Copyrighting Che: Art and Authorship under Cuban Late Socialism
Visitors to Havana are dwarfed by Ernesto Che Guevara’s monumental face presiding over Revolution Square. A principal icon of the Cuban revolution and anticolonial movements worldwide, Che Guevara has been the object of state worship since his death in 1967. So when Tomás Esson, a young graduate of Havana’s prestigious Art Institute, scandalized the public in 1988 with an exhibit featuring an image of Che associated with sexual and scatological imagery, the Ministry of Culture quickly closed down the show.1 In the words of one onlooker, the offending artwork depicted Che looking at “figures doing ‘things’! Fornicating! People with horns! And one was sticking his horn up someone else’s ass! And in the middle of that there were little Cuban flags! And pioneros climbing a cannon that was in fact a phallus!” (Garcia 1999).2 Visitors were puzzled to see at a state gallery what appeared to be blasphemy. And to no one’s surprise, the exhibit lasted only one day. Allegedly, it was the minister of culture himself, Armando Hart, who asked the artist to close it down. This incident marked the boundaries of Cuba’s version of perestroika, a period of ideological opening and generational renewal in the Communist Party that brought about a thriving youth culture and unprecedented political humor. Barely two years later, perestroika, like the entire Soviet bloc, was a thing of the past, and Tomás Esson had moved to Miami. Some of his controversial paintings, however, remained in Cuba, since the government declared them to be “cultural patrimony of the Cuban nation” and therefore not permitted to leave the national territory (Plagens and Katel 1992).
As Cuba moved to salvage its economy from the deep crisis caused by the loss of its socialist trading partners, much of the state infrastructure of cultural production and distribution was turned into a network of for-profit semiautonomous enterprises. The Cuban culture industries became a sort of “border zone” (Sassen 2000), “zone of contact” (Lomnitz 2001), or “zone of graduated citizenship” (Ong 1999) structured by the interests of a new array of stakeholders, both state and corporate. Within these zones, new social relations developed around the clash of socialist ethics and capitalist practices, along with new forms to imagine, mediate, and contest ideas of identification and community. On the whole, the inscription of cultural production, patterns of leisure, and approaches to labor and community within transnational circuits of mass culture and entertainment fostered alternative discourses and forms of social practice. This dynamic cultural formation defines a moment that, following Alexei Yurchak (1997), I refer to as “late socialism.” And while the Communist Party still sought to reassert its command over artistic imaginaries and public discourses at home through ideological persuasion, capitalist mechanisms of control over cultural products extended the reach of patrimonial rights well beyond national jurisdiction. That is, to consider a cultural product, such as any depiction of Ernesto Che Guevara, as collective patrimony could be an arbitrary decision resting on state-appointed guardians of national ideology. But now, in addition, the control over such images was exerted through a seemingly neutral, internationally binding juridical resolution made on the basis of authorship. An international lawsuit pursued by a Cuban photographer in 1999, over the use and commerce of a picture of Che Guevara that he took in 1960 for a government newspaper, will exemplify the shift in notions of individualism, labor, and property occurring in Cuba throughout the 1990s.
Formerly valued according to socialist notions of aesthetic quality, cultural relevance, and ideological significance in the postperestroika period—known as the Special Period in Times of Peace—both creative labor and the cultural product became valued in relation to agents and processes outside the socialist state. This resulted in the separation of two distinct labor regimes, that is, in the differentiation between cultural and manual labor that was very much rejected under socialism but stands at the core of neoliberal capitalism. Economic and legal reforms throughout the 1990s turned cultural institutions into copyright industries structured by the dynamics of global markets of leisure and entertainment. Artists prospered, allowing the socialist state to renew, however precariously, its own legitimacy and public prestige, thereby revitalizing its articulation of national culture and identity with the revolutionary project. As a result, a group of musicians, artists, performers, and entertainers emerged as a highly visible elite with transnational connections—their jet-setting lives contrasting with the bleakness of everyday food deprivation, electricity blackouts, and water shortages. This farándula immediately became a symbol of a nascent capitalism that was not identified with a socialist ethic of work but with a system of valorization in which wealth accumulation appeared in the public consciousness to be disproportionate to the input of labor.
This article details the valorization of both artistic labor and the art product under a late socialist regime marked by the rise of hybrid modalities of value production and subjectivities that were as much the results of a burgeoning ideology of possessive individualism and new forms of transnational identification as the outcomes of a revolutionary ethos of work, community, and equality. It locates the Cuban government’s social and economic privileging of independent creative work amid the transformations and turmoil wrought by the country’s engagement with global markets structured by neoliberal regimes of value. And it examines the tensions and negotiations that ensued as cultural producers—exclusively— vied to convert their own labor into financial capital by entering directly and individually into contractual agreements with transnational stakeholders that now mediated and regulated Cuban fields of cultural production. The analysis identifies a decisive shift in signifying practices of authorship—now caught between socialist conceptions of collective redistribution and capitalist practices of individual profit and corporate speculation—whereby the cultural product of artistic labor assumed both a commodity form and a quasi-global copyright form.
Following a decade of cultural change in the 1990s, these developments emerged in the limelight of global media with the international legal dispute over the ownership of a revolutionary icon: Ernesto Che Guevara—or, rather, the photographic image that had become associated with him, in Cuba and abroad. Although the international press focused on the image itself, the issues at stake, when placed in the Cuban context, revealed enormous rearrangements of social relations and subjectivities around notions of labor, property, community, and culture. The copyrighting of Che, its ownership in Cuba and in the global circuits beyond, will serve as a starting point to illustrate the complexities of art and authorship, property and patrimony, and community and commodity for Cuban late socialism.
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Notes
Special thanks to Raj Balasubramanian, Marcial Godoy, Kaylin Goldstein, Dana Holland, Beth Povinelli, and the Public Culture reviewers for their engaged commentary.
- The exhibit was titled A Tarro Partido 2 and was shown at Galería 12 y 23 in Havana.
- Pioneros refers to the Communist Children Organization. Its slogan is “Pioneers like Che.” 3. Ley No. 14, Ley del Derecho de Autor, Gaceta Oficial de la Republica de Cuba, 30 December 1977, 757–62.