Territorial Masquerades

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I couldn’t pass this up. It turns out that the artist commissioned to design Colombia’s 1,000-peso bill slyly included a portrait of a young Fidel Castro in the background of the bill. It took eight years for anyone to notice the portrait of the Cuban revolutionary on what I assume, being the smallest denomination, is the nation’s most-circulated bill. The bill glorifies Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a rising and left-leaning politician from the 1940s, whose assassination on April 9, 1948, symbolically marks for many the beginning of the country’s most recent cycles of violence. (In fact, this year, Colombia will be commemorating the first “National Day of the Victim” and April 9 was chosen for this reason.) When Gaitán was gunned down in the broad daylight of downtown Bogotá, a national uprising emanated from the capital city, and the day is since known as the Bogotazo. Visiting the city that day was Fidel Castro, a 21-year-old Cuban law student who was taking part in a Latin American Youth counter-summit to a meeting of the precursor to the Organization of American States (OAS)—a body from which Cuba remains banned since 1962 at U.S. insistence. The Bogotazo helped further politicize the young Castro, who 11 years later would march victoriously into Havana. José Antonio Suárez, the artist commissioned to design the 1,000-peso note, subversively recorded this historical circumstance on the bill. Continue reading →