Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

El Periodo Especial

ERNESTO BAZAN AND SILVANA PATERNOSTRO (1997)

With the disappearance of Soviet communism, Fidel Castro’s government lost its economic guardian, which alone accounted for 85 percent of Cuban exports and imports. There were no more preferential trade agreements, and no more swapping of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil. In just three years, from 1989 to 1992, Cuba’s economic production shrank by 40 percent. Overnight, Castro’s socialist state found itself unable to continue supporting its population, and Cubans were left, like orphans, to fend for themselves. Castro called the loss of Soviet support the Special Period.


PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Ernesto Bazan




WRITING

Diary of a Special Place
By Silvana Paternostro

For thirty-seven years, the United States and the Cuban-American community have scrutinized Fidel Castro’s steps—worrying, plotting, planning, projecting life in Cuba without him. Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, predictions of his demise have intensified. The United States has tightened its thirty-three-year-old embargo on trade with the island, and Castro has railed even more furiously about imperialist plots to destroy the triumphs of his revolution.

The average Cuban citizen, however, has little time to spare thinking about the trade embargo, or about politics. On the streets of Havana, even the simplest tasks are a struggle, and the search for basic goods so urgent that everyday Spanish gives way to a vocabulary of crisis. The verbs for to find, to get, and even to have merged together into one: to resolve.

When I visited the island in the fall of 1995, I heard a young father, who’d had plenty to eat in the Soviet era, proudly declare to a friend: “Today, mi hermano, I resolved a pound of cheese for my kid’s lunch.” But his upstairs neighbor, a theater director and his wife “resolved” their midday meal by boiling some herbs and drinking the infusion to quell their hunger. And when I asked a teenager wearing a black Metallica T-shirt if he liked heavy-metal music, he said no. “It was the only T-shirt I could resolve.”

Before they can worry about Fidel’s future, Cubans must “resolve” their rice and beans, their rum and cigarettes, the milk for their babies, and the bus ride to work each day. With few spare parts, little modern technology, and no money, their resourcefulness shows in their inventions: I saw a 1957 automatic Chevrolet that ran with the stick-shift transmission of a Soviet Lade and mopeds that had been made from bicycles and the motors of lawnmowers. A young rock musician made an amplifier out of a Russian turntable and a couple of television cables. Another musician used telephone wires for guitar strings. [1996]


A true child of the Cuban revolution, Mailene Moreno stood in Havana’s cathedral after Christmas Eve mass and whispered a confession: “I’ve never been inside a church before.” Born in 1959, the same month Fidel Castro came to power, Moreno grew up a committed atheist. She was taught that religion was “the opiate of the masses” and that the Roman Catholic Church was an enemy of the revolution. When the taboo against religion was lifted in 1991, the lifelong Communist Party member stayed away for fear of losing her secretarial job. Why the change of heart? A combination of despair at Cuba’s dismal conditions and hope inspired by Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit, in January 1998. “The pope’s message motivated me,” Moreno said, eyes welling with emotion. “I’ll do whatever it takes to go see him. I now believe in both Christ and Fidel.” [1998]


There may be blackouts, a shortage of gasoline, even rationing of rum, but there is still music. News is scarce on TV, but there are plenty of music shows. Paychecks are meager but state-organized afternoon parties with free live music abound. Calzado tells me that when his band plays in the countryside, the only people who stay home are the elderly and newborns. “Charanga drags as many people to the Revolution Square of Santiago as Fidel Castro,” he says.

The music that Charanga plays is called timba, and it is a combination of jazz and rumba spiced with reggae, funk, and hiphop. Although rooted in the traditional elements of the son (a guitar-driven, brass-laced Cuban rhythm), it sounds as different from the music of old Havana as rap does from the Ronettes. Timba is the modern mambo, a hard-edged cha-cha-cha, designed to make the stiffest of dancers want to get up and try. “It is based on son, but it is more African, more percussive,” says Ned Sublette, a Texas-born singer-songwriter who started one of the first American record labels for Cuban music. “It is sophisticated dance music.”

Timba is the sound of the new post-Soviet Cuba; the music of the Special Period. It is the voice of the average Cubans, of those who allow their cubania—the Cuban identity that combines a joy of life, sensuousness, a macho attitude—to seep out. “We are about la alegria that Cubans have even when they do not have anything,” says Paulito as he puffs on a midmorning cigar and crosses his legs to display Mickey Mouse socks. “Here people sing all the time, even when they clean.” [1999]


More than fifty young women crowd around the back door of the Tropicana, Cuba’s most famous cabaret, chatting and freshening their makeup. They are all here to audition for Havana’s version of the Moulin Rouge. Amid the excited teens, one girl stands stiffly, casting anxious glances at her mother. In her backpack, fourteen-year-old Maria de la Caridad Penalver carries childhood photos of herself dressed as Carmen Miranda and a letter she has written to the artistic director of the school. “My dream has always been to dance here.”

There are other, second- and third-tier cabarets in Havana—but the Tropicana is the oldest and most glamorous. Every December, it holds an open call to recruit new students for its yearlong, tuition-free training school. The requirements are posted outside the door: To qualify as dancers, girls must be younger than twenty-one and at least 5'4"; to be “dancing models,” the stars of the show, they must be 5'8". They must possess grace, beauty, rhythm, and musicality. . . .

These lucky entry-level dancers will receive the standard 350-peso paycheck—and plenty of perks: free transportation to and from performances, subsidized meals, and each month, a ten-dollar “java” (slang for shopping bag). Experienced dancers earn larger bonuses, and dancing models enjoy nearly unthinkable luxuries: European travel, trendy clothes, and cellular phones.

That’s why Maria’s mother, who works as a lawyer for the revolution, has taken a day off to bring her daughter to this audition. She even spent fifty cents for a cab instead of taking the unreliable bus. They couldn’t afford to be late. Their future is riding on Maria’s tryout. [2001]


Bordier, a biologist from Guantánamo, began breeding the blue scorpion, native to Cuba, in the early 1980s and experimentally treating mice and dogs with cancer with scorpion venom—as many spider and snake venoms are used around the world as antidotes for a variety of ailments. It soon became clear to Bordier that the mice and dogs’ tumors were visibly shrinking with continued treatment of diluted venom. Word came to Monzón, who would listen to anyone who had anything hopeful to say about cures, no matter what they were or where they were, because his fifteen-year-old daughter was in the late stages of pancreatic cancer, which, despite four years of chemotherapy and radiation, had spread to her liver and intestines.

Upon meeting Bordier, who at that point had never tried the solution on humans, Monzón asked for some for his daughter, Niurys. Month after month, Monzón made the fourteen-hour trip to see Bordier every time Niurys ran out of the venom. In 1993, this kind of travel was only for the truly despairing. Three years after the end of Soviet subsidies Cuba was experiencing a draconian gasoline shortage. But something must have been working. Monzón’s daughter’s recovery was striking.

Although the scorpions reproduce prodigiously, the production of poison is both slow and extremely minimal. The scorpions aren’t “milked” until they are one year old, and they only produce one drop of poison every twenty days. Bordier soon decided he had to expand availability. He gave some scorpions to Monzón, who set up his own breeding and treatment center. For many years, it was a two-man operation: Bordier in Guantánamo, Monzón in Jagüey Grande. Dismissed at first by the medical authorities, the men would not be thwarted. They kept dispensing poison and continued their research, keeping track of their patients’ health. “In my experience,” says Monzón, “15 percent of those who’ve come to see me have terminal cancer, and there is little chance for them to be cured, but the venom does help them feel better, helps with their quality of life.” Of the remaining 85 percent, according to Monzón, 30 percent have reportedly gone into remission, and the other 55 percent, though not cured, have felt better and lived longer.

Word of these statistics spread to the burgeoning biotech industry in Cuba—improbably one of the most advanced in the world. In the last fifteen years, Cuba, left to fend for itself after the Soviet Union became non-communist Russia, has developed a massive biotechnology industry. Today it supplies all manner of pharmaceuticals, including a meningitis vaccine, to over thirty countries. Its research and development of a vaccine for lung and other cancers is considered so critical that this past June, the U.S. government was forced to break its forty-three-year-long trade embargo, allowing CancerVax, based in California, to set up a joint venture with the Cuban government. (CancerVax pays its share not in cash but in medicine, medical supplies, and food.) As for the venom, Escozul, any potential cooperation remains top-secret. Cuban authorities refused to talk about the blue scorpion.

Journalists make Monzón very nervous these days. He recently gave an interview to a Greek television program for a story about a sick boy whose rich family brought him to Monzón to be treated. “Now half the world is coming to see me,” he says. “I don’t want to raise people’s expectations.” [2005]








banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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