zapadnost-blog

[zapadnost-blog]

NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC REFLECTIONS ON THE CUBAN AUTOMOTIVE TRADTION 

While Cuba’s thirty-year relationship with the USSR is perhaps most famously characterised by the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis, a permanent and little publicised reminder of the long and fruitful relationship between the two countries can be seen trundling along the streets of Cuba en masse in the form of the Lada, Moskvich and Polski Fiat: some of the Eastern Bloc’s most famous automobile exports.  

It may be surprising to note that the number of such Eastern Bloc exports in Cuba vastly outnumber the more championed pre revolutionary American counterpoints – with which the perceived image of Cuba is inextricably intertwined – to a ratio of roughly 2:1. Given, then, that the Eastern Bloc cars form an indelible part of Cuba’s automotive landscape, why have they not formed part of the imagery of Cuba?

A quick browse through any Cuban travel guide, book or calendar, or a search on Google images for ‘Cuba’ affirm that the American automobile is the image of Cuba, despite the fact that the last of these machines to be imported onto the island was over 56 years ago.

While it is true that the Cadillacs, Chevrolets and Studebakers have come to typify Havana’s urban landscape much like the old town’s crumbling facades and revolutionary murals of Fidel Castro, this is nevertheless a highly curated image which ultimately fails to reflect the reality of the automobile situation and its impact on one's everyday experience in Cuba.

Far from being seen as fascinating photographic subjects for travel photographers, Eastern Bloc cars are cast to the side in the face of the bigger, brighter and louder American car – which are representative of an entirely different, apparently more favourable era of Cuban history.

The reason Eastern imports are overlooked and the old Western ones are celebrated is simply because the latter are more interesting as the remains of a grandiose capitalist era, preserved in a sort of amber (though an imperfect one) and thus Cuba represents a sort of time-capsule.

As a result, we may have to delve deeper to understand some other forces at play which are colouring – whether consciously or not – the image of the Eastern Bloc car in Cuba, or lack thereof.

Susan Sontag writes in On Photography: “Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.”

Replace the word ‘conscience’ with ‘ideology’ or ‘discourse’, and we understand more about the potential biases and prejudices lingering in the mind of the western photographer which ultimately influence what exactly is being taken,  how perceived reality is being shaped and, ultimately, what the image of the Eastern Bloc car ultimately comes to represent.

For those on the western side of the former iron curtain, the Eastern Bloc car was – and to a large extent still is – seen through mocking eyes as inferior, technically inefficient and backward, in much the same way as the individual countries themselves and related cultures have become stereotyped and conflated into one generally inferior regional entity.

Contrary to this view, Eastern Bloc cars such as the seemingly omnipresent Fiat FIA.MI 124 based Lada Zhiguli series are much loved and respected among Cubans, bringing mobility and opportunities for personalisation – as seen with the modifying culture surrounding Lada ownership on the island. This fact is also reflected with their price: while an average condition 1950’s Chevrolet can be purchased for around $10,000, a Lada will typically cost you around $15,000.

Perhaps, then, it is those all too familiar negative cold war associations that have consigned the imagery of the Eastern Bloc car in Cuba to the dustbin of history, the consequence of which is a thorough lack of acknowledgement and representation through the lens of the western photographer. In doing so, any illusions of reality that western photographers attempt to mirror are grossly distorted, with American material hegemony and influence within Cuba before 1959 hugely romanticised to the detriment of the highly regarded Soviet co-habitants on the island. Ultimately, the American automobiles are celebrated as the remains of a grandiose capitalist era in Cuba, preserved in a sort of imperfect time capsule.

In this tentative time of relative economic opening in Cuba and uncertainty following the death of Fidel Castro; balance, objectivity and open discussion are required in order to ensure all parts of Cuba’s recent history are approached and processed on an equal footing, with no one era eulogised through external discourse. On a very basic level, this begins with the simple recognition of the presence of the Eastern Bloc automobile on the streets of Cuba. Perhaps then we’ll be one step closer to deconstructing ill founded Eastern European associations in Cuba which ultimately serve to obscure realistic representation of the country.

Patrick McCumiskey