{"id":243330,"date":"2021-09-06T13:25:29","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T17:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=243330"},"modified":"2021-09-06T13:25:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-06T17:25:29","slug":"cuba-synchrony-of-an-image-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/cuba-synchrony-of-an-image-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Cuba: synchrony of an image (II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989) and the disintegration of the USSR (December 26, 1991) fueled in the United States a kind of in crescendo in public information about Cuba. Expectations were built around this platform regarding the possible evolution of internal events in a context of economic and social crisis with deep repercussions that continue to this day. Socialism on a single island? For how long? Could Cuba survive the disappearance of Soviet subsidy? Peaceful or violent transition?<\/span><\/p>\n

The above were, basically, the big questions planted in politics and the media at that time. In its answers, the predictions about the duration of the Cuban regime were usual, which, if generous, came to grant it only a 50-50 chance of survival in the new century. A strongly negative image about the socialist system was reinforced then, built on the general consensus in politics and the media, granting it little space for alternative points of view within the mainstream. This in turn led to the idea of \u200b\u200bcelebrating Christmas Eve in Havana or predicting that Fidel Castro would fall three months after the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act, better known as the <\/span>Helms-Burton Act<\/span><\/a>, was approved by the U.S. Congress (1996).<\/span><\/p>\n

In this context, there was an overestimation of the role of contacts with the West in the events of Eastern Europe, since, according to this logic, what worked there would inexorably work in Cuba, a card that was bet on in reports, recommendations and the media. That is where the so-called \u201ctrack two\u201d emerged, understood as a way to get rid of the prevailing system through the logic of contacts: in Cuba it was characterized as \u201cthe kiss of death.\u201d \u201cWe are trying to open more communication channels,\u201d said a State Department official in the Clinton administration. \u201cWe expect that what is seen in Eastern Europe will help refresh the island\u2019s society. We are trying to help the Cuban people for when the <\/span>inevitable<\/span><\/a> transition occurs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Berlin Wall. Photo: Archive.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Seen in retrospect, perhaps one of the most vulnerable points in the entire process of rearranging the image was to present Cuban culture as a closed culture without interactions with external dynamics, precisely in a context characterized by the multilateral relationship with the world, not only from tourism and foreign investment, which in 1993 began to make their way in Cuba as part of an agonizing process of adjustments and reforms, which has shown, to date, more resilience than progress.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the idea of \u200b\u200bisolation had a powerful support in the construction of the image: <\/span>Buena Vista Social Club (1997)<\/span><\/i>. Captained by the Beach Boy Ry Cooder and Cuban Juan de Marcos, the producers of the CD and the homonymous film by Wim Wenders (1999) recycled a group of past musicians, oblivious to any sense of modernity even in the instruments they played, an ideal force to prop up the image of a country where neither McDonald\u2019s nor Coca-Cola advertisements are part of the visual horizon. In that atypicality lay its power of convocation, that is, in the idea that globalization, supposedly, had not appeared in Cuban lands, even at the level of the media in which that wonderful music sounded, but stopped in time, well away from electronics and synthesizer sound.<\/span><\/p>\n

And along with Buena Vista came two correlates, the first painfully real: the image of a Havana ruled by ruins and old cars, converted from that moment into what tourism experts call \u201ca brand.\u201d But, in all cases, one thing was clear: the Cubans were a dark smiling people waiting for a new Rudyard Kipling photographer.<\/span><\/p>\n