In my travels, I’m always intrigued to find examples of iconic historical figures of communism, summarily stripped of ideology and turned into capitalist brands.
In 2003, as Cuba was taking its first steps towards a market economy, the hottest items on the market I visited in Havana was a T-shirt with the classic image of Che Guevara—the same one painted on walls with revolutionary slogans--and his trademark beret.
In 2005, in Yekaterinburg in Russia’s southern Urals, a popular interior design choice for upscale bars and restaurants was Soviet retro—reproductions of Pravda front pages, grainy blown up photos of May Day parades in Moscow’s Red Square, posters urging farm and factory workers to meet production quotas, and portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.
In 2012, at a resort in the Tian Shan mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan, an imitation of the classic Lenin statue, his right arm raised as if pointing towards a misty socialist nirvana. Except that he’s not—he’s pointing the way to the Russian restaurant. I titled a short essay “Lenin’s commercial arm.”
And in 2022 in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the We Are Tito café.
When Josip Broz was born in 1892 to a Croat father and Slovene mother, the northern Balkans were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Drafted into the army, he was seriously wounded and captured by the Russians in World War I. After the war, he returned to the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia and joined the communist party. When the party was banned in 1920, he took the name Tito, as other members did, to avoid detection. In World War II, he led the Partisans, the Yugoslav guerrilla movement, against the occupying Nazi forces. In 1945, the Partisans, backed by the Soviet Union, came to power.
Tito served as prime minister, president, and later president for life of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980. Unlike other leaders in the Soviet bloc, he broke with Stalin. He established a domestic form of market socialism where firms were owned and managed by their employees and competed in open and free markets.
Tito kept a lid on ethnic tensions by delegating as much power as possible to each republic. Under the 1974 constitution, Yugoslavia was defined as a "federal republic of equal nations and nationalities, freely united on the principle of brotherhood and unity in achieving specific and common interest." A leader of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Tito was popular both in Yugoslavia and abroad. Although some historians criticize his authoritarian rule, others see him as a benevolent dictator who held the country together. Tito is credited with transforming Yugoslavia from a poor to a middle-income nation, a process that saw vast improvements in women's rights, health, education, and economic development. He ranked first in a 2003 “Greatest Croatian” poll. In a 2010 poll, four out of five Serbs believed that life was better under Tito.
Nostalgia is evident throughout the former Yugoslavia. One historian writes that Tito’s cult centres around his persona as a common man, a friend of the people, in contrast to Stalin who was depicted as a “cold, aloof god-like figure whose extraordinary qualities set him apart from ordinary people.” in Catholic Croatia some remember him as “a sort of secular saint” and hang his portrait on the wall beside those of Catholic saints.
‘Long live Tito’ graffiti, Mostar, Bosnia
After the break-up of Yugoslavia, many towns and cities changed their communist-era street names to those of national figures. However, Tito’s name is preserved in streets and squares in all the republics. Stephanie and I enjoyed a fine lunch at a restaurant on Ulica Maršala Tita, the main drag in the Croatian seaside resort of Opatija. Tito lends his name to city squares in Rjeka, the third largest city in Croatia, and Koper, the largest port city in Slovenia, to downtown streets in Sarajevo and Mostar in Bosnia, and to numerous streets in northern Serbia.
Street sign in We are Tito cafe
The We Are Tito Café, in a park behind Sarajevo’s Historical Museum, a few blocks from the western end of the broad Ulica Maršala Tita, celebrates all things Tito. Inside are posters, portraits, newspaper pages, red flags, and a bust of the revered leader.
Beside the terrace is a motley collection of old Yugoslav military vehicles, including a World War II-era tank and a jeep. It’s a favorite weekend hangout, where parents sitting on camouflage-covered stools watch their children climbing over the tank and sliding down the barrel of an artillery piece. Visually, it seems an ironic commentary on the four years of conflict that tore Yugoslavia apart and destroyed Tito’s legacy of peace and unity.
