The future's past: re-imaging the Cuban revolution.

Parallel to the current flood of essays, articles and newspaper and television reports from all sectors of the political spectrum that insist on the immanent demise of a hobbled Cuban Revolution, there has been the equally hard to miss return of the image of the revolution's heroic martyr: Che Guevara. This time Guevara does not return hanging on the wall of a college dorm or painted onto a wall of an inner city mural, but as a grunge hipster ghost and motorcycle-riding Madison Avenue shill. In this incarnation, his bereted and bearded visage - an artifact of a by-gone idealistic, but certainly naively wrong-headed era - is appearing on everything from wristwatches to TV commercials. Since the ceaseless fin de siecle mass media declarations of the total defeat of twentieth-century world socialism that began with the globalizing free market push of the mid '90s, no fewer than two dozen books on or by Guevara have appeared in English. Moreover, Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging baby boomer market. Aside from the new "coffee table" edition of the Communist Manifesto, there have been endless special issues on the new "dollar Cuba" in glossy magazines from Cigar Aficionado to The New Yorker and a marketing explosion of Afro-Cuban music as corporate record labels manufacture the latest world music craze - "Dancing with the Enemy" - for those aging liberal arts grads still looking for the real thing. For the more lumpen, there is Guevara's new look as a bereted, talking Chihuahua endorsing fast food tacos or peering out from the faces of low-cost designer "Commie-sheik" watches. This kind of pop appropriation coupled with the return of other iconography of past revolutions is now visible in many American advertising campaigns in the 1990s, working to equate socialist revolutionary iconography with consumer freedom. Youth, idealistic rebellion and participation in the good life of adventure take on the proportion of political propaganda when "infotainment" becomes mixed with current events. A recent Newsweek featured a photo essay of a young and dashing Fidel Castro bounding about the globe as comfortable in tweeds in Central Park as he was in uniform in the cane fields of Oriente, hanging out with Papa Hemingway and a gorgeous long-haired Guevara. How sad it is, the accompanying text suggests, that this once young idealist has become the enfeebled aging dictator of today, further suggesting that the spirit of rebellion is lodged in the young bodies of the beautiful, while the real-politic of past socialist movements are, like impotence and wrinkles, a phenomenon of the old.(1) One wonders what the marketing possibilities might have been if Castro had been assassinated during that 25-year, $50 million CIA operation called Mongoose before his beard started to gray. Ironically in both Cuba and the United States this deep association between youth and progressive change becomes a problem in the effort to sustain the utopian impulses necessary to keep radical social movements vital as they age or become institutionalized and mainstreamed.

This type of analysis of the growing commodification of icons of the "age of revolution" and the ways they have become appropriated and reified by consumer capitalist culture is rather straightforward. Far more complicated and riddled with ambivalence is the status of such iconography and the lived experience of past radical social movements for the left as they attempt to rebuild opposition movements in the face of the globalization of free-market capitalism. If twentieth-century revolutionary socialist movements have failed, as is currently being claimed, does the iconography of this passing age of revolution continue to contain the potential for inspiration by connecting the present with an idealistic past? Or has such iconography become so much cultural baggage, exhausted, now simply nostalgic, preventing the present from rethinking the past critically and imagining the future in new and original ways? Should they be abandoned to become another emblem in the next "Just Do It" ad campaign or should this kind of iconography be integrated into the historical continuum of progressive and revolutionary struggle?

Leandro Katz's 16mm film El Dia Que Me Quieras (The Day That You'll Love Me, 1998) and Steve Fagin's videotape TropiCola (1998) are two recent works to emerge from the American avant-garde that focus on the fate of the Cuban Revolution, investigating and implicitly raising these questions. Though very different kinds of work, both aesthetically and perhaps politically, each takes up the fate of radical utopian social experiments in the twentieth century, specifically the Cuban Revolution. Katz and Fagin are media artists long associated with experimental film and video movements in the U.S. Katz, who began his career as a poet in his native Argentina and has been living and working in the U.S. for the last 30 years, has made numerous films, photographic works and installations focusing on the problem of historical memory, particularly as it relates to Latin America. Fagin, an American, has made five feature-length videos situated in the midst of current postmodern cultural debates, particularly the problems of globalization and First/Third World relations of the last 15 years. Both El Dia Que Me Quieras and TropiCola are radically unconventional films that engage the problem of representing a transitional political movement, as it is expressed in/by/through photography, film and video, whose development has been intimately entangled with the history of such vanguard cultural change.

For Latin Americans who came of age in the 1950s, the summer of love wasn't San Francisco circa 1967, but rather 1959, when the dashing long-haired Castro and Los Barbudos - like rock stars from the future - marched victoriously into Havana. From the vantage point of the cynical '90s, it is hard to understand just how romantic and full of meaning the victory of the Cuban Revolution with its rhetoric was for young Latin Americans. After over a century of brutal imperialist domination, there was a sense of hope for progressive social change - not just in Latin America, but throughout the Third World.

Nearly 40 years later, artist/filmmaker Katz, who left the growing repression in Argentina soon after his fellow countryman Guevara took up residence in Havana, has produced a beautiful and moving series of artworks collectively entitled Proyecto Para El Dia Que Me Quieras/The Project for The Day That You'll Love Me (the title is taken from the famous Argentinian tango of the same name) with the image of the slain Guevara at the center of all the pieces. Katz's return to this photograph of Guevara's dead body in the late 1990s is an effort to contemplate the ways in which the hopes and promise of revolutionary social movements of the century as a whole turned out. This body of work can be seen as an elegy to a lost moment when love, youth and revolution seemed synonymous. As part of an ongoing series of artworks including gallery installations, photographic series and this 30-minute film, Katz meditates on the strong relationships between the romance of liberation struggle, violence and death that have surrounded the history of Latin American revolutionary movements. El Dia is also a work of mourning - an attempt to work through the trauma of a lost moment, the horror of ceaseless dead bodies lost in Latin America's ongoing struggles for justice and self determination, of youth, the romance of heroes and the possibility of progressive utopian transformation central to the 1960s. In keeping with the sense of infinite possibility that defined those years, Katz focuses on Guevara's final ill-fated revolutionary campaign in Bolivia. In early 1965, Guevara left Cuba and his position as hero of the Cuban Revolution for Bolivia with a group of 17 followers to organize the peasantry and overthrow the military regime of General Rene Barrientos. Two years later, in October 1967, with the help of the CIA, Guevara and his small band of guerrillas were captured in the mountains of Bolivia and executed.

In El Dia, Katz contemplates the last photograph of Guevara's body, seen surrounded by the Bolivian military officers who captured and killed him. The photograph was published in newspapers around the world to prove that Guevara's campaign to foment revolutions beyond Cuba had ended in ultimate defeat. The photograph showing his prone corpse, beatific with open eyes gazing skyward, in fact, had the opposite effect. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to familiar images of Jesus Christ, the photograph worked instead to embody Guevara as the Christ-like martyr of international liberation struggles. Throughout Latin America, it is still common to see Guevara's photograph displayed next to images of Christ or the Pope. This photograph has long fascinated the international cultural left, linking contemporary revolutionary iconography to traditional Christian religious and messianic imagery in Western art. John Berger, for example, compared it to Andrea Mantegna's Dead Christ (c. 1501) and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulip (1632).(2) More recently, the exhibition "Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message"(3) looked at the myriad ways Guevara's image has been used politically, in fine art and pop culture.

El Dia deals with the fascination that this photograph still holds as a central image in modern Latin American history. The film is a work of mourning in the form of an investigative elegy, not just an attempt to raise an image of the dead, but also as a way of working through the memory of a period of history that has just past. The film is structured around a range of materials: Katz's footage shot in the mountains in present-day Bolivia, talking head interviews, newspaper dippings, archival photographs and films as well as a reading of a poem by Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. Katz explores this image of the dead Guevara not only as a symbolic icon, but more importantly as a document of a moment that took place in real time and in a specific place. The film becomes an investigative report on how this photograph came to exist and closely examines it as a document of brutality in the Latin American past. Katz relentlessly reexamines this photograph using extreme closeups and croppings of the original image. In addition he visits the site in Vallegrande, Bolivia where Guevara's body was exhibited, exploring with his own camera the room where the famous photograph was taken and the landscape surrounding it. For the exiled Katz, the central action in the film is one of obsessive return. Katz keeps returning to the photograph of Guevara, to Latin America and to the site where the photograph was taken and to the lost promise of revolution that marked his youth.

Eric L. Santner defines the work of mourning as "a process of elaborating and integrating the reality of loss or traumatic shock by remembering and repeating it in symbolically and dialogically mediated doses; it is a process of translating, troping and figuring loss . . ."(4) Throughout the film, Katz shows us this famous photograph over and over again through different discourses, trying to understand the continuing mythic power of Guevara and the photograph. He begins by tracing the image to its origins. Originally published as a UPI wire photo credited to the photographer Hal Moore, Katz discovers that the photograph was actually taken by a young Bolivian photographer, Freddie Alborta. He travels to Bolivia to talk to Alborta about taking the picture. In a series of highly moving descriptions, Alborta describes himself in 1967 as a young freelance photographer who was flown with a group of 24 journalists and photographers by the Bolivian military to Vallegrande where a press conference was held to report the capture of Guevara and to display his corpse to prove it. Cutting between images of present-day Vallegrande and Alborta's interview, Katz asks pointed and detailed questions about Alborta's experience. Now in his sixties, Alborta is a soft-spoken and elegant man shown recalling this central moment in his life in which the forces of history called on him to be part of a defining and crucial moment of Latin American history, and he remembers everything. He describes how the journalists were taken to a small laundry room near a hospital in which Guevara's body was laid out on a sink. Alborta remembers the smell of rotting flesh. Despite the intensity of the moment, Alborta immediately understood the mythological dimensions of Guevara's body. When asked how he felt when he saw the body, Alborta explains:

I had the impression that I was photographing a Christ, I had in fact entered that dimension. It was not a cadaver that I was photographing but something extraordinary. That was my impression, and that is perhaps why I took the photographs with such care: to demonstrate that it was not a simple cadaver.

In his questions to Alborta, Katz tries to tease out what seems to be the particularly ironic conjunction of the reality of Guevara's image as a freewheeling Communist adventurer/revolutionary and the iconography of the Catholic church. Is Guevara's visage a predestined immanence of Christ revealed in the photograph similar to the way sightings of the Virgin Mary's shadow appear on a wall as the moon casts its light through some tree? Or is Guevara-as-Christ a set of formal constructions that a young photographer from a Catholic culture created? Katz asks why Guevara's eyes were left open while on display. Alborta suggests that they kept his eyes open to better identify him, "however, that helped me to photograph not a common cadaver but a person who seemed to be alive and gave the impression of being a Christ." Katz asks Alborta if he was aware of historic paintings using Christian iconography such as Mantegna's Dead Christ? Alborta replies, "No I did not know them. When I took these pictures I really did not want to make photographs for the press only, but in looking for angles and composition, I tried to do something artful in each one of them." What is uncanny in Alborta's photograph is the way it repeats and returns the image of Christ to Guevara's political legacy - a discourse that was deeply critical of such religious traditions. The film scholar Tom Gunning has suggested that in photography, the uncanny has to do with a notion of the double and in particular, doubling as part of a fascination with repetition. Gunning theorizes that historically this has been central to the power of photography itself. He writes that photography:

[was also] experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses verified by positivism.(5)

The Alborta photograph at once identifies the physical body of Guevara proving that he is dead and at the same time opens onto a dematerialized world of the phantasm of a Christ. The figure of Guevara is uncanny because he evokes the discourse of the double: Guevara/Christ, Communism/Catholicism, living/dead, tradition/innovation, all of which make him at once familiar and strange. This is what produces one of the central ironies of Guevara's legacy, that in 1999 capitalism has claimed Guevara as an icon for freedom, rebellion and nonconformity, while socialists have worked to legitimize him by connecting him to traditional religious iconography. Christian Liberation Theology movements can be seen as an example of this.

Fortunately, Katz tries to undermine the attachment of religious mythos surrounding the photograph by showing many of the other photos that Alborta took in the laundry room during the press conference. In a wide-angle shot of the room, we see that Guevara's is not the only corpse in the room. This is a charnel house and there are corpses of several other guerrillas from Guevara's army strewn around the floor of the room, bloodied and in various states of decomposition. It is a horrifying scene in which generals and journalists are stepping around these bodies to see Guevara. Through these shots we see that behind the beatific Christ-figure image there is horrible brutality and carnage. Rather than just focusing on Guevara's spiritual aura, we must also speculate on the horror of the last hours of these men as they endured what must have been - given the condition of the bodies - unspeakable torture and execution. Katz asks Alborta to speculate on the reasons why in the photograph Guevara's left arm was covered on an otherwise shirtless body. We see newspaper and television images of severed hands as Katz and Alborta discuss rumors that Guevara's left hand had been cut off and sent to the U.S. for identification as well as other reports that both hands were later sent to Cuba. The Alborta photographs document the aftermath of an execution and are central to Katz's retelling of this historical moment.

Still, much of the poetic power of the film comes from the uncanny doubling of images and the layering of representations upon representations to the point where any sense of an original body becomes obscured. We see the negatives and contact sheets of the famous photographs and Alborta in his darkroom printing new copies - the images miraculously appearing in the developing tray. Throughout the film, the photographs are constantly being resized, cropped and segmented. There are even photographs within photographs. In one shot the generals are holding a magazine with photographs of Guevara alive next to the corpse to prove that it is the same person. In another picture Guevara's corpse is almost obscured by all of the photographers and cinematographers hovering over the body with their cameras. At this point Katz intercuts motion picture footage (shot at the same moment as the stills) with Alborta's still photographs. It is a startling transition. Suddenly there is movement as the camera pans down the length of the body. There is a momentary sense that the body has come alive as we are moved from the frozen time of the stills to the real time of the movie footage. While the photographs give a sense of death as frozen in time, the motion pictures show the body laying in real time as life around it continues. The still photograph is frozen time, a flat death as Roland Barthes puts it, an image that is"contemplat[ed] without ever being able to get the heart of it, to transform it."(6) On the other hand, the film footage gives an eerie sense of presence: Guevara's eyes, wide open, staring into the camera as we see people moving around him opens up a space between the living and the dead. More powerful than the still photographs, the shaky movements of the hand-held movie camera give Guevara, with his still-piercing open eyes, the appearance of being at once alive and dead, as if he had not yet completely passed into the past tense, suggesting a liminal space between life and death. In this footage we perceive glimpses of a "living world" around the frozen corpse. Some peasants can be seen in the background moving cautiously in relation to the generals surrounding the body. The film footage exposes the awe with which the generals relate to Guevara's body. They are constantly touching the body, pointing at it, hovering over it as one might examine a fallen angel or a mythic creature heard of but never actually seen. Despite the fact that they have killed him, this footage demonstrates how Guevara's charisma and its threat remain powerful. Katz has done a wonderful job of cutting between the stills and motion pictures, showing how differently each medium evokes a different sense of how death is part of a temporal continuum.

Katz chooses to embody the present of this continuum by intercutting breathtaking shots of the Bolivian landscape and villages in the mountainous region in which Guevara fought. Here Katz suggests the persistence of life through images of these vital landscapes. Despite the traumas of human history a sense of potential for transformation lies in the abilities of nature to constantly renew itself. Less convincingly however, Katz staged several scenes showing Bolivian peasants carrying red flags through the landscape and others where peasants in traditional costume dance and play music. In this context they seem to stand in homage to Guevara, but their anonymity creates a childlike purity in their activity, as if in their innocence they - like nature - stand outside of time. The film positions them as exotic bystanders in their own land, while somehow the workings of history are left to others from the outside, such as Guevara arriving from Cuba to organize them in 1966 or even Katz himself flying in from New York 30 years later to eulogize them as part of a failed movement. While it was necessary to create an image of the people for whom Guevara was fighting, the peasants remain at a distance, simply an abstraction - a criticism that was also made of Guevara's own relation to Bolivia, which, it has been claimed, contributed to his failed campaign.

The film ends with a still image of a smiling young Guevara. The title song, "The Day that You'll Love Me" sung by the Argentinian singer Carlos Gardel, tells of a love fantasy that brings about "an almost biblical transformation." Here Katz's mourning work is overtaken by a sense of moral outrage. An intertitle appears quoting a passionate Latin American text from The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia condemning the cold-blooded execution of Guevara after he was captured:

Shot, executed, murdered or finished off - whatever particular personal interpretation one gives to the facts - there is a human truth which gives rise above any subjectivism: A man, a sick and wounded prisoner, was killed without any semblance of justice when he was in the hands of those whose duty it was to rigorously guard his physical safety. Beyond any moral law and above any legal principles, the truth is that an elementary rule of war had been violated: A prisoner is always sacred.(7)

This quotation raises the specter of the brutality and the moral bankruptcy of forces of repression in the history of Latin American politics in the face of Guevara and his cohorts' mythic purity of purpose fighting for social justice. The final postscript states that in 1997, Guevara's remains were finally discovered in Bolivia and returned to Cuba, creating a sense of closure in which the final return is that of Guevara back in the country he helped to transform. One is left to wonder what Guevara might have thought of Cuba in 1997 as the last holdout of the failed international communist experiment he died trying to promote.

Fagin's 95-minute video TropiCola offers a unique window into today's Cuba and suggests a very different idea of rethinking the legacy of the Cuban Revolution. Unlike El Dia, Fagin's image of Cuba in 1997 is marked by the total absence of revolutionary iconography so central to Katz's work. As freewheeling and celebratory of the present as El Dia is deliberate and elegiac, Fagin is not so much interested in the lost promise of a revolutionary past as he is in exploring the political contradictions of the new economic reality of a post-Soviet Cuba and the ways in which Cubans have been forced to rethink their ideas about the future. In TropiCola, as with his other tapes, Fagin has devised an original video essay form that freely mixes documentary and pastiches of every movie genre from soap opera to the musical to television news. In 1997 Fagin traveled to Havana and began a collaboration with some of the most renowned actors from Cuban theater, film and television. Together they created a series of interlinked melodramatic portraits of two fictional families from different social sectors as a way to look at the complex problems facing Cubans during the current economic reconfiguration. In an effort to get Cubans to speak about the stickier elements - both politically and personally - in regard to the state of their revolution, Fagin eschewed conventional ethnographic documentary strategies of conventional tropes of observation, interviews and testimony as signs of authentic representation of people's daily lives. Rather he has gone in the opposite direction, toward a fictitious collaborative and improvisational dramatic form in which the actors, in Fagin's words, "were given abstract characters to play, [to] find a way for them to perform everyday life in more revealing and interesting ways" that are often impossible through direct questioning.(8) Through the displacement of personal testimony onto fictional situations, the actors were able to speak about issues that were much harder to articulate personally. This strategy of mutual collaboration began with Fagin writing a series of loosely structured scenarios from which the actors could improvise. It was through this process that the scenarios could be refined, the nuances of the actor's personal experiences and most importantly the authenticity of their use of language could be incorporated as a part of their performances. Even though this was an "unofficial production" it was through his producer Nina Menendez, a Cuban-American scholar with deep connections to the Cuban cultural community, that Fagin found interest among the Cuban actors in his project and his working strategies.

TropiCola is a marvelously loud film with characters talking, arguing and yelling at each other nearly nonstop from beginning to end, except when energetic Afro-Cuban music takes over. Using the genre of the telenovella, Latin America's version of the soap opera, the narrative of the tape is structured around the interlinking stories of two families. These scenes are shot in digital color video and are performed on location in houses or on quickly built makeshift sets. Fagin combines a tightly composed tableau-style static camera and a Cassevetes-like in-the-middle-of-the-action hand-held camera, skillfully photographed by Igor Vamos. These colorful dramatic sequences are intercut with a movingly lyrical black and white portrait of the city of Havana shot on 16mm film. This footage is shot in the hallmark style of the Cuban verite style documentaries of the 1960s, recognized most notably in the films of Santiago Alvarez. Fagin managed to get Pablo Martinez, one of Alvarez's cinematographers, to shoot these sequences in which many of the characters are seen walking around the streets, in open air markets, talking to people and moving from one scene to the other. This black and white footage of Havana is used to link the different dramatic scenes, giving respites for the viewer to reflect on the intensely verbal interactions between characters and, most significantly, to give a sense of Havana as a uniquely funky place in which nineteenth-century colonial buildings butt up against 1920s Art Deco and 1950s-style American architecture. The mixing of the color video footage with its hard edges and garish lighting with the more impressionistic, grainy black and white film footage creates lovely textural juxtapositions of past and present. The images of the streets of Havana recall the romantic heyday of the revolutionary '60s as seen in the unique neo-realist style of early Cuban films such as Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). The video footage seems to evoke an eternal present, which is a perfect medium for watching the melodramatic performance of present-day problems.

Of the two families that are at the center of TropiCola, one is white and middle-class. The father, Raul, a long time member of the Communist party and a deep loyalist to the Revolution, discovers that his daughter Katia has become a jinotera, embodying the growing population of young Cuban women who have begun to supplement their meager or non-existent income by being escorts and/or prostitutes, catering to the burgeoning Euro-tourist industry. For Katia, becoming a jinotera and perhaps marrying a foreigner is a solution to her feeling that her life in Cuba is going nowhere and it becomes a way to make a living that might make her dreams of the good life come true. At the same time Raul's wife expresses her desire to leave Cuba for Miami to join the rest of her family. As a good Revolutionary and Party member, he feels that what his wife and daughter are doing is a betrayal of the ideals that have guided his life. At the same time he also seems to understand the reasons for their behavior. These events throw Raul (who is wonderfully portrayed by Mario Balmaseda who played the young revolutionary worker in Sara Gomez's seminal 1974 film One Way or Another) into a crisis of confidence in the ability of the Revolution to meet the needs of the people.

Unfolding simultaneously is a portrait of an Afro-Cuban family that is centered around the santero Arsenio. Although he is deeply religious, Arsenio is also totally committed to the Revolution and finds it highly ironic that in the mixed economy of the new "dollar Cuba" Santeria, once bitterly denounced by the government, has come back into vogue enabling him to make a little money reading the shells. One of the young women in his family, China, who speaks several languages and works with computers, has decided to leave Cuba and emigrate to Spain in order to try her luck in the outside world. Much of the family's interactions center around trying to talk her out of leaving Cuba. The conflicts in both families provide the opportunity for much argument.

In fact, every aspect of life in this new period in Cuba is up for debate in typically Cuban style gallows humor, which makes the tape hilariously funny. Raul is seen flipping through the newspaper and each headline becomes the basis for the expression of ironic bemusement or outrage about nearly every current Cuban policy. "How is it" he asks with pride after reading a story on the problems of German reunification, "that half the world fell in 1989 except us?" Then he answers his own question "We didn't fall, we got the shit knocked out of us" For Arsenio's family, China's desire to leave Cuba is an opportunity for Arsenio to insist on the achievement of the Revolution, claiming that those who have abandoned Cuba are simply unappreciative, unpatriotic and disgraceful. On the other hand, Raul and Arsenio both express outrage at the way Cubans have capitulated to the blockade by creating the "dollar economy" At one point Raul exclaims "we have become a country where we will spread our legs for anybody who will give us four fucking dollars." At other moments they argue that it is the U.S. blockade that has forced Cuba into such undignified solutions while other characters talk about the government's ineptitude and corruption. Through the constant arguing of these fictional characters we begin to get a highly complex sense of the issues facing Cuba today. The marvelous use of language and what the characters talk about shows that the ideological rhetoric of the revolution as "good or bad object" or "capitalism versus socialism" that constitutes much of the North American discourse regarding Cuba is far in the background. At one point a character exclaims that Fidel is talked about more in the U.S. than in Cuba. Through these everyday arguments we see Cuba as a vital society in which the problems are not as ideological as we might imagine from the outside, but are those of personal desire. What is most interesting about the discussions is how they seem to center on Cuba's current relation to the outside world. There are endless debates about why one should stay in Cuba, given the debilitated state of the country, or seek fortune elsewhere.

As an island nation, Cuba has always been particularly dependent on the outside world for its economic development and well-being. One of the ironies of the Cuban Revolution as one of the great examples of this century's successful nationalist independence struggles is the way it had to trade one form of economic dependence, imperialist domination, for Soviet dependency. Part of what has captured the world's imagination in regard to Cuba has been the way it has negotiated such dependency while maintaining its revolutionary rhetoric and iconography of defiant self determination. Yet what the video also makes clear is that since the abrupt ending of Soviet economic support and the strength of the U.S. blockade, the issue of dependency can no longer be ignored. Furthermore, Cuba cannot continue to isolate itself from the influences of the outside world. This opens Cuba to the larger problem of current globalization in which the whole of Cuban society can no longer be contained by the geographical edges of the island or maintain its sense of itself as an island under the singular identity of a defiant nation besieged by imperialist forces. The notion of what is Cuban is being rethought in relation to people and communities outside of Cuba itself. Like the rest of the world, Cuban identity becomes a kind of mapping across geopolitical locales and begins to raise new possibilities for what constitutes Cubanness. This problem has caused a crisis of identity in Cuba. In TropiCola this is performed as a generation gap between an older generation whose identity was forged in the victory of the Revolution and the younger who came of age after the negative consequences of the Revolution had isolated them from the world.

For instance, there is an interview with a young woman who is in a relationship with an American in which she discusses the positive and negative aspects of emigrating to the U.S. and how she would have to make a choice between her American boyfriend and ongoing contact with her family. For other young characters in the film the desire to leave is deeply intertwined with a desire to see other places and to explore new experiences not available to them on the tiny island of Cuba. At one point China says "I don't care about religion or politics. I don't want to waste my youth." Leaving has not only to do with what the Revolution can or cannot offer, but also with a youthful desire to be in the world. For the educated China, being loyal to the Revolution becomes synonymous with the isolation of island living. She, like Katia and others of her generation who were born and grew up within the Revolution, have no memory of the conditions in which average Cubans lived before the Revolution; hence she perceives the Revolution as limiting her options rather than expanding them. Arsenio and Raul, however, know firsthand how their lives and living conditions were changed for the better.

Floating between the two families and the different arguments that occur throughout the tape is the character of Nieves who serves as a kind of narrator who, through a direct address to the audience, tries to make sense of all the contradicting arguments and positions. Nieves is a record producer who works for the Cuban record company ARTEX and travels all over the world promoting Cuban music. As the most worldly character in the tape she is able to be critical of the political situation in Cuba and debunk the myths that it is better "over there" or that a true commitment to Cubanismo can only be expressed by living on the island. Although she can travel freely, she has chosen not to emigrate and recognizes that with all of Cuba's problems there is no place like home. She tries to convince the young to commit themselves to staying in Cuba, while at the same time help their elders understand that the younger generations desire to leave is a natural impulse and not a betrayal. Perhaps it is because Nieves is able to leave and reenter the country that she has the luxury of being the voice of reason and compromise. Her character is the most optimistic as she maintains her belief in the possibility that staying with Cuba and struggling to make the necessary changes will allow both generations to realize their ideals.

But Cuban music has the last word in TropiCola, seeping in everywhere: Arsenio and family break into song in the middle of an intense discussion, two elderly women sing after having read an old Cuban poem and an a cappella trio hang out on the street corner. Song now expresses more in contemporary Cuba than the ideological rhetoric of Revolution. As Fagin has said, "In Cuba people are always quoting song lyrics at you . . . Music that I used in TropiCola by bands like Charanga Habanera and El Medico de la Salsa has become the shared tone and pitch that are heard as the echo of everyday life." Fagin uses songs in place of dialogue throughout and has a knack for finding just the right song, whether traditional or pop, to accompany the images of Havana streets or Busby Berkeley dance parodies that also serve as additional interludes to the melodrama. At the end of TropiCola, Nieves sums up the current situation in Cuba in a moving speech about Afro-Cuban music being the deepest expression of Cuban culture. In '90s Cuba, the iconographic images of the old revolutionaries such as Guevara, Castro and the Cuban flag are now replaced by images on the album covers she holds up of great Cuban musicians such as Beny More, Enrique Jorrin and Arsenio Rodriguez. Nieves says "after the 'special period' we have to sell more than just recordings. We are selling the voice itself, the heart, the spirit . . ." suggesting that whatever happens politically it is in the music that Cuba's essence can be found. She pays homage to Rodriguez, the greatest songwriter and tres player in the history of Cuban music, who in his attempt to push his extraordinary music beyond the island shores died in obscurity, blind and penniless, in Los Angeles. Nieves reclaims Rodriguez for this moment in history, saying "you are Cuba's history, you are our heart and soul, our spirit . . . you will never be forgotten here."

Nieves declares in her parting shot that Cuba is like a melodrama, where the script is good but the staging is the problem. It is here that TropiCola suggests that despite the Communist government's continuing grip on the politics of the country, the people of Cuba are already moving beyond the long-held revolutionary iconography embodied by Guevara and his revolution, once the alpha and omega of Cuba's utopian spirit, through a more benign expression - its music. TropiCola's absence of any images, rhetoric or even discussion of the legacy of a figure like Guevara and that particular part of Cuban history may invite comparison between the figures of Guevara and Rodriguez. Although both died in their attempts to export their own kind of Cubanismo beyond Cuba's self-contained borders, it is implicit in Nieves's passionate evocation of an artist like Rodriguez that it is the unquenchable vitality of his music and not Guevara's failing radical socialism that ultimately holds Cuba's future. Whether images of musical figures can sustain the political imagination of the country the way the image of Guevara did is questionable. Perhaps it is the figure of Nieves, a successful woman now open to capitalist solutions-exporting Cuban music - and still deeply committed to the well-being of her country, who replaces Guevara, the macho idealist soldier - exporting Cuban socialism - as the embodiment of the "New Cuban." The fate of Cuba as it adapts to new globalized economic conditions is still unknown, but the continued vitality of the Cuban spirit either through figures like Guevara or Rodriguez or even a fictional one like Nieves continues to capture the imagination of the world.

El Dia Que Me Quieras met with great success when shown in Havana, winning the Corral prize for Best Documentary at the 1997 Latin American Film Festival. As of this writing TropiCola has yet to be shown publicly in Cuba, but is being met with enthusiastic responses from Cuban and other Latin American communities outside of Cuba. The official Cuban sanctioning of El Dia by the Cuban festival is understandable as the film shows how an icon like Guevara continues to be imbued with so much meaning. On the other hand, to embrace the film is also to accept it as an elegy for an icon whose relevance is in the process of passing out of the present. While TropiCola may be a more problematic and ambivalent work in the ways it plays fast and loose with the legacy of the revolution, it also speculates on what the Cuban present may be moving toward. It suggests that the relation of the present to the past moment, as embodied by the image of Guevara, is something that has not yet been defined. Despite the claims of the Revolution's failure, the present seems as engaged and dynamic as any other moment in Cuban history. The pairing of these two works, showing their profound connections, uncovers a complex and dynamic process of working through the relation between the current shifting narratives of what constitutes national identity at the end of the twentieth century and the role of revolutionary iconographies as a way to understand the utopian impulses of the past.

TropiCola is distributed by Steve Fagin, c/o Visual Arts Dept. 0327, UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093; (619) 5343138; e-mail [e-mail]. El Dia Que Me Quieras is distributed in the U.S. by Mirror on the Moon, fax [phone]; e-mail [e-mail]; and by Jane Balfour Films, Burghley House, 35 Fortress St., London NW5 1AQ, UK; (44-1) 171-267-5392; fax [phone].

NOTES

1. Brook Larmer, "Candid Castro," in Newsweek (November 9, 1998). Photographs by Osvaldo and Roberto Salas.

2. John Berger, "Che Guevara Dead," in Aperture Vol. 13, no. 4 (1968).

3. "Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message" at the UCLA Museum of Cultural History, 1997.

4. Eric. L. Santner, "History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

5. Tom Gunning, "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography's Uncanny," in Patrice Petro, ed., Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).

6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 92-93.

7. As quoted from the film script of El Dia Que Me Quieras from Luis J. Gonzalez and Gustavo A. Sanchez Salazar, The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia, Helen R. Lane, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1969).

8. Unless indicated, all quotations by Fagin are taken from my own interview with him entitled "Forget Guantanamera: Steve Fagin's TropiCola captures the new voices of a Changing Cuba" published in Release Print, March 1998.

JEFFREY SKOLLER is a filmmaker who writes frequently on experimental film. His films include Nicaragua: Hear-Say/See-Here (1986), made during the Sandinista Revolution. He is currently Assistant Professor of Filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.