By Toloo Riazi
Abstract
The concept of revolution is intertwined with significant change, idealism, and intense emotions. The Cuban Revolution, in this specific case, ushered in profound transformations and painted a new future for the people. However, the Castro regime, with its authoritarian politics, imposed restrictions on various aspects of life, including the experiences of homosexuals. This article delves into the hidden narrative of the Cuban Revolution, as seen through the eyes of a homosexual individual who chooses the medium of graphic novels to depict her emotional archives of life in Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba.
Keywords
homosexuality; feelings; archives; graphic novel; Cuba
Introduction
The 1956 Hungarian uprisings and ensuing Soviet invasion, combined with Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech from earlier that year at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led to disillusionment regarding Soviet-style communism and consequently altered its influence around the world, particularly among intellectuals. This disillusionment with the Soviet Union shifted attention to Third World countries such as Cuba, where the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution came to embody the struggles against colonialism and imperialism. It announced a new beginning for all people. Castro and his young followers triumphed over Batista, which made the former a hero and a strong contrast from the “characterless bureaucratic leaders” of the era (Wrong 100). Norman Mailer, in praising Castro, writes, “It was as if the ghost of Cortes had appeared in our century riding Zapata’s white horse. You were the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second War” (qtd. in Radford 66).
However, Castro’s revolution contradicts the very basic notion of revolution as a new threshold for greater equality and freedom for everyone. The culture in revolutionary Cuba was polarized and driven by deep ideological cleavages. Under Castro’s regime, comics were considered a vehicle for propaganda and ideological symbols of capitalism (i.e., the United States). In the first years after the revolution, as expressive medium comics were at the service of the new man and the revolutionary project. Jorge L. Catalá Carrasco classified two different ideas about comics in Cuba since 1960: “The first was that adopted by the so-called ‘High Culture’ intellectuals, concerned with finding the best way to bring culture to the people and to make them participate in the culture being produced as subjects and not just consumers,” and “the second was the discourse of actively creating a national Cuban comics industry, serving the Revolution; this could mean using the medium to satirize the enemy” (143). In the 1960s and 1970s, comics became an ideological tool in the hands of Castro and his regime to educate children about revolutionary ideals and values. Therefore, the medium was “infantilized” (Merino 77).
This article puts under scrutiny a recent graphic novel that sheds light on the first years of the Cuban Revolution. Following the Archive of Feelings, this article argues that Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba (Anna Veltfort) is “‘an archive of feelings,’ an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception” (An Archive of Feelings 16). Anna Veltfort chose an alternative way of narrating the history of the Cuban Revolution: The triumph of Castro is told from the perspective of homosexuality, which is closely bound to the image of the revolution (Epps 231). The graphic novel as a medium equipped Veltfort to “map alternative political genealogies and critical historiographies” (Cutter and Schlund-Vials 2).
Veltfort illustrated her memories, in the first place, in a blog called “Cuba: el archivo de Connie” and through what Van Dijck calls “mediated memories” as “the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (21). The encounter between Vetlfort’s personal memories and the collective ones creates “cultural knowledge about the construction of historical and contemporaneous selves in the course of time” (Van Dijck 2). In the blog and later in her autobiographical graphic novel, Veltfort’s memories create a connection between her and those people who share the same past, while also challenging the mainstream image of revolutionary Cuba. The blog gives us access to vivid anddetailed mnemonic archives. This blog becomes the foundation of Goodbye, My Havana: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba.
In her autobiography, Veltfort tells the story of 16-year-old Cornelia who, after escaping from Germany to the United States, traveled to Cuba in 1962 with her German mother, Lenore, American stepfather, Ted, and two stepsiblings, Nikki and Kevin. Ted was a right-wing antisemitic republican. He studied at Princeton and was forced to move frequentlybecause of the security checks. In California, Cornelia changed her German name to Connie. She was interested in social justice, civil rights, and art. In Cuba, Connie studied art history at la Universidad de Havana. Gradually, Connie discovered that she is homosexual. Connie learned about UMAP camps (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción), the Beatles situation in Cuba, the El Puente literary group, ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos), and much more. Although Connie started working voluntarily in camps at the beginning, very soon her revolutionary illusion was replaced with disenchantment.
Veltfort takes the reader through the process of disillusion by detailing the ordinary life of a homosexual in revolutionary Cuba. Veltfort’s account of what happened in Cuba is a form of microhistory that is shaped by “‘little facts’ of the sources” (Szijártó 210) rather than traditional forms of social history. Through the narration and contextualization of the everyday life, the individual and the personal, Veltfort attempts to “convey lived experience to readers directly on the micro-level of everyday life” (Szijártó 210). The reader is not only reading the personal life of Anna Veltfort but also the past of a society (Szijártó 211). The story of Veltfort contributes to the creation of knowledge “through the fate of a single person” (Szijártó 212) and gives the reader new insights on the collective understanding of the present and future. The individual life of a homosexual, Anna Veltfort, testifies to a society’s concern with sexual identity that is translated into oppression and marginalization. Veltfort’s personal memories of her daily life in the course of the Cuban Revolution, from listening to the Beatles to making a condom Christmas tree, is “connected to the hermeneutic activity of making the invisible visible” (Merino and Tullis 211).
It is with a similar scruple in mind that I analyze this work by placing “social context” at one end of a continuum and “text” at the other end. Interpretive action is what connects the two. Veltfort’s hairsplitting details of homosexuality in revolutionary Cuba supplies “alternative modes of knowledge” (Chute 17) for some readers to remember a shared past or for others to visualize a Cuba that has never been seen before. She retraces every event as if she is revisiting her beloved Havana and then depicts all those details for her readers (Chute 17). The autobiographical graphic narrative is the best tool in Veltfort’s hands, not only in the way that she portrays what happened in Cuba but also in how she frames (Chute18) and remembers them. Veltfort brings the past to the reader in the form of a graphic novel replete with “textualized remainders-memories” and “archives, monuments, and so forth” (La Capra 128). Comics are able to remedy the limitations of memory by encouraging the reader to engage with the text creatively. This way, readers understand how past Cuban and the revolution’s gender standards bear meaning on the present.
In the same vein, the autobiography genre as “the text of the oppressed and the culturally displaced’ (Swindells 7) is crucial here. Of particular interest to my study is its function in disclosing the oppression to the reader and giving the author a voice through her “cultural inscription and recognition” (Anderson 104). The violence and oppression that the reader witnesses in Anna Veltfort’s autobiography testify to an institutionalized repression. At the same time, Veltfort’s book brings her the cultural recognition that the official state always denied.
A Homosexual in the Era of New Man
Castro’s concern with socialism and commitment to revolution is materialized, among others, in his focus on gender. For Castro, a homosexual is the embodiment of all antirevolutionary values and a pervert that will never find the correct path:
Nothing prevents a homosexual from professing revolutionary ideology and, consequently, exhibiting a correct political position. In this case he should not be considered politically negative. And yet we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be. (Castro qtd. in Lockwood 92)
By presenting himself as the harbinger of a new chapter in Cuba, Castro cultivated an aura of fetichism around himself and his newly established state. By the same token, for the Cuban Revolution ideologues, homosexuality was a “gender parody” that “mocked state-defined ideals of revolutionary manhood and femininity, destabilizing the principles by which citizens were meant to interpret their reality and act within it” (Guerra 271).
The bearded Castro and his group symbolize a true man (i.e., the new revolutionary man) that stands apart fromhomosexuals, who are usually considered “imperfect” and should be hidden from the public eye as a result (López 4). Castro embodies an exemplary revolutionary life, in which revolutionary cause is more important than personal life. Based on the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), expression of sexuality is not a “private affair” but a “fulfilment of obligation to society” (Arguelles and Rich 691).
Veltfort’s autobiography, Goodbye, My Havana, is set in a Cuba where good citizens are supposed to sacrifice their lives for a common cause (see Fig. 1). Veltfort could not recount her autobiography in any other format than a graphic novel. The pages become an extension of all of Veltfort’s emotional scars and feelings: sometimes calm, sometimes depicted with peaceful colors, and sometimes gloomy blue and green; in some cases, the pages are red because Veltfort and her persona are burning with fear, shame, and anger. Images are crucial here. Ulrich Winter grasps the significant role played by the image in constructing memory. For him, image is a shift to the “increasing plausibility in contemporary theory of a knowledge of the past that is visually or imagistically organized”. Besides that, Winter believes that image is rooted in the “notion of ‘la constitution iconique de la mémoire elle-même’ (Ricoeur, La mémoire 339) (the iconic constitution of memory itself) or ‘le devenir-image du souvenir’ (Ricoeur, La mémoire 7) (the becoming-image of memory) (Winter 17). The images are representing meaning on multiple levels: the visible message that each images delivers and the invisible layers of meanings that depict the life and time of not a gringa, Connie, but a nation in that historical period. What the author draws challenges the reader by invoking his or her memory. Veltfort’s autographical novel, due to its interactive nature, is an effective means to represent her traumatic experience (Kunka 2–3). All of Connie’s emotions in the graphic novel form “a rich moral array through which and with which the world is thought and which can sense different things even though they cannot always be named” (Thrift 60). By portraying her feelings, the author depicts another image of the Cuban Revolution and the quality of life in Cuba.
In this article, I will show how the author uses comics as a medium for remembering those years and illustrating her feelings for the reader: First, I will discuss the techniques and instruments that she used. Second, I show that all those techniques “are memorial talismans that carry the affective weight of the past” (“Drawing the Archive” 120), making Veltfort an archivist of feelings. Connie, the protagonist, experiences exile in different stages of her life. Goodbye My Havana is her voyage from the first exile, when she escapes from Germany to the United States, travels to Cuba, and,finally, leaves Cuba. Her body is in transition between different places. She is in emotional and physical pain. No longer is her body merely a biological concept; rather, its constant transition and forced exile are a testimony to her disillusion with the revolutionary ideals. She is subject to double invisibility: the physical and the ideological (López 16). Feelings become an unfinished entity that develops through her forced displacement in conjunction with sociopolitical forces. She is in constant negotiation and is challenged by Cuba’s standards of a good revolutionary citizen. The final exile from Havana is not only a geopolitical displacement but also an affective departure from the values that she once believed in.
Aesthetic Modes of Portraying the Archive of Feelings: Colors
Veltfort picks her semiotic resources wisely and puts the multimodality nature of comics at the forefront of her story—that is, to make it vivid, tangible, and human. Theo van Leeuwen defines semiotic resources as
the actions and artefacts we use to communicate, whether they are produced physiologically—with our vocal apparatus; with the muscles we use to create facial expressions and gestures, etc.—or by means of technologies—with pen, ink and paper; with computer hardware and software; with fabrics, scissors and sewing machines, etc. (3)
Ink and paper are useful technological means that help the author to navigate the terrains of memory and feelings and visualize the confrontation between the violent and violated bodies. Drawing for Veltfort is an act of witnessing pain, fear, and delusion. (“Drawing the Archive” 120). The third chapter, “The Sierra Maestra,” is mostly depicted with bright colors reflecting the life of Connie as a young revolutionary dreaming of a utopian future.
However, after being accused of homosexuality, Connie and her friend Martugenia are put on a public trial. Now, under Castro’s new revolutionary project, “intimacy is itself publicly mediated” (Berlant 4). Every good citizen holds him- or herself accountable for confronting those who are not following the commander’s orders. It is what Epps calls the “surrender of the individual to the collective, a sacrifice of the ego to the (ego) ideal,” as compared to “one man to another” (234) or one human being to another one. Bodies of all citizens are properties of the state (Epps 243) upon which domination is established. The body of a homosexual such as Connie violates the established rules of sovereignty and docility. Ian Lumsden sheds light on the Cuban government’s policies from a historical perspective. The Cuban government places “national sovereignty and collective self-determination” and “national unity and integrity” (Lumsden xvii) before anything else. Thus, minorities such as gays and lesbians and their rights become secondary.
Veltfort explores her own personal experience—its ups and downs—through colors (see Fig. 2). It is what Cvetkovich calls the emotional rather than factual forms of truth provided by means of testimony (“Drawing the Archive” 114). All of the images in which the two young women are attacked and ultimately accused by two strangers on the Malecón in 1967 are depicted in red.
When Connie is questioned by Carlos Amat, the prosecutor and judge of the university trial, she is becoming red as she burns in fear, shame, and panic. Her facial expression ignites an emotional reaction among the readers/viewers, who feel the fear and terror through multiple means (see Fig. 3 and Fig. 4).
By the same token, “the night of three Ps” (37) is blue-grey with red images of the so-called perverted people (prostitutes, pimps, and queers) beaten by the revolutionary guard (see Fig. 5). The infamous disappearance of Gustavo Ventoso and the UMAP camps are portrayed in red.
These camps were used to reeducate people based on revolutionary values. The Cuban Revolution’s concern with homosexuality is symbolized by a blood red color that shows the position of non-normative gender identity or sexual orientation. To borrow Lessing’s term, I would call these scenes “pregnant moments” that capture the essence of the reader’s imagination: The protagonist is put on a trial, images are portrayed in red, and the viewer is able to unfold the emotional layers accumulating in this scene. Besides color, bodily movements, gaze directions, pupil size, and hand and arm movements are a major source for the meaning-making process (Allwood 14–16). The images of torture and horror follow a semantic sequence. The separate yet interdependent images create a web of meaning through which the reader interprets the “lawmaking” and “law-preserving power” (Benjamin 243) of the revolutionary state against homosexuality.
The graphic novel ends with two black pages and a single word: “fin” (see Fig. 6).
The color, in my view, represents the protagonist’s disillusionment as she is forced to leave her beloved Havana, her girlfriend, and her dreams of becoming a film editor. The symbolic boat with which the story starts and ends symbolizes Connie’s emotional voyage as a revolutionary and her permanent exodus from Cuba. Unable to prove her “revolutionary credentials,” Connie and many other homosexuals are “invited to leave the country” (López 6).
Redrawing the Reality
Joe Sacco draws on a fundamental difference between photographing and cartooning because a cartoonist can voluntarily and deliberately choose the images and put them together for particular purposes.
Drawings are interpretative even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing. A cartoonist assembles elements deliberately and places them with intent on a page. There is none of the photographer’s luck at snapping a picture at precisely the right moment. A cartoonist “snaps” his drawing at any moment he or she chooses. It is this choosing that makes cartooning an inherently subjective medium. (Saco xi–xii)
The author draws her story and redraws deliberately elements of pop culture in her depiction of what happened. Veltfort’snarrative, on multiple occasions, is constructed of quotations, borrowings, allusions, and citation—what critics define asintertextuality. Official news, propaganda posters, and images constitute the backdrop of Veltfort’s drawings in different parts and become “archival mode of witness” (“Drawing the Archive” 114). When the reader reads and visualizes Connie’s story, in conjunction with other images, a new meaning is born. In other words, the meanings drawn from Veltfort’s story differ “from those that would be drawn if it were interpreted in isolation” (Werner 64).
The reader/viewer binds Veltfor’s original images and reproductions of newspapers and posters into one collective framework. The author’s reproductions of real images and posters, along with her careful study of history and her own memory as a “historical resource” (Archives 19), suggests a twofold purpose: It makes Veltfort’s story extremely credible, calls into being the collective memory, and calls for the public to bring justice to all those who suffered.
Veltfor is not the only person who lived through that period. The public memory of violence against homosexuality is embedded not only in the text but in “material artifacts” such as photos, images of newspapers, and posters that “are invested with emotional, and even sentimental, value” (Archives 19).
Conclusion
Analyzing the works of Reinaldo Arenas, Vek Lewis believes that it is difficult to separate Arenas’s “life writing and fictional writing” (104). Then, he concludes that together they create a “discurso contestatario of the regime, an act of revenge, his gift to the post-Castro future” (104). By the same token, Veltfor’s literary and artistic talents are fused with her depiction of the state’s manipulative policies. Her autobiography peels back different layers of the Cuban Revolution’s sociopolitical landscape and reveals the processes that forced her to flee her beloved Havana. Connie’s non-normative gender expression hinders the stability of Castro’s regime. The Cuban Revolution assigned the dual role of a devoted mother in the private space and a New Woman in the public sphere to Connie. The homosexual Connie is the ultimate example of the failure of someone who should be the embodiment of a revolutionary way of life. The story of Connie reveals how the gender standards of the state punished and reconstructed the gender identities to a more docile and heteronormative narrative.
Anna Veltfort depicted her confrontation with a regime that punished homosexuals and tried to reduce the image of a good citizen to a heterosexual narrative. Her book becomes an archive of feeling that touches the readers and takes them on an intense, affective voyage. Thus, she establishes a textual contact with the readers. As Nancy states, writing essentially “touches upon the body” (11), or else it would be a report or a summary. She makes contact with the reader and recreates her happy, mundane life, which becomes full of blue-gray disillusionment and red violence. Veltfort reports the facts that might have become unclear in post-revolutionary memories through her careful depiction of a microhistory: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba.
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