We are living in a time of accelerated change, I write in my Artist Statement. Cuba is one of those places where few things changed in the last decades. So where is the transition? How things will change in the future?
One of the surprising aspects, for a visitor coming from the West, is the nearly total absence of street advertising. This is, obviously, the norm in a Communist country where competition doesn’t exist. There are no commercial banners on the roads, with the only exception being sporadic billboards exalting the values of the “Revolucion”, generally reporting famous phrases by Fidel, Chè, Marti, Cienfuegos or other fathers of the nation. At the entrance of most towns a billboard displays the town name and it’s role at the end of the 50’s.
The rhetoric of the regime, with all its powerful iconological apparatus, is solidly planted in the ground, so as to make a static counterpoint to everything that is in transit: from people walking to improvised sellers, bicycles, cars, horses and carts.
So, I observed Cuba from a speeding car, portraying people in transit as I was, on an island, which, almost sixty years after the revolution of 1959 and just one month since Fidel Castro died, is still moving at a different pace than the rest of the world. “Sic Transit Cuba”.
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