Picturing Cuba Jorge Duany Published by University Press of Florida Duany, Jorge. Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora. University Press of Florida, 2019. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/67866. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/67866 Access provided at 25 Jan 2020 21:11 GMT from New York University  ••••••••• Fashioning and Contesting the OliveGreen Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts María A. Cabrera Arús In 2015, the English fashion designer Stella McCartney launched her Resort 2016 collection at a New York City garden party with a Cuba theme.1 The collection itself bore little resemblance to Cuban sartorial practices or history other than its tropical ethos, but at the premier extravaganza McCartney treated her guests to mojitos, a salsa band, chocolate cigars, and the presence of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara impersonators, clad in military fatigues. The following year, Karl Lagerfeld made history when he presented the Chanel 2016/17 Cruise collection in Havana’s Paseo del Prado.2 The French fashion house combined references to Cuba’s midcentury material culture with sartorial elements borrowed from revolutionary imagery, including allusions to Castro’s guerrilla. The olive-drab color of the fatigue uniform and Guevara’s beret—adorned with zirconia studs in the shape of the Chanel logo instead of a star—gave local allure to the show and introduced Cuba’s military chic to the world-renowned tailored universe of haute couture. These two major events, widely promoted around the world, were by no means the first or only instances of commodification of guerrilla garb since the dawn of the Cuban Revolution. Back in the early days, the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) was highly successful in associating the anti-Batista insurgency with the olive-drab fatigues and beards of the Sierra Maestra rebels. As historian Michelle Chase observes, the M-26-7’s propaganda “romanticized rural rebellion,” flaunting the revolutionaries’ “beards, uniforms, armbands, and long rifles” to foreign journalists 156 · María A. Cabrera Arús and locals.3 On February 24, 1957, The New York Times’ veteran reporter Herbert L. Matthews presented Castro as the “flaming symbol of the opposition” to Fulgencio Batista, describing his style in detail.4 The M-26-7’s propaganda department also lured CBS journalist Robert Taver and cinematographer Wendell Hoffman to the rebels’ hideout, where they shot the thirty-minute documentary Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters, aired by CBS News on May 19, 1957, and covered in photo reportages in the magazines Life (in the U.S.) and Bohemia (in Cuba).5 The M-26-7’s publications also indulged before and after the victory in depictions of the guerrilla’s sartorial identity. For instance, the comic strip “Julito 26,” published during the insurgency in the clandestine newspaper El Cubano Libre, edited in the Sierra Maestra, and written and illustrated by Santiago Armada (Chago, 1937–95), introduced the homonymous character as a male guerrilla who wore a campaign uniform and a black beret—elements Stella McCartney and Chanel borrowed sixty years later.6 Campaign 03C, launched in December 1958, days before the fall of the Batista dictatorship, also acknowledged the contrasting prestige of the insurgent garb vis-à-vis elegant urban dresses.7 With 03C standing for zero movies, zero shopping, and zero nightclubs, this campaign opposed the frivolity of Christmas shopping to the life-threatening anti-Batista war the fatigue-clad young guerrillas were fighting. By midnight on December 31, 1958, when Batista escaped to the Dominican Republic and a new era dawned in Cuba, the uniform of the Sierra Maestra guerrilla was widely recognized as a revolutionary symbol, and people took to the streets to celebrate the victory wearing fatigues.8 U.S. photographer Burt Glinn, who flew to Havana in the early morning hours of January 1, 1959, noted that, at first sight, “it was not clear who was the legitimate rebel and who was not” until the authentic guerrillas arrived.9 The revolutionary cabinet’s first Minister of the Treasury, economist Rufo López-Fresquet, also referred to the prevalent visibility of olivedrab uniforms in the aftermath of the victory, which many associated with Castro’s guerrillas, as illustrated by a photograph taken on January 8, 1959, the day Castro and his troops arrived in Havana.10 The photo features a toddler clad in the uniform of the Rebel Army and wearing a fake beard, a black beret, and a sign that states, estoy con Fidel (“I am with Fidel”).11 Castro and the guerrilla leaders opted not to change out of their uniforms after the triumph, not even to step in to occupy civil positions in the Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 157 revolutionary cabinet. Castro was sworn in as Prime Minister on February 16, 1959, dressed in guerrilla fatigues, having stated that it was preferable to take the risk of evoking a Latin American military dictator, as one of his advisers had warned him, rather than change his clothes.12 Luis M. Buch Rodríguez, Secretary of the Council of Ministers at the time, recalls Castro’s protest: “Ah no; this uniform and this beard represent the rebelliousness of the Sierra Maestra and our Revolution, and I absolutely won’t get rid of them; look for another Prime Minister.”13 As literary critic José Quiroga notes, “the Cuban comandantes . . . were, from the beginning, the most aesthetically self-conscious political nomenklatura in Latin American history.”14 Moreover, they were interested in the possibilities fatigue uniforms—and their iconoclastic identity in general—offered as a means of reenacting the revolutionary ethos of the Sierra Maestra enduringly in post-1959 daily life, as Castro and Guevara expressed several times.15 Foreign as this identity was to many of the leaders who, like Castro himself—the son of a wealthy landowner—came from privileged backgrounds, the unpretentious military fatigues also portrayed them as being close to the working class.16 All in all, the guerrilla identity helped to convey the advent of a new era and the emergence of a new political class. For that, leaders also counted on the media, both private and stateowned.17 The printed media, for instance, went to great lengths to establish a hierarchy of sorts that enthroned Castro’s guerrilla and its sartorial identity as a symbol of the Revolution, the regime, and, by extension, the country.18 Magazine covers, postcards, posters, postage stamps, banknotes, book covers, and billboards reproduced epic photographs of the guerrillas, which Cubans rushed to consume, collect, and even display in domestic spaces.19 INRA, the magazine of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, founded in 1960 at Castro’s request, published the photographs of principal government officials on the covers of issues 7 through 11 of its inaugural year.20 These invariably portray the guerrilla leaders clad in their uniforms, with a daydreamer’s expression, staring into space as if they were envisioning a bright future. In contrast, President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado was photographed working in his office, dressed in a formal suit, much like a bureaucrat. The contrast between the epic stature of the guerrillas and the simple administrative position of the presidency is also stressed in the portraits’ order of appearance on the magazine’s covers, 158 · María A. Cabrera Arús with Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Che Guevara featured before President Dorticós, who precedes only Afro-Cuban comandante Juan Almeida Bosque. Implicit in this order is the idea that civilian authority, even presidential, was secondary to the prestige of the principal guerrillas. Images of Castro clad in guerrilla uniform were also associated with the country’s flag and other national symbols in magazine spreads, flyers, and publication covers, as seen in Figure 10.1. In this propaganda illustration, Castro appears above the Cuban flag and the national emblem’s Phrygian cap (representing liberty) and olive branch (the symbol of victory and peace). This illustration is not only worshipful of the guerrilla leader but also equates the man with the country’s national symbols, giving the former preeminence over the latter. In doing so, this illustration anticipates the idea of a fidelista state.21 The guerrilla leaders also counted on the collaboration of artists to produce the olive-green fidelista iconography. They created emblematic posters and works of art that, over the years, have identified “the Revolution,” as well as, after the critical 1980s, canvases and prints that contested the regime’s legitimacy. Political posters, for instance, promoted iconic photographs of the leaders, clad in fatigues. Initially doing little more than conveying their iconoclastic identity through black-and-white photographs, poster designers soon began to explore the expressive possibilities of olive green as a symbol of the regime—at the expense of the red-and-black colors of the M-26-7—and, by the end of the 1960s, of postrevolutionary society in general. The first poster designed after the revolutionary war, created on January 1, 1959, by Eladio Rivadulla (1923–2011), features one of the photographs Taver and Hoffman took of Castro in the Sierra Maestra, modified to produce a high-contrast black-and-white outline of the leader, clad in fatigues, over a red-and-black background.22 Three years later, Castro was also depicted in the first photographic poster made after 1959, designed in 1962 by Juan Ayús for the Young Communists Union.23 Comandante en Jefe: ¡ordene! (Commander in Chief, Give Your Orders! Plate 31) reproduces a black-and-white photograph Alberto Korda (1928–2001) took of Castro standing on a mountain peak after the rebels’ victory. In his campaign uniform and carrying a rifle and a backpack, Castro looks like a classic general or king surveying his domains.24 The message, in big red typeface, stresses the leader’s larger-than-life stature, compelling citizens to surrender to his will: “Commander in Chief, Give Your Orders!” Figure 10.1. Illustration featuring Fidel Castro, the Cuban flag, and the Phrygian cap and olive branch of the national emblem, 1959. Cuba Material Collection. Photograph by María A. Cabrera Arús. 160 · María A. Cabrera Arús In 1969, Félix René Mederos Pazos (1933–96) designed for the Department of Revolutionary Orientation of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party the poster 1959–1969 Tenth Anniversary of the Triumph of the Cuban Rebellion, also based on a photograph Taver and Hoffman took in the Sierra Maestra.25 In it, Fidel and Raúl Castro appear at the front of a group of guerrillas, all holding their rifles up in the air. Mederos Pazos, however, transformed the photograph with a colorful style, painting with psychedelic pink, yellow, and blue the anonymous guerrillas and their weapons, yet leaving untouched the Castro brothers, their uniforms, and the Cuban flag. The special treatment Fidel and Raúl Castro and their uniforms receive in this poster, similar to that observed with the country’s flag, leaves no doubt as to the symbolism of both the leaders and their costume. The use of olive-drab as a symbol of the Revolution and the regime is a constant in Mederos Pazos’ work, also observed, for instance, in Condenadme, no importa, la historia me absolverá (Condemn Me, It Doesn’t Matter, History Will Absolve Me), a 1973 silkscreen that features Castro addressing the masses in Revolution Square.26 At the lectern, Castro wears his olive-drab uniform, with even his boots painted this color. A background of political slogans and a faceless multitude that disappears in a palette of colors surround the leader in this elegiac composition, stressing the political semiotics of olive green as symbol of the fidelista state. And yet, in a way, if only incidentally, this work also denounces the homogenization of the masses under Castro’s rule and their lack of political agency. Literary critic Duanel Díaz Infante has compared the political propaganda built around guerrilla imagery with Snow White’s neurotic stepmother, constantly looking at herself in the mirror.27 And certainly, as in the children’s fairytale, the (re)production of the revolutionary ethos in postrevolutionary Cuban society was based on strategies of representation. Yet it was also the result of mechanisms of impersonal rule that sought to mold individual identities and practices after the archetype of the guerrilla leaders, giving shape to a figured world of power centered around the figure of Castro as a larger-than-life revolutionary hero.28 The fidelista mechanisms of impersonal rule were laid out in great part through government-sponsored institutions, such as paramilitary mass organizations, which promoted practices and lifestyles associated with the Sierra Maestra guerrilla—e.g., climbing Turquino Peak, Cuba’s highest mountain. These institutions also transformed the sartorial identity of Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 161 Figure 10.2. Military training of the militias of the medical association in Havana, April 24, 1960. María A. Cabrera Arús family photograph. the citizenry once workers, students, and intellectuals were drafted, mobilized, and trained in the military or the militias, as Figure 10.2 illustrates.29 Just as people recognized and expressed their political allegiances by wearing fatigues, visual artists also used olive green to represent political sympathies. Painter Raúl Martínez (1927–1995) depicted members of Cuba’s socialist society with olive-drab complexions in pieces such as Patria (Fatherland, 1969–70) and Isla 70 (Island 70), the latter painted in the watershed year of 1970, when the government planned to produce ten million tons of sugar to develop the island’s economy and, to achieve this goal, mobilized workers and students to harvest sugarcane.30 Exhibited at Cuba’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum of Fine Arts), this tableau depicts a group of persons, including Martínez himself, along with historical figures such as Vladimir I. Lenin, Ho Chi Min, José Martí, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, all painted with olive-green skin, against a background of phallic sugarcane that also includes a sugar mill and the logo of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. 162 · María A. Cabrera Arús The painting, inspired by the national mobilizations for the Ten-Million-Ton Sugar Harvest, represents the society of the time, including the pantheon of heroes (national and foreign, anti-capitalist and anticolonial) the regime then extolled. Notably, Martínez depicted with a bluish complexion a young man whom art critic Ernesto Menéndez-Conde identifies as dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas, stressing the symbolism of olive green in signaling people’s support of the regime.31 But, in Martínez’s painting, olive green is more than a symbol or marker of people’s allegiances—something external that can be put on (and taken off) at will, like clothes; it also represents the incorporation of the fidelista dogma into the biological body and moral self—which would explain why Arenas, the dissident, is depicted with blue skin. It took more than ten years, over a decade described as bitter and dark in terms of individual liberties, for a new generation of artists finally to approach olive green first as a commentary on postrevolutionary society and eventually as a critique of the fidelista regime. At the first Havana Biennale in 1984, Leandro Soto (b. 1956) exhibited the series Retablo familiar (Family Altarpiece), composed of altarpieces made from family photographs, toys, postcards, and other objects from his own childhood, in a nostalgic unearthing of bygone days.32 According to Soto, he wanted to address through this work criticism from cultural officials who had pointed to his practice of yoga as an ideologically compromised activity, and prove his and his family’s long-term commitment to the Castro regime.33 Within this series, the wooden altarpiece La familia revolucionaria (The Revolutionary Family) features a 1962 family photograph in which Soto’s mother is wearing a militia uniform, his siblings are clad in the uniform of the literacy brigades, and he, a toddler, wears the uniform of the pioneros children’s organization—all but the latter being variations on guerrilla fatigues. To have that photograph taken, Soto explains, they walked to a photo studio across town in a political performance of sorts that demonstrated their “revolutionary” credentials.34 Twenty-two years later, Soto subverted these meanings, and the hierarchy of the fidelista figured world, offering himself and his family as cult objects in lieu of the leader they had previously revered—an attitude typical of the so-called William Tell Generation.35 It was not, however, until the late 1980s that a new generation of painters consciously formulated an uncompromising critique of the fidelista Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 163 regime and its mechanisms of political persuasion and exclusion, based on the olive-green trope. Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas (b. 1962) is perhaps one of the Castro regime’s most vocal and systematic critics among those artists. In Ahorrando más, tendremos más (By Saving More, We Will Have More), painted in 1988 for his solo show Artista de calidad (Quality Artist), scheduled to open at the Castillo de la Fuerza, Rodríguez Cárdenas depicts Castro’s face, connecting his mouth to a pipeline that discharges fluid into a reservoir.36 Everything is painted olive green, an unequivocal symbol of the fidelista state, but also, in this case, of the lack of alternatives and diversity the regime offered, whereas the mouth and pipeline allude not so subtly to the uncritical reproduction of fidelismo as a dogma. In the same series, Come micrófonos (Microphone Eater, 1988) portrays Castro both as a fleshless cartoon-like figure composed of unintelligible words and a character who eats microphones at a podium, painted in olive green.37 According to the artist, he took inspiration from Castro’s fascination with having his words amplified through microphones and loudspeakers.38 But, like Ahorrando más, tendremos más, this painting criticizes the mechanical production and circulation of the fidelista dogma, portraying it as a signifier emptied of meaning, produced by a doodle whose contradictory fate is to consume his own words. In Máscara de cocodrilo (Crocodile Mask), another olive-green monochromatic painting from the 1988 series, Rodríguez Cárdenas depicts Castro in his guerrilla uniform, wearing the bracelet of the M-26-7, a pistol, and a rifle, putting on (or taking off) a crocodile mask.39 Given that the island of Cuba has always been compared to a crocodile in its shape, the overlapping of the silhouettes of Castro and the island in this painting alludes to Castro’s nationalistic discourse as a mask. Cuban crocodiles are, moreover, aggressive animals that stalk their prey by blending into their surroundings, a characteristic that Rodríguez Cárdenas would have also implicitly attributed to Castro. Finally, in Un cielo despejado (A Clear Sky, 1988, Plate 32), Rodríguez Cárdenas denounces the Castro regime as a deadly fatum, suggesting that only with the leader’s death would the country have peace.40 The artist paints Castro’s silhouette lying at the bottom of the sea, depicting his drowning as the cause of Cuba’s clear sky. The painting also presages the drama endured by thousands of people who fled the country on simple rafts during the 1990s, sailing when skies were clear—meaning good weather—and hoping to reach the United States. Many of them never 164 · María A. Cabrera Arús made it, drowning in the Florida Straits, as the crosses buried at the bottom of the sea in this image might premonitorily indicate, resting inside a Castro-like figure that would have been the ultimate cause of their deaths. And yet, much like in the elegiac work of Mederos Pazos, Martínez, and Soto some elements suggest a subtler sociopolitical critique, we can detect in Rodríguez Cárdenas’s up-front political criticism the underwriting of some of the discourses of legitimation of the Castro regime, notably the postrevolutionary nationalism and Castro’s embodiment of the government, the country, and the nation. Regardless, the exhibition Artista de calidad never took place; Cuban authorities censored it.41 That same year (1988), Glexis Novoa (b. 1964) inaugurated To Be or Not to Be at Galería Habana with works from what he called his etapa romántica (“romantic stage”), which he describes as a reaction “to the censorship of [artists] Tomás Esson and Carlos [Rodríguez] Cárdenas.”42 Of To Be or Not to Be, art critic Rachel Weiss writes that it was “a general mess of an exhibition that meant to, and did, confuse everybody, hung up between critique, repudiation, and acceptance of the ideas that seemed to be in the work.”43 One of the pieces in the show consisted of a text written with sloppy olive-greenish brushstrokes that stated, “this piece was made by a young artist, born and living within the Revolution. Havana. Cuba.”44 As with the Rodríguez Cárdenas series Artista de calidad, this was a monochromatic piece with olive green arguably representing the fidelista state, but in this case meanings are not to be found in the canvas or color. Novoa’s piece—and the show in general—denounced a cultural policy that privileged art that, first and foremost, was meant to be “revolutionary,” that is, aligned with the regime’s ideology, even if it were to the detriment of its artistic qualities. Novoa’s critique thus rested not in the exhibited pieces, but in the show itself as a denunciation of the ideological restrictions imposed upon art.45 The following year (1989), René Francisco Rodríguez (b. 1960) and Eduardo Ponjuán González (b. 1956) inaugurated the show Artista melodramático (Melodramatic Artist) at the Castillo de la Fuerza, in which they exhibited, for a brief five days before censorship intervened, Las ideas llegan más lejos que la luz (Ideas Go Farther Than Light, 1989).46 In this painting, René Francisco y Ponjuán, as the duo was known, represented the Morro fortress—one of the symbols of the city of Havana and part of the colonial military complex that included the Castillo de la Fuerza— painted in green, with the head of Castro in lieu of the lighthouse’s Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 165 beacon. The head emits alternative halos of white and black birds toward a red sea, leaving the city behind in darkness, a not-so-hidden allusion to Castro’s Janus faces, which promote a black-and-white discourse of liberty and hope in Communism overseas while ruining the territory he administered. Five days after the opening of Artista melodramático, political commissars took down this painting, along with three other pieces, alleging that they misrepresented the Cuban leader.47 One of the other banned pieces, Suicida (Suicidal, 1989), forms Castro’s silhouette with small pieces of mirror glued to plywood painted olive green. Reflecting the image of the viewer, the mirror de facto fuses it with—or incorporates it—into the leader’s silhouette, making any attempt at destroying the latter an act of self-destruction or suicide, as René Francisco declared in a recent interview.48 In this work, again, olive green is the substrate, medium, or background, the uterus in which the symbiosis of leader and viewer occurs.49 Referring to the artists who emerged in the 1980s, frequently called the Children-of-William-Tell Generation, art critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera argues that they “initiat[ed] and spearhead[ed] a critical consciousness that ha[d] never been publicly expressed in Cuba.”50 Both as a collective and individually, this generation of artists put forth a political critique of the fidelista state articulated, and on occasion concealed, through the olive-green trope. In the post-Soviet era, when the Cuban government introduced a series of political and economic reforms—including the legalization of the U.S. dollar—to keep the Cuban economy afloat and guarantee the stability of the socialist regime after the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc, a new generation of artists worked with the photographic image and actualized the olive-green metaphor within new forms of sociopolitical critique. Like Rivadulla did in 1959, José Ángel Toirac (b. 1966) drew from the photographic archive of the early postrevolutionary years, recreating iconic images of the radical 1960s more than a decade before it became trendy in Cuban literature and art.51 Toirac put them in conversation with iconic capitalist commodities, including brands such as Marlboro and Yves Saint Laurent, in a political commentary that denounced guerrilla chic—and the ideology this trope represented—as a global commodity. In the light box La Maison. Casa cubana de modas (La Maison. Cuban Fashion House, 1995), Toirac reproduced a photograph of a young Castro taken in the mid-1960s by U.S. photographer Lee Lockwood, in which the 166 · María A. Cabrera Arús leader is dressed in military fatigues and wears no shoes, smoking while relaxing in a rocking chair at one of his country houses.52 By combining this image with the logotype and slogan of the Cuban upscale fashion house La Maison, opened in the early 1980s to cater to foreign tourists and diplomats, and transformed in 1994 into a high-end boutique for dollarholding Cubans, Toirac contrasts the former utopian discourses of revolutionary asceticism with the commoditization of the revolutionary ethos and its imagery in the post-Soviet era. Toirac’s commentary on Cuba’s opening to the global market as a means of sustaining and legitimizing the local regime after the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc is not limited only to the combination of capitalist and upscale socialist brandscapes. La Maison. Casa cubana de modas also alludes to the commodification of the revolutionary myth, in ways that resemble the commercial signs that resurfaced in the public space in the 1990s. All in all, as curator Juan Carlos Betancourt argues, this work suggests that “socialist propaganda and capitalist advertising shared a common goal: to sell compelling images aimed at mass consumption.”53 With fine-tuned sarcasm, this piece denounces the contradictory coexistence of an official rhetoric of sacrifice and material austerity alongside the emergence of state-sanctioned spaces and mechanisms of distinction, mainly restricted to the political elite and dollar-holding foreigners. Also, playing with the domestic setting in which Castro was photographed, the title of the piece, La Maison (French for “the house”), demystifies the fidelista epic, portraying the leader as an ordinary man. With the turn of the twentieth century, the photographic image gained in elaboration in the critique that visual artists put forth of the olivegreen figured world of power. In his 2009 piece Samurai (según Donatello) (Samurai [after Donatello]), a life-size photograph of a naked black man imitating Donatello’s David but wearing a corduroy olive-drab cap and a sword, René Peña (b. 1957) merges classical and contemporary referents in a powerful political critique.54 Peña’s references to the biblical character who faced the giant Goliath with no armor and killed him with a slingshot allude to the triumph of the powerless over the strong—that is, to the victory of courage and determination against the sheer power of force. At the same time and almost contradictorily, the reference in the work’s title to samurai, the Japanese medieval warriors who owed absolute loyalty to their feudal lords and were willing to kill themselves for honor, criticizes the obedience the fidelista Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 167 regime demanded from individuals, in particular black bodies, and the onerous sacrifices—and even death—Castro had asked people to endure to preserve his power. Moreover, Peña’s naked David-samurai evokes the sexual objectification of black bodies, frequently dehumanized as mere cogs in Cuba’s large military, trapped in the myth of David versus Goliath, which the Castro regime translated in terms of the island’s antagonism toward the United States.55 A similar critique toward the military apparatus is developed by Adonis Flores (b. 1971), a former student of the Camilo Cienfuegos military school and an Angola war veteran, in this case conveyed through photographic images of (generally) the artist himself, clad in camouflage fatigues. His work Maleza (Undergrowth, 2005), which literary critic Rachel Price describes as “a large format print that teems with soldiers in army crawl, outfitted in camouflage—all digitally replicated copies of Flores himself,” denounces the homogenization of individuals under military institutions. Military training, Flores suggests, turns individuals into identical clones, comparable to an unproductive extension of weeds—undergrowth.56 In the series Camouflages, which Flores began in 2007, he develops a more general critique of the impact of the militarization of society and the relationship between power and individual identity. Inspired by da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Canon (2012), a piece in this series, portrays the archetypical Renaissance man as a soldier dressed in camouflage fatigues.57 Representing the impossible reconciliation of praetorian and humanistic values, Flores denounces the idea of the soldier as the measure of all human things, a message that arguably alludes to Cuban state propaganda, which presented Castro and Guevara as archetypes to imitate by the generations born after 1959. Canon, moreover, might also denounce the spurious, antithetical humanism of the fidelista regime. In 2009, Tania Bruguera (b. 1968) presented the performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) at the Wifredo Lam Center, during the Tenth Havana Biennale.58 In that version of Tatlin’s Whisper, the artist invited members of the audience to express their thoughts at a podium, granting each person a minute to speak, escorted by a young man and woman clad in military uniforms. The fatigues-clad actors also escorted speakers off of the stage when their allotted time was done, and placed a white dove on their shoulders when they stepped in, a nod to Fidel Castro’s inaugural speech in Havana after the revolutionary victory. Among the multiple meanings each element of this performance suggests (including some not 168 · María A. Cabrera Arús referred to here), I want to stress the use of military uniforms not just as a representation of power but also as the source of it—Bruguera’s collaborators are mostly obeyed because of the uniform they wear. In Bruguera’s reenactment of a democratic forum, the uniformed individuals are the authority that guarantees order and, thus, conversation, protecting against others’ abuse of their allotted time. In doing so, Bruguera’s performance arguably points to the role military authorities are called to play in a democracy, when—as the artist declares on her webpage—people awake to their political responsibility and become the authors and owners of their political lives.59 In such a scenario, fatigue uniforms are due to become the guarantee of each other’s rights and public dialogue. I will conclude with the work of Aldo Damián Menéndez López (b. 1971), especially the recent protest art of Maldito Menéndez, his alter ego, directly confronting the fidelista regime and its symbols, notably military drab and guayabera shirts.60 On his blog Castor Jabao, an anagram of abajo Castro (“down with Castro”), Maldito Menéndez documents his performances of protest, including a 2015 denunciation of his banishment from Cuba and state authorities’ decision to send him back to Spain on the same plane on which he had arrived in Havana to participate in an artistic event while visiting his mother.61 Maldito Menéndez posted pictures of an inflatable sex doll (Plate 33) that he dressed in an army shirt and “adorned” with tools of sadomasochistic sex in an explicit denunciation of the abuse of power the military and political authorities perpetrated against artists and citizens in Cuba.62 Those pictures address not just the militarization of the Cuban regime, but also the tyrannical power the government exerts against citizens and their bodies, similar to sadomasochistic practices. Exploring the representation of the olive-green imagery in a group of works of visual art, this chapter has interpreted a diverse repertoire of critical approaches to the Castro regime and the olive-green figured world of power, ranging from praise to uncompromising critique, including more or less tacit conciliations. Whereas in the early postrevolutionary decades Cuban artists often conveyed their hope in and support for the socialist regime, celebrating its symbols, namely through the olivegreen trope, criticism eventually emerged targeting the praetorianization of Cuban society, the disproportionate power of its military caste, and the state’s intrusion into the private sphere and transformation of family relations, individual identities, and people’s daily lives. Unacknowledged Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 169 by international couture labels, which enthusiastically borrow from the olive-green imaginary to recreate Cuba’s long-lost revolutionary ethos, throughout the last four decades Cuban visual artists have deconstructed this history, pulling the military drab imaginary apart. Notes 1. Alyssa Vingan Klein, “Stella McCartney Brought Cuba to Nolita for Her Resort Presentation.” 2. Sarah Mower, “Resort 2017: Chanel.” 3. Michelle Chase, “The Making of Fidel Castro.” 4. Anthony DePalma, Myths of the Enemy, 3. Matthews’s coverage, which spawned three articles published on February 24, 25, and 27, 1957, was, in Cuban officials’ view, “worth more than a military victory.” DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel, 111. 5. Chase, “The Making of Fidel Castro.” 6. Jorge L. Catalá Carrasco, “El humor gráfico revolucionario en Cuba.” 7. See the campaign brochure in Chase, “The Making of Fidel Castro” and Revolution within the Revolution; Lillian Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958. 8. Burt Glinn, Cuba 1959; Lee Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba; Rufo López-Fresquet, My 14 Months with Castro. 9. Glinn, 96. 10. López-Fresquet. 11. Ignac90, “La llegada de los barbudos.” 12. Luis M. Buch Rodríguez, “El día que Fidel asumió el cargo de Primer Ministro.” 13. Buch Rodríguez, my translation. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 14. José Quiroga, Cuban Palimpsests, 94; see also Iván de la Nuez, “La imagen lo absorberá”; Guerra, “‘Una buena foto es la mejor defensa de la Revolución’”; Juan A. Molina, “La marca de su cicatriz.” 15. See, for example, Buch Rodríguez; Omar Fernández Cañizares, Primer viaje del Che al exterior. 16. Yeidy M. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity, 158; Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution. 17. Rivero; Pérez-Stable. See also María A. Cabrera Arús, “For Sale”; Chase, “The Making of Fidel Castro.” 18. Cabrera Arús, “For Sale.” 19. Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs. 20. Minerva Salado, Censura de prensa en la Revolución Cubana. INRA was accessed online at the Digital Library of the Caribbean of Florida International University, http:// www.dloc.com/AA00013449/00001/allvolumes?search=inra. 21. Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba. 22. Chase, “The Making of Fidel Castro.” 23. Luis Hernández Serrano, “Cincuenta octubres de un cartel.” This photograph also 170 · María A. Cabrera Arús appeared on lapel pins, bookmarks, stickers, and other media. It was the photo displayed at Castro’s wake in November 2016, both by the (empty) coffin and on the façade of one of the buildings surrounding Revolution Square. 24. Hernández Serrano; see also Isabel, “El grafismo cubano en estos años”; Chase, “The Making of Fidel Castro.” 25. Shreeya Sihna, “Castro’s Revolution, Illustrated.” This photograph is also reproduced in the masthead of the Granma newspaper, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party. It was taken atop the Turquino Peak, in the Sierra Maestra mountains, during the production of the CBS documentary. 26. Sihna. 27. Duanel Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada and “La revolución es el espectáculo”; Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba. 28. I develop the notion of Cuba’s revolutionary figured world of power in chapter 1 of my book in preparation, “Dressed for the Party: Fashion and Politics in Socialist Cuba,” after the theory formulated by sociologist Chandra Mukerji in “The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power.” 29. María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet, “La moda en la literatura cubana”; Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba. 30. “Adiós Utopia”; John V. Alencar, “Raúl Martínez, Island 70”; Rachel Weiss, To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art. 31. Ernesto Menéndez-Conde, “Dos bromas de Raúl Martínez (II).” 32. Carlos Tejo Veloso, El cuerpo habitado. 33. Leandro Soto, personal communication, June 23, 2017, Miami; Enrique González Rojas, “‘Yo vengo de todas partes y hacia todas partes voy’”; Juan A. Molina, “La marca de su cicatriz”; Weiss. 34. Soto, personal communication. 35. On the William Tell Generation, see Ruth Behar, ed., Bridges to Cuba; Betancourt, “The Rebel Children”; José M. Fajardo, “Los hijos cubanos de Guillermo Tell.” The musical theme that gave the name to this generation, composed by songwriter and singer Carlos Varela, was first performed in 1989 at the Chaplin Theater in Havana. 36. Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Facebook message to author, July 26, 2017; Weiss. 37. Rodríguez Cárdenas. 38. Rodríguez Cárdenas. 39. Rodríguez Cárdenas. 40. Rodríguez Cárdenas. 41. Weiss. 42. Weiss, 75. 43. Weiss, 73. 44. See GlexisNovoa.com. 45. Weiss. 46. Betancourt, 74; Rose M. Salum, “Adiós a la utopía cubana”; Weiss. Las ideas llegan más lejos que la luz is also the title of a previous painting by Rodríguez Cárdenas. 47. Betancourt. 48. Salum; Weiss. Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts · 171 49. In 1986, Glexis Novoa also colored in olive green the background of his paintings No tengo palabras para expresar mi emoción (I Have No Words to Express My Emotion) and Martí en el 3er congreso del PCC ([José] Martí at the 3rd PCC Congress). See GlexisNovoa.com. 50. Quoted by Betancourt, 74; see also Behar; Fajardo. 51. Rachel Price, Planet/Cuba. 52. Betancourt, 79. 53. Betancourt. 54. Deborah Vankin, “In Havana, Following a USC Museum Director in Search of Great Cuban Art.” 55. “‘Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art.’” 56. Price, 154. 57. “Exhibition Walk-Through.” 58. “Tania Bruguera. Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version)”; Taniabruguera.com. 59. 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