Revolutionary Time

I always think: I have our strongest column right here, our best troops—the only troops able to win the war alone—right here. Those troops are the people! . . . the people are invincible. And it was the people who won this war. . . . And so the victor’s crown goes to the people. . . .  I have tremendous faith in the people of Cuba [APPLAUSE].

—Fidel Castro, Speech to the Cuban people, January 8, 1959[1]

The Cuban Revolution was, itself, an existential question at the heart of Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance, “Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version),” which consisted of placing a microphone on a dais in a cultural center in Old Havana, and inviting the audience to speak openly about whatever was on their mind.

After nearly a century of struggle for independence in Cuba, Fidel Castro had entered Havana on January 8, 1959, triumphant. As he addressed the nation for the first time as revolutionary victor, a white dove had landed on his shoulder: for some believers, this signified that he had been anointed by the AfroCuban divinity Obbatalá, whose symbol is a dove. The moment became a key icon in the revolutionary image bank. Echoing that historic punctum, Bruguera stationed two attendants in military garb alongside the dais who placed a dove on each speaker’s shoulder, suggesting that they—like Fidel—were anointed.

Within the context of Cuban visual art, the performance can be seen as part of a concerted effort by young artists to hold the country’s political leadership accountable for the still-unfulfilled promises of the 1959 revolution—a movement that gained steam especially at the end of the 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis of political and economic isolation that it engendered in Cuba.

At the time that Bruguera and her classmates were coming of age, it was not unusual for artists in Havana to position themselves alongside the revolutionary process—albeit, increasingly, critically. Although official rhetoric customarily referred to 1959 as the moment in which the Revolution had “triumphed,” by the 1980s it was not unusual for artists to confront it as radically unrealized or, to put it more gently, unfinished: emblematic of works from that period was Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas’s “To Build the Sky,” an image in which a wall of sky blue bricks rises against the background of a looming dark void.[2] By the time that she staged her performance, Bruguera was upping the ante in that clash, mounting her work as a direct challenge to the organs that wielded political power on the island. At issue, we could say, was the matter of who, exactly, were the rightful heirs to those revolutionary promises of dignity, independence, and voice made decades before.[3]

Or, from another angle, there was the question about what, exactly, that Revolution consisted of. Some things were undeniable: Batista fled, the rebels entered Havana, victorious—but what that meant, and what it presaged, were highly contested, almost from the first. Beyond those who were flat-out opposed on ideological grounds, there was tension and conflict with others who favored the change of regime, but soon came to understand that there would be battles to fight over many arenas, including culture. Those conflicts were already in full bloom by 1961, when the experimental film “PM,” by Orlando Jimenez and Sabá Cabrera Infante, was proscribed for its verité portrayal of AfroCuban nightlife—memorable especially for its scenes of couples dancing close in a seedy waterfront bar. This was not the heroic image that leadership sought from the national cinema.[4] This legacy of strict image management is another heritage to which Bruguera’s performance can be traced back.

Bruguera’s performance also follows in a tradition of vanguardist cultural activity in Cuba from early in the twentieth century, with the political lines being pretty clearly drawn: although they were not combatants, painters and others were firmly in opposition to the various corrupt and clientelist regimes that had held sway. After 1959, however, the mandate for culture was handed over to so-called hard-liners, who hewed to an approach heavily inflected by Soviet proclivities.

The political and artistic vanguards slipped out of alignment, as it became clear that the Revolution’s cultural policy would not tolerate definitions of revolutionary culture other than its own. It is significant, then, that it was artists born in or around 1959—the first generation formed within the Revolution’s aura, the first molded by it—who called the question as they came of age.

*****

That night in Havana, Bruguera’s open mic had played out in a ragged and stop-start kind of way, the level of polemic rising and falling randomly. It was a strange kind of narrative space, never accumulating energy or building in some dialectical kind of way, a meandering and unsettling kind of thing—impossible to discern a shape from inside of it, so whatever was around the edges took on weight: the jostling and chatting, the booming sound and difficulty of hearing, the flapping bird. At times it felt like the whole thing might just drag to a halt, nobody doing anything and nobody knowing if that would be the end of it or if it was a waiting game, where as long as people stuck around it would keep going.

The participants often seemed at something of a loss once they got up on stage. The long stretches of dead air never settled into a rhythm, and the reactions to each speaker passed quickly. Notably, each time the mic fell silent the space filled with the overall hubbub: people, in other words, behaving like an audience, rather than a multitude, enjoying the performance as performance more than getting whipped up by it—no chant in unison, no sense of the crowd organizing itself into a voice. No big catharsis, no major poetic moment, just a lot of stabs in various directions.

I’m reminded of how Che Guevara had once rhapsodized that “utilizing the almost intuitive method of sounding out general reactions to the great problems we confront . . . Fidel is a master,” that he possessed a

special way of fusing himself with the people. . . . At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.[5]

At Bruguera’s podium, however, instead of an orgasmic synchrony, there was a range of contradictions: a social body both choral and riven, the trace elements of utopianism and the “choked verbs” of stunted discourse, the farce of historical iconicity and the continuing force of it, the vainglorious impulse to get up on stage, and so forth.[6] A weak riposte, in other words, far short of a ringing, defiant salvo.

What happened that evening read differently to different people. An open mic and people demanding freedom was just extraordinary for the Cuban context, even though it was also something closer to political kitsch. It’s possible that the discrepancy owed a lot to the incompatibility of the various historical memories in the crowd. Judging from reactions at the time, the awkward and self-conscious declarations were moving for some but they were depressing evidence for others: “nothing more than the reflection, and maybe the least of the consequences, of the constant ‘nobodyizing’ (ninguneo) that we’ve been subjected to for so many years,” as one guy put it; “Fleeting phrases, choked verbs in which, with some exceptions, you could see the thick and viscous patina of fear” (Redacción CE, “Blogueros y artistas”). Depending on who you asked, what happened was the germ of awakening defiance, the cynical maneuvering of regime strategists, evidence that “freedom” means the same thing everywhere and, equally, evidence that a concept of freedom transported from one place to another will turn into a performance rather than a realization of itself. The performance did once again ratify Cuba as an incubator of radical contemporary art, and it convinced some reporters that change was definitely coming on the island: it was proof, for others, that the regime always gets the last laugh.[7]

An argument has been made for the value of a “weak avant-garde,” appealing substantially to Rosa Luxemburg’s acceptance of failure as an integral part of the revolutionary process.[8] This is offered as corrective to the epic, romantic narrative of avant-garde rupture and revolution, countering its hegemonic position of authority without opposing it from just another hegemonic position. Using that as an interpretive framework would give us a palliative logic for the mostly cramped and unsteady utterances that Bruguera’s dais gave rise to. The performance, then, in its debility, would ironically destabilize the stentorian certitude of the emancipatory declarations made at that original podium. In that, it might not be too far-fetched to think of the hour as a welling up of a sort of vanguard of the common, counterpart to the patriarchal heroism that it stood in reply to, shorn of grandiose claims about remediating the nation’s ills—something like the “power of the powerless” that was so often appealed to in 1970s and 1980s Eastern Europe.[9]

That’s a somewhat plausible argument to make here, and it fits well with the idea that the performance was a crack in the wall of the regime’s total control, using the relatively looser strictures accorded to art to test the limits of the possible. The open mic, then, reprised a historic moment in which Fidel had named the “victorious people” as the core of the Revolution, also warning that “the worst enemies which the Cuban revolution could face in the future are us, the revolutionaries.” Fifty years later, Bruguera offered the mic to anyone who cared to speak and, in doing so, she called those original revolutionaries to account, making manifest the faith in the Cuban public that Fidel had reneged on.

But in this reading, Bruguera’s mic was a corrective to Fidel’s, a simple contradiction predicated on and defined in relation to that precedent. It was one set of utterances ricocheting against another. But I don’t think that quite captures the potential of Bruguera’s gesture; the act of contradiction has scant potential to meaningfully exceed the language of the podium. It seems to me that another aspect of the performance—another way of reading its echo—can be more fruitful, if what we want to learn from it is something more than what we already understand about how power can absorb and metabolize its foes.

******

So then, even if the performance has been read mainly in terms of defiance, what if we think about it differently? Maybe, instead, we could say that it was part of a broader effort to re-calibrate Time, as it were—revolutionary Time. In that case, it could lay claim as legatee of that original Tatlin gesture—that monument to modernity which was never realized, but whose presence nevertheless remains indelible. After all, the performance was that monument’s namesake.

It would have been heresy to suggest that 1959 was continuous with the revolutionary moments that had gone before in the island’s history. In fact, Fidel had made a point of belittling those efforts, noting that “The people are greatly affected by whether we’re going to make a good job of this revolution, or if we’re going to make the same mistakes as in the last revolution, or the one before that, or the one before that” (Castro, January 8 speech). 1959 was—had to be—sui generis, in a class by itself, unique and final. The Revolution was the First—the first time that revolution had succeeded in Cuba and, given its singularity, it was proclaimed to be the only time that the nation would require that.

In fact, for a long time it was customary for official correspondence to be dated with reference to key moments in that historic struggle, as though January 1959 was the zero hour of History— as though time itself began with that event. Much of the struggle in Cuba in the years since has revolved around the temporality that habit had suggested, namely that the revolution, as an event, had already happened—as though once that had occurred, it was a fait accompli. But does it make any sense to think of revolution in such decisive terms, if we understand it only as an event in the past? There was a long and complicated process of arriving at the moment of revolutionary declaration, and by what logic could we think that the process magically ends there? In fact, since the beginning there have been those who have insisted, in the face of that historical exclusivity, that the Revolution is an ongoing process, forever on the horizon yet never at an end. The implications are clear: there is revolution yet to be realized. What I have in mind here is a reframing of the question—not one of who gets to say, because that leads to a clash solely in the form of a contest for power. But rather one of time—what is the temporality of revolution?

The concepts of time traditionally used by historians, as one of them says, “are structurally more compatible with the perpetrators’ than the victims’ point of view.”[10] The arrow of time declares the past to be inalterable and irreversible. Experience, though, and especially limit experiences such as that of revolution, deny that absolute absence of their pasts which are, instead, stubborn and tough, and stuck to the present. In that sense, we might distinguish between irreversible and irrevocable. Irreversible history thinking promotes an approach of letting bygones be just that: the past is cut off from us, made distant by the forward march of time. Modernism, broadly speaking, chimes with this approach, assuming as it does a protocol of continual movement forward and conceiving of time as comprised of moments containing successive events: at base, then, time is something parceled out in increments, related one to the next in terms of rupture more than continuity.[11] There’s no going back and, moreover, it would be folly to do so since that would be to regress. Constant singularity continually archaizes historical truth and, furthermore, the past is not a problem in the long run: there’s no need to repair what’s past, since time has already brought us someplace new. Inconveniently for this view, though, memory of catastrophe “tends to” exist in “a ‘durational time’ that disrupts chronology,” such that memory exists less as recall of the past than as something like a sensation of it in its eternal contemporaneity (Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, 14). As R.G. Collingwood has observed, “We do call the past, as such, into being by recollecting and by thinking historically; but we do this by disentangling it out of the present in which it actually exists, transformed” (Collingwood quoted in Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, 117). Collingwood writes: “The past is not merely a precondition of the present but a condition of it,” and in this iteration it has a “new quality” (120).

The past as irrevocable, however, proffers a “persistent and massive depository” that stands at our disposal (Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, 4). As a “nonspatial proximity,” it “defies the dichotomy of the fixed categories of the absolutely absent and the absolutely present,” as Berber Bevernage sees it, and the fact of it grants us “some intellectual space to take seriously the idea of a ‘persisting’ or ‘haunting’ past” (4–5). This past, by its very nature, smudges the bright line between Then and Now.

By going back to that moment of transcendent optimism, Bruguera’s podium could re-cast revolution as a tendril, whose wavering form allowed the present a shot at connecting to the lingering, haunting past, staging sparks of hope whose origins lay there. In that sense, it was continuous with its past, continuous with the Revolution, while pointing against what had been the direction of national history—against those who claimed to be its guardians, and the ruins over which they presided. Seen in this light, the performance stands not as a “recapitulatio[n] that aspire[s] to criticality,” if by that we mean a return to something in the past.[12] More fundamentally, then, Bruguera’s performance raises a question about the temporality of revolution.

Opposite to the monument’s iconicity, Bruguera’s representation wavered at an edge, a limit, an impasse, and reached out from there into an intermediate zone of potential. It offered a speculative state of mind rather than one framed in obligations of remembrance, forgiveness or reconciliation and, in that, it was probably bound to disappoint: speculation always must, because it never knows for sure. The performance went back to do something about the past as it lived in, erupted into the present; it was a way forward, in the form of repetition. Repetition poses questions about sameness and difference, stagnation and change. Desire and repetition often keep each other’s company. The performance was a way of wrapping us up in the difficult truths of the past, it brought the past close by, but it left us hanging. I think that indirection lies at the heart of the task.

Derrida says that “It is the very idea of a first time that becomes enigmatic . . . we may still maintain that in the first time of the contact between two forces, repetition has begun. . . . It is thus the delay which is in the beginning.”[13] Fidel’s first time ought to have led to innumerable next times, each increasingly porous to the participation of the many. Bruguera’s version of the next time, also, stands as radically incomplete. But the fact of it reaches for a state of revolution, rather than an episode or moment of pyrrhic triumph.