The war of the billboards
By Varela
This new visit by the Van Van orchestra to Miami has introduced an interesting ingredient: the billboard that announces the concert. It symbolizes our evolution as a community. Our maturity. We slid down from the trees and walked.
Decades ago, we would have blown up the billboard, along with a stretch of the highway. But the so-called militant historic exile has shrunk to a hateful geezer with an inflamed prostate, loose-fitting dentures, the shakes, and adult diapers. Everything else is health, progress, a productive life, and a cultural exchange between the nation and its émigrés.
Ever since the Secret Service slipped into Pérez Roura’s and Ninoska’s studios after a combative listener phoned in to ask for a regicide (in other words, blow Obama away), things have turned sour for the local professional instigators. Whereas they used to threaten to bash the heads of musical-show producers and strangle the artists, now they’re satisfied with only saying nasty things about their mothers.
With the FCC regulations hanging overhead, there are some TV channels (some of which used to engage in intimidation) that now interview the visiting musicians with some respect and moderation. They even allow them to answer and defend themselves, sorta. And The Herald, although it publishes malicious articles by the usual two or three opportunists, covers the events with pictures and all. These people have learned another lesson: whosoever ignores the sign of the times and stays still … will run out of time (in their language: without public and without clientele.)
So our recalcitrant friends shut their eyes, throw a tantrum and froth at the mouth, but attempt to adapt to the times. And proceed to counter a billboard with another billboard. And they create the counter-billboard, a patriotic denunciation of a “provocation against the exile community.” They are so dumb and ridiculous that they would hire Posada Carriles as spokesman for an airline or Saavedra as a salesman of black shirts.
They have erected a billboard with no taste, no decency, no social respect or urban esthetics. Worst of all, their idea backfires, because – since all propaganda, good or bad, is propaganda just the same – the motorist driving down the highway now sees two billboards about the same topic. In other words, the product gets advertised twice.
Let me explain. Basically, one billboard announces that Juan Formell and Los Van Van will perform Jan. 31 at the James L. Knight Center, and the other billboard (in insulting terms) says that Juan Formell and half the Cuban musicians’ union are accomplices of a murderous regime, and they ask us not to forget – although they don’t say whether we should not forget the concert, or what? One billboard is an artistic poster, the other is a political placard. But that’s what democracy and freedom of expression are all about. To bring people’s talents to the eyes of the people.
The two billboards represent two cultures. Two social concepts. Pettiness and an opulence of opinions. The fullness and the narrowness of dialectics. The Dr. Jeckyll and the Mr. Hyde of a nationality. They’re the two lives proposed for us Cubans. In the better life, joy overcomes bitterness, because it is a human being’s defense mechanism in the search for happiness.
José Varela was born in Cuba in 1955. He was editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years, working for the magazine Exito (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). A publicist and a television writer, he is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.
