The Fiske/Anspach CollectionHere's a story about the photographer, Osvaldo Salas, written by Robert Goff: Ambitious Osvaldo Salas came from Havana to New York in 1928. A hard-up paparazzo, he jostled his way into photographing celebrities like Cary Grant and Louis Armstrong. In 1955, Life magazine published his now-famous portrait of boxer Rocky Marciano, bloodied with a split nose. His son, Roberto, born in the Bronx, worked as his assistant. In 1955, Osvaldo got an assignment to shoot the swankily dressed son of a Cuban land baron, who had come to New York to raise money for a revolution. The then-beardless Fidel Castro received a generally warm welcome. Few Americans cared for the corrupt Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant who had seized power from a legally elected president. Here was a hansome young man who promised to replace Batista with a democratic government. Photographer and revolutionary became friends. "He used our studios as a kind of hangout", recalls Roberto, who was 14 at the time and who still speaks with an authentic Bronx patois. When Castro's communist band marched almost unopposed into Havana four years later, Roberto Salas jumped on a plane to Havana. "When I got there, I ran into Fidel at the television studio and he says, "Salitas, how's your old man? How's the legs? Tell him to come down."" Osvaldo arrived in Havana a week later and stayed until he died, in 1992. He and Roberto soon became Castro's semiofficial photographers, traveling with him for the official government newspaper, Revolucion. Now 57 and still living in Havana, Roberto Salas has distanced himself from the communist powers that be. The regime itself hangs on, a cruel anachronism. Yet through the Salases' superb photography, the world can still see history through the eyes of Castro's upper crust in its' glory days. How did Roberto feel about Castro's ideology and his well-documented atrocities? "Look", he says, "I was 18 years old and in the middle of this great adventure. Why the hell would I want to go back to New York?" Roberto was invited to North Korea to take pictures to display in Cuba of the glories of sister communist states. Despite Salas' Castroist credentials, the North Koreans were especially suspicious of this guy with an American accent. "I get to the airport and the first thing the Koreans do is take my goddamned cameras. They'd only let me out to see their holy monuments. Kim Il Sung sat there, Kim Il Sung gazed over this valley, Kim Il Sung took a crap here." Salas balked and hopped the next plane back to Havana. Communist North Vietnam was more hospitable to a hungry young photographer. Salas spent nearly a year snapping photos from behind the Vietcong lines. Ho Chi Minh invited Roberto to his home. Those days are long gone. "My old man busted his ass for 34 years in the States and then Cuba", Salas explains. "What did he have to show for it? A few boxes of negatives.". The bulk of the Salases' work remains unseen, rotting in boxes in Roberto's comfortable seventh-floor flat in Havana's faded Vedado quarter. Roberto continues to work, having just opened his 50th exhibition in Havana. His subject? Nudes and cockfights. Recently, Cuba's minister of culture complained to Roberto that photographers are no longer taking the kinds of heroic shots common in the early days of the revolution. That's hardly surprising: Castro's facade has cracked and today, Cuba is in a shambles. "In the beginning, theings were moving - objects, people - things you could take pictures of, like agrarian reform or taking over the United Fruit Co.", explains Roberto. "Now they talk of this being their 'special period'. Special period means that a guy goes to a bus stop, spends three and a half hours there, and no bus shows up. Now, how the hell do you reflect that in a photograph?" |
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