What Chanel In Cuba Means To The Cubans Who Live There

What Chanel In Cuba Means To The Cubans Who Live There
MAY 4, 2016 3:00 PM
JENNIFER SHYUE

There was them and there was us: "Them" being the guests of the Chanel
Cruise 2017 show and "us" being the crowd of Cubans and camera-toting
foreigners pressed against the yellow tape that sliced between us and
the blue-uniformed Cuban police officers standing close enough to touch.
A long block stretched between their backs and the runway illuminated by
street lamps.

For many of those guests, the evening's events began at 6:15 p.m., when
a fleet of mint-condition almendrones — Havana's iconic American cars
from the '50s — began ferrying guests from the Hotel Nacional, one of
Cuba's oldest luxury hotels and former playground of the mafia, to the
show space on El Prado, a long and narrow park that bisects an avenue of
the same name. On one side of El Prado lies the tourist hub that is Old
Havana; on the other is Central Havana, which has historically been home
to lower-income families.

For the three Cuban models who walked the show — Lupe, Johana, and
Yessica — tonight's events were the end of a months-long process
involving auditions, training at a Cuban modeling academy, and waiting
to see which models the house would ultimately choose. For Cubans who
weren't invited, like jewelry designer Mayelín Guevara, the show was
nevertheless emblematic of the sort of attention Havana has long deserved.

"We have a lot of artists here too, people of great worth," Guevara
said. "It was time, no?"

Migue Leyva J., model and blogger behind this is this, put it in more
definitive terms: "Chanel is going to mark a before and and an after in
the history of Cuba," he said. "Some time in the future, if everything
goes the way it has been, we won't have just Chanel — we'll have Louis
Vuitton Moët Hennessey; we'll have Hedi Slimane presenting his
collections here."

It's interesting to note that despite this quick change (and what you
might have gathered about Cuba from Instagram), Havana is nowhere as
developed as Seoul, Dallas, or Salzburg. Currently, you're unable to
actually buy Chanel products, except from its perfume and cosmetics,
anywhere in Cuba. For 30 years after the Revolution in 1959, Cuba was
closed to foreign enterprises and private businesses were illegal. In
the 1990s, however, the Special Period that followed the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the heavily Soviet-subsidized economy forced the
government to loosen restrictions. These days, more and more tourists
are flooding into Havana, European companies are investing in hotels
across the island and Cubans are opening private restaurants. The gap
between rich and poor, greatly reduced in preceding decades, is
beginning to widen again.

Chanel is known for hosting shows in far-flung locales. This particular
show, however, was a first in many ways: Chanel's first in Latin
America, and, for Cuba, the first time since the Revolution that so many
notable people had come from abroad to collectively view a display of
what can ultimately be summed up in one word: capitalism. And unlike the
Major Lazer and Rolling Stones concerts in March, which were free and
open to the public, the Chanel show was a private event.

"That's kind of expected from this kind of fashion world, which is
really an elite thing," said Adriana Marcelo Costa, a literature
professor and book editor.

"I would prefer it, of course, to be different, but I didn't expect it
to be." Echoed Guevara, "We all want to see the Chanel show, [but] it
has to be done this way, half-closed; that's something normal."

For others, however, the fact that El Prado — normally a public park on
a street like any other — had been sealed off for the show was troubling.

"I don't understand why, if they're going to make it a private event,
they do it on El Prado," said Glensy Palay Alonso, a psychology student
at the University of Havana. "El Prado belongs to the Cuban population.
It's not something with a rate that you can rent."

Cuba's prestige has long stemmed from the emphasis it places on
equality. Free healthcare and education are two of the country's
greatest selling points on the international political stage and have
resulted in two oft-cited statistics: an infant mortality rate lower
than that of the U.S. and a 99.8% literacy rate.

"I think that [Chanel is] taking advantage of this moment in which Cuba
is in view on a worldwide scale," Palay Alonso added.

There certainly has been a lot of buzz about Cuba recently — whether, as
Marcelo Costa said, it's "because Beyoncé and Jay Z came here three
years ago, or because Rihanna took some pictures here [for the cover of
Vanity Fair], or because Obama came a month ago, or the Rolling Stones."
The fashion industry, in particular, has had a strong aesthetic
fascination with Havana.

"Right now, Cuba is scenography," Leyva said. "We're in the middle of
the Caribbean, we have marvelous architecture from a time period that is
well-preserved...And for certain people, it's exotic to come here and
find an old car, an old building. It's like, 'Let's go to Havana. We
need to use this as scenography.'"


RIGHT NOW, CUBA IS SCENOGRAPHY
MIGUE LEYVA J.

This perspective on Cuba, Leyva said, does not bother him at all.
Marcelo Costa, on the other hand, is worried about Cuba becoming just
another tourist souvenir.

"'Exotic' for me is another word for stereotypes. It's exotic for whom?
And who decides, 'That's exotic?' [I]t's kind of a colonial attitude,
for me," she said. "Everyone wants to be in an almendrón; they want to
be photographed with a beautiful mulatta [mixed-race woman] or beautiful
mulatto, and they want to dance salsa and rumba — and yeah, those things
are really important for our culture. But my concern is that that's not
the only thing that identifies us as Cubans."

Her concern seems to have been well-founded. On the runway yesterday,
many looks featured beribboned straw fedoras reminiscent of those sold
in Havana tourist shops. The show closed with a Cuban comparsa, or
musical group, dancing down the runway with the models in its wake. A
scroll through Instagram will reveal plenty of photos from attendees
posing with local schoolchildren against crumbling buildings and inside
pre-Communist-era cars.

While the attendees were decked out in head-to-toe double-Cs, that logo
is a rare sight for Cuban citizens. If Chanel were to open a store in
Havana, there remains the question of who would be able to shop there
and who it would be built for. This is, after all, a country where the
average doctor, for example, makes $20 to 30 a month.

"[Whether a store opens] doesn't really interest me, because if they
open one, neither I nor my friends are going to buy anything there,"
said Palay Alonso. "It's not bad to like luxurious things or expensive
things. What would be bad would be treating people [differently] based
on what they're wearing."

("You should give people the option [to buy Chanel]," Marcelo Costa
said. "If you have money or you want to sell your house to [buy] a
Chanel dress, that's your deal. You should be able to do that.")

Ultimately, anxiety about what the arrival of Chanel in Cuba symbolizes
is twofold: There's apprehension about what an influx in tourism might
mean for how Cuba's multi-faceted culture is viewed on a global scale;
and there's apprehension about what the country's increasing interaction
with a capitalist world means for the world's most enduring large-scale
socialist project that, despite its many flaws, had almost succeeded in
wiping out inequality before the Special Period.

Most people would agree, however, that change is inevitable — and might
even be a good thing.

"We want a base for Vogue here. We want NEXT Models, Elite Models,
everything here. They should come," Leyva said. "Maybe we'll have a
Parsons here soon in Havana where I can study fashion — we want it, we
want it."

Source: Chanel Cuba Cruise 2017 - Havana Fashion Show -
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/05/109950/chanel-cuba-cruise-2017