Prior to the 1990s, triumphalism characterized most Cuban state propaganda. Self-congratulatory statements and predictions of Communist victories once universally pocked the landscape. However, after billions of dollars in annual aid disappeared along with the Soviet Union, messages on billboards and government-made signs like these evinced a reactive, often defensive tone. Painted on a wall in Trinidad, these signs seemed laughable in the summer of 2000. “In Cuba there will never be a transition to capitalism. —Fidel Castro”, one reads. The other shouts back to an American imperialist adversary: “Yankee! Fear has no place to eat here!” Given that Communist Party rule had survived largely because leaders adopted monopoly-style capitalism in the early 1990s, such party-authored slogans and Fidel Castro’s own mantras were clearly steeped in denialism. Even an apparently inspiring quote from Fidel on another wall—“Bravery lacks no intelligence and intelligence lacks no bravery—was remarkable because it seemed so pathetically flat. Trinidad de Cuba, July 2001.
