The Revolution… Mighty?

Foto: Claudio Fuentes Madan

I think the political posters and billboards have long since crossed the line of semantic absurdity. But this latest adjective, “mighty,” [pujante] has left me with my mouth hanging open. The first time I saw one of these banners (they’re now hanging all over 23rd Street), and read “mighty,” I imagined a woman laboring to give birth with tremendous pain and, since then, every time I read the little word I can’t get the idea out of my head. The worst is when I read the complete phrase, “The Mighty Revolution.” I can’t even begin to explain the disagreeable image that forms in my brain, where there’s no longer a woman in labor, but poor exhausted Cuba, incessantly pushing to give birth to this enormous revolution that won't leave her womb once and for all.

I wonder, who are the people who are making the signs and how much are they paying them? At times, I can make myself believe that they’re doing it deliberately, that those fetuses of metaphor are so that we will read between the lines, so that we will laugh to ourselves and know that they, the designers and publishers of the Mighty (from now on I’ll call it that), are only doing their job because that is how they earn their beans.