tagged w/ The Cuban Revolution
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“A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now” is a photographic exhibition that looks at three critical periods in Cuba’s history as witnessed by photographers before, during and after the country’s 1959 Revolution. The exhibition juxtaposes Walker Evans’s 1933 images from the end of the Machado dictatorship, with views by contemporary foreign photographers Virginia Beahan, Alex Harris and Alexey Titarenko, who have explored Cuba since the withdrawal of Soviet support in the 1990s. Walker Evans's distinctive photographic style was nurtured by New York in the late 1920s, but it became more fully formed by his 1933 experiences in Cuba.
Virginia Beahan, Alex Harris and Alexey Titarenko look at Cuba in very different ways. In 2001, Virginia Beahan began a multiyear project on Cuba; Beahan’s Cuba is a land of contradictions, full of disappointments and hope, decay and rejuvenating beauty, simultaneously anchored to the past while looking beyond the present.
Through distinct vantage points, Alex Harris probed the country’s propensity for ingenuity as it underwent great transition. His 1998-2003 photographs focus on three icons of the island, the American car, the beautiful woman and the revolutionary hero, as metaphors to explore the distortions with which Cubans and Americans see one another.
Alexey Titarenko’s 2003 photographs of life in Cuba depict people persevering amid varying states of ruin: collecting food rations, fixing long-outmoded cars or playing baseball. Titarenko was drawn to Cuba following years spent photographing his home town of Saint Petersburg, a once-grand city transformed by revolution and slow decay under Communist rule. Titarenko deliberately photographed Havana in much the same way he’d photographed his native St. Petersburg, as a city that has suffered very much from communist policies and communist rule. And so his black-and-white and very dusty gray imagery removes any spark, any color from Havana, which is in fact very colorful.
This piece includes a number of black-and-white and color photographs, a photo-gallery and three documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/a-revolutionary-project-explorations-of-cuba-from-walker-evans-to-now/“A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now” is a photographic... more
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Panfilo the drunk Afro-Cuban that was caught on tape talking about the lack of food in Cuba, while intoxicated has once again surfaced.
He has been interrogated by the Secret Police several times. He is trying to say that he has no political associations and that he didn't ask for any of this. He became an overnight sensation when he appeared on a video screaming in Cuban slang "Lo que necesitamos es Jama"-What we need is food!
In Cuba you can't even tell the truth while drunk.Panfilo the drunk Afro-Cuban that was caught on tape talking about the lack of food in... more
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Zurama
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2 years ago
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Words can't begin to describe it. An Afro-Cuban woman is literally eating off the street. After fifty years in power the communist regime can be summed up with this video.Words can't begin to describe it. An Afro-Cuban woman is literally eating off the... more
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Zurama
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3 years ago
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Hollywood filmmakers blind to Che Guevara's brutality
http://article.wn.com/view/2009/02/01/Hollywood_filmmakers_blind_to_Che_Guevaras_brutality/
Guy Sorman | February 02, 2009
Article from: The Australian
Hollywood history is often nonsensical, but filmmakers usually have the good sense not to whitewash killers and sadists. Steven Soderbergh’s new film about Che Guevara, however, does that, and more.
Che the revolutionary romantic, as depicted by Benecio del Toro in Soderbergh’s film, never existed. That hero of the left, with his hippie hair and beard, an image now iconic on t-shirts and coffee mugs around the world, is a myth concocted by Fidel Castro’s propagandists – something of a cross between Don Quixote and Robin Hood.
Like those tall tales, Fidel’s myth of Che bears a superficial resemblance to historical facts, but the real story is far darker. Some Robin Hood probably did brutalize the rich and, to cover his tracks, gave some of his loot to the poor. In medieval Spain, Quixote-like knights probably did roam the countryside, ridding it not of dragons but of the land’s few remaining Muslims.
The same goes for the legendary Che. No teenager in rebellion against the world or his parents seems able to resist Che’s alluring image. Just wearing a Che t-shirt is the shortest and cheapest way to appear to be on the right side of History.
What works for teenagers also seems to work with forever-young movie directors. In the 1960’s, the Che look, with beard and beret, was at least a glib political statement. Today, it is little more than a fashion accoutrement that inspires a big-budget Hollywood epic. Are Che theme parks next?
But once there was a real Che Guevara: he is less well known than the fictional puppet that has replaced reality. The true Che was a more significant figure than his fictional clone, for he was the incarnation of what revolution and Marxism really meant in the twentieth century.
Che was no humanist. No communist leader, indeed, ever held humanist values. Karl Marx certainly was not one. True to their movement’s founding prophet, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Che held no respect for life. Blood needed to be shed if a better world was to be baptized. When criticized by one of his early companions for the death of millions during the Chinese revolution, Mao observed that countless Chinese die everyday, so what did it matter?
Likewise, Che could kill with a shrug. Trained as a medical doctor in Argentina, he chose not to save lives but to suppress them. After he seized power, Che put to death five hundred “enemies” of the revolution without trial, or even much discrimination.
Castro, no humanist himself, did his best to neutralize Guevara by appointing him Minister for Industry. As could be expected, Che applied Soviet policies to the Cubans: agriculture was destroyed and ghost factories dotted the landscape. He did not care about Cuba’s economy or its people: his purpose was to pursue revolution for its own sake, whatever it meant, like art for art’s sake.
Indeed, without his ideology, Che would have been nothing more than another serial killer. Ideological sloganeering allowed him to kill in larger numbers than any serial killer could imagine, and all in the name of justice. Five centuries ago, Che probably would have been one of those priest/soldiers exterminating Latin America’s natives in the name of God. In the name of History, Che, too, saw murder as a necessary tool of a noble cause.
But suppose we judge this Marxist hero by his own criteria: did he actually transform the world? The answer is yes – but for the worse. The communist Cuba he helped to forge is an undisputed and unmitigated failure, much more impoverished and much less free than it was before its “liberation.” Despite the social reforms the left likes to trumpet about Cuba, its literacy rate was higher before Castro came to power, and racism against the black population was less pervasive. Indeed, CuHollywood filmmakers blind to Che Guevara's brutality... more
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the "International Center of Neurological Restoration (CIREN), an institution sponsored by the Cuban State, which discovered the" Fetal Substance Nigra ", consisting of spinal tissue and neuronal cells of human embryos. This substance, in order to achieve regenerative effects in adult nervous tissue should be transplanted from a living human embryo.
The Cuban neurosurgeon Hilda Molina remaining in Cuba, without the possibility to exit, may have been involved in the worst of crimes, to the most defenseless beings-unborn babies.
The fetuses were to be used to treat patients with Parkinson's disease, which did not improve, but continued with their disease and many died. This transplants were never performed on a foreign patient, only Cuban, monkeys, rats and rabbits.the "International Center of Neurological Restoration (CIREN), an institution... more
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Zurama
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3 years ago
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The book titled "Boring Home", by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, was not allowed at this years Havana's Book fair.
In a gesture of defiance, it's author and his friends dedicated the book anyway. Yesterday February 16, 2009 in front of "La Cabaña", the site of hundreds of deaths by order of Che Guevara - the man known to freedom loving Cuban as "The Butcher".
The author dedicated the book to his mother who suffered the cruel treatment of Castro's secret police. The book is not yet translated into English, but this is nothing google translator can't fix, if you really want to read it. The book has been published on the internet. To view "Boring Home", click here:The book titled "Boring Home", by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, was not allowed... more
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Zurama
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A great article, very concise and at the same time comprehensive. A lot has been written about Che, but I hadn’t seen a compilation such complete and effective like this article.A great article, very concise and at the same time comprehensive. A lot has been... more
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Ernesto Che Guevara, the Butcher of the Cabaña is a celebrity to the Hollywood elite. While in charge of this hell of a prison, 400 men were executed,in the first three month he oversaw it, their crime, to have the audacity to think different then he did.
Che's hero was China's Mao, who killed 20 million of his countryman.
All together the victims of communism total approximately 60.3 million, but it would appear, that the victims of communism are insignificant to them. The people Che would have imprisoned and killed, think he is a hero. They truly are the useful idiots Vladimir Lenin dreamed about.
I'm guessing, I have probably died and gone to hell!!!
Found this video on http://www.veoh.com/videos/ Very informative for people with blind consciences! The rest of us know better!Ernesto Che Guevara, the Butcher of the Cabaña is a celebrity to the Hollywood... more
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Zurama
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Huber Matos es uno de los comandantes que acompañan a Fidel Castro en su entrada triunfal en La Habana tras la huida de Batista en enero de 1959. Matos denunció valientemente, a unos diez meses de la entrada triunfal en La Habana de los revolucionarios (entrada en la que él acompañó a Fidel Castro), la traición a la revolución cubana que empezaba a ser dominada, en los hechos, por los comunistas, cuya cabeza visible era nada menos que el “hermanísimo” Raúl.
Esa denuncia le costó 20 años de cárcel y torturas y sigue con vida, en el exilio desde luego, gracias a la perseverante presión que ejerció en su momento José Figueres, el ex-presidente de Costa Rica.Huber Matos es uno de los comandantes que acompañan a Fidel Castro en su... more
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"In a crucial sweep during the last two weeks of the fighting, Morgan and his men attacked a fortress that guarded the road to Cienfuegos, forcing the soldiers inside to surrender. The move not only allowed Morgan to capture the city, but opened the area to the guerrillas marking the beginning of the end for Batista's army, historians say."
Check out the rest of the story it makes for compelling reading."In a crucial sweep during the last two weeks of the fighting, Morgan and his men... more
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The ultimate legacy of the Revolution may very well be its utter contempt for Cubans. For half a century now, Cuba’s leaders have strangled all political discourse, poisoning whatever common future all of us Cubans could have hoped for. The Castro regime has not only expelled twenty percent of the population and ripped apart millions of families, but also fanned hatred and intolerance. In the process, the Revolution turned us all into beggars of one sort or another, either in our own homeland or in exile, and bequeathed to us a destitute island prison, part brothel, part work camp, part freak show, where the only way to escape despair –short of suicide-- is to flee, or to become an agent of repression.
That is one hell of an achievement. Hell itself, one might say.The ultimate legacy of the Revolution may very well be its utter contempt for Cubans.... more
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Five decades after the rise to power of the Castro brothers, Cuban crumbles, while the world keeps looking at the Castros as if only they were citizens of Cuba. The people must be heard!Five decades after the rise to power of the Castro brothers, Cuban crumbles, while the... more
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Zurama
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3 years ago
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Last week, Fidel Castro gave up the almost total power he's had in Cuba for nearly 50 years. Given his prolonged illness, Castro's announcement wasn't a big surprise, but it's received a great amount of attention from the media and politicians. However, this article also looks at the extreme urban decay and ruin in Cuba as one of the outcomes of The Cuban Revolution.
Photographs, three videos and a photo-gallery are included.Last week, Fidel Castro gave up the almost total power he's had in Cuba for... more
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