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Some Historical Themes in Cuban Cinema

Reynaldo González

The documentary film, well developed within the Cuban cinema, reflects historical subjects by its very nature. To cover the documentary, though, would require more space than is available in this article. I would like instead to discuss some dramatic works which directly or indirectly express artistic values with reference to history. This too will require some omissions in the revolutionary period of Cuban film, the period when the Cuban film industry truly emerged, with its unprecedented levels of production particularly centered on realism and historical and social investigation. This article will be organized around thematic groupings, to the detriment of chronological treatment.

Under these headings, the reader will not be surprised to find comedies and dramas which are not explicitly historical, but which in some way contributed to the understanding of definitive aspects of social evolution. Films whose goal was to relate historical events or the lives of outstanding personalities do not always merit consideration as artistic works, even if their abundance proves useful in the celebration of anniversaries and in civic and patriotic education (for which purposes they appear in cinematic retrospectives and on television).

Before examining history in the post-revolutionary dramatic film, a brief historical context is needed.

Prehistoric History
The cinema arrived in Cuba toward the end of the War of Independence. It was shaped by a social reality of backwardness and later by a republic subject to outside control. The protagonists of this cinematic adventure saw themselves more as technicians than as artists. They were learning a craft which seemed to begin and end with each new initiative. These experiences left their mark, even beyond these forebears' perseverance in creating something which would become the passion of multitudes. Later, Cubans began to look for themselves in the cinema, as in other artistic genres, but they came up against the fact that film production and distribution depend on large financial investments and involve opposing interests. The surviving titles produced by our pioneers testify to the fact that early Cuban film sought mostly to record events. These titles include Enrique Díaz Quesada's "Don Tomás Estrada Palma's Departure from the Presidential Mansion" (1906), "Mr. Magoon Leaves Cuba" (1909), "José Miguel Gómez' Office" (1909), "Celebrations of the Virgin of Charity in Camagüey" (1909), "Aviator McCurdy's Flight over Havana" (1911), "The Maine's Epilogue" (1912), "Troops Leaving for Santiago de Cuba during the Race War" (1912).

These titles fit the goal of taking snapshots of daily events, which can be a way of telling history, if only in a factual sense. Díaz Quesada was following in the footsteps of Javier Veyre, the agent who introduced Lumiére's Cinematograph in Havana in 1897. Audiences became accustomed to viewing contemporary scenes which might turn out to be of historical importance. Edison photographers shot some of these in filming "Burial of the Maine Victims" and "Wreck of the Battleship Maine" (1898), as did Vitagraph photographers with the capture of San Juan Hill in Santiago de Cuba in "Fighting with Our Boys in Cuba" (1899) and "General Lee's Procession" (1899), an infantry parade through the streets of Havana.

These were episodes of the denouement of the Spanish-Cuban war, which the U.S. entered at the last moment in order to divert its course. Journalistic zeal gave rise to the first examples of documentary montage when "The Naval Battle of Santiago de Cuba" was constructed out of photos from New York dailies and passed off as actual takes. The celebrated George Méliès was not far behind: at his Paris work table he reconstructed the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay: Les quais de La Havane et l'explosion du Cuirassé Maine (The Docks of Havana and the Explosion of the Battleship Maine), L'epave du Maine (The Wreck of the Maine, Visite sousmarine du Maine (Underwater Search for the Maine). An illusionist's trick had been discovered: montage editing.

In the early years of the twentieth century Díaz Quesada made several silent films about the recent independence war: "Manuel García or The King of the Cuban Countryside" (1913), "The Mambi Captain or Liberators and Warriors" (1914), "The Jungle or The Cuban Woman" (1915), "The Rescue of Brigadier Sanguily" (1916); of these, only posters and contemporary references remain. That which recurs most frequently is the one about the outlaw Manuel García. This figure, a Cuban phenomenon of the independence war period, acquired emblematic stature in the precarious postwar society. Outlaw bands abounded in the woods and keys of the island, a loose insurgency against economic inequalities, as the thinker Enrique José Varona saw them. In the popular imagination they were colored by a romantic halo because they robbed from the rich to give to the poor. As any subject related to the exploits of the independence movement won the spectators' favor, the figure of García was a wink to the credulousness of a population dissatisfied with an independence and a republic that were more apparent than real.

At the same time as the premiere of "The Rescue of General Sanguily," which reconstructed an episode of the conflict, there occurred an incident which reflected the interference of the U.S. film industry in Cuban cinematic affairs. The Edison company screened Richard Ridley's "A Message to Garcia," with North American actors and Mexican extras. As viewed by the press, the gringo film falsified our history. To mollify the local cinematographers, the production company Santos & Artigas and the Havana municipal government awarded Díaz Quesada a gold medal for "The Rescue of General Sanguily". An annexationist councilman proposed honoring the Americans as well. This blunder was prevented, but in 1936 Twentieth Century Fox made a remake of "A Message to Garcia," directed by George Marshall, with Wallace Beery, Barbara Stanwyck, and John Boles in the leading roles. No one vouched for its historical accuracy. When the republic acquired its definitive form under U.S. influence, historical themes became grist for reenactments and anniversaries controlled by the political powers that were.

Since its birth, Cuban cinema had participated in the debates of the time, and not without a strong tint of melodrama if we can judge from newspaper references (since there are few extant films on which to base an opinion). Though I assume that Díaz Quesada filmed with the intention of evoking more worthy pages of Cuban history to contrast with the bog of dependency, there is no way to venture to evaluate his work. Later, when less innocent interests entered into the foolishness of the republican era, film productions had a different character: the desire to falsify reality, accompanied by a notable decline in national self esteem. When a Cuban cinematography struggled to appear, foreign producers and distributors took advantage of Cuban unwariness and of acquiescent resignation to accepting foreign viewpoints on our own affairs. In truth, domestic plots had a hard time competing: stories of campesinas and seamstresses who stumbled until falling into prostitution, rumba dancers of dubious success, kitschy and stereotypical vaudeville acts, and treatments of agrarian problems deformed by paternalistic points of view. Between unworthy sons and disconsolate mothers, the problems of history and individual or collective dignity were drowned by waves of melodramatic tears. How could there be a flowering of the historical, especially if we asked for the subject to be transcended by the act of artistic creation?

Reviewing the catalog of films made in Cuba and by Cubans in the first half of the 20th century, what we find is a succession of unfulfilled desires and distorted projects. If those times may be summed up by the Lisandro Otero's phrase "the mambo versus the Enlightment", in cinematic terms it was melodrama vs. historicism. Radio-influenced dramas captured the screens. Everything was colored by a whining self-commiseration and a recitative sentimentalism, followed by the conciliation of the classes to the tune of a wedding march. The force of the substandard products enthroned in place of culture was greater than the intellectual and artistic possibilities of the creators within an economic machinery that overpowered them. [See Reynaldo González, Llorar es un placer, Editorial Letras Cubans, Havana, 1988.]

In that intermittent cinematography--it would be an illusion to speak of a film industry--the themes of foreign domination, structural and political weaknesses, and the latifundio and rural displacement did show their faces, but they were denatured by melodrama or inappropriate slapstick humor (or both at once) which turned the tragedy of a republican life without handholds into farce. We can point to one notable example in Cuban cinematic precincts, Ramón Peón's silent film "The Virgin of Charity" (1930), cited by Georges Sadoul as an antecedent of neorealism. Though naive, it depicts the rule of rural chieftains with exceptional coherence for a Latin American film of its time.

But the available data on some films about the dire problems of the countryside is enough to make one's skin prickle and one's teeth chatter. It could have been one of the great historical themes, if we didn't understand history only as the sum of heroic deeds. In this sense I'd like to attribute unconfirmed claims to two films which are not preserved but attached to which are the names of intellectuals who inspire confidence: "Eviction in the countryside" (1940) by Luís Alvarez Tabío with text by Juan Marinello, photography by José Tabío, and musical scoring by Alejo Carpentier (an occupation which the novelist combined with writing radio scripts), and "Ejection of a Campesino" (1944) by José Tabío, starring Paco Alfonso, who was known for his political militancy on stage.

Raúl Medina's "Creole Corner" (1950) mixes cabaret and rumba with the plow and land tenancy. In Peón's "The Only One" (1952), despite the presence of Rita Montaner as the central character, trade unionism is smothered by laughter and the lightweight. The same thing happened to the grandiloquent "Strong as Oaks" (1954) by Manolo Alonso, one of the best-made films of the era: the plight of the campesino vanishes behind the tried and true plot of the unworthy son. These were the 50s, decade of the emergence of CubaMex, a company that counted on the funds and talent of "the Midas of the Soap Opera," Félix B. Caignet, for a series headed by his signature film "Right of Birth," followed by "Street Angels" and other tearjerking cocktails that blended social criticism, sentimentalism, shock value, and the never-ending search for commercial pay dirt. Some figures of the live stage made the jump to silver screen in order to broaden their popularity. That was the case with Montaner: if the films in which she appeared have any significance it is only because of her presence in the cast, and, despite the opinions of her fans, it is not exactly her acting ability that stands out. Apart from musical productions which could show off the melodic and rhythmic riches of the Cuban people (an assertion questioned by Fernando Ortiz in his work on the Africanism of Cuban folkloric music) and a very few films of some formal effectiveness, the rest can only be valued as the reflections of a dazed and bewildered time. Even those observers most loath to recognize discontinuities in the trajectory of the Cuban cinema have to recognize that in these avenues there was space for neither serious intellectual inquiry nor the cultural aspirations of individual artists. If those films contributed anything lasting, it lay in the gathering of technical skills and knowledge that would be of use in a later epoch.

As far as subjects traditionally accepted as historical one, in the forties the director Jean Angelo returned to the Independence War and its symbols: another version of "Manuel García, King of the Cuban Countryside" (1940) and "She Died of Love" (1942), about José Martí=s poem "La niña de Guatemala." This last was renowned not for its accomplishments but because it gave rise to one of the financial wrangles that typified Cuban filmmaking of the era. The director left no stone unturned in his search for capital, and a group of city councillors and the mayor of Havana voted him a subsidy on the grounds that the film would do honor to Martí; on the same grounds they later banned the film, considering it disrespectful.

In the 1950s, anticipating the celebration of Martí's centennial, Angelo returned to the fray with a film version of another poem, "The Little Pink Shoes," while Díaz Quesada made "Martí, the Mentor of Youth" (1952). Most anything could be sheltered under the umbrella of the Martí centennial, and the pose of independentismo provided fuel for political maneuvering. A case in point was what many considered a false step by the Mexican Emilio Indio Fernández, the Cuban-Mexican coproduction "The White Rose" (1954), an image of Martí which is best forgotten. This too involved the obligatory financial scandal, in this case funding by a propagandistic National Centennial Commission (an organization created by the dictator Fulgencio Batista to polish up his image), compounded by bribes--what in Mexico they call la mordida and in Cuba la puñalada--kept off the books by an assiduous accountant. The product left some viewers unhappy and others insulted. It was an errant episode in the filmography of Indio and the cameraman Gabriel Figueroa, who did not find in the Cuban landscape the inspiration that allowed him to immortalize the Mexican one.

Another film that socially conscious intellectuals of the time saw as an attack on their patriotic roots was Gordon Douglas's Hollywoodesque "Santiago" (1956), with Alan Ladd as a gringo adventurer who helped arm the Cuban rebels. The film portrayed Martí as a stereotypically pretentious Latin cowboy, more of a smuggler than a hero of the independence struggle. Rejection of the film rolled through the Cuban press at a moment when Washington's backing of Batista was coming to be viewed as a major insult. Among so many mistakes, a John Huston work about the struggle against the Gerard Machado dictatorship, "Breaking the Chains" (1949), may be remembered more positively. The story required exterior shots in Havana, with studio stars (John Garfield, Jennifer Jones, Pedro Almendariz, Gilbert Roland, Ramón Novarro) in the major roles. At least it is not remembered as an aggression in comparison with the adulterations with which Hollywood generally seasoned our subjects and the presentations of the Latin character.

One thing escaped the general damage: newsreels with their contextual references. It was well worthwhile to take cameras into the streets when something of historical interest occurred. In this sense, though with caution and without great expectations, these newsreels are studied by specialists who do not give themselves over to nostalgia. Journalism, translated into the image in motion, left behind some valuable documents, especially the work of the daring news cameraman Eduardo Hernández (Guayo), who captured the shootouts of political gangsters as well as filming one report on Fidel Castro's mountain guerrillas, "From Tyranny to Freedom," which he was able to show in 1959 after the overthrow of Batista.

Thanks to the persistence of these cinematic journalists, the Cineperiódico firm was able to put together a documentary about the underground anti-Batista struggle, "The Great Reckoning." Other films that saluted the revolutionary victory were the docudrama "Immortal Epic" by Eduardo Palmar and "Tracks of Freedom," by Manuel de la Pedrosa, and the fictional drama "Life Begins Today" (1959), by Antonio Vázquez Gallo, which united a typical love story with the clandestine struggle. Suddenly history was something that the audiences lived at the same time they saw it reflected on the screen, and neither breakthroughs nor defects in the filmmaking mattered very much. This historicist feeling left its mark on later Cuban cinema.

The Revolution and its Cinema.
The Cuban Institute of Cinemographic Art and Industry (known by its Spanish acronym ICAIC) became, on March 24, 1959, the first cultural institution to be created by the revolutionary government. It gave particular attention to historical themes, especially those of the recent heroic struggle. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, one of its founding talents, took on the task of narrating some of these episodes in the 1960 film Historias de la revolución (Stories of the Revolucion). This was followed in 1961 by El joven rebelde (The Young Rebel) by Julio García Espinosa with a script by Cesare Zavattini. Gutiérrez Alea and García Espinosa, graduates of Rome's Experimental Cinematography Center, took up arms on a path that started almost from zero. They rejected Hollywood's influence and methods, sought a contemporary form of artistic expression, were disposed to assimilate experimental and anticommercial tendencies, acknowledged a debt to the European avant garde, and had their heads full of dreams. Two directors making their first efforts, José Miguel García Ascot and Jorge Fraga, joined in the project of reconstructing the dawning moments of the triumphant revolution with Cuba '58 (1962). Realengo 18 (1961), by Oscar Torres and Eduardo Manet, took up the tragedy of the campesinos, a subject that, till then, had always been twisted by melodrama; theirs was a film version of a book by Pedro de la Torriente Brau.

The young Cuban cinema would give pride of place to documentaries and would develop a particular way of making them, later considered the Cuban School of documentary. It took shape under Gutiérrez Alea and Santiago Alvarez with the canonical 1961 film Muerte al invasor (Death to the Invader). Alvarez became the master of the Cuban documentary and for many years directed the weekly ICAIC Latin American Newsreel, which itself was a school for directors. In Los refugiados de la Cueva del Muerto (The Refugees from the Cave of Death) from 1983, Alvarez drew on both docudrama and documentary while moving further into the realm of fiction, to recount events immediately following the attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Even those already recognized on the terrain of dramatic film returned to the documentary to treat immediate and imminent political themes which cried out for their efforts in an art form with great social impact. Newsreels and film documentaries, an essential pillar of Cuban cinematic experience, took on immediate contemporary history and won a loyal audience.

Cuban filmmakers would refer again and again to the guerrilla struggle, both in their zeal to be of service and because they were inspired by an epic that had given their society a definitive change of direction. From documentary mixed with elements of fiction there emerged here what is internationally referred to as docudrama, a particularly flexible modality for the retelling of historical events. In this field the director Miguel Torres has distinguished himself with such works as the 1982 film Crónica de un infamia (Chronicle of an Infamy), about the offense committed by a U.S. sailor who urinated on the statue of Martí in Havana's Central Park; 1984's Primero de enero (First of January), about the final months of the insurrection against Batista; 1988's Asalto al amanecer (Attack at Dawn), on an episode of the guerrilla war; and the recent Che from 1997.

Enrique Pineda Barnet also had recourse to the possibilities of docudrama in David (1967), about the urban guerrilla Frank País. A skillful fusion of docudrama and fiction generated a film experiment which has not always received the consideration it deserves, Oscar Valdés' 1973 work El extraño caso de Rachel K (The Strange Case of Rachel K), in which a murder reported in the press serves to reflect the moral and political decadence of the Machado regime. This film, dignified and effective but not showy, is an example of indirect use of historical themes. If we are looking for reflections of Cuban history in Cuban film, we must take it into account.

In the early years of the revolution, when the social changes stirred an outpouring of sympathy from foreign artists and intellectuals, many filmmakers who would leave a mark on Cuban cinemas historical vision arrived. They too preferred the recent struggle against the dictatorship and the movement to construct a new type of society: The Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, who made 1961's Cuba pueblo armado (Cuba, a People Armed) and "Travel Documents"; The Soviets Roman Karmen ("Cuban Dawn" and "The Blue Lamp") and Mikhail Kalatosov, who made 1964's Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba); The French directors Chris Marker (Cuba Sí!), Armand Gatti, who directed El otro Cristóbal (The Other Christopher) in 1963, and Agnés Varda ("Greetings, Cubans!"); the Czech Vladimir Cech made Para quien baila la Habana (For Whom Havana Dances) in 1963; and the German Kurt Maetzig filmed Preludio 11 (Prelude 11) in 1963. Not all these films turned out to be memorable, but they contributed to the apprenticeship of the native talents who joined in their making, anxious to practice and to learn.

These were times of searching, of rejecting wellworn paths, and of a decided preference for artistic avant gardes. The new directors, more cultured than their predecessors, started from the innovations of the Italian neorealists, the influence of the French New Wave, and other tendencies of European film. Cuban intellectuals rejected the formulas of so-called socialist realism without negating the epic, which was integral to their experience. The breadth of the cinematic criteria championed by ICAIC's president Alfredo Guevara involved him in a polemic with the Party ideologue Blas Roca. The texts of this debate deserve an analysis which exceeds the limitations of this panaroma, but from these texts emerged aesthetic lines which took deep root in Cuban film directors. From this point on, ICAIC was the vanguard of intellectual thinking and practice in Cuba, which would be demonstrated later, when the flow of events and the character of the Cuban political process imposed a schematic regimen on the rest of the arts, with particular rigor in theater and literature. Prevailing circumstances determined cinematic genres, with an almost total absence of musicals and light comedies in a country of proven musicality and highly valued idiosyncratic humor. Directors feared falling into clichés; they were too given to complexities, too serious, and too solemn to indulge themselves in the temptations of local color, or even to subvert it. From today's perspective, this absence reveals something lacking in the output of the time. But the rejection of what had been the leading formulas of the past, from which at all costs these directors wanted to keep their distance, led them down other paths. There was no room for what they considered escapism or bourgeois art. In its place, and as an escape valve, there was a flourishing of irony, a certain type of satire, and black humor with an explicit debt to the Hispanic tradition. In these precincts, Gutiérrez Alea's filmography establishes the paradigm: beginning with Las Doce Sillas (The Twelve Chairs) from 1962 and La Muerte de un burócrata (The Death of a Bureaucrat) from 1966, it was reaffirmed in 1978's Los Sobrevivientes (The Survivors). This caustic humor would reemerge in Guantanamera (1995), his last film, co-directed by Juan Carlos Tabío.

A vision of historical and social matters was brewing, one whose first embodiments were of a romantic and epic character, as in Solás' 1966 film Manuela, or ironic and satirical, like García Espinosa's 1967 Aventuras de Juan Quin Quin (Adventures of Juan Quin Quin). In the category that concerns us, two exceptional films appeared in this first period. One was Solás' Lucía, a great historical fresco reaching from the independence struggle to the contemporary revolutionary efforts to change Cuban customs; milestones of social experience were treated in this 1968 film with surprising maturity, sharpened sensibility, and a particular assimilation of the achievements of good cinema put to use in an analysis of Cuban virtues and defects. From the same year, the other memorable production constituted a skillfully critical questioning of the revolution's impact on the middle class and intellectuals. Gutiérrez Alea's Memorias de subdesarollo (Memories of Undervelopment), considered one of the fundamental Latin American films, viewed its milieu from a daring perspective and bore the imprint of a creator called to surpass his models with something that was distinctively Cuban yet free of the formulae of earlier periods.

Beginning in 1968 (which marked 100 years of struggle since the outbreak of the first independence war), Cuban filmmakers developed a retrospective gaze which validated the present through a nationalist and antiimperialist past. In response to a summons by the revolutionary process, this tendency generated films that well deserve to be remembered. In 1969, a patriotic experiment that resulted in an outstanding film was Manuel Octavio Gómez' La primera carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete), a work without formal precedents, a game for the initiated, a film for cinephiles. We owe a debt to this same director for a piece two years later which reflects elements of Cuba's republican history under exceptional circumstances, Dias del agua (Days of Water), which is about a deluded woman trapped in the ups and downs of politics. This approach, which we might call indirect history, struck a chord in the sensibility of Cuban filmmakers as a departure from the rhetorical inflexibility of some other works.

There was a slew of commemorative films, which sometimes sacrificed formal virtues for an emphasis on ideological interpretations and objectives: Jorge Fraga's 1968 La odisea del General José (The Odyssey of General José), José Massip's 1971 Páginas del diario de José Martí (Pages from the Diary of José Martí) and 1986's Baraguá, Pineda Barnet's Mella (1975) and Aquella larga noche (That Long Night) from 1979, and more. Some suffered from concepts divorced from their plots, suggesting that great themes do not always make for great films, or can promise depth while not penetrating beneath the surface. There were also films about the colonial past, of a type which popular wit dubbed negrometrajes (black subjects), of which the most outstanding were 1974's El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco), Rancheador (1976), Maluala (1979) and Plácido (1986) by Sergio Giral. This director's work, dedicated to the study of the African roots of the Cuban nationality from slavery days to those Africans' mulatto descendants, was interrupted after María Antonia by his 1990 emigration to the United States.

Una pelea cubana contra los demonios (A Cuban Fight with Demons) marked the incursion into historical themes of Cuban cinema's master, Gutiérrez Alea; the 1971 film was based on the book of the same name by the well-known Cuban anthropologist Ortiz. The plot involved colonialist arrogance, religious fetishism, piracy, and a compulsion to swallow dirt. It interested Gutiérrez Alea because it allowed the synthesis of large stretches of history within a single anecdote, pointing toward 1976's La última cena (The Last Supper), one of his major works, which best presents the contradictions of the slaveowning Cuban bureaucracy of the 18th and 19th centuries. A story of exemplary intensity, it portrayed the contrasts among the Enlightenment, the humanist vision, and the reigning mode of production: the use of slave labor to amass the fortunes of the patrician class. Further developing his concept of history and his sardonic humor in Los sobrevivientes, Gutiérrez Alea added the deluded adventure of an aristocratic family who, at the triumph of the revolution, sought refuge in their mansion while awaiting the supposed U.S. invasion; in fact, they devolve into successively inferior historical states within their sanctuary.

The greatest effort at reconstruction of the past from a challenging new standpoint was Solás' Cecilia (1981), a particular reading of one the myths of Cuban national culture, the nineteenth-century novel Cecilia Valdés or The Hill of the Angel by Cirilo Villaverde. The novel had previously been adapted as a zarzuela (Spanish style operetta) for television by Gonzalo Roig and for film by Jaime Sant Andrews. Made in 1949, the Sant Andrews film appeared two years after the film portrayal of another tragic mulatta, María de la O, adapted by Adolfo Fernández Bustamante from the zarzuela by Ernesto Lecuona. The earlier treatments of Cecelia Valdés limited themselves to the romantic triangle and shied away from the novelist's preoccupation with social context (to which he devoted more space and care than the plot, which was a mere device on which to hang extensive, coded antislavery observations).

Thanks to his sharp creative sensibility, and by employing formal concepts which evoke Visconti and other masters of cinematic melodrama, Solás proposed to do the opposite. The critical reception of Solás' film was dimmed by a debate which reached beyond the limits of aesthetics to serve other interests. It generated a polemic that was part of a struggle to impose dogmatically economistic criteria on the one bastion which had not yet been taken by the disastrous movement toward socialist realism, already dominant in the publishing houses, collective organizations, and specialized periodicals in the field of art and culture. Fed by internal contradictions within ICAIC, the polemic had damaging effects on later productions. This subject, which has not been fully aired in analytical precincts, deserves a well documented study which is beyond the possibilities of the present essay. I merely want to remind readers that its denouement was the removal of ICAIC's founder, Alfredo Guevara, from the directorship of ICAIC for ten years, and the implantation of a new image of the goals of Cuban cinema. Other Solás films presented history with a certain élan tragique and poetry: Un hombre de éxito (A Successful Man), a 1986 film about the evolution of the presocialist Republic, and the 1992 screen version of Alejo Carpentier's novel El siglo de las luces (The Age of Enlightenment), a reflection of the French Revolution in the Caribbean.

Missteps and Discoveries: Revolution in the Caribbean
The screen continued to find nourishment in themes stemming from revolutionary practice and the contingencies of socialist construction, a cinema whose virtues are not to be found in formal or artistic efficacy but in the communication of messages dictated by political necessity. Among these is the Manuel Pérez standout El hombre de Maisinicú (The Man from Maisinicú), a 1973 popular success which became the archetype of a genre about the struggle against "banditry" and the infiltration and dismantling of counter-revolutionary bands armed by the CIA. It garnered great impact by making use of the techniques of action films without sacrificing its popular sensibility. But too much repetition, in TV series as well as films, wore out both the subject and the formal treatment. The same director repeated the recipe in Río Negro (1977) and La segunda hora de Esteban Zayas (Esteban Zayas' Second Time Around), from 1984.

The theme of counterintelligence work also engendered several films of Rogelio París: Patty Candela (1976), about a 1961 plot to assassinate Raúl Castro, and Leyenda (Legend), a 1981 collaboration with Jorge Fraga, about a Cuban double agent. In 1990, París and Hulio César Rodríguez were more fortunate with Caravana (Caravan), dealing with military actions in Africa, whose exceptional realism stands out among war films made by Cubans. Until the well ran dry, this genre had a passionate following among moviegoers, influenced by ideological reaffirmations and the values defended by the new society. in 1987, one of the greatest box office hits of Cuban cinema and the best film about the revolutionary struggle in the cities was Clandestinos (The Underground) by Fernando Pérez, a case in which the screen accepted spontaneous heroes, without declamatory grandiloquence or the haloes of martyrs. This director returned to the last years of the Batista dictatorship (and of the period of the bourgeois Republic) with another notable film, "Hello, Hemingway" (1990).

The years that followed the 1971 Congress on Education (which, extended to culture, began the so-called "five gray years", more like a black decade for Cuban intellectuals) were difficult ones for artistic investigation and formal innovations; the consequences of those years are slow to be erased.

Although this ill wind blew with less rigor in cinema than in literature, TV, and radio, it is reflected in those films of the late 1970s and the 1980s about heroic actions or productive activities without much aesthetic elaboration, as well as in debates imposed by political praxis, though there were some rebuttals to the local version of socialist realism. Such films include: 1973's Ustedes tienen la palabra (It's Your Turn Now) and 1979's Una Mujer, un hombre, una ciudad (A Woman, a Man, a City), both by Manuel Octavo Gómez; 1979's No hay sábado sin sol (There Are no Saturdays Without Sun) by Manuel Herrera; the 1980 film Guardafronteras (Coast Guards) by Octavio Cortázar (the director to whom we owe a film of great mass impact, 1977's El brigadista (The Brigadier), an evocation of the literacy campaign against the backdrop of the mercenary invasion at Playa Girón and the actions of the counter-revolutionary bands); Pineda Barnet's 1983 film Tiempo de Amar (A Time to Love); 1981's Polvo rojo (Red Dust) and 1985's Lejanía (Parting of the Ways) by Jesús Díaz; Jíbaro (1984) and 1986's Otra Mujer (Another Woman) by Daniel Díaz Torres; and Como la vida misma (Like Life Itself) from 1985 by Casaus, among others. Two masters from the previous era tried to go this route without appreciable results (although they did gain some renown): Gutiérrez Alea with Hasta cierta punto (Up to a Point) in 1983 and García Espinosa with La inútil muerte de mi socio Manolo (The Useless Death of My Pal Manolo) in 1989. The latter recovered with his 1994 work Reina y Rey (Queen and King), about the relationships of bosses and servants and a dialogue between emigrants and those who stayed within the national territory. This subject was treated with less fortunate results by Jesús Díaz in Lejanía and Pastor Vega in Vidas Paralelas (Parallel Lives) in 1992.

Preoccupation with the contradictions of the revolutionary process (which were likewise contradictions of the human element that undertook this process) generated in 1974 a film that has achieved cult status in festivals and among scholars, De cierta manera (One Way or Another), the only entry into fictional film by the documentarian Sara Gómez and a posthumous work that had to be finished by her colleague Gutiérrez Alea. Few Cuban films are so authentic in their content and take so many risks in the their aesthetics, with the inclusion of documentary elements and the use of professional actors with amateurs, á la neorealism. It presented an image of ideological struggle in a process of political radicalization where the isolation of class enemies (whether within the country or outside it) left the road open to change. However, there remained the obstacle of the subjective remnants of a past clinging stubbornly in a marginal sphere, the supposed beneficiary of progressive changes (Racial problems had appeared in a previous round of dramatic film in the 1964 case of La decisión (The Decision) by Massip, and would achieve more representation in the aforementioned filmography of Giral.)

Also dealing with the theme of underlying social contradictions is an outstanding film of this period, Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa) by Pastor Vega, in which women's integration into production conflicts with their defenselessness with regard to the inherited structures of machismo. Released in 1979, it broke all box office expectations, appeared in international feminist forums, and gained enormous attention. It featured Daisy Granados, one of the definitive stars of Cuban cinema, who has played more leading roles than any other. She was also featured in a 1989 satirical short subject which skillfully made fun of the traps of productivist films and bureaucracy: Rigoberto López' La soledad de la Jefa de Despacho (The Loneliness of the Woman Who Runs the Office). Machismo, an obligatory subject in our precincts, is a constant presence in several films, strongly so in Gutiérrez Alea's Hasta cierto punto; it would be tackled again in Miguel Torres' 1991 comedy Sueño tropical (Tropical Dream). Una novia para David (A Girlfriend for David), Orlando Rojas' 1985 film, was a typical film about adolescents, yet offered itself to a more ambitious reading thanks to its defense of diversity in the face of an explicit imposition of unanimity. This film introduced Rojas as a director of dramatic films who stood out among his cohorts for his complex artistic goals. In 1989's Papeles Secundarios (Supporting Roles), he would treat with more sagacity and depth the damage caused by a rigid understanding of art and life in a situation of the unavoidable succession of new generations and the eroding power of the preceding ones.

The treatment of history as the essence of cinematic art had penetrated deeply into our directors, and so it was reflected as well in our only music hall movie, which, being Cuban, was a film of rumbas, danzones, and boleros: Pineda Barnet's 1989 work La Bella del Alhambra (The Beauty of Alhambra). This director, who had already taken on the docudrama and film biography, achieved mastery with a film which in other national filmographies would be a repertory piece but in Cuba is almost unique. His evocation of the epoch by the accomplishments of its popular music, allowed him to emerge with a film of great dignity. The box office responded clamorously, and prizes were not lacking either. It appeared that, through the hand of Pineda Barnet, the genre of the musical (practically absent before) had come to Cuban film of the revolution; however, this has not been repeated.

As a window opened to allow a lighter atmosphere for cinematic messages, there entered a populist current, oriented toward communication supported by light humor and an instant moral. Viewers appreciated the breath of fresh air in a cinema which had gravitated too much toward serious tones, and they viewed with delight Los pájaros tirándole a la escopeta (The Birds Throwing Themselves on the Shotgun) from 1984, En tres y dos (In Three and Two) from 1985, and La vida en rosa (Life in Pink) from 1989, all by Rolando Díaz; and 1985's De tal Pedro tal astilla (A Chip Off Pedro's Block) and 1988's Vals de la Habana Vieja (Old Havana Waltz) by Luis Felipe Bernaza. A different tendency was the questioning humor of a director who moved easily from documentary to fiction, Juan Carlos Tabío. Se permuta (House for Swap) from 1983, La entrevista (The Interview) from 1987, and Plaff from 1988 led to a curious movie where the film within a film opens out into criticism tinged with a certain postmodernism: El elefante y la bicicleta (The Elephant and the Bicycle), from 1994. Another director, Gerardo Chijona, gained attention through the 1988 short subject El desayuno más caro del mundo (The World's Most Expensive Breakfast), and then announced himself with Adorables Mentiras (Adorable Lies), a 1991 bedroom comedy that strongly condemns a two-faced morality bolstered by the mechanism of survival.

The dramatic films mentioned above, and others, presented aspects of past and immediate history and reflected events which conditioned the society in which the Cubans live, events which differentiate them from their predecessors and from those outside the island. The decade of the 1990s has brought a vision more committed to criticism of problems confronting the revolution, or generated by it. Living history, one of the permanent super objects of Cuban cinema, encounters diverse interpretations which do not always coincide with the line considered to be orthodox.

After Rojas' sharp Papeles Socundarios and the irony of López' La soledad de la Jefa de Despacho, the decade of the 1990s came in like a storm. Cuba went through the changes induced by the collapse of the Eastern European socialist camp, explicit internal defects, and the tightening of the U.S. economic blockade. The art which sought to reflect immediate or antecedent reality would no longer answer to hymns of exaltation, nor welcome with the unwariness of the past such models as the socialist realism decreed by the political leadership in the ill-fated "five gray years".

In 1990 the breach was opened by Laura, one of the tales included in Mujer transparente (Transparent Woman), a film by Ana Rodríguez which dealt with a theme that was latent within the political and human sensibility of the Cubans: exile and the division of family and friends. Without sentimentalism or concessions to melodrama, it portrayed a controversial episode in the relations of the Cubans on the island and those abroad: the visit by relatives living abroad, which had previously been prhibited. Rarely has a short subject said so much in so little time.

1991's Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown), by Daniel Díaz Torres, turned out to be a surprisingly polemical and popular film, in spite of the wishes of those who orchestrated one of the strangest receptions ever offered to a work of art. Responding to an invitation to social criticism, the director, until then in conformity with the reigning political line, constructed his story. However, after the typical delays of cinematic production, he faced a change in the political line and found himself abandoned, condemned for having acted against the interests of the revolutionary process. The premiere became an inextricable tangle of political and cultural propaganda. The resulting knot threatened to bring down ICAIC itself. The incident was resolved thanks to the support of all the filmmakers and the astuteness of the founder of the revolutionary cinema, Alfredo Guevara. The affair deserves a lengthy analysis which is beyond the bounds of this panorama. I refer the reader to reviews, commentaries, and declarations already published. (Cine Cubano No. 135, April May June 1992.) It is sufficient to say that the event marked a milestone in the trajectory of Cuban cinema, perhaps because the accumulated contradictions required a leap.

Joining forces in 1993 with Carlos Tabío, Gutiérrez Alea made a film with touched another sensitive spot in Cuban life: the marginalization of social sectors by intransigent positions buttressed by an ethic which, seen from the perspective of contemporary progressive thinking, is reactionary. The characters of Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), a homosexual intellectual and a Young Communist inoculated by homophobic intransigence, became paradigmatic. The final embrace, in which the future émigré joins with the one who will stay to construct socialism with a novel tolerance, became symbolic of a Cubanness which, after extremisms and confrontations, placed itself above mere contingency. The film's worldwide and internal success moderated any potential response from levels which had systematically postponed discussion of the gay issue and wished it could be tacitly left behind.

The next year, with Madagascar (1994), Fernando Pérez delivered a short subject which was unobjectionable in terms of its aesthetic presentation, but which contained references to generational nonconformism and young people's maladjustment to a life without many alternatives. Gutiérrez Alea and Tabío again joined for what was to be the former's final film, Guantanamera (1995). Bureaucratic insensitivity and other aspects of daily life are seen through a satirical filter, consistent with the tendency of both directors and with traditional Cuban political humor.

Arturo Soto, a young artist who first made himself known with a 1995 film about myths, Pon tu pensamiento en mi (Turn Your Thoughts to Me), crafted the 1997 comedy Amor Vertical (Vertical Love) about sex and romantic relationships complicated by economic difficulties and lack of understanding. This signaled the appearance of a new cohort of young directors. The same is true also of Thirst (1991) and La Ola (The Wave) (1995) by Enrique Alvarez. These two films take recourse to language which is sometimes uninhibited and at other times somewhat cryptic in order to approach, from the individual's point of view, themes of social environment and collective events, in an attempt to avoid well traveled roads and express a new generational sensibility.

The Cuban filmmakers with the most genuine concerns have amassed a record of service and communication with their spectators. They are co-participants in a social trajectory which has encompassed self-recognition, reaffirmation, and an investigation of the past to better understand the present, all inherent in the discipline of history. Though it does not need to be restated, all the films mentioned above, and others which there was not room to name, contain an understanding of the historic not as a past frozen inside museums, but as life being lived, exposed to multiple interpretations, and indispensable in order that the systole and diastole of creation may generate a coherent dialogue.

Translated by Dick Cluster