Revolution is retro

[lapsedmodernist]

Las Mujeres de la Revolucion, courtesy of apropos from a book published by the Cuban government in 1981. As apropos put it, It's the awesomest. Cuban women doing military drills! Cuban women manning microscopes! Cuban women harvesting tobacco! Cuban women throwing discus!







and here are a couple of Soviet women, for good measure. These are from me, to you.

Comments

[apropos.livejournal.com]

The most awesome thing about the book is the fact that when I first picked it up I realized I could read Spanish! I speak French but I've never had any Spanish beyond what American Sesame Street could teach me when I was 4, so I got one of my classmates who is doing fieldwork in Guatemala and asked her to confirm that I was actually able to read it. She was as mystified as I was.

If you really want the discus and microscope pictures I can scan them next week. The book is quite long and covers the whole spectrum of domestic, agricultural, industrial, military and social situations (Cubans dating, Cuban women shopping, Cuban women running classrooms in Angola, Cuban women on voluntary work crews). It makes communism look really really fun.

It makes me think about Adriana Petryna's book on Chernobyl and her discussion of how a not-insignificant part of the trauma of post-communist transition was how people suddenly had nothing to DO, no state-enforced social life.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Well, between French and English you have a solid base of Latin-rooted Romance languages. My father never studied any Romance language except English, but because of his background in Latin he can read all of them adequately.

It makes communism look really really fun.

That made me think of how communism was structured along the same fascistic principles as a theme park...especially for children. So it never needed a theme park of its own. Although would an ultimate Disney coup be Pinkoland: the Adventure!? With a trifecta of Marx, Engels and Lenin dolls greeting you at the entrance? It could have attractions like Whack-Trotsky-in-the-head-with-an-Ax! (and win a prize, an action figure of a Young Pioneer saluting that he is "always ready!").

[apropos.livejournal.com]

My father never studied any Romance language except English, but because of his background in Latin he can read all of them adequately.

My crazy 91 year old grandfather is like that: he taught himself Italian by reading Dante when he was 16 in the North of England and then combining it with the French and Latin he already knew.