The decline was fast.
In 1964 Micah Carpentier joined the surprised and clandestine Iglesia del Pasado es el Pasado, a brutish, throwback cult of hollow social strivers who found Fidel’s form of communism difficult to compete with. The group, made up almost entirely of informers, would meet secretly once a week at the Gran Club de Dominó José Martí. The pastor who was on the direct payroll of both the CIA and the KGB was known for his deadpan sermons made up mostly of non sequiturs and puns.
Carpentier, a man prone to easy submission, felt very much at home among this ragtag group of black marketeers, social misfits, religious fanatics and snitches. His once colorful personality flattened into a caricature as soon as he started attending their meetings. He would start referring to fuzzy concepts like la génesis de ser, ya siempre escuchando and hablando en el avance and became increasingly incoherent to his family and to his friends. Attending the church’s meetings incurred great risk but it was worth it to Carpentier because it was the only place in Cuba where he felt somewhat appreciated.
Carpentier, a man prone to easy submission, felt very much at home among this ragtag group of black marketeers, social misfits, religious fanatics and snitches. His once colorful personality flattened into a caricature as soon as he started attending their meetings. He would start referring to fuzzy concepts like la génesis de ser, ya siempre escuchando and hablando en el avance and became increasingly incoherent to his family and to his friends. Attending the church’s meetings incurred great risk but it was worth it to Carpentier because it was the only place in Cuba where he felt somewhat appreciated.
The conventional scholarship points to my uncle’s putative commitment to political dissidence that led to his demise. The harsher truth was that Carpentier was a joiner - a person more prone to follow than to lead and his involvement with the illegal Iglesia del Pasado es el Pasado was a therapeutic decision rather than a political one. Ironically, it was the Church that ultimately restored my uncle’s reputation. In the 1990’s when the Soviet Union abandoned Cuba like a waif among the gales the noose of repression momentarily relaxed and the Church was able to carry out a yard sale.
La Venta de Noventa y Tres, the somewhat risky and short-lived open air market in Havana’s Plaza Vieja was an early Cuban experiment with free enterprise. It was there amidst the waterlogged paperbacks, transistor radios, and old vinyl recordings of Don Azpiazu and Orquesta de Tata Alfonso that the Iglesia del Pasado es el Pasado displayed in public for the first time the odd gum wrapper sketches of Micah Carpentier.
Most of this work is dispersed around the globe and I am extremely grateful to Armando Masuero and Valerie Paes, graduate fellows at the Institue de la Inteligencia Útil in Quito for compiling and editing a definitive catalogue raisonné of these important drawings.
