From satire to sobriety

From satire to sobriety
By: Yoani Sánchez

Until the Berlin Wall came down, the world was much easier to explain
for the restless markers of the cartoonists publishing in Cuba's
government media. The Cold War fed a Manichean vision of good and evil,
guns and roses, smiles and tears which flooded those publications now in
the process of extinction. Cuba's shoreline was demarcated by a single
green line with a palm-tree sticking out while the rest of the world was
represented by rows of smokestacks belching soot. The technical quality
of these illustrations was very good, inheriting the tradition of the
previous republic, but their political content was doctrinally rigid.
There was an incredibly deformed bad guy, an Uncle Sam with a pointed
beard and a star-spangled hat, while the good guy of these cartoons was
a Cuban militia man or a huggable bear, the latter representing the
Soviet Union.

For those of us who grew up with almost zero access to children's
comics, those stereotypes inked in the national press came to fill the
gap left by other kinds of cartoon although at our age we would have
preferred fun to the pamphleteering. Nonetheless, we were captivated by
these drawings showing guerrillas brandishing their Kalashnikovs while
they stood up to CIA agents hiding under their helmets and behind their
ridiculous horn-rimmed spectacles. Of course, from our childish
viewpoint it could have been better adjusted to the tastes of the small
but those profoundly political humourous drawings at least enabled us to
escape from the tiresome iconography with which socialist realism
saturated our school books.

And so we were schooled between sketches where the enormous debt
contracted with the IMF took the form of a bag full of holes while peace
was represented by the image of a dove which only nestled on our small
Caribbean island. Those were also the times when Cuban cartoonists had a
field day with Richard Nixon's nose and with Ronald Reagan's rugged face
while portraying George H.W. Bush in unimaginable postures. Meanwhile a
cartoon depiction of the Commander-in-Chief was so sacrilegious and
dangerous (almost as if he were the Prophet Mohammed) that his profile
remains absent from our comic strips to this day.

The revolutionary cartoon started running into obstacles at the start of
the 1990s. Most of the best cartoonists emigrated elsewhere, often to
places which they themselves had depicted in the yellow and
apocalyptically dark tones of international crisis. Some of the
best-known went to work in the newspapers of Florida, Madrid, Buenos
Aires or Santiago (Chile's, not Cuba's) and there started to criticize
with their fountain pens even the figure of Fidel Castro (untouchable
within Cuba).

We have not only lost a large part of the national press but the world
itself has been transfigured and the Soviet bear has vanished from our
illustrations. The lack of paper dismantled the publications devoted to
social and political satire. Names like Palante or Dedeté have
practically ceased to be chanted by news-vendors. But the comic strips
were not only affected by the exodus of talent or the lack of the basic
raw materials, but also because it was increasingly difficult to find an
issue without censorship into which to sink their artistic teeth.
Stripped of all irreverence, those hilarious sparks emanating from our
government newspapers could only bash the United States or mock the odd
Latin American president.

Then Barack Obama arrived in the White House and the few newspapers had
to be cautious with the humour against him. The trickiest part was
keeping the drawings as belligerent as their predecessors — without
exaggerating the lips, flattening the nose or frizzing the hair, which
would seem a racist dig at the US president. But things did not just get
complicated for the soldiers of the pen. The island's whole political
discourse had to be redefined. For almost 50 years since the Revolution
the Republican candidates had made much better "bad guys" while
Democrats like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did not entirely fit into
the confrontation game. To crown it all, Obama aroused much sympathy
among Cuban intellectuals, the black population and, above all, among
the young. His fresh dark profile has plunged into crisis the "bad guy"
image which took decades for the state media and the witty cartoonists
to construct.

We are facing the reality of a press practically bereft of those sparks
of wit supplied by the cartoon vignette and the scathing portrayal of
some celebrity. Colourless, mirthless newspapers without that gram of
pepper which the irreverent gives us. The newspaper Granma is perhaps
the most perfect example of that sobriety, of how the caustic nibs of
the cartoonists have also started to be considered anti-establishment
and counter-revolutionary. The social and political cartoons in our
press has grown so poor that we have come to miss the 70s and 80s, to
feel nostalgia for that repeat image of that comic strip where an
unflappable militia man stands guard over the island of the solitary
palm-tree while outside a toxic cloud made up of a single blob of ink
threatens to swallow us all.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/62775/from-satire-to-sobriety