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................ 10 ................ Topographies of Cosmonauts in Havana: Proyecto Vostok and Insausti’s Existen jacqueline loss What to do with monuments once the figures they represent are no longer viewed as heroes is a subject that many nations from the former Soviet Bloc confront. According to Michael Kimmelman (2008), Hungary adopted one of the most unusual resolutions: ‘‘In Budapest statues of Communist idols have been relocated to a park on the city outskirts to become virtual headstones at a kind of kitsch graveyard.’’ Unlike what occurred in many places in the former Eastern Bloc, the government of Cuba, though strongly supported by the Soviet Union, did not erect many statues in honor of its heroes in Havana; furthermore, it forbade statues of living Cubans. In fact, one of two statues in honor of Lenin in Havana was erected on January 27, 1924, the very day of Lenin’s funeral in Moscow and long before the Soviets exerted influence in Castro’s revolutionary Cuba. Indicative of the two nations’ later state of a√airs, in 1984 the site was named a national monument , and that same year at Lenin Park in Havana (opened in 1972) a 1,200ton white marble Lenin monument, sculpted by the Soviet Lew Kerbel, was erected. Engraved in the statue is an excerpt of a speech that Fidel gave at an event commemorating the one-hundredth birthday of Vladimir Ilich Lenin at the Chaplin Theatre on April 22, 1970, ‘‘el año de los diez millones’’ (the year of the ten million). The words are: ‘‘Lenin fue desde el primer instante no solo un teórico de la política, sino un hombre de acción, un hombre de práctica 210 jacqueline loss revolucionaria constante e incesante’’ (Lenin was from the first instant not only a theoretician of politics, but also a man of action, a man of constant and incessant revolutionary practice). Statues dedicated to Lenin are scarce; however , those dedicated to Cuba’s national hero, José Martí, are ubiquitous, as anyone who has seen La muerte de un burocráta (1966) (Death of a bureaucrat ) would know. In Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film, a bureaucrat is killed by the giant machine that he invented to mass-produce busts of Martí. Illustrative of fiction and history’s coincidence, just six years after Kerbel’s monument to Lenin was erected in Cuba’s capital a proposal was made in Moscow to move ‘‘Lenin’s body from the mausoleum in Red Square to the Vlokov Cemetery in Leningrad’’ (Pavlov 1994, 141). With the advent of perestroika, Cuba did not literally inter or exhume its ‘‘Soviet brothers,’’ but it did distance itself from the previous predominant narrative of international solidarity. In 1992 the Cuban Constitution was radically transformed to demote their function by taking away previous references to them, such as ‘‘la amistad fraternal y la cooperación de la Unión Soviética y otros países socialistas’’ (the fraternal friendship and cooperation of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries). To a large extent, everyday Cuban people , politicians, intellectuals, and artists followed suit and claimed that nothing remained of the Soviet Bloc in Cuba. However, in the wake of the most di≈cult hardships of the Special Period, stories that once again connect the island to the extinct bloc have surfaced in the memory of Cubans. Ostalgie, a term that, according to Reinhard Ulbrich and Andreas Kämper, was coined by the German comedian Bernd-Lutz Lange to mean nostalgia for the East, has often somewhat erroneously been viewed only as East Germans’ escapism from the present. Actually, the phenomenon is more complex than that. It refers to: ‘‘a mixture of memories that gloss over the real problems and an emerging East German consciousness, point[ing] to intra-social problems that can only partly be explained with the legacy of the GDR and the reintegration of East Germany, but perhaps all the more with the twofold crisis to adapt to a capitalist West Germany and a transforming global economy’’ (Andreas Ludwig quoted in Blum 2000, 230). In a review of Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), Slavoj Žižek (2007) points out that Ostalgie is ‘‘not a real longing for the GDR, but the enactment of the real parting from it, the acquiring of a distance.’’ The multiple nuances of Ostalgie ought to be kept alive as we examine a distinct, yet comparable...

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