The Art of Propaganda
One day in 1955, Osvaldo Salas, a Cuban expatriate living in New York City and scratching out a living photographing fighters for Ring magazine, had a visitor brought to his studio: a tall, loquacious countryman who needed a portrait taken. The gabby stranger was Fidel Castro, freshly released from a Cuban jail, where he’d served two years for staging a failed uprising against Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
The irrepressible Castro was in New York to raise money from the expatriate community to finance another revolutionary assault. “By 1956, we will be martyrs or we will be free!” was the implausible promise that he shouted to his enthusiastic audiences. Osvaldo--who had no politics whatsoever (and never would)--was charmed by the young man’s dynamic personality, his patriotic fervor and, especially, his audacious self-confidence. Leading him into nearby Central Park, he shot an informal portrait of Castro with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop.
This first picture in the sumptuously produced book “Fidel’s Cuba: A Revolution in Pictures” is so different from the stock image of Cuba’s Maximum Leader that it makes us look twice. Here, a clean-shaven, debonair Fidel with a pencil mustache, elegantly turned out in double-breasted suit, tie and tennis sweater, his left hand in his jacket pocket, strolls the greensward, looking more like a Latin playboy played by Cesar Romero in a Hollywood movie of the era than the scruffy guerrilla fighter he would shortly become. (The picture also serves to remind us of Castro’s origins in the very Cuban bourgeoisie that, in short order, he would overturn and then disenfranchise.)
In fewer than four years, Fidel kept his promise, invaded Cuba, fought a war against Batista’s overwhelmingly superior forces and, on Jan. 1, 1959, expelled the dictator from the island forever. The next day, Roberto Salas, still a tender 18, hopped a ride to Havana from Idyllwild Airport with a planeful of delirious Cubans toting grenades and submachine guns to throw in his lot with the revolution. It took Osvaldo only a week more to close up his studio and join his son. Castro appointed the elder Salas head of photography at Revolucion, the official newspaper of the new order, and Roberto became one of its staff photographers. Suddenly, father and son had jobs, a purpose and a cause.
I was in Cuba when the Salases arrived. Now, 40 years later, it takes effort to recall the euphoria of that remarkable moment so vividly reflected in these pages: the jubilation of the Cuban populace at having got rid of the hated despot at last, their wonder that such a miracle could actually have happened, the innocent sense of optimism that permeated the entire social fabric of the island. After struggling 100 years for their freedom, Cubans at last had their destiny in their own hands and a magical hero, Fidel, to lead them. Everything seemed possible.
Osvaldo Salas’ initial task was to assemble a team of photographers to fill Revolucion’s over-large pages. The newspaper had a critical need of photographs. Cuba, essentially a third-world country, had a small, affluent, relatively well-educated middle class, but the majority, especially the workers and the guajiros, the peasants of the mountains, were illiterate. Although they supported the revolution enthusiastically, they were ignorant of its intentions. Castro, who had an intuitive understanding of the expressive value of photography, gave Salas and his staff a simple mandate: Tell the story of the revolution to the Cuban masses in pictures.
The team he put together--names still mostly unknown outside Cuba: Korda, Corrales, Mayito, Liborio and he and his son--threw themselves into the effort as if they themselves had just been liberated. A disparate group of freelancers, they had been given by the revolution an unexpected opportunity to contribute to their country’s social transformation by documenting its progress. And, since the newspaper had no advertising, they had the luxury of having practically unlimited space in which to display their images.
Although they probably were unaware of the parallel, Salas’ team would operate in many ways as did the Farm Security Administration photographic unit of the 1930s in this country, a New Deal initiative formed under the direction of Roy Stryker to document the poverty and suffering caused by the Great Depression in the rural areas and small towns of the American South (and, not incidentally, to justify the federal expenditures Franklin Roosevelt was pouring into the relief effort). For nearly a decade, 11 photographers with wildly differing styles roamed the countryside, compiling a trove of documentary images that, published in newspapers and magazines, drove home to the rest of the country the incredible dislocation and distress caused by prolonged drought in the American Southwest, the great Dust Bowl which resulted and the plight of thousands of farm families who were forced to make the long, hard trek to California.
Among the photographers whose styles and careers were formed in the FSA were Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans and other star-quality names. But their purpose, like that of the Salas unit, was frankly propagandistic. Stryker’s photographers were even provided with shooting scripts for each day’s work and, when the cumulative result of their work began to add up to an unrelievedly gloomy picture, were instructed to produce more positive images of the national experience.
In this respect, they were actually under stricter editorial control than their Cuban counterparts. Roberto Salas, whose informal captions provide a diverting counterpoint to the photos in this book, insists there was no political superego watching over their shoulders. “The government never told us what to shoot, what to do or what not to do,” he insists.
No doubt this is true. For one thing, during those early years, before the Bay of Pigs invasion pushed Castro leftward toward socialism, everything was disorganized, and few of those in charge were qualified by experience to implement the ambitious initiatives of Castro’s program. The leaders, Castro included, figured things out and made up the rules as they went along. There was no ideology, no system. The glue holding things together was the sense of common purpose and a universal faith that the revolution would succeed. In this respect, the photographers were one with their subjects.
The cultural divide in Cuba between the city and the countryside was not at all imaginary, and it can be said that Revolucion’s photographers played a crucial role in closing this gap. Before the revolution, Havana residents had virtually no contact with the marginal, hardscrabble life of the guajiros of the Sierra (whose support had been crucial to the revolution’s success), while the peasants had only fairy-tale notions about life in the capital.
Salas’ team also had a second mandate: to put human faces on the new leadership, most of whom were unknown to Cubans at the time they came down from the mountains. “Fidel’s Cuba” is replete with engaging portraits by both Salases of these men (and a few women), who must have seemed refreshingly different from the sleek politicos and fat cats who had ruled and exploited the island for 100 years. The new leaders appeared hard-working, unpretentious and fun-loving, not afraid to get their boots muddy or to put in a back-breaking day cutting sugar cane in the infernal Cuban sun.
Osvaldo Salas’ portraits, showing his background as a studio photographer, tend to be frontal and formal-looking, while Roberto, who from youth was a natural photojournalist, is looser and more candid in his approach. Among the most entertaining portraits: Roberto’s picture of two barbudos (bearded ones) with shoulder-length hair, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial during Castro’s 1959 visit to Washington, their cowboy boots and hats and bemused expressions a comic contrast to Lincoln’s solemn gaze; Osvaldo’s tight close-up profile of Castro’s hand and face as he smokes a cigarette, his index fingernail clogged with Cuban soil; Roberto’s candid shot of Che Guevara laughing during a break from a day of voluntary labor, looking more like a day laborer with his bare chest and dirty boots than a member of the ruling elite.
(The enigmatic Guevara was not universally loved at first. The only foreigner in the guerrilla leadership, and one whose public appearances had been limited, he was a mystery to many Cubans, feared and even demonized by some. Pictures such as this helped to demythologize him and convince Cubans that he was one of them after all.)
Another portrait of Guevara by Osvaldo is more familiarly iconic. Shot under TV lights while Castro was speaking at a 26th of July gathering, it could just as well have been taken in a studio. Carefully composed, it shows Guevara in noble profile, cross-lit by the Klieg lights, expelling an airy flower of white cigar smoke.
Indeed, there are enough pictures in this book of Cuban leaders puffing stogies to fill an entire issue of Cigar Aficionado.
And, of course, among the 100-plus black-and-white images in this book are many pictures of the Horse himself: Fidel orating to huge crowds; Fidel schmoozing with Ernest Hemingway; Fidel slashing cane in a straw sombrero; Fidel swinging a baseball bat in full combat uniform, including fatigue hat; Fidel hoisting Leonid Brezhnev’s arm skyward at the Havana airport. (The Soviet premier, making his first official visit to Cuba, intended to kick sand in Washington’s eyes, but the effect is somewhat vitiated by his appearance in this picture as an old reprobate.)
This accidentally satirical image is the closest thing in “Fidel’s Cuba” to anything remotely critical. Cuba’s leaders are always portrayed adoringly as either heroic or humane, while rank-and-file Cuban citizens appear content. This book is not intended, after all, to be a journalistic report but more a family picture album, filled with snapshots of the revolution’s childhood taken by two of its most enthusiastic family members.
But the Cuba in the book is so different from the Cuba of today that its contents have an unintended archeological quality about them. In the light of all that has happened to the revolution--the failed hopes, the vaunted social initiatives dismantled by the triple whammy of the USSR’s collapse, the unremitting U.S. embargo and the leadership’s own willful mistakes--and the pervasive disillusionment of the Cuban people as they struggle to hang on until the day Fidel exits the stage, it is impossible not to feel profoundly melancholy turning these pages.
