There is a photo of a man slumbering on a chair in a Havana park that is part of the new Getty Museum exhibition, "A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now."
Taken by Evans in 1933, it shows a worker, eyes closed, head propped up by his arm in uneasy rest. He could have dozed off waiting for someone or was waiting out the summer sun - or just waiting.
When it comes to Cuba, the picture could have been taken yesterday.
Waiting is what many do in the island nation, a communist state that was ruled by Fidel Castro for nearly 50 years and is now run by his brother, Raul. It is safe to say that many people, both in America and Cuba, are waiting for the Castros to die. In a half-century, very little has changed in relations between the two countries - heavy-duty travel restrictions remain despite a slight easement recently. However, there has been a sudden surge in things culturally Cuban happening around Los Angeles.
In the next three months, besides the Getty show, there will be other art exhibitions, a visit from the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, a number of screenings of Cuban and Cuban-related films, a night of Cuban music at the Hollywood Bowl, the appearance of folk-rocker Carlos Varela, called the Bob Dylan of Cuba, at the Playboy Jazz Festival, and the induction of Cuban-born Grammy Award-winning pop music superstar Gloria Estefan into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.
No one seems to know why so many things Cuban have coincidentally
and unexpectedly popped up on the entertainment menu.
"It would be nice to say that it was somehow coordinated," says Rebecca Yeldham, director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, which is showing a number of Cuban films during the festival, which runs from June 16 to 26. "But it is fascinating that there is this very synergistic celebration across different mediums."
Indeed, some publicists have noticed many of the events have recently been branded under the heading " S Cuba! SoCal."
But even Judith Keller, who curated the Getty exhibit, was unaware until recently that there were other Cuban-related events going on. She had been planning the museum's show for quite some time, and part of it involved a State Department-sanctioned trip to Cuba last year, which took some five months for approval.
What she saw was a Havana that doesn't look much different than what is seen in the photos shot by Evans (1903?1975), which were taken as an assignment for a book called "The Crime of Cuba," an indictment of the corrupt regime of the nation's president Gerardo Machado, and the exploitation of the country by the U.S.
The photos Evans took, however, turned out to be more of an exploration, a documentation of old Havana, its decaying colonial architecture, and the people.
"Evans primarily photographed an area of the city called old Havana, which is now being heavily restored," explains Keller. "He had spent a year in Paris and wanted to become a writer. So for him having this old city to photograph (gave him) the freedom to shoot what he wanted to."
There were two influences on Evans at the time. One was French photographer Eug ne Atget, who was becoming known at the time for his documentation of old Paris. "I think an awful lot of what Evans did there was - especially the photographs of the storefronts and the carriages and older architecture - an imitation of Atget," says Keller.
While in Havana, Evans met Ernest Hemingway, whom he admired for his stripped-down writing style and political views and was interested in putting that aesthetic in his pictures. Interestingly, one of the photos in the exhibit shows a man standing in a doorway beside a film poster for "A Farewell to Arms." In one of those strange coincidences, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences currently has an exhibition called "Cuban Film Posters: From Havana to the World." The 125 hand-silkscreened posters, though, are all created post-1959, after the revolution; so "Adios a las Armas" - as it is known in Spanish - is not one of them.
Evans' photographs include portraits of poor workers, men in the ubiquitous Panama hats and a few stylish women, who may be streetwalkers. It's easy to see a connection to another part of the show that features three photographers who have chronicled Cuba since 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart and the island nation lost its economic support. Known as the "Special Period" (per odo especial), the time was especially hard on the poor nation.
Some of Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko's black-and-white shots look like they could be part of the Evans group, so little seems to have changed.
"He grew up in Leningrad and to him it was just another Cold War city that is crumbling and that was devastated by communist rule," notes Keller about Titarenko's work.
Virginia Beahan's pictures explore the relationship of the country's landscape and its history, including the many reminders of the revolution that have been erected, from billboards to statues. A photo by Alex Harris, showing a young "Woman Posing in Her Living Room, with Camilo Cienfuegos on the TV" captures many of the aspects of modern Cuban life. A former student of Evans, Harris took portraits of women whose lives have been affected by the tourist-fueled sex trade and have become part-time prostitutes.
Contrast that with a shot in the third part of the exhibition of photos taken during and directly after the country's 1959 socialist revolution to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Alberto Korda's "Plaza de la Revoluci n, Havana, May 1963" shows proud armed women marching on parade, a far cry from Harris' image.
The revolution photos are from the private collection of Christian Skrein, and include an iconic shot of Che Guevara by Korda. As Keller notes, Castro understood the propaganda advantage to documenting the revolution and hired a number of photographers to do so. Many of the shots are restagings of key events, while others show communist ideals, like those women soldiers.
Harris liked to aim his camera at landscapes taken through the windshields of refurbished 1950s American cars. Since the U.S. embargo of 1962, Cubans have been unable to get American autos but have kept the ones they have running.
One of the films in the Los Angeles Film Festival, "Habana Eva," has a scene that spotlights one such car - that of a bride riding in an old convertible against the Havana skyline. The festival's artistic director, David Ansen, calls the film a romantic comedy that shows you the city and "what goes on in the foreground story and what goes around in the background story."
Ansen, who was a longtime film critic at Newsweek, and Yeldham, a producer whose credits include "The Motorcycle Diaries" about the young Che, took their own State Department-sanctioned trip to Cuba last December. They were there, along with others from the American movie industry, for the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana. The group included director Kathryn Bigelow and the writer Mark Boal, who introduced their Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker."
"We met with a lot of Cuban filmmakers while we were there," says Yeldham, "and out of that experience came the desire to continue furthering that cultural exchange. And in turn to bring Cuban films and filmmakers to the festival."
Calling it a "fascinating and complicated place," Ansen says there are two types of filmmaking going on in Cuba - movies that go through the official government channels and a growing independent film movement. Those are largely being financed by overseas money - "everything but American money," Ansen notes. He adds, "They have an amazing film school there, which brings people in from all over Latin America and Europe as well."
Though the flight from Miami was less than an hour, landing in Havana was something of a culture shock for Yeldham.
"It's so removed from American commercialism and consumerism, capitalism," says the producer. "I think for many of us - as well traveled as we are - we've never been anywhere quite like it, and it's such a creative place, born out of this situation dominated by meager resources."
Ansen says he was surprised by the variety of movies he saw, especially considering the government's hold on the people. One film at the festival is "Ticket to Paradise," set in the "Special Period" of the 1990s. "This movie shows a kind of desperation that people were driven to during that period," he says.
One of the highlights of the festival will be the showing of "Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba." It's a documentary about some 14,000 Cuban children who were sent by their parents to the U.S. to "save" them from the revolution in the early 1960s. The film follows several "Peter Pans" who return to their homeland for the first time.
"The reason we're particularly excited about it is that since we announced this film," says Yeldham, "David and I have heard an outpouring of inquiries from `Peter Pans' - people who have come forth and declared themselves to either be the children who were sent to the U.S. or children of those children. And we are expecting quite a turnout at the festival."
A recent informal poll by a travel agency group says that if restrictions were lifted, most Americans would consider visiting Cuba.
It's all part of the waiting game that is the island nation, but with all that is happening around L.A., we can get a taste of it without getting on an airplane. Mojito anyone?
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