Parallel to the existing flood of essays.

Parallel to the existing flood of essays, articles and newspaper and television reports from all sectors of the political appearance that insist on the immanent demise of a hobbl Cuban Revolution, there has been the equally hard to miss get back of the image of the revolution's heroic martyr: Che Guevara. This time Guevara does not answer hanging on the wall of a body dorm or painted onto a wall of an inner city mural, however as a grunge hipster spectre and motorcycle-riding Madison Avenue shill. In this incarnation, his bereted and bearded visage - an artifact of a by-gone idealistic, further certainly naively wrong-headed era - is appearing onward everything from wristwatches to TV commercials. Since the ceaseless fin de siecle mass media declarations of the total defeat of twentieth-century world socialism that began with the globalizing clear market push of the mid '90 no fewer than couple dozen books on or by the agency of Guevara have appeared in English. Moreover, Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging baby boomer market. Aside from the of recent origin "coffee table" edition of the Communist Manifesto, there have been endles special issues forward the new "dollar Cuba" in smooth and shining magazines from Cigar Aficionado to The of recent origin Yorker and a marketing explosion of Afro-Cuban music as corporate record labels manufacture the latest world music craze - "Dancing with the Enemy" - for those aging liberal arts grads still looking for the real thing. For the more lumpen there is Guevara's of the present day look as a bereted, talking Chihuahua endorsing fast regimen tacos or peering out from the faces of low-cost designer "Commie-sheik" watches. This kind of explosion appropriation coupled with the recur of other iconography of past revolutions is now visible in many American advertising campaigns in the 1990 working to equate socialist revolutionary iconography with consumer freedom. Youth, idealistic rebellion and participation in the righteous life of adventure take forward the proportion of political propaganda when "infotainment" becomes mixed with passing from hand to hand events. A recent Newsweek featured a photo essay of a young and dashing Fidel Castro bounding about the globe as comfortable in tweeds in Central Park as he was in uniform in the cane fields of Oriente, hanging public with Papa Hemingway and a gorgeous long-haired Guevara. to what degree sad it is, the accompanying body suggests, that this once young idealist has become the enfeebl aging dictator of today, further suggesting that the spirit of rebellion is lodg in the young bodies of the beautiful, while the real-politic of past socialist motions are, like impotence and wrinkles, a phenomenon of the old(1) the same wonders what the marketing possibilities might have been if Castro had been assassinated during that 25-year, $50 million CIA operation called Mongoose before his beard started to gray. Ironically in one as well as the other Cuba and the United States this sagacious association between youth and progressive change becomes a point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled in the effort to sustain the utopian impulses necessary to detain radical social movements vital as they age or become institutionalized and mainstreamed.

This protoplast of analysis of the growing commodification of icons of the "age of revolution" and the ways they have become appropriated and reified from consumer capitalist culture is rather straightforward. Far more complicated and riddled with ambivalence is the status of as it was iconography and the lived experience of past radical social mental actions for the left as they attempt to rebuild opposition moves in the face of the globalization of free-market capitalism. If twentieth-century revolutionary socialist moves have failed, as is publicly being claimed, does the iconography of this passing age of revolution continue to contain the potential for inspiration on connecting the present with an idealistic past? Or has similar iconography become so much cultural baggage, exhausted, now simply nostalgic, preventing the at hand from rethinking the past critically and imagining the yet to be in new and original ways? Should they be abandoned to become another mark in the next "Just Do It" ad campaign or should this kind of iconography be integrated into the historical continuum of progressive and revolutionary struggle?

Leandro Katz's 16mm film El Dia Que Me Quieras (The Day That You'll regard with affection Me, 1998) and Steve Fagin's videotape TropiCola (1998) are couple recent works to emerge from the American avant-garde that focus in succession the fate of the Cuban Revolution, investigating and implicitly raising these questions. yet very different kinds of work, the two aesthetically and perhaps politically, each takes up the fate of radical utopian social experiments in the twentieth hundred specifically the Cuban Revolution. Katz and Fagin are media artists drawn out associated with experimental film and video motions in the U.S. Katz, who began his career as a author of poems in his native Argentina and has been living and working in the U for the last 30 years, has made numerous films, photographic works and installations focusing forward the problem of historical memory, particularly as it relates to Latin America. Fagin, an American, has made five feature-length videos situated in the midst of passing from hand to hand postmodern cultural debates, particularly the question s of globalization and First/Third World relations of the last 15 years. as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but El Dia Que Me Quieras and TropiCola are radically unconventional films that engage the moot point of representing a transitional political change as it is expressed in/by/through photography, film and video, whose disclosure has been intimately entangled with the history of like vanguard cultural change.