Millenniums Past Cuba's Future

Socialism or Death
Both this commercial North American representation of a Cuban appropriation of a U.S. symbol, and the image of a decaying revolutionary slogan too easily map onto Western complacencies regarding the inevitability of capitalism and the futility of alternative ideologies or resistant practices. Image consumption of this sort not only naturalizes a not-New World Order, it also implicates the consumer: the star-spangled woman pictured is not actually waiting for Fidel, but for a dollar-rich foreign client-�one of the very persons most likely to find a comfortable irony, eroticism, or pathos in such photographs.

Paul Ryer, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, conducted fieldwork in Cuba, 1995-97.

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