The Illusion of Color

The Illusion of Color / Yoani Sanchez
Posted on November 23, 2013

I got home from school and there was a man sitting on the floor in front
of the TV. His fingers were stained with paint and some oil-paint tubes
were scattered around him. It was the latest fad in the neighborhood:
painting a colorful pattern on those boring black-and-white screens. The
first one to do so was the downstairs neighbor, always up-to-date with
the latest trends, which included posters of lightly-clad women taped to
the walls, and an enormous porcelain tiger at the entrance to her home.
She dictated fashion throughout the whole tenement, so when she
transformed her "boob tube" with a rainbow in reds and blues, everyone
imitated her. In my house at 218 Krim, they painted some stripes and
even a central circle in various tones. Most significant is that years
later, I remembered the programs and cartoons I saw on that "invention"
as if they'd come to me in their original polychrome. My brain had
joined the shades and constructed the illusion of color.

This personal anecdote comes to me when I read the latest 2012
Statistics from the Census of Population and Housing. On learning that
there are still more than 700,000 black-and-white TVs in Cuba, I can't
help but evoke the excited neighbors of my tenement using their
fingertips to paint their cathode ray tubes. But in the current figures,
there is not only evidence that they are still watching TV programming
in black, white and gray… but also that they are economically worse off
in our country. They are the ones who have failed to get together the
convertible pesos for a modern Sony or LG. Those who probably have no
family abroad, who haven't found a way to divert State resources, or
whose privileges ended with the end of the USSR. The poorest who, in a
society of such avid TV watchers, don't have the resources to enjoy the
tonalities.

I wonder if any of those old TVs touched up with stripes in green,
purple and cyan still survive… If some child on this island still
watches like my sister and me did, mentally joining a piece of color
here and another there to imagine Huckleberry Hound was a blue dog, or
Cheburashka with his fur brown.

Now I no longer know, I can no longer distinguish in my memory, between
what came to me thanks to the ingenuity of painted screens, or what I
enjoyed years later thanks to Technicolor.

The post La ilusión del color appeared first on Generación Y – Yoani
Sánchez.

23 November 2013

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