Rare footage - Trotsky greets Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Coyocoán, Mexico, 1938:
At 10 seconds in does Trotsky really do the old "hey dude, put 'em up" sparring routine beloved of a certain kind of awkward male-on-male encounter, before quickly thinking better of it? I'd like to think so.
From Open Culture:
The Trotskys had arrived the year before, after Rivera petitioned the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas to grant the controversial Marxist leader and theorist sanctuary in Mexico. When the Trotskys arrived on a Norwegian oil tanker at the port city of Tampico in January of 1937, Rivera was not well, but Kahlo boarded the ship to welcome the Trotskys and accompanied them on an armored train to Mexico City. She invited the Trotskys to stay at her family home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in Coyocoán, now a section of Mexico City. By the time this footage was taken by a visiting American named Ivan Heisler, Trotsky and Kahlo had either had, or were about to have, a brief affair, and the friendship between the two couples would soon fall apart. In early 1939 Trotsky moved to another house in the same neighborhood, where he was assassinated in August of 1940.
"Enormes personas", writes one of the YouTube commenters, perhaps a little unfairly. Certainly Diego Rivera looks like he could lose a few pounds, but the others seem slim enough to me. Trotsky's weight problems, if he had any - and let's not forget how many of those whose lives he so dramatically affected back in the USSR were spared ever having to worry about such things - were soon sorted out by that ice pick.
Lovely music, anyway: La Zandunga, by Mexican composer and guitarist Antonio Bribiesca.
...that made his ears burn.
Posted by: Andy | July 18, 2012 at 04:40 PM