Te dí todos mis sueños

"The Children of the Che"

A few words about the reportage "I give you all my dreams" could easily become words about the millions of people, those that during this more than 40 years have sacrificed their lives and their dreams to the altar of Utopia, searching the noble objective to build a fairest and flourishing society. As the Hebrew people, the Cubans had wander through the desert always about to find the Promised Land, every second, at every corner, only one more effort, just a little more.. Some forgotten theorist wrote that Moses, consciously submit the Jewish people to search circularly, because only in an extreme situation the brotherhood it is forged and only after the brotherhood, nationality arise. Truth or not, it is truth that during this long years the Cubans practically had leave off being Cubans to become "Revolutionaries" and this new nationality doesn‚t exclude those who have been against the Revolution but include them as well, no matter what is logical.

In 1978 at the age of 9, I dare to, for the first time, read an adults` book. The bind was red and in the large golden prints, you can read the title: "The revolution, the socialism, and the construction of the new man in Cuba" by Ernesto Che Guevara. I am not sure what and how I understood that, it was not a thick book and it had big types easy to read, but I am sure that I too. Everyday at the school during the morning meeting, all of us shout in a chorus "We shall be like the Che" If I had a son or a daughter, he or she will swear the same today.

When we walk Havana City, and we get in to the streets into their secrets, we notice even after the colourful peeling out paint, between the cracks in the walls and the slacked columns, softened or perhaps increased by the time pass, splendour and majesty of this mythical city. Even when Desiree Dolron had reached deeply into our particularities, the images of Te di todos mis sueños.. avoid the engagement that surely would have if were made by a Cuban photographer eye. The foreigner gaze and an open sensibility to the documental simplicity, gave birth images that become aware of information, that even within the limits of our reality aren‚t easily visible to our eyes sightless in the habit. As a mirror, give us back an image load of a climax full of contradictions, where everything happens within a perfect present, still, in its vertiginous circular movement, revolutionary, filled with sign of utopia and hanging from a thread, which in its principal component has an endless sacrifice will and a striking Faith in a better tomorrow.

These photographs, poetically scientific, select and analyse carefully the elements. The splendorous glamour of the fifties that has survive, not only in the architecture of the city and in the classic cars running through out the island, but yet in the private interior of the home where last living together with the icons of the revolution, as an aesthetic model.

The utopia, the children, the old people, the power, the success, the revolution, the new man, the socialism and Cuba, and within the people revolutionaries or not but revolutionaries, we those who gave all our dreams. Moreover, suddenly we discover Desiree's images and found that the years pass by and the Promised Land had been replaced by the endless search. However, even like that the truth it is that at "its 44 years old the Revolution it is today, strongest than ever".

LyN

Cuba 2003