Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacies of Cuba's 1959 Revolution and its promised utopia fell under renewed scrutiny. During its post-Cold War "Special Period in Times of Peace" in the 1990s, the island was thrust into a climate of scarcity that demanded its inhabitants formulate new visions of both its past and its future. While scholarship on literature emerging from the Special Period has focused on the impacts of globalization and concurrent literary tropes of fragmentation and ruin, questions around how individual subjects grapple with mediated memories of a revolution that preceded them call for further exploration.
In this paper, I examine the process of re-envisioning revolutionary history not as an act of rewriting the past, but of contending with that past's continued impact on the present and its capacity to determine future possibilities for the individual subject. I examine Cuban poet Reina María Rodríguez's 1998 collection La foto del invernadero / The Winter Garden Photograph as a site where questions of memory and revolutionary inheritance converge, as her poems challenge persisting misconceptions of the island as isolated and stuck in the past. Rodríguez establishes an ekphrastic dialogue with the UNESCO Courier, which offered readers the opportunity to engage in what she describes as "mental travel" to other parts of the world via the medium of photography. Much like the Courier photographs, Rodríguez posits the poem as a vehicle for the development of a subject whose mobility is limited by geographic and economic circumstances.
However, the poems simultaneously intimate an anxiety around the spectral doubling that comes with one's rebirth in verse or in photography. Through a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (to which the title of her collection alludes), Rodríguez develops a parallel between Barthes' mourning of his late mother and her own reflections on Che Guevara both as a literal father and as a spectral father to the children of the Revolution. Rodríguez addresses Guevara and his mass-proliferated portrait in a manner that undercuts the seeming immortality of this overdetermined image by attending to its material vulnerability. Ultimately, I argue that Rodríguez's process of mental travel through Camera Lucida and the Courier facilitates a process of individual and social mourning of the losses always already inscribed within the utopic vision.
