Photos reveal Cuba
Legendary
American photographer Walker Evans travelled to Cuba to document the
waning days of dictator Gerardo Machado in the 1930s. His photos were
published in Carleton Beals’ The
Crime of Cuba,
which garnered rave reviews in 1933. Sixty-five years later, Evans’
student Alex Harris photographed Cuba in the waning days of Fidel
Castro at a pivotal moment in Cuba’s affairs with the U.S.
What
Harris documents in The
Idea of Cuba
co-published by the University of New Mexico Press and the Duke
Center for Documentary Studies, is not only contemporary Cuba but
also the idea
of
Cuba. Harris’ photographs reveal Cuba’s history and heroism, the
symbols of its culture, and gender issues on the island. Harris shows
how Cuba preserves the ideals of utopian philosopher and intellectual
José Martí — despite a difficult history, political
rigidity, and the dark shadow cast over the country by the U.S.
As
Harris worked, one theme emerged: change is slow. “Cuba and the
United States are stuck in old attitudes toward one another,” says
Harris. “What do Americans really know about Cuba?”
Harris’
images allow us to experience a Cuba apart from politics. Caribbean
historian and Cuban Lillian Guerra of Yale, in her essay,
“Cubanidad,” writes about what is missing
in
Harris’s work, compared to the work of other photographers of Cuba.
“Missing
are the predictable narratives of decaying societal structures,
failing ideological foundations, and the anachronistic, exoticized
panoramas,” Guerra says.
Replacing
these outmoded ideas in Harris’ portrayal are irony, collective
memory, possessiveness, and pain that are the real protagonists in
Cuba. The
Idea of Cuba offers
valuable insight into the Cuban national character so to better
understand what gives Cubans their enduring strength and hope for the
future. Not only an extraordinary body of photographic work, The
Idea of Cuba also
gets at what is essential and unique about the Cuban people: their
struggles to create Martí’s utopian society — the “idea”
of Cuba.
The
Idea of Cuba is
available at bookstores or directly from the University of New Mexico
Press. To order, please call 800-249-7737 or visit www.unmpress.com
Alex
Harris is
professor of documentary studies at Duke University and is a founder
of the Center for Documentary Studies and DoubleTake
magazine.
He is author or editor of a dozen books, including River
of Traps, a
Pulitzer Prize finalist, written by William deBuys and published by
the University of New Mexico Press. Lillian
Guerra is
assistant professor of Caribbean history at Yale University. She is
the author of The
Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalism in Early
Twentieth-Century Cuba (University
of North Carolina Press.)
