other end of the island. That was five and a half years earlier and it had initiated the revolution. Throughout the city people had begun honking their car horns rhythmically in a chorus – honk-honk! honk-honk-honk! – and many vehicles could now be seen circling the city, crammed with celebrants, many of them also carrying guns and rifles.

We arrived at El Principe prison, a massive structure built from stone in the style of a Spanish fortress, situated at the crest of a steep hill and defended by two large moats, complete with drawbridges fore and aft. Relatives of those en-sconced therein (mostly wives and mothers) could already be seen struggling up the hill, hauling suitcases, shopping bags and other containers stuffed with civilian clothing they had brought for their men to exchange for the white cot-ton uniforms that all prisoners wore. A sizable crowd had already formed near the prison entrance, clamoring for entry.A roar now went up as someone had found a key to the jail. A moment later, the prison’s massive iron gate was flung open, releasing a hoard of inmates, who surged from the prison in a white river and began tumbling down the hill.

Like all the others, I was swept out, streaming down the slope and clutching my cameras for dear life. I landed in the street below the prison, narrowly missing collision with a knot of just-liberated prisoners who were clustered around a chest of weapons liberated from El Principe which they were distribut-ing to their comrades amid shouts of jubilation. While I found my Rol-liflex, I tried to think of something to say that would galvanize them into a picture. But the best I could come up with, as I backed away in order to include them all in my viewfinder, was to call out, “VIVA FIDEL!” Immediately they grabbed their new weapons, raised them high and shouted, “VIVA CUBA LI-BRE! VIVA LA REVOLUCION!”

I took just one picture, then we all embraced each other with gigantic abrazos (hugs). For the first time I felt that I was part of something important. I had never been so ex-cited in my life.

 

 

 

 

Just Liberated Prisoners © Lee Lockwood, 1959,2007