An old man sits at the edge of a mangrove bank. Dressed in white, as if to match the color of his hair and long beard, he stands out against the bright colors that surround him. He reads a newspaper, his bare feet outstretched and books and sandals piled beside him. The water catches his reflection, and catches him thinking. But this is no lunch in the park. This is a scene in a painting about war and resistance.
“He looks like Grandma’s Chinese neighbor,” six-year-old Raysa Mederos commented after seeing another portrait of the same man. “Is he from the Soviet Union?”
His father, the Cuban graphic designer and painter of this portrait, René Mederos, replied: “No, he is from Vietnam.
The man in the painting is Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. In 1969, the Communist Party of Cuba sent Mederos to document the war in Vietnam. There he marched for months alongside the liberation forces in order to paint portraits of imperialism. This image of Uncle Ho, as he was often called, by the river, titled “Viet Nam Will Win” (1971), is one of 24 paintings the artist produced from this trip. , later mass-printed as posters and postage stampsbringing the struggle of the Vietnamese people into popular Cuban life.
“Viet Nam Will Win” became the inspiration for the cover I was asked to do for the new Selected Ho Chi Minh, edited by Vijay Prashad and published by LeftWord Books. I have reached out to the Mederos family to seek their blessings and learn more about this work. In October 2021, I had a video chat with René’s daughter, Raysa, and her grandson, Marcelo Brociner.
Born on November 20, 1933 in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, René Mederos was a self-taught graphic designer, rum lover, dominoes player and, allegedly, a horrible dancer. This trip to Vietnam and a subsequent visit in 1972 marked an important moment in his life as an artist, socialist and internationalist. At the time, Raysa and her sister were very young.
“I remember my father was coming back from Vietnam,” Raysa recalls. “He started painting all this vegetation and these faces that were unknown to me before. He didn’t talk about the war, but about the many things people were carrying there on their bicycles. Instead of documenting the brutality of an imperialist war, he painted colorful portraits of daily life: buffaloes bathing, soldiers resting, children going to school. Raysa remembers that the colors were so vivid that they were difficult for engravers to reproduce. Our imaginations too are limited by the material conditions that can give them life. These limitations were all the more acute on an island where access to essential supplies, from food and medicine to paper and ink, has been limited by a six-decade blockade.
“Weren’t you scared?” Raysa remember ask her father when she was a child.
“Of course I was,” Mederos told him. “I had never known what fear was like before. But I saw children going to school every day despite the bombardments. Nothing stopped them from learning to read and write…. Nothing stopped them. prevented them from continuing their lives in the middle of the war.
They insisted on living. But this insistence is not an individualized experience. It is collective, felt and practiced by a class, a nation and peoples throughout the colonized world. Ho Chi Minh’s act of reading by the river, unfazed by the vulnerability of being unarmed and alone, is that insistence. The great stories of history—revolution, national liberation, human emancipation—are composed of these moments of immobility. As Ho Chi Minh reads and thinks, his sandals come off.
These iconic sandals are a symbol of anti-colonial resistance. The desire for rubber was responsible for some of the worst brutalities of French colonialism in Vietnam. The largest plantations — including michelin‘s, now known for its international restaurant guide and friendly white mascot selling car tires, saw death rates of up to 47% for its indentured workers in the 1920s. Ho Chi Minh wore these rubber sandals not only in the jungle, but throughout his presidency of North Vietnam from 1945 until his death in 1969. Every step he took was therefore a meditation on the end of colonialism.
Anti-colonial theorist and psychiatrist from Martinique, Frantz Fanon, helped us understand how essential culture is to the fight against colonialism and for national liberation, praising Fodéba Keïta’s poem “Aube africaine” (African Dawn) as an example of such a culture, “a true invitation to reflection, demystification and combat. The portrait of Mederos is such an invitation, calling us to that moment when Ho Chi Minh sat by the river, theorizing and analyzing a world he wanted to change. Rather than a nostalgia for the past, what can the works and lives of Mederos and Ho Chi Minh teach us today? Like Fanon saidwe “must use the past with the intention of opening up the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope”.
Ho Chi Minh died after a long illness the same year that Mederos went to Vietnam. He was 79 years old. He saw 79 springs, but did not live long enough to see his country united and his people liberated. “79 Primaveras” is the title of an experimental film by Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez made the same year. The 24-minute black and white film is made up of montages. An invitation to reflection: in the middle of a jungle, Ho Chi Minh works at a typewriter and scratches his head. To demystify: He puts the bed away in its straw hut. To fight: He greets a huge crowd of soldiers and civilians. And yes, he wears his sandals.
