‘We are a very resilient people’: in the face of Trump’s threats, Cuban cinema comes out fighting
With the island back in Washington’s sights, the Screen Cuba festival is taking UK audiences beyond the blockade
At a packed trade union meeting in Havana, one of the workers calls out management’s delays in sending a technician to repair faulty machinery. Perhaps, he suggests, the required specialist has yet to be born. Another labourer called Lina – one of the few women employed at the site – stands up to criticise the dilapidated state of the dockyard.
All the while, a bourgeois theatre director named Oscar looks on in search of characters for his next creative project. This is Hasta Cierto Punto (“Up to a Certain Point”), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1983 film interrogating the state of gender relations in post-revolutionary Cuba.
If the extent of sold-out screenings at the Screen Cuba film festival is anything to go by – of which Hasta Cierto Punto is one – then popular interest in the Caribbean country shows little sign of abating, not least in the current context of aggressive US intervention here and elsewhere.
Washington’s ire toward its island neighbour is, of course, nothing new. Last October, for the 33rd year in a row, the UN general assembly once again adopted a resolution condemning the US embargo on Cuba. These sanctions have been in place since the early 1960s, making them some of the longest-running in modern history.
In the shadow of an imperial hegemon and with severe restrictions on its ability to trade and access resources, Cuba may appear as an enigma to audiences curious about the type of cinema that has emerged from such conditions.
The Cuban revolution of 1959 caused a radical break in the development of the country’s cinema. Film-making existed before “this moment of effervescence” but was historically an imitation of Hollywood-style film-making, according to Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Edinburgh. In contrast, the first decade after the revolution heralded “a very exciting and innovative time, both politically and aesthetically in Cuba”.
Within a year of overthrowing the Batista dictatorship, the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro established the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) as an incubator for new cinematic practices that could play their part in the broader project of what Aimé Césaire would later refer to as “tropical Marxism”.
Alea was one beneficiary of the new cultural infrastructure and his oeuvre reflects the developments Cuban cinema has experienced through the decades since, from the sharp satire of everyday life in Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), to the rise of international co-productions such as Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), necessitated by funding shortages at a time of severe economic crisis.
Now in its third year, Screen Cuba hopes to draw the attention of UK audiences to a film culture that nurtured such works as Humberto Solas’s 1968 triptych epic, Lucia, in which three big historical events are presented through the lives of a female protagonist in differing formats, but with the same name.
Dodie Weppler, one of the organisers of Screen Cuba, acknowledged that “it’s very rare for people to be able to see the films” and described the US blockade as a “catastrophic siege”.
“It has affected us [with] getting films sent electronically. You have outages in electricity [so] you start having a discussion on WhatsApp and then [the] electricity is out.”
Restoration and distribution are also at the forefront of the festival’s engagement with Cuban film-makers, with the latter being a particularly underrated point of consideration in cinema more generally.
Trish Meehan, a co-organiser of the festival, said that Screen Cuba had made a modest contribution to help finance the restoration of some short films by the Cuban “godfather of animation”, Juan Padrón. She also noted that “it’s very, very difficult to get any international point of distribution of [Cuban] films” because of the need to wire payments for submission fees, and that it is “just a tiny little bit of the blockade, but it’s endless”.
One alternative to the established festival circuit, whose linchpin – the Oscars – took place on the same day as the launch of Screen Cuba, is the Havana film festival. Launched as the International film festival for New Latin American Cinema in 1979, the event built on a foundation of radical cinematic movements, such as “third cinema” and “imperfect cinema”, which emerged from the continent but were by no means confined to it.
Gordon-Burroughs said: “I think ‘imperfect cinema’ especially has been a source of inspiration for many film-makers all over the world … you see it cited by African film-makers, Indian film-makers. [It’s] a powerful oppositional concept in terms of thinking about alternative ways of producing cinema outside Hollywood, big productions and normative capitalist value systems.”
Films such as Hasta Cierto Punto, which won the festival’s Grand Coral award for best film in 1983 signalled “a new openness, perhaps” in discussions around topics like gender while bumping up against ongoing limitations.
At one point in the film, Lina challenges Oscar about the lack of women involved in his own line of work. It’s a criticism that Sara Gómez, Cuba’s first female director, would have been all too familiar with.
Described by Gordon-Burroughs as “this incredible early female director” who has “definitely been overlooked” in accounts of the country’s film history, Gómez was a trailblazing Cuban film-maker whose first feature, Da Cierta Manera was only released posthumously – yet, its working-class feminist approach to addressing sexism already pre-dated Hasta Cierto Punto’s discovery of the subject. Screen Cuba has also included a number of her short-form documentaries in its programme.
Tania Delgado, the director of the Havana film festival and a former vice-president of ICAIC, said: “I like to think that Cuban cinema is a very honest one, but at the same time, very poetic. When you see Cuban cinema, it’s very strong in terms of images, in terms of topics.”
For the outside world, Cuba remains a country that is often viewed through lenses coloured with an ideological hue. On the one hand, it is the home of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, with an outsized reputation in parts of the world (as depicted in Jihan El-Tahri’s Cuba, An African Odyssey) that reflected on the country’s role in Africa’s postcolonial struggles. On the other, it is a one-party state from which significant numbers of people have voted with their feet and in doing so, contributed to a diasporic cinema tinted with shades of frustration and loss.
Gordon-Burroughs suggests that Cuban films have “become less politicised in recent years”, while Delgado points to contemporary topics being raised by creatives that address “the reality that we live [on a] daily basis … familial relationships, violence … LGBTQ+ plus topics are [also] very recurrent in our cinema”.
Yet, the growing risk of another American president aiming for regime change in Havana is as current a topic as ever. As President Trump threatens a “friendly takeover” that would be far from amicable, the island was plunged into its third nationwide blackout this month. At the weekend, an international aid convoy accompanied by figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and the Irish rap band, Kneecap, arrived in Cuba in a symbolic act of solidarity.
As Delgado puts it: “We have a very hard embargo – blockade – and it affects everything, cinema is not an exception. We are a very resilient people and if anything, we are looking for solutions, and we are looking for maintaining the creation … [of] cultural life in Cuba … and what we cannot lose right now is the hope.
“The world is in a very complex situation and Cuba is not an exception. I like to think about all the solidarity that we bring to everybody that needed us, to be there to do something, and art and culture is not an exception within that.”
• Screen Cuba runs between 15 and 28 March in London and will be on tour in England and Wales