When I was in high school, in no way could I have pictured myself collecting ephemera, rusty artifacts, diplomas, certificates, or table games from my childhood. While my grandparents were always inclined to keeping almost everything, I did not share their hoarding instincts. To their advantage, they lived in a large house in Vedado with more than enough storage space, whereas we only had a two-bedroom apartment for my parents, my sister and I.
Back then, I encouraged my grandparents to get rid of many things. They responded to my complaints by reminding me that, whenever I needed something—no matter how strange—I always found it at their house. But I was different, I liked to throw things out or give them away. In many cases I was unaware of their value, but I would not have regretted parting ways with them. It was only when I was immersed in my dissertation research that I started collecting precisely the kind of stuff I despised as a child. To make things worse, this change in me happened at an inconvenient time, as I was out of my country, leading the kind of nomadic life to which emigrants are condemned.
Thanks to my grandparents’ treasures, it did not take much effort to amass a “collection.” They had all sorts of Soviet appliances, state-produced clothes, military bracelets, notebooks, diplomas, cosmetic and food containers (in many cases still half filled with their content), ID cards, sales receipts, warranty notices, and even instruction manuals for everything they ever purchased from the 1940s to the 1990s.
My collection later grew thanks to donations from friends and readers of my blog Cuba Material, a sort of virtual archive of Cuba’s socialist material culture. Part of this collection will be on display for the first time this fall. The Arnold and Sheila Aronson galleries of the Parsons School for Design will host Pioneros: Building Cuba’s Socialist Childhood (September 16th to 30th, 2015). I have been preparing for this project for two years, and I received the New Challenge award for student social innovation in 2014 for it. Pioneros… puts under the spotlight the material world of childhood in Cuba through the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The show explores the relationship between the political and the material orders of Cuban socialism. It offers a portrait of the effects of global and national politics on the material environment and in everyday life. It also shows the resilience of some individual practices to politics.
The public exhibit is co-curated with art historian Meyken Barreto. It features over two-hundred items, including toys, furniture, books, clothing, appliances, and children ephemera from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as many photographs from the period. The exhibit also showcases posters, television shows, and recorded music from the period. The Cuban-born photographer Geandy Pavon, a former pionero—and now exile and political activist—created a series of new photographs for the exhibition, anchoring this collection of ephemera as a critical part of the present. The end result is a testimony to both the efforts of the Cuban state to shape a new socialist man and the individual tactics to resist them by stressing the role that objects played in these processes.
Two major events will complement the show. One is a film screening co-coordinated with CUNY’s doctoral candidate Walfrido Dorta and the second is a panel discussion, Grown-Up Children from State Socialist Regimes, led by University of Connecticut professor Jacqueline Loss, author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Guest include Nina Khrushcheva, granddaughter of former USSR president Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban American NYU Professor Ana María Dopico, Polish sociologist Elzbieta Matynia, Hungarian sociologist Virag Molnar, Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto, and Cuban historian Abel Sierra Madero.
There could not have been better outcome for the stuff conserved by late generations of Cubans, who were not convinced of the prosperous future the state propaganda promised to them. These “souvenirs” of the past document not only state practices but individual lives. They point at the role that individuals played in the construction of Cuba’s revolutionary utopia. Pioneros… is tribute to all of them. It is also a way to honor my grandparents, the foremost hoarders in my family.
Pioneros: Building Cuba’s Socialist Childhood will open on September 17, 2015, at 6:00 pm at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery, located in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center of the New School University’s Parsons School of Design, 66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street, New York, NY.