Political Advertisement: An electoral timeline that spans my lifetime

In late October, I was able to see Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese’s Political Advertisement X: 1952-2020, The latest version of their ongoing project is an incisive, revealing compilation of segments drawn from electoral advertising campaigns broadcast on US television. It’s a 97-minute video that runs chronologically from the time of Eisenhower until today. By the time I reached the end of it, I realized it spans and recaps my 61 years of life: 32 of them living in Cuba and 29 in exile, a majority of them in this country.

Some interrelated dates:

• In 1950, television arrives in Cuba • 1959, the armed insurrection led by Fidel Castro is triumphant • The rise to power of the bearded guerrilla fighters is televised and seen around the world • In March of that year, I was born • 1960, the first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon, and the young Democrat wins • In Cuba, the oil refineries and other US industries are nationalized • The United States breaks its trade relations with Cuba • 1961, an armed group trained by the CIA invades Cuba at the Bay of Pigs • The invasion is a failure, and Castro declares Cuba a Socialist country • 1962, The United States forces the Soviet Union to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba; Kennedy promises not to invade the island • The government of Cuba nationalizes television and other forms of mass communications • 1963, Kennedy is assassinated in the street, and the impact of the bullet in his head is caught on film • From that point on, everything, or almost everything, has been documented and broadcast on television. From that first televised presidential debate until today, fifteen electoral campaigns have been held in the United States and eleven presidents have occupied the White House, five Democrats and six Republicans. While in Cuba, I grew up in the post-revolutionary period and was educated under a radicalized populist dictatorship with a single leader, one party, one doctrine, and television in service to its propaganda. More than a half century later, they have yet to hold a presidential election.

Political Advertisement as both historical review and evidence is a powerful video, edited and conceived by Muntadas and Reese as an ever-expanding piece to be updated and shown every four years, during each successive election. I think this piece may have never had so much force as this year, shown during the most polarized and contentious presidential election to take place in this country. As I watched it, I could feel the weight and passage of time. Words and images exhausted by use and re-use scrolled before my eyes as if they were credits in a film without end. Speeches and vacuous slogans brought to mind the remains of signs and fliers that cover the streets after a march or mass celebration, transformed the following day in trampled garbage. I could calculate the investment in these mediatic spectacles and feel the tremendous repercussions and the enormous power wielded by these image laboratories. These lucrative businesses are the producers of senators and presidents through the calculated goal of influencing the citizen-elector and converting him or her into the consumer of a political agenda, selling paternalism and the savior integrity of the leader as just another product. 

In 1984, 36 years ago, when Muntadas and Reese first showed Political Advertisement, I was graduating from the Higher Institute of the Arts in Havana. During those years of academic formation governed by a Soviet-imposed Socialist Realism, I had access to prohibited documentation. Magazines like Art News, Art in America, and Flash Art were where I stumbled upon the ideas and work of other artists who, like Muntadas, had already spent decades experimenting with and challenging the conventional ways of creating and the rigid definitions of what an artist should be and do. All that clandestinely acquired information began to form part of my revolutionary secret archive.

In 1993, I arrived in the United States as a political refugee because of my human rights activism and my independent actions and interventions in the streets of Havana. While in Miami Beach, I discovered a book with some of Muntadas’ work at a friend’s house. The book was in English, and I didn’t understand everything I was looking at, but I was struck by two pieces that I have never been able to forget: the multimedia installation The Board Room (1987) and the urban intervention The Limousine Project (1990). I have followed the intelligent and impressive work of Muntadas with much interest ever since.

When I found out that he would have a piece at the Wexner Center for the Arts, nothing, not even the intense impact of the coronavirus in Ohio, could keep me from seeing his work in person for the first time. For this opportunity, I am very appreciative to the Wexner Center and all those who made it possible.