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Progreso Weekly - Sep 20, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1

Photos reveal Cuba’s paradoxes, heroes, and everyday life

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 http://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.)

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