Arriving in 1961, Swiss photographer Luc Chessex spent several years in Cuba documenting the revolution and life on the island. In an interview with Manuel Pereira, Chessex talked about his experiences, his photographic influences, and the face of the revolution today. Published last month on the Madrid-based website CubaEncuentro, the interview appears here in English for the first time, courtesy of Cuba Encuentro. –Editors

Recently, Swiss photographer Luc Chessex presented his book Le Visage de la révolution (The Face of the Revolution) at Paris Photo, a photographic art exhibition held recently at the Grand Palais.

Chessex’s book is a portrait of that Cuba he knew in the 1960s. Luc is almost a Cuban; perhaps he was born in Switzerland by mistake. I worked with him for nearly six years at the magazine Cuba Internacional. He’s an old friend, and I wanted to take advantage of the homage paid to him in Paris as an opportunity to interview him.

However, before getting down to the conversation, I would like to note the fact that several photographers who have recently been recognized with awards—Iván Cañas and Ernesto Fernández, for instance—worked or trained at Cuba Internacional.

It’s as if, in that Art Nouveau mansion on Reina Street at the corner of Lealtad, a highly diversified eye was able to record, with the greatest aesthetic quality, the passage of history on the island, which emerged from the cameras as if by magic. Each of these artists has used his lens to help create a collage of graphic testimonies about what some people still call revolution.

Tell me, Luc, your first impressions on your arrival in Cuba.

It was in 1961. On June 14, at dawn, I saw an illuminated Havana rising out of the mist. Before me was the Vedado, a U.S.-style modern neighborhood with tall buildings and twenty-story hotels. I was surprised by the modernity of that scene, because I had another image of the country. My father was a Cuban cigar smoker and he gave the cigar boxes to me when they were empty. The lithographs that decorated them drew a mysterious and fascinating country. Beyond the inevitable palm trees and abundance of indigenous peoples, I could see threatening lions, thatched houses, factories overflowing with sprockets and even Romeos in search of Juliets.

The Italian ship I was traveling on—the Enrico Dandolo—had already moored at the dock, and the captain exhorted me to think better before I set foot on solid ground: “Communists are relentless,” he warned; “you will regret it some day.” I had heard this phrase in Switzerland during the months before my departure, and I had always gotten exasperated. But now I had fun. For me, the situation was different. I had reached the place I wanted to be. In my childhood, I had been denied nothing, or almost nothing: a watch when I was ten, an electric train when I was twelve, a kayak when I was fifteen had cost me no effort. For me, they were almost inevitable presents. The trip to Cuba was something completely different. It was my project, my first personal project. And now that I had reached my goal, I had the impression of mocking my destination, of escaping from it.

Apart from that first vision, what struck you most in Havana?

The minute I disembarked, I felt a fervent fraternity. The Havana of 1961 was always like a dream, and at times a delirium. I wondered why this small country—the last Spanish colony to gain independence—had become the model for a Third World, which every day is more third and less world. Why was it also a point of reference for the European left-wing, which is disappointed by the socialism of the popular democracies?

Were you invited to Cuba by the government or recommended by Sartre?

I arrived to Cuba on my own initiative after reading a newspaper article entitled “Hurricane Over Sugar,” published by Sartre in the newspaper France-Soir on his return from Cuba.

You and I met in 1969, at the magazine Cuba Internacional. Later you began to work at Prensa Latina as a traveling photographer. In what other places and institutions did you work?

In September 1961, Alejo Carpentier, Vice-Minister of Culture, hired me to work as a photographer for the magazine Pueblo y Cultura (People and Culture), which was later called Revolución y Cultura (Revolution and Culture). I worked there until the end of 1968.

Who are your favorite photographers—I mean, as teachers or influences?

Robert Frank and Richard Avedon.

Your affinity with Robert Frank is evident. Like you, he is a Swiss fugitive, something like a Gauguin of photography who needs to expand his horizons. But... Richard Avedon? That seems like quite a departure from your usual line. I see him much more linked to fashion.

I understand your confusion. I have been deeply influenced by Robert Frank. Perhaps without him, I wouldn´t have stuck with it. For me, in photography there’s before and after RF. With one book, The Americans, he decisively influenced documentary photography, which is sometimes called “reportage.”

Avedon's case is more complex, as he became famous throughout his long career as a fashion photographer and portraitist. But he is also the creator of an oeuvre, less known, in which he collaborates with writers like Truman Capote and James Baldwin. He uses the same formal aesthetic, but not to fill the pages of fashion magazines or portray the haute bourgeoisie and everyday people, but to address highly political topics such as racism, the treatment of the insane, and the Vietnam War.

The strength in this is that he uses the same high-gloss aesthetic, and often the same figures, to articulate a discourse about his society that’s as subversive as Frank’s, with his trash aesthetic. It’s strange how two such opposite ways of working achieve the same result at the end.

Luc, tell us that story in which you mistook the word paredón for perdón.

When I arrived in Havana, the city was covered with huge posters that read: Pardon for traitors! Those posters were hung on the facades of buildings that were now empty, as the General Electric, Coca Cola, and Ford Motor Companies had been confiscated by the Cuban government. One day after my arrival, I went to the Cuban Film Institute with a presentation letter that the Cuban ambassador to Switzerland had given me. My Spanish was not so good. I had learned it hastily during the three-week trip. After waiting several hours, I was greeted by a group of young filmmakers who were looking forward to the photo dossier I had brought to them. We had a meeting in which they asked me to explain my reasons for coming to Cuba. In short, they wanted me to define my profession of revolutionary faith, which was very difficult because of my imperfect Spanish. I tried to explain that I had found the country of my dreams: What a wonderful revolution, and what proof of their generosity, that being harassed by their enemies they were able to conduct this propaganda campaign asking for forgiveness to their traitors!

They did not understand me well, but one of them spoke fluent French and almost died laughing. After he exchanged some words with his colleagues, all of them began to laugh. I would have loved to laugh, too, or at least know the reason for so much joy. After I consulted the dictionary, I could understand it: the correct translation for paredón—which I was reading as ‘pardon’—was execution.

Unwittingly, I entered the Cuban cultural world. I was assigned and suddenly immersed as a set photographer in a movie—a comedy, of course. That filming lasted only a few months, but those nine years living in Cuba were like a good movie. The script was simple and all the incidents were allowed.

Tell us about your adventures following in Che Guevara's footsteps in Bolivia.

I left Cuba with the Uruguayan journalist Ernesto Gonzalez Bermejo. Each of us had a passport that allowed us to travel to Bolivia. Our aim was to gather testimonies about the fatal adventure that Che and his comrades had played out in the Bolivian jungle. We traveled for just over two months, following the route of the guerrillas up to La Higuera, the village where Che was wounded before being executed.

How and when were you kicked out of Cuba? Why?

It was in 1975, in the quinquenio gris (Five Gray Years). Prensa Latina left me unemployed. At that time, the influence of the Soviet Union became very strong in Cuba, and as I was not a member of any Communist party, neither Swiss nor Cuban, I guess the bond of trust was broken. This is my interpretation of the events, because it´s worth mentioning that nobody has given me an official explanation.

Your book Le Visage de la révolution (The Face of the Revolution) seemed to be an analysis about the cult of personality. Can we assume that your work shows a spontaneous, street-level expression of the cult of personality? Or do you think it’s a tropical version of the quasi-religious worship of a charismatic leader?

The cult of personality as we know it—Stalin, Walter Ulbricht, Mao—is always based on a few iconic images of the leaders. They are the same recurring archetypes: the leader talking with workers, interacting with children, visiting factories. In the Cuba of the 1960s, by contrast, Fidel´s images were diverse and at times contradictory. Some were released by the Party, but many others were the result of private or popular initiatives. For a European observer, it gave the impression of a kind of “tropical surrealism,” or perhaps “magical realism,” about which Carpentier spoke—quite alien to the canons of personality worship existing in the USSR or China.

After half a century, do you think that the Italian captain who brought you to the Island was right?

In June, 1961 Marxism-Leninism had not still been established on the island, so the captain had some vision of the future. Communism was finally swept off the face of the earth. It was an incident in the history of humanity—no more, no less.

Luc, you have been a privileged witness of what happened in Cuba, first because you have the perspective of a foreigner, and second for having been there with your camera from the first moments. Now, fifty years later, what is the face of the revolution? By which I don’t mean the physical face of one individual.

It is difficult to draw conclusions. Obviously, all those promises of the revolutionary project were not fulfilled. Social revolutions are always utopias that sooner or later collide with reality, and reality is always stronger than revolutionary utopias. I do not know who used to say that the economy is always reactionary. The industrial revolution and the information revolution have been much more radical than any social revolution. I mean to say that human beings are much, much more complex than any technology, and for this reason grand theories always fail when they try to change the course of history too quickly.

Manuel Pereira, Mexico DF, 15 December 2011
Courtesy of CubaEncuentro