A Stamp Collection

January 1st was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

I turn fifty this March, so it puts my whole life in perspective to think that I have lived in parallel time to this epochal event.

Whatever one thinks of the government there, it is hard to imagine a more woeful, misguided, immoral and ineffectual policy than the embargo this country has maintained against this small island and all of its citizens for most of my life.

Under Bush the screws were tightened so much that even though the majority of Elsa's family still lives on the island, including her father and brother and sister, we are only legally allowed to go visit them once every three years, and not for more than two weeks, with absolutely no exception for medical or any other emergencies. If her father was dying in the hospital and we had been there in the last three year period, too damn bad is what our laws now say. We like to lecture the world about human rights, but does any just person think that that is a humane policy?

Elsa and I have great hope that one of the early acts of our own new administration will be to end this madness and restore trade and travel with our neighbor.

Stamp collecting has gone out of fashion for most kids, but at one time it was a great hobby, bringing the art and imagery and people of the countries of the world into our homes and meticulously arranging them in an album.

The world was a bigger place then and things seemed so much more remote and exotic. 

Elsa wasn't a stamp collector, but she remembers this album and these stamps and how coveted they were in Cuba when she was growing up.

If Americans know anything at all about the history of Cuba or the revolution, it is mostly the reductive story of just one man, Fidel Castro, the great boogeyman Communist dictator of American politics for the last fifty years. But the revolution, any revolution, is not the product of one man. Here then, is an old stamp collection of the other names and faces of the Cuban revolution.

If you want to know more, there is a brief bullet point history of the main events of the revolution here.

There was also a very evocative novel out last year called Telex From Cuba by Rachel Kushner which weaves a fictional account of the perspective of an American child growing up in a family that is working for the sugar cane and mining interests that dominated Cuba before the revolution, that reads like a memoir. 

It is interesting to hear a story from this unusual point of view, and instead of the head on history of the guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestre and the canonized version of historical events that are so familiar to us, we get a different nuanced perspective that makes the familiar seem fresh and more relevant to us.

Hope to see all of you in Havana soon!

william

Comments

[Mary]

It is a country that I long to photograph.

I had no idea about the travel restrictions - they are outrageous...

Fingers crossed for your family that things do indeed change with the incoming administration.

[iliana luque barr]

The album you have there was done by my Father, his name was Federico Luque, I remember that our apartment was filled with boxes of these albums and cards, he would hand them out to all the kids in the neighborhood. My father loved Fidel and felt deeply betrayed by him, we left Cuba in 1965. Iliana Luque Barr

[Jose L. Gonzalez]

The album you are showing is not of Cuba "postage" stamps. These are what we Cuban kids used to call "postalitas" (small postals)and over the years, in the late 40' and early 50', many different collections were published. I can remember "postalitas" for Cinderella, and Pinocchio and even one album of 200 with scenes from the Prince Valiant movie, with Robert Wagner and Janet Leigh. The albums were provided free of charge at our local "bodega" and then you purchased the candy for 1 centavo each. Inside the candy wrapper you would find the numbered "postalita". Then, all you had to do was glue it to your album and go buy more candy! But there was a trick to it! The manufacturer of the candy made sure that
most of the numbers were easy to get, but some not so much and one or two, very hard to find, so the result was that you had to buy an awfull lot of candy to complete one of these!
If you would like to see some pages from my Cuba Postage Stamp collection, please go to: http://www.cuban-stamps.com/RefColl1.asp
Jose L. Gonzalez

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Cool stamps, putting aside their politics Cuba is a beautiful island to visit, amazing beaches, beautiful women.

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I love these vintage propaganda from the Revolution! how nostalgic!