50 Years of Cuban Life in the Work and Words of 25 Photographers

About the Exhibit

This exhibit updates the Center’s excellent 1985 photography exhibit at the Ledel Gallery in New York City (“40 Years”). The photographers included are the original 20 plus five: Tito Alvarez, Constantino Arias, Ivan Cañas, Corrales, Mario Díaz, Ernesto Fernández, Mario Ferrer, José Alberto Figueroa, Abigail García, Gory, Grandal, Ernesto Javier, Korda, Raúl Martínez, Marucha, Mayito, José Ney, Max Orlando, Pirole, Rolando Pujol, Rigoberto Romero, José Tabío Palma, Osvaldo Salas, and Vidal.

The exhibit consists of 100 black and white images, covering the period of the 1940’s to the 1990’s, several videotapes which include interviews with some of the photographers (including Corrales and Korda) and documentary films covering the same period. A few of the photographs are framed, but most will be sent in protective envelopes to be prepared for exhibition as desired by the renting institution. Each photograph has an identifying caption card, and an exhibit list shows which of the photographs can be ordered. The exhibit is also accompanied by catalogues from the first exhibit and by sets of eight postcard images from the show, both of which can be sold during the exhibit.

Rental fees vary with the number of photographs requested, and the exhibit period of time. 100 photographs for one month is $10,000. 50 photographs for one month is $6,000, but we will always try to work out something satisfactory for each institution.

The excellent 64-page catalogue includes an introductory essay by critic Max Kozloff, 20 images, biographies of and quotes from the photographers, and essays by anthropologist Johnnetta B. Cole (formerly president of Spelman College) and political scientist Richard R. Fagen. Excerpts from the introduction are included below.

From the Catalogue

Critic Max Kozloff, in his perceptive introduction to the 1985 exhibit, writes:

“Photography is the least known and yet one of the most revealing and instructive of the arts through which revolutionary Cuba has reflected upon itself. . . . Despite the necessary fragmentary character of photographic pictures, and the individualistic, comparatively unorganized working conditions of the photographers themselves, their images lead towards an integral understanding, from the inside, of a country that has been consistently distorted, when not ignored, by outside media. . . .

“Of course, what sets the Cubans apart is their revolution. For 25 years, among the tropical and undeveloped Latin American countries, so many of whose rulers caused their citizens to ‘disappear,’ there existed, quite alone, a governmental form and a social model of a very different kind, invested in the comprehensive delivery of social welfare, hemmed in by the U.S. economic blockade, burdened by the gravest material problems, but liberated from the general grief. The Cuban photographers . . . matured as picture-makers in an unprecedented situation, one that assumed the atmosphere of trust, and the sharing of fundamental values, to be nation-wide.

“We have only to compare some good Cuban photography of the Batista era with the work that came after 1959 to see the psychological change brought by the revolution to the technical images. José Tabío Palma and Constantino Arias were serious professionals, the first devoted to a softly lit elegy of the rural poor, and the second, a flash publicity photographer sometimes operating out of the Hotel Nacional, and then in the rumba palaces, cabarets, or along the resort beaches and tourist casinos of the capital. If Arias was required to do justice to gringo bacchanals, and he covered the political ‘carnival’ of the time (1950’s), he also studied the raffish backstreets or seedy courtyards, the dudes and hookers there, cafe life and lottery vendors, all of them illuminated by an icy and often sardonic flash. Tabío and Arias offered a quite thoroughgoing critique of the cliché of Cuba as paradise island and of Havana as fun city. . . .

"All that dissolves in Raúl Corrales’ justly famous picture of guerrilla horsemen entering the United Fruit Company’s plantation in 1959. For me this has always been a charming photograph, and its charm stemmed from a hunch that these tough conquerors from the sierra didn’t know too much about riding horses. . . . When Corrales explained that the caballeros were symbolically re-enacting a plantation takeover during the 1895 War of Independence, my idea was confirmed and the charm was enhanced. In this amiable charade, there’s no need to dwell on the obvious associations of the straw hats and the forward march. Much more important, even for political significance, is the psychological stance of the image. Not only are subjects and photographer equal participants in a historical event, their mood brings spectators right in, as if they, too, were engaged in an act of national re-possession. Here is one of the great welcoming images in the history of photography, all the more irresistible and buoyant because it seems such a lark.

"Unlike other Latin American photography, that of revolutionary Cuba favored icons or symbols of national consciousness. José Figueroa has a series called ‘That Flag,’ and Mario Díaz titles his ‘My Flag.’ Raúl Martínez often frames flag posters and colors them in black and white photographs. . . .

"Cuban photography can display a fine sensual appetite for the world, but its most seductive element is its rhetoric of social inclusion. The freshness of its campaign consists in this: that its social transactions continue unreflectively past the frame, or rather that the ‘frame’ is re-defined as the national community in which viewers, no less than subjects, are cast together . .

"Given the scantiness and the de facto blackout of U.S. media coverage of Cuban life, the information contained in these photographs is especially useful. Aside from their material data, however, these images show how many Cubans have perceived themselves, since their revolution, and that is valuable. There is the outer history of the island, big events recorded by official photo-journalists: Fidel in the Sierra Maestra, the great masses in the Plaza de la Revolución, the Bay of Pigs invasion repelled, the missile crisis, and mass protests at the Mariel exodus of 1980. Throughout all Cuban photography, eyes flash in anger only at Mariel, where it was demonstrated that a very sizable chunk of the Cuban people, for the most varied reasons, had opted out of the revolution. . . . "

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