A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now

I'm not a museum frequenter, and not really a museum fan. I note this simply to say that I feel very disconnected in museum spaces, and usually retain little of my experience.

This summer I was entertaining my family who came to visit and I took them to the Getty. It was my first and only time going to the Getty, and the only thing that I can recall from my visit was the exhibition on Cuba and the Revolution.

What I remember about the exhibition is a large room displaying huge, colorful photographs. One wall showed a series of photographs of prostitutes, another showed a series of Havana scenes from the inside of dilapidated cars, a third showed scenes of daily life featuring busts of Jose Marti, and last was a wall of decaying billboards toting slogans from the time of the Revolution.

In two enclaves of the exhibit were some smaller, black and white, and considerably less awe-inspiring photographs. One room featured photos from the 1930s taken by Walker Evans, an American, who was hired to provide illustrations for a book titled The Crime of Cuba, which according to the website "would be a scathing indictment of the then-current regime of Cuban President Gerardo Machado".

In the other room were photographs from the 1959 Revolution, featuring at its helm the original photograph of Che--which has since become a popular t-shirt, button, poster print for teenagers all over the U.S. All the photographs in the room were taken by Cuban photographers who wanted to record and preserve the Revolutionary moment.

Reading over the description of the exhibit really connects my feelings of being there with the intentions of the curator. It seems to me that the exhibit doesn't paint the Revolution as a successful venture. The room dedicated to the 1930s shows the oppressive (and U.S. backed) dictatorship, the room full of photographs of Castro and more prominently Che shows the Revolution, and the rest of the exhibit seems to position the Revolution in a very romantic light as well as a failed venture. The huge color photographs from the 1990s show a Cuba (from an overwhelmingly American and anti-communist perspective) that seems to have failed to live up to its revolutionary zeal. The message I got when I walked into the room was that Cuba today is full of prostitutes, outdated cars, hopes unfulfilled, and a desire for a true revolutionary hero, Jose Marti.