Alejandro González: Cuba, Año Cero

In Cuba, Año Cero, Alejandro González portrays the gap between reality and its prevailing ideology, much as Roberto Rossellini did in Germania, Anno Zero (1948). Rather than photographing scenes, he photographs an ideological apparatus: places that, in his childhood, promised a future that never came, joined with constructed scenarios. Seen from a present in which almost every communist project has collapsed, the destruction is both physical and moral. The series portrays a frustration, a dwarf star that contracted: the collapse of the totalitarian utopia.

González manages to photograph two temples of the regime: the National Television News studios and the printing press of the Communist Party newspaper. These sources of the narrative of power appear desacralised and faded, like an empty stage set, an unsettling image for those who revere them as emblems.

On his imaginary journey, he restages the repression of the protesters of the 1994 Maleconazo, the first mass demonstration since 1959, amid unprecedented blackouts and shortages. In the scene, a “comrade” tries to block the camera: some photos must not exist. After the uprising, the government stopped preventing exodus by sea, and the wave of migration that followed became known as the Rafter Crisis. Its cost in human lives is unknown.

The series Mega Proyectors includes the Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant and the city built for its workers, which are not even ruins but buildings that were never used. What was ruined was not the structures but the idea behind them.

Ubre Blanca, an obsession of Fidel Castro’s in the early 1980s, became a national celebrity by snatching the Guinness milk-production record from an American cow. Her genes are said to have been frozen, awaiting a technological advance that would allow her return, multiplied. But sustained blackouts, a far too earthly contingency, spoiled the tropical leader’s dream. Today her mummified body remains, a stage-prop reality, a witness to a past that resists both returning and disappearing.

Exhibition text by Marcelo Morales