Tampa Bay Rays vs Cuban National Team, Estadio latinoamericano, Havana, March 2016
Does it seem like much of a stretch to envision that millions of our fellow north americans are mentally exhausted and not a little trepidatious as the relentless information shit stream saturates our waking moments with the details and detritus of Election 2016. Add the vexation of escalating references to a demagogue who was thought to be a joke (until he wasn’t) may yet approach unnerving levels of hysteria. Thus, the visit of the President of the United States to the sovereign nation of Cuba may provide a welcome distraction from our own endlessly echoing travails .
Lets put aside * the historiographic quagmire that currently accounts for US- Cuban relations since Thomas Jefferson’s presidency (no one who follows the imperial foreign policy of this most exceptional of all nations should be surprised that Cuba has long been a object of lust to US mandarins). This largest of the Greater Antilles island nations has also long been a provisioner of a various sybaritic pleasures (coffee, cigars, rum baseball **) as well as cultural riches (Jose Marti, Alejo Carpentier, Kid Chocolate,Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Ernesto Lecuono, Minnie Minoso,Celia Cruz, Beny More, Alicia Alonzo, José Raúl Capablanca (y Graupera) and a long list of great piano players).And as much as any place in the known world ,Cuba is a disproportionately photogenic place. The substantial list of photographers who have done work in Cuba and the fine monographs that have been published are testimony to that circumstance—David Alan Harvey, Robert Polidori,Mariette Pathy Allen, Micheal Eastman, E Wright Ledbetter to name but a few.
Now comes a new tome by Anna Mia Davidson, Cuba, Black and White, which, as is indicated by the title ,presents Cuba linda in that most evocative of pallets.
I am aware of a couple of monographs that present Cuba in this way —sixty of the images Walker Evans shot in 1933 for American journalistCarleton Beals ‘s The Crime of Cuba [ as had long been the case Cuba was in the thrall of another corrupt and cruel dictator) have been republished under the title Cuba, most recently with a vivid and illuminating introductory essay by poet and man of letters Andrei Codrescu.
Cuban born musician/composer Clemente Ruiz created a jumpin’ video of Evans’s images
And Burt Glinn’ S El Momento Revolutionario that catalogues the early days of the Triumph.
As the publishers note asserts this book
presents a unique collection of never-before-seen photographs by veteran Magnum photographer Burt Glinn, recording Fidel Castro’s historic entry into Havana. In the introductory memoir, Glinn describes the combination of chutzpah and journalistic prescience that led him to leave a New York party and hop a plane to Havana on New Year’s Eve, 1959. The photographs he returned with—of Fidel thronged by his countrymen and women as he stopped to encourage them along the road to Havana, of troops embracing, and of fierce men and women alike taking up arms in the streets—are full of the revolutionary fervor and idealistic anticipation that characterized that moment in Cuban history.
At the age of 25 Anna Mia Davidson visited Cuba for the first time in 1999
determined to capture her personal vision of this isolated Carribean island nation with her camera. At this time Cuba was just beginning to recover from the “Special Period,” the economic crisis that occurred after 1989 when Russia withdrew its financial support after nearly four decades. On further travels during the following eight years, Davidson portrayed daily life in the cities, villages and the countryside in an attempt to depict her sense of Cuba’s “soul.” Her black-and-white photographs reflect the resilience, ingenuity and spirit of the Cuban people during the embargo against them. It was also here that Davidson came into contact with traditional forms of sustainable farming—a passion that has since influenced her life and work.
*an issue I am happy to take up in my annual celebration of the Triumphant Cuban Revolution with a bibliographical review of Cuban related books and media.
The announcement this week that the Obama Administration’s initiative to normalize relations with Cuba was,with the exception of the usual pathological reactions by the Know-Nothing party and its flying monkeys, greeted with jubilation and hosannahs. And a number commentators offered to catch up curious readers with lists of Cuban books. Thus, I feel compelled to offer my own primer on Cuban culture
John Williams, a New York Times writer put together a useful list which is a good place to start:
“Telex From Cuba” by Rachel Kushner
“Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba” by Tom Miller
“The Man Who Loved Dogs” by Leonardo Padura
“Dancing With Cuba” by Alma Guillermoprieto
“Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba” by Tom Gjelten
“Cobra” and “Maitreya” by Severo Sarduy
“Waiting for Snow in Havana” by Carlos Eire
“Three Trapped Tigers” by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
“Before Night Falls” by Reinaldo Arenas
“Dreaming in Cuban” by Cristina García
“Paradiso” by José Lezama Lima
“Explosion in a Cathedral”by Alejo Carpentier
“Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life” by Jon Lee Anderson
Cuba by Hugh Thomas
Cuba: Or the Pursuit of Freedom by Hugh Thomas
This is the original seminal comprehensive survey of Cuban history from pre-Columbian innocence to Spanish conquest to American annexation to the revolutionary present.
Fidel By Tad Szluc
Fidel: A Critical Portrait by Tad Szluc
Any book list would be incomplete with out a book on Fidel. Szluc’s biography is useful and unadorned and it only suffers from the burden that afflicts most stories of person’s life, there is too much information.
The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes
The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes (a novel)
Journalist Fuentes was once a revolutionary and a member of Fidel’s inner circle. As such things happen, he came a persona non grata,fleeing from a death sentence. This fiction closely adheres to the facts but is presented in Castro’s bombastic, megalomaniacal style voice (familiar for his endless hours long orations)
Mea Cuba by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Mea Cuba by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guillermo Cabrera Infante exiled in 1965, an important figure in the cultural battles that took place under the Triumph of the Revolution,was the quintessential Cuban man of letters and his Mea Cuba, a collection of prose miscellany, showcases his wry wit, penchant for puns, and encyclopedic overview of Cuban literary culture.This anthology is rife with the narratives about those battles its belligerents told by a gifted storyteller.I interviewed him in 1995.Here’s a snippet of that chat:
RB: Why do you write?
GCI…I was a very keen reader which I’m not anymore. So there was a book called El Senor Presidente by Miguel Ángel Asturias[Nobel Prize winner] a Guatemalan writer…it was all the rage in 1947. A friend of mine told me about it and there was an article in a magazine and there were excerpts from the book. And I saw them and I said to him, “If that’s writing I can do it.”
And he said to me, “I bet you can not.” I said, “yes, I’ll prove it to you.” So I wrote a short story which was just terrible. I’m not going to tell you the title because I want to forget all about it. And he read it and said why don’t you take it to Bohemia, which was the same magazine the magazine that published the article on Asturias. And I took it and I met there a man who was managing editor of Bohemia, who was in charge of all fiction, who was also a Spanish exile from Franco. He was a member of the Republic, very important in those years…I gave him the short story and he said come back next week and I thought, because he had a very thick Spanish, I mean, Northern Spanish accent, you wouldn’t believe it how fast they talk and how thick they are that they actually can be, I thought that he meant that the next week they were going to publish my story. So I went back and he was there. And, of course, they didn’t publish my story so soon. They waited for the next year— for 1948. But this man said why don’t you come to see me on Saturday afternoon and I’ll give you some books to read. And he gave me mostly books by Spanish authors which, for me at the time, didn’t mean anything. So Spanish writers were not my ideal of writers at all. And this man made me his private secretary. So, he published the short story. They gave me fifty dollars, which for me was, you know, like Ali Babba going into the cave. And I just wrote another short story. They published it and again another fifty dollars. So, I made a correlation between writing and getting money. And then it became a habit. And then it became something more serious, like an addiction. And that’s how everything started.
The Mambo Kings Sings Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love Oscar Hijuelos
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a vivid albeit melancholy portrayal of life in mid century Cuba and in the US for Cuban exiles/immigrants.
Los Gusanos by John Sayles
Los Gusanos by John Sayles
Many writers have attempted to write the Cuban-American exile story; with Los Gusanos SP , worms), gringo John Sayles lays out a compelling tale as illuminating as any documentary on Cuban-American relations during Fidel’s tenure.
Driving Through Cuba by Carlos Gebler
Driving Through Cuba: Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugar Cane and Revolution by Carlos Gebler
in 1988 Gebler, in an ailing Russian auto, travels the length of Cuba ostensibly in a hunt for a 1959 Coup de Ville Brougham),. encountering abandoned vintage cars, the propagandist museum of the Bay of Pugs, decaying architecture in Old Havana, and once famous beaches swamped with dead crabs.
Cuba in Splinters: Eleven Stories from the New Cuba Selected and edited by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Cuba in Splinters: Eleven Stories from the New Cuba Selected and edited by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
I have written previously about this anthology Pardo Lazo characterizes the sum total of the eleven stories:
t is possible that this anthology is the portrait of a family that never was. The communicating vessels between these eleven stories are not bridges but circuits: affinities, violence, tensions between text and anti-text which coinciding in the same book, produce a collision that consumes its own meaning, generating light. A radiant, incandescent zero of patria-plasma
Cuba and Its Music by Ned Sublette
Cuba and Its Music by Ned Sublette
Texan musician Ned Sublette, founder of Qbadisc records, taps his unparalleled knowledge of Cuban culture and music to provide the informed and impassioned history Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press). P.S.: A second volume is forthcoming.
The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria
The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria
Among other things this tome dispenses with the myth that Castro was scouted by the U.S. major leagues and was signed…well, you can guess the rest. Echevarria also does well to restore dignity to Caribbean and Cuban beisbol that suffers at the hands of other nasty yanqui habits and attitudes.
Back Channel to Cuba by Willima Le Grande and Peter Kornbluth
Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana by William M. LeoGrande , Peter Kornbluh
As has now become apparent Barack Obama’s promise of a “new approach” has come to fruition. This book, using hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and interviewing numerous negotiators, intermediaries, and policy makers presents the long untold history of efforts to normalize US-Cuban relations.
Cuba by Walker Evans
Cuba by Walker Evans
In the spring of that 1933, Evans was asked by publisher J. B. Lippincott to produce a body of work about Cuba to accompany a book, The Crime of Cuba,by journalist Carleton Beals. It was intended to be an expose of Cuban President Gerardo Machado,yet another corrupt and rapacious American puppet. When Evans arrived in May, as he later wrote, Cuba was “in the midst of a revolution” and these images are from the end of the Machado dictatorship, who was gone by August
Transcuba by
Transcuba by Mariette Pathy Allen
New York-based photographer and painter Mariette Pathy Allen has been documenting transgender culture worldwide for more than 30 years. Apparently under the newest regime the transgender community of Cuba is gaining some measure of acceptance. This tome also includes interviews and and a note from Director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education in Havana, Mariela Castro, who is the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education in Havana (who happens to be Cuban President Raúl Castro’s daughter), and was instrumental in passage (2008)of the law to allowing transgender individuals to receive sex reassignment surgery and change their legal gender.[ed note; this was taken from my September 9 book notice]
Cuba by David Alan Harvey
Cuba by David Allen Harvey
Magnum photographer Harvey’s collaboration National Geographic staff writer Elizabeth Newhouse is an excellent survey of life in contemporary Cuba. See gallery of photos here
Havana by Robert Polidori
Havana by Robert Polidori
Robert Polidori‘s frequent appearances in the New Yorker, should make his focus on human habitats and environments apparent as do his monographs on VErsailles, post Katrina New Orleans, Chernobyl, Beirut (Points Between…Up Till Now his latest tome includes samples of from those series).To quote his publisher
In this city the peddler lives where the countess once resided; children dance and tumble where merchants conducted their business. Each photograph is a discovery and a fragment of the city’s biography.
Shot in the Dominican, Schnabel manages to capture the feel of the Triumphant Revolution and its not-so-triumphant aftermath. Javier Badem won an Oscar for his portrayal of poet Reinaldo Arenas.
Our Man in Havana by Sir Carol Reed
Graham Greene’s lampoon of incompetent secret services and secret police (later artfully mimicked by John LeCarre in Our Tailor in Panama) was shot in Havana with a young Alec Guiness, Noel Coward and US funny man Ernie Kovacs) Reed did leave out the live sex show that was mentioned in the novel.
Currently reading There Must Be Some Mistake by Frederick Barthelme (Little Brown)
For someone who came of age aware of the titans of 20th century photography, recent museum exhibitions and their attendant monographs are an encouraging sign that raging digitalisis has not extinguished the memory of and interest in pictures made out of light, silver and paper. Personally, I am past the time of life that finds traveling to museums a comfortable and satisfying way of seeing photograph or for that matter any art. Thus that publishers continue to invest in the production of paper books is a double blessing— one need not travel and the opportunity to view favorite images at will and endlessly.
Harry Callahan: Retrospective by Dirk Luckow , Sabine Schnakenberg & Harry Callahan
Harry Callahan’s life coincides with most of the 20th century. When he passed in 1999 he left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. So, consider the task of curating a retrospective of Callahan’s long and productive and multi faceted career. WHich is the challenge Dirk Luckow and Sabine Schnakenberg took upon themselves in assembling Retrospective (Kehrer Verlag) It’s a spendid tome and if you are in the neighborhood or are inclined to travel to Munich you can view Harry Callahan – Retrospective through October 27, 2013 at Münchner Stadtmuseum.
Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door by Abelardo Morell, Elizabeth Siegel, Brett Abbott and Paul Martineau
Youngster Abelardo Morrell work can be found in collections the world over and he is currently on exhibit Chicago’s Art Institute through September 13. And barring a trip to the Heartland, you will find his work in Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door by Abelardo Morell, Elizabeth Siegel, Brett Abbott and Paul Martineau (Art Institute of Chicago)
Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition by Lincoln Kirstein, Walker Evans and Sarah Meister
If Walker Evans needs an introduction you are in the wrong place.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is celebrating the anniversary of Walker Evans’s 1938 exhibition with a reprise of Walker Evans American Photographs through January 26, 2014. The exhibition catalogue, Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition by Lincoln Kirstein, Walker Evans and Sarah Meister(The Museum of Modern Art, New York;) is essentially the edition offered originally, taking advantage of new technology available seventy five years later to produce a first rate book of 60 plus photographs.
Currently reading Orfeo by Richard Powers (WW Norton)
Before television (in fact, before rural electrification) periodicals did what some tv programs still attempt to do. Before Henry Luce invented Life magazine, his pet project was Fortune (upon which he concentrated his fawning attention and upon which he lavished many dollars, employing talented artists, accomplished or yet to be. James Agee before he made his mark (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) (he was awarded Yale’s Younger Poets prize in 1934), was hired to travel to southeastern Alabama to write about white tenant farmers.He was joined by Walker Evans and they spent two months in Hale County, Alabama, living with three different tenant families. The fruits of that project were never published (until recently). The newly renascent Baffler #19, editor John Summers takes great pride in uncovering and publishing a good chunk of this mislaid gem. As John Jeremiah Sullivan observes
That’s the first thing to be said about this essay: Fortune was crazy not to run it. It was a failure of nerve, and a lost chance at running one of the great magazine pieces from that era. But who knows? It’s possible no one ever actually read it. I’ve worked at many magazines; you’d be stunned. Also: fifty pages on malnourished, fatigue-racked poor people? It was Fortune. Magazines do like having advertisers. Which only makes what The Baffler and Melville House have done more valuable.
Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans
Sullivan is referring to the recently published 30,000 word essay in book form, Cotton Tenants: Three Families James Agee and Walker Evans’ (Melville House) with an introduction by John Summers. I leave it to you suss outwhat it signifies that 70 plus years later Fortune magaizne is a running a review of the book in its June 10 issue
This Is the Day: The March on Washington by Leonard Freed
And yet another reminder of the power and poignancy of black and white photography is This Is the Day: The March on Washington (Getty Publications) by Magnum photographer Leonard Freed with textual embellishment by Michael Eric Dyson, Paul Farber and Julian Bond.The March, you will recall, took place on August 28, 1963 with a quarter of a million people gathered at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in a peaceful protest demanding equal rights and economic equality for African Americans. It was where Martin Luther King declaimed his famous “I have a dream…” Though
Malcolm X did refer to the march as the “Farce on Washington.”
Freed’s tome includes 79 images culled from innumerable photos he shot that day—before, during, and after the march. Included in this array is an account of the preparations leading up to the march by civil rights activist,author and statesman Julian Bond and some thoughts on its significance by Dyson.
You can find a sampling of Freed’s photographs here
ourmaninboston 