Replications in Time - The Cuban Revolution at 50

It seems fitting to begin 2009 by remembering New Year's Day of January 1, 1959, and news reports of the revolutionary forces of Fidel Castro securing Havana; a few days later el Commandante himself, flanked by Raul and Che in the back of a jeep, arrived in Havana to claim the leadership of the Cuban Revolution. At thirteen, (to Castro's thirty-three), and generally clueless, I was unaware of not only the Cuban revolution itself, but of the need for revolution. In 1959, I lived in a world apart from the world of today, growing up white and middle-class on Cleveland's west side. In the world before Civil Rights, Vietnam and Watergate. We really knew very little about Cuba. Who was the revolution for, and who was it against?

Castro was a new and unkown sort of hero, unattached, at first, to the dark struggle between left and right. he seemed to us a true man of the people; he fit our model of freedom - a somewhat scruffier version of Washington accepting victory at Yorktown. He was of the people, or so it was reported. The oppressor, Batista, packed up a suitcase of gold, and split for the Dominican Republic. In the decades that followed, the steady progression of tyrants to a safe haven and plush life became a tradition of sorts. Only slowly did it dawn on some that many of the tyrants in exile had been former allies of the U. S. Government. So it was with Batista, but at the time, who knew?

The message about Castro grew dark. He was a communist; he had betrayed the revolution. Some of it was based in a true assesment of political struggle at the top; much of it was American propaganda; political marketing in the days before spin. Slowly Castro the populist hero disappeared from the American media, replaced by the face of an enemy. Then came the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missille Crisis and the first and greatest of the assassinations. JFK had been the emerging hero of a new age. Suddenly he was dead. And gradually thereafter emerged a new political world. One filled with confusion and dark conspiracy. One in which the fate of the country seemed bound up in a triangulation of Cold War forces, and always at the center, Cuba. And to the US, Cuba meant Castro. For the average American it became a struggle to see beyond the television image; to see the relationship between the aspirations of people in the Americas; Central, South and Carribean, and the power of the elite. To see that the template of our past has become the predictor of our future.

Now the old man is 82 and enfeebled. He hasn't been seen in public for over two years. Old and fat at 62, I feel deep empathy for the fate of the old warrior. As the death stare deepens in the face of the defiant one, we turn to face the uncertain world we have created and must now live in.

DHL

Header Image by DHLarsen: Replications in Time No. 5 - 20 x 25 - from image taken on January 1, 2004