Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Thank you, President Castro!

I'd like to thank Fidel Castro for timing his resignation to fall on precisely the week in which I planned to teach Mikhail Kalatozov's marvelous 1964 film, "I Am Cuba/Soy Cuba/Ya Kuba." The film, which begins with a beauty pageant and ends with the triumph of the guerilla movement, presents the Cuban Revolution through a series of episodes increasing in solidarity and violence and decreasing in shadows that resemble cages.

My friend Roger Levy, upon seeing yesterday's New York Times photo essay, pithily summed up what many hope and others fear may be a disillusioning reversal in Fidel's revolutionary poetics: "He is wearing Adidas."
Image: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/world/americas/20cuba.html

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