Regla de Ocha

Take a Caribbean paradise, add the counter-cultural chutzpah of its pariah status; throw in ubiquitous revolutionary iconography and finish with a generous dash of easy sex and cheap cocaine! The perfect post-modern retreat. Cuba is experiencing the biggest tourist boom since the explosion of the Southeast Asian travel market during the Eighties. Gap year dharma bums in Thailand begot an entire corrosive culture. It remains to be seen what the tourist dollar will do to Cuban identity.
The hulking Chevies and Cadillacs which ply from point to point are from an age of illusory innocence. They are echoes of an erstwhile decadence which survives as the essential texture of Cuban identity. They are mobile, barely rusting monuments to the Cuban love of Americana, wrought in genuine Detroit steel.
There are frozen tableaux of the years of conspicuous decadence everywhere. But the day-to-day reality of most people’s existence is a rice-and-beans, tobacco-and-coffee shrouded queue for soya to make smoothies for much needed protein.
There is, of course, the fabled revolutionary infrastructure. There is extensive, accessible education of good quality. The lights work, as does the sewage system. A minor miracle for the poor Caribbean. Cuba’s is a very photogenic pathos. And though this is an unbranded city, its very substance is becoming its own eminently marketable brand.
We are here as part of the process. No one really knows where it will all lead.
Cuba represents an incalculable square-acreage of empty advertising space. The country is devoid of the semiosis of profit, although its graphic language has been recuperated for the revolution.
Modernist monuments of boom years have decayed by time and circumstance into something resembling tragedy.
‘We will continue our struggle’. The most telling of statements I hear in the first 24 hours in Cuba. Many of the Cuban people, particularly the older generation, see themselves as last bastions of sanity in a crazy world. Thing is, that in the process of the revolution they have created what at times appears to be one of the craziest political situations possible.
What is it Mr Spock said? In an insane world the logical man is the true outcast.
We hear a lot about the Truth in Cuba. Intertwined with La Revolucion is a deep spiritual thread, a texture of belief displaced and projected at the most unlikely symbols.
These photographs were shot on the day of the Yanqui lections. Waiting to leave the city, crashing through potholes and crevasses disguised as streets dotted with colour-coded modernist blocks and eminently skateable surfaces, though bereft of the smooth surfaces necessary for skating. Pushing out into the hinterland, the billboards show us that the graphic creativity of a nation is focused deeply on revolutionary propaganda.
Out into the flat, lush centre of the country, Camaguey and other central cities. Hitchhikers at every junction, rattling trucks laden with passengers, peasant workmen and wives, fruit trucks crashing through this hot, humid November. Somewhere North of here the failure of the founder of democracy is in progress and we watch while the pariah carries on regardless.
Rada, a pink clad transvestite demanded we take her picture. What do you think of the American elections? I ask her. “Stupendous. Fantastic. But Bush is better. .. “