Cuba's "Revolutionary Project' at the Getty in LA

Porfirio Diaz, Mexico's late 19th-Century dictator, once lamented his country's fate: "So far from God, so close to the United States." Cuba has been officially far from God since 1959, the year of Fidel Castro's revolution. Alas, it too is close to the United States, and getting closer.

Cuba was an American dependency when the young photographer Walker Evans visited it in 1933. The U.S. controlled the Cuban economy lock, stock and barrel, with the usual consequences: a wealthy comprador class and a mass of immiserated workers and peasants.

Evans made a suite of striking photographs recording the poverty he saw in Havana and the prosperity that lorded itself over the city as well. These pictures, far less well known than Evans's images of Depression America, were meant to illustrate a muckraking book by the journalist Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba. The Getty Museum, which lords itself above the depressed Los Angeles of 2011, has used Evans as the springboard of an exhibit that muses on Cuba's modern fate, and that of 20th-Century revolution as well.

The exhibition consists of three parts: Evans's photographs; those of the fine young generation of Cuban photographers who recorded the Castro revolution in its early years; and a final section depicting the Cuba of today, again from the vantage point of foreign visitors. The result is a melancholy triptych, mercifully free of commentary, that reflects on a century of disillusion. The subject is Cuba, but the moral is one for us all.

What buildings tell us

Evans was sent to document Cuba's poverty, but he seems to have been as much taken with the peeling architecture of its Spanish colonial past and the piquancy of its dry goods storefronts as with the passing parade of the population. This was to be the case with his portraits of the American Deep South as well.

There's strategy here though as well as aesthetic choice. Buildings do reflect their inhabitants, whether they include or exclude them. The poor of Havana— beggars, peddlers, prostitutes, peasants, day laborers, stevedores— are denizens of the street, and their faces, tragically exposed to the winds of fortune, express the condition of a people fundamentally homeless in their own land.

They are not all abject; the portrait of a blade-thin stevedore, his hat casting a shadow behind him and a cigarette dangling from his lips, suggests the violence that accompanies such lives and slowly builds within them. But the plight of the country is best summarized in the picture of a young girl looking out a barred window; her fate seems literally projected before her.

Is it propaganda?

Every revolution begins as a Sunday, and so it was when Fidel Castro and his ragtag army swept down from the hills on Havana on New Year's Day, 1959. Here is Fidel in the pride of his young manhood, with the even younger Che Guevara by his side; here are the crowds that appear to welcome them rapturously; here is the work of the revolution commenced by its leaders themselves, with Fidel taking a hand in the sugar harvest. And here, too, are the young photographers— Alberto Korda, Tirso Martinez, Perfecto Romero, Osvaldo Salas and others—recording the revolution's first, fresh days.

Is it propaganda? Of course. But where does one draw the line between genuine fervor and the calculated pose? It is obvious enough that Fidel, Che, Camille Cienfuegos and the rest of the revolution's glamour boys were natural actors, and never really off-camera.

The centerpiece of this section of the exhibit is Raul Corrales's iconic portrait of Che, the one that wound up on a million T-shirts. The obvious point is made, as also in an "official" portrait of Che (Benicio del Toro never looked so good!).

A cloud of cigar smoke

A more intimate picture shows Fidel and Che conferring in a cloud of Fidel's omnipresent cigar smoke, and of course we see the tumultuous popular rallies, one of which features a crowd of peasants waving their machetes. The most exuberant (and impressive) photograph, by Korda, is of Cienfuegos on horseback, leading a rally on the revolution's anniversary.

Whatever of all this is staged, and whatever is left out— the refugee exodus streaming for Miami, for every revolution has its victims and losers, too— there is no gainsaying the energy in these pictures, and the briefly lived hope that redeems all popular revolutions, whatever disenchantment awaits them.

Reality, though, was always the United States. That made a Soviet client state of Cuba and, in the 1962 missile crisis, almost turned the planet into a cinder. What followed was America's very special, very private cold war with Cuba, now 50 years old, that helped ossify the revolution and has, but for the peeling pictures and slogans of the revolution and its octogenarian leaders, turned Cuba back toward destitution— a colony without colonizers, awaiting "liberation" at the hands of its new conquistadors.

Photographers as vultures

The photographers who have come to observe the revolution in its senescence display varying degrees of sympathy for the island's plight, but one can't but see them a little as vultures picking their way through carrion. The Russian Alexey Titarenko (born 1962) photographs Havana in a tinted, crepuscular black and white: a woman leaning over a parapet, waiting for nothing; a dog perched on the second floor ledge of a dilapidated tenement; the blur of a figure going past the closed door of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution; abandoned cars, rusted out and derelict. The pictures are elegant, surreal, and the point of view is unmistakable: Here is revolution's dead end, waiting for its coup de grace.

Virginia Beahan (born 1946) and Alex Harris (born 1949) use brash color. Harris, himself a student of Evans, has shot much of his work through the windshields of the dinosaur cars that still prowl Havana's streets, a device borrowed from Lee Friedlander's American landscape series.

Beahan, going into the countryside, finds revolutionary posters still adorning abandoned "cultural centers," while in Havana itself Harris documents the revival of prostitution. A portrait of two sisters is particularly striking: the elder one, just in her teens but already apprenticed on the streets, and the younger one, her eyes still innocent but her future writ large. In a way, the image brings the exhibition full circle, inevitably recalling Walker Evans's shot of the girl behind barred windows.

As I say, a melancholy reflection, and not on Cuba alone in what its leaders call its "special" (i.e. post-Soviet) period. One wonders what Fidel thinks about now, padding about in his slippers. Maybe it's what Porfirio Diaz thought about too.