A Case of Accelerated Underdevelopment
A Cinema of Defiance
There was an island in the sun. They had a revolution. They created a new society, dedicated to social justice—and to making films (and music and other arts). It would be a new kind of cinema, which would transcend both the formulaic escapism of the Hollywood genre movie, and the bourgeois individualism of the Western European art film. It might be low budget and imperfect, like the country’s economy, but it would vindicate cinema by revolutionizing the modes of both production and representation, thus freeing up the imagination and bringing a fresh eye to the social and historical reality in front of the camera. Remarkably little of the new Cuban cinema was straightforward propaganda. The operative principle was the dictum uttered by Fidel Castro in his speech of 1961 known as “Words to the Intellectuals”: “Within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing.” [1] Cuban filmmakers would question whether reality as it appeared on the screen was a true reality, and whether that reality was good enough. Cinema is the perfect place for this kind of aspiration. Not only the foremost popular art of the twentieth century but in transcending social distinctions like class and culture, cinema is a form of collective dreaming that deposits its images in the cultural subconscious of the whole society.
When the Cuban revolution launched a project to create a new national cinema, in defiance of both Hollywood and economic practicality, the historical moment was not unfavorable. With new nations emerging from colonial rule around the globe and a growing sense of rebellion among the postwar generation in the First World, there was a sense of hope in struggle across the world. If geopolitics were governed by the Cold War, a third force emerged in the 1950s in the shape of the Non-Aligned Movement, created at the Bandung Conference in 1955, comprising the nations that came to be known as the Third World, in which Cuba would subsequently become a key player. In the Second or Communist World a year later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin, and soon began to forge new relations with Marxist movements in what we now call the South. The Kremlin welcomed Cuba into the Communist bloc partly because the Caribbean island provided them with a bridge to the Third World. In the First World, meanwhile, the heartlands of capitalism, postwar reconstruction was in full swing—in Britain, Prime Minister Macmillan told the nation in 1955, “You’ve never had it so good”; and when Washington tried to enlist British support for their embargo against Cuba, the reply was a polite refusal: the Americans were told that Britain was an overseas trading nation, and would not suffer interference over its trading policies. [2]
In those days, terms like neoliberalism and globalization had not yet been coined, yet a new sense of global consciousness was already in evidence, developing unevenly and full of ambiguous tensions. The result in part of what Lenin, in a pamphlet of 1916, too hopefully called “Imperialism, —The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” and then of two world wars in less than half a century, a new global sensibility now comes to be succored in the public sphere by the rapid spread of new mass media, but in a highly distorted form, because it is the North that controls the flow of information and images. Cuba had been an early entrant into this modern world of media and communications, and between the world wars came to serve the U.S. as a kind of offshore testing laboratory for trying out new technologies and techniques in the fields of media and communication. The future telecommunications giant ITT (who offered the CIA one million dollars to ‘destabilize’ the Popular Unity Government in Chile at the beginning of the 1970s) grew out of the underwater telephone cable between Cuba and the U.S. opened in the mid-1920s; radio broadcasting was introduced in 1926, by which time Cuba already had a small record industry. The following decade Cuban advertising agencies were producing copy for American products in Central America, to which Cuba was also selling its own music and radio shows. In cinema, however, it was far too small to compete with Mexico, which benefited from a large domestic market, and until the revolution, film production in Cuba was mostly an appendage of the Mexican film industry with a few excursions by Hollywood (one of the last being Errol Flynn’s own last and terrible movie, Cuban Rebel Girls in 1959, with Flynn as a war correspondent helping Castro to overthrow Batista). However, in 1950, Cuba was one of the first Latin American countries to see the introduction of television.
Many of the artists and intellectuals who found themselves working in these fields were far from compromised by the experience; on the contrary, they would later appear in the lists of the revolutionaries, like T.G. Alea and Julio García Espinosa, who worked on a Mexican-produced cinema newsreel; the documentarist Santiago Alvarez, who worked in the music library of a radio station; or the photographer Korda, who took the famous iconic picture of Che Guevara, and whose métier was originally fashion photography. Some of them even found ways of insinuating their rebellious messages into the media unbidden, including documented incidents reenacted by Fernando Pérez in Clandestinos (1987) in which the urban underground, acting in support of the rebels in the mountains, mounted demonstrations in front of television cameras at a baseball match, and even invented an advertising campaign for the revolutionaries under the guise of launching a new product. The guerrillas in the mountains also showed a sharp appreciation of the usefulness of the media. Fidel himself had firsthand experience of radio, and Radio Rebelde was an important arm of rebel propaganda. They also knew the value of the foreign press, inviting New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews to interview Fidel in his hideout, thereby giving the lie to Cuban government declarations of his defeat. As Che Guevara observed soon after the rebels ousted Batista, “At that time the presence of a foreign journalist, preferably American, was more important to us than a military victory.” [3]
Television followed and extended the cinema in picturing the four corners of the world, a process that intensified in the mid-1960s with the introduction of satellite communications, which allowed for the global transmission of television signals. But cinema is already the paradigm of a modern international art form, from the very moment of its debut in the 1890s when the Lumières set the pattern by sending their agents around the world not only to introduce their invention in practically every major city of the day but also to bring back ‘exotic’ imagery to tantalize their rapidly growing audiences back home. Because no country in the period leading up to World War I was able to satisfy the huge demand from its own domestic production, the film trade was international. The growing dominance of Hollywood after the war, on this reading, is a function of the same international character but inside out: it is precisely because cinema is international in its reach that the American film cartel was able to become a monopolist vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Nevertheless, strong national industries prospered in a good many countries on several continents, wherever conditions allowed them to take advantage of linguistic barriers, cultural pride, and a sizable domestic audience of their own. (The trick was to keep budgets down in proportion to the expectable returns from the home box office, because foreign earnings could not be assumed; but a good many countries devised methods of providing support their own film industries, of greater or lesser efficacy.) Some of these industries imitated the Hollywood model on a smaller scale, but as often, Hollywood’s aesthetics—its dramaturgy, rules of montage, the generic happy ending—were challenged by successive waves of artistic innovation, beginning with Italian Neorealism at the end of World War II. Come the 1960s and the filmmakers at the new Cuban film institute joined the new wave cinemas of Latin America and Europe (especially the French) in common cause, and a small stream of new Cuban films created waves among film audiences across the world—or at least, wherever they had a chance to be shown. Films with titles like Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), Hanoi Martes 13 (1967), and Lucía (1968) by Alea, Alvarez, and Humberto Solás respectively—directors who have earned a proud place in the history of cinema, all now with two dates after their names.
Alvarez spoke of himself and Cuban cinema as a product of “accelerated underdevelopment.” [4] I interpret this as a peculiar condition in which a definitive ideological and political break has been made with the past, propelling the society into the promise of a new future, but the country continues to suffer the consequences of its preceding neocolonial deformation, and economically it remains incorporated into global trade only at the margins. In the cultural sphere, however, the story is a little different, that of a small country on the fringes, isolated and defiant, which despite half a century of blockade by the empire in the north, was never cut off from the cultural currents abroad in the world, but on the contrary, has contributed to them. Today it’s music, but Cuban cinema in the 1960s is the first example, which brings an immediate rider: its growing renown abroad was a recognition of its character as a new national cinema, just as its success at home was a reward for its sense of cubanía, of being Cuban.
There is always a great puzzle, when talking about cinema in national terms, over where the national lies and what it comprises. In Hollywood they think the cinema they make is universal, whereas in fact it’s the national cinema of the U.S. Most of the cinema that dominates most of the screens throughout the world is American—yet any film made anywhere has the potential to achieve a worldwide audience. This is the lifeblood of the international film festival, not just for the distributor seeking product but even more for the filmmakers showing there, who thus enter and draw succor from an international community. Everywhere, filmmakers measure themselves up against international cinema (from everywhere, not just America) without necessarily placing themselves beyond the national. In the case of Latin America, this puzzle takes a particular form because of the special tension that exists between national identity and Latin American identity. Linguistic union, the shared history of the conquista, of wars of independence, of economic imperialism by the Anglo-Saxons (British in the nineteenth century, the U.S. in the twentieth)—these factors are present in every country south of the Rio Grande. The result of this supranational culture has been that sometimes the most intensely local subjects are praised for their reflection or expression of a continental sensibility. And when it comes to Cuba, we get the added tension of an island that in 1959 was turned from the gem of the Caribbean into embattled isolation, because they challenged and insulted the hegemony of the empire in the north. And not just in the political and economic domains, but also the imaginary of the cinema screen. As a new cinema rapidly emerges—the creation of the film institute, the ICAIC, was the first cultural decree of the new regime—what you quickly begin to see is a radical project for the reconstruction of the collective or social memory, which like everywhere else, is always bounded by national experience.
Havana in the 1960s began to exercise a magnetism on the leftist artistic intelligentsia around the world, which was celebrated in the Havana Cultural Congress of 1968, and the freedom and originality of the new Cuban films had much to do with this effect. This was also the year in which Julio García Espinosa wrote a crucial manifesto, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” which reflected the Communist island’s unique position but was also taken up more widely. Espinosa called for a cinema that would resist the temptation of technical perfection (which after ten years now began to lie within the reach of the Cuban filmmakers), arguing that it would be self-defeating: they could never afford what it took to produce that kind of cinema, and worse still, because cinema of that kind only induced audience passivity; instead he advocated a more experimental, in fact, a Brechtian cinema, which resisted convention and upset orthodox representation by demonstrating its own methods of construction, opening up spaces for real involvement and public participation.
Relative Autonomy
Cinema spans the economic and the cultural in a form that is paradigmatic for the entire culture industry (the name ICAIC acknowledges this: Instituto Cubano del Arte y Industria Cinematográficos—the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry). The relation, however, between art and industry is not symmetrical. Economic power buys cultural space, but through exposure at film festivals and in the film magazines (the two main forms of publicity in those days), the cultural impact of marginal cinemas, despite their relegation to the fringes of international distribution, can sometimes be out of all proportion to their rentability. Such was the impact of the new Cuban cinema, in defiance of the attitude of international distributors that it was merely propaganda. And in a sense it was excellent propaganda—on behalf of the relative autonomy of the cultural sphere. For whereas Cuba was incorporated economically into the Soviet trading bloc Comecon, culturally it remained an exotic outsider, which always retained its Latin American, Afro-Caribbean, and Third World identity.
In this perspective, the trajectory of Cuban cinema is at the same time both anomalous and exemplary. It is exemplary because audiences eager to see the cinematic representation of their own living reality in its moment of upheaval flocked to watch the small but steady stream of new Cuban films, for several years bucking the international trend of falling cinema attendance. Indeed, the audience expanded, as new mobile cinemas took films to remote parts of the island. At the same time, with new Hollywood films officially unobtainable (they always managed to get some in through the back door), the Institute imported films from everywhere else—Europe East and West, Latin America, Japan—with the wholly positive result that a radical alteration took place in the island’s film culture as Cuban audiences came to see a greater diversity of world film production than anywhere else in Latin America. And they thrived on the diet, guaranteeing the popular success of the annual Havana Film Festival initiated in 1979. (Which doesn’t mean they ceased to have regard for American cinema; quite the contrary.)
But compared to film production anywhere else in Latin America, it was anomalous. The ICAIC grew out of the film unit that the Rebel Army set up rapidly after the seizure of power to make documentaries explaining policies in key areas like agrarian reform (Alea and García Espinosa were among the directors). The new institute was subsidized by the government, but enjoyed a notable degree of autonomy. Its founding president, Alfredo Guevara, was a member of Fidel Castro’s inner circle, where he argued for a cinema of art, not propaganda. The Institute would not be controlled by government bureaucrats but self-managed by the filmmakers; later it would come under the Culture Ministry, rather than the Ideological Office of the Party Central Committee, which controlled broadcasting and the press. Subsidy meant it was free from the immediate pressures of the market, and Alfredo Guevara publicly defended the filmmakers’ stylistic freedom to the utmost. There was no attempt to impose stylistic models, least of all Sovietstyle socialist realism, which Cuban filmmakers found aesthetically unconvincing and even anathema, and nor was the ICAIC to be in the business of making genre movies that simply swapped the goodies and the baddies (although they inevitably made some of those too). As a result, in the words of Gerardo Chijona, a second-generation ICAIC director, Cuban filmmakers were “the spoiled children of Latin American cinema.” [5]
Foreign commentators (of the left as well as the right) have often found it difficult to believe that a state film institute in a Communist country could possibly be as independent of authority as this. And of course it’s true that those who ran the ICAIC were generally Party members—although again contrary to the outsider’s reductivism, the Cuban Communist Party was itself an institution of diverse opinion. The objection that if it isn’t censorship, then it’s self-censorship, which also, of course, goes on in an institution like, say, the BBC—one learns the rules of the game—is too hasty. In the words of Ambrosio Fornet, who is both literary historian and screenwriter, referring to Fidel’s formula of 1961, “The fact is that, in the context of a state of siege, aesthetic discourse, perhaps because of its own polysemic nature, delights in the license of this ‘inside’ where everything—or almost everything—is permitted.” Nor are the limits ever fixed, because “the ‘everything’ permitted is not a permanent right but an arena of conflict that must be renegotiated every day, with no quarter granted to the bureaucracy and with the temptation of irresponsible whimsy firmly resisted.” [6]
Comparison with the BBC might seem unlikely, but the British broadcaster is another peculiar media institution often poorly understood abroad, where it is often believed that the BBC is an extension of the government in Westminster. But it isn’t quite that—it is not a state broadcaster, directly controlled by the minister on duty, but a public service, a public corporation licensed by parliament but operating according to what is called in Britain ‘the arm’s-length principle’: a major part of the cultural-ideological apparatus of the state that is nonetheless trusted to run itself, precisely because it’s controlled by the right people, government appointees who in the end can always be counted on. The Cuban film institute is remarkably similar. Again the arrangement is good propaganda on behalf of institutional autonomy, because it generates a high degree of trust on the part of the audience—opinion polls repeatedly report that they trust the BBC far more than the politicians. It also has other benefits, including a certain freedom to experiment in the full glare of the public (which the BBC also once used to do).
The conventional view is that in the Communist state the political public sphere ceases to exist, and the cultural public sphere is reduced and denuded by direct censorship, the direct arm of state patronage, and sanction. In Cuba, this happened to radio, television, and the press, but not to cinema, which produced a succession of films that pushed at the edges and expanded the limits of permissible speech, often by ingenious and irreverent means. Whereas the island’s broadcasting and the press were controlled by the ideologues, cinema became a unique cultural space that functioned as a kind of surrogate public sphere and thus a major site of public discourse. However, such independence is often politically difficult to sustain, and in Britain the BBC has periodically come under very public attack by the government of the day; the same has happened on occasion in Cuba to the ICAIC.
Nevertheless, it was not mere rhetoric for Cuba to call itself ‘the first free film territory’ in Latin America. From the start, the ICAIC opened its doors to collaboration with filmmakers from abroad. The 1960s saw a stream of both features and documentaries by directors from a dozen different (European and Latin American) countries. These filmmakers brought with them the widest range of influences, styles, and practices from which the young Cuban filmmakers were eager to learn. They would soon be followed by filmmakers from across Latin America fleeing repression, for whom Havana became a second home. The refugee filmmakers found themselves within an institution unique in their experience, with its benevolent control over practically the entire film industry and one of the most prestigious cultural organizations in the country. But the result was a paradox: around the world Cuban cinema became a standard-bearer of new wave Latin American cinema—wherever radical cinema counted, names like Alea, Solás, and Alvarez were on people’s lips—yet these films were actually produced under conditions that were entirely untypical of the rest of the continent. And at home, with no obstacles to distribution, Cuban filmmakers enjoyed a uniquely close relationship to their public (their audience was huge: second only to that of a speech by Fidel Castro) and in Fornet’s account, they were able “to return to the spectator—the new protagonists of history—the multiplied image of their own transformative capacity.” [7] Abroad, however, their succès d’estime notwithstanding, international distribution was something they secured only with difficulty.
The film institute was centrally funded on a fixed annual budget. For seven million pesos (a fraction of the budget for a Hollywood blockbuster), they managed to produce a handful of features every year together with a weekly newsreel, forty or more documentaries, and even some animated cartoons. By the early 1980s, when García Espinosa took over as president of the ICAIC, film audiences had begun to decline, like everywhere else, with the spread of television and growing competition from other forms of diversion. Determined to maintain the Institute’s prestige, he encouraged a new generation of directors by promising more films on lower budgets. What emerged was a new genre, what might be called the critical social comedy, which met with huge popular success, with titles like El pajaro tirandole a la escopeta (Tables Turned, 1984) by Rolando Díaz, and Juan Carlos Tabío’s ¡Plaff! (1988). But the Institute’s momentum would come up against a barrier at the start of the 1990s, which brought crisis to the filmmakers as it did to the whole Cuban economy, when Communism in Eastern Europe collapsed, leaving Cuba in desperate isolation.
Street Film-Making
The film institute started the decade with a political crisis of its own when an absurdist comedy about bureaucracy, Alicia en el pais de las maravillas (Alice in Wondertown) by Daniel Díaz Torres, was branded counterrevolutionary and withdrawn from exhibition. According to the personal account of García Espinosa, a curious thing happened. The storm was whipped up by the then head of the Party Ideological Office, who had VHS copies made of the film that he sent to various people to goad them into action. The result was that when the film was withdrawn, more VHS copies began to get passed around (of poor quality because they were often third or fourth generation—my own copy is one of these; one of the benefits of digital video is that the copies can be equal to the original). The Party official, said García Espinosa, had not understood the logic of video, that it not only multiplies the circulation of copies but renders it uncontrollable.[8] García Espinosa himself perceived valuable possibilities in the arrival of video in 1980s Cuba, including a string of ICAIC-sponsored videotecas; and in 1993 he shot a no-budget feature film, El plano (The Shot) on video at the Film School in order to show it could be done—a lesson that would soon turn out to be well taken.
The Alicia affair ended with García Espinosa stepping down and Alfredo Guevara returning as the Institute’s President, but when the Soviet Union fell—the news of the coup that ousted Gorbachev arrived in the middle of a meeting of the commission investigating the troubling film—no one could have stemmed the tide. The ICAIC’s future was extremely bleak. Production was severely curtailed. The weekly newsreel was discontinued, documentary production heavily cut back, and Cristina Venegas calculates that over the ten years 1991–2001, only thirty-one features were made (none at all in 1996), compared with one hundred over the previous decade. [9] Technicians and actors soon began to emigrate or seek short-term jobs abroad. The Institute followed other entities into a new regime of self-financing operations—no more central budgeting—and survival therefore depended on finding finance from outside the country through co-production.
The Cubans now found themselves in much the same position as other Latin American film industries, thrust into a globalized cultural marketplace where they all competed with the same niche product for the same international co-production funds—which were mostly European—and where the interests of the co-producers did not by any means match their own. Faced with the Institute’s internal loss of dynamic, the first problem for the filmmakers who were once in the vanguard of revolutionary culture, was suddenly having to learn how to hustle for themselves; then came the difficulty that new partnerships brought new ways of working, and (as Ariana Hernandez-Reguant puts it) a clash between “old socialist ethics and capitalist practices” [10]—in short, Cubans on fixed internal salaries working alongside foreigners earning high sums in dollars, a condition that unsurprisingly demoralized the Cubans further. And on top of that, the problem of the script, of a film that satisfied the susceptibilities of co-producers for whom, whereas Cuba held a certain fascination, cubanía was reduced to an exotic add-on. [11]
The result was both a reduced production program and a growing proportion of films designed to justify the co-producers’ interests by exploiting the island’s exotic image, providing local color as a background for lowbudget genre movies. The film institute tried to strike a balance that was often upset by the need to construct a story that explained the presence of a Spanish or a German or whatever nationality the actor. A few directors held their own, and with Spanish funding, Alea made the most successful film of his career—Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, codirected by Tabío), in which a young Communist university student is picked up in an ice cream parlor by a gay photographer. The film’s plea for tolerance and dialogue touched deep social wellsprings. Fernando Pérez solved the foreign actor problem brilliantly in his surreal La vida es silbar (Life Is To Whistle, 1998) which raised the stakes of his already accomplished artistry to a new symbolic level, showing that Cuban cinema was still alive and kicking.
But something else was also happening, not on the big screen but the small one, with the emergence of a new audiovisual culture in the neighborhoods. As Lisa Maya Knauer observes, the legality and availability in Cuba of the ‘small media’ of domestic usage—audioand videocassettes, CDs and DVDs—has fluctuated over the years, and there have always been inequalities of access to means of audiovisual production (cameras, editing desks, computers, Internet access). [12] But small media are easily carried and thus imported privately by family visitors from allá, ‘over there’—and often the equipment to play them on as well—and they readily circulate informally. As a result, whereas the blockade became, on both sides, an obsessional fetish of U.S.–Cuban relations, it failed to cut the island off from the latest products of the global corporations, whether hardware or software. Knauer reckons that visitors from New York already carried records and tapes back and forth in the 1970s, which soon included audiotapes and later videotapes of rumba and religious music, a traffic that increased after the Mariel boat-lift of 1980. Thus, beneath the radar of the mass media, state controlled in Cuba, commercial in the U.S., the small media generated a new popular genre of communication between the different moieties of a split community. Knauer argues that such traffic demonstrated a strong desire at a popular level to sustain a sense of Cuban identity that could negotiate the political divide independently of official discourses on either side. A renegotiation of cubanía. We should also observe that the Cuban experience is not atypical, but quite the contrary, because the small media the world over provide for new informal means of communication between home and diaspora.
By the 1990s, and the new wave of emigration by the balseros (rafters), Cuba had a flourishing informal sector that traded in home-burned CDs and unauthorized video rental (colloquially known as bancos de videos or video banks), along with illicit activities like the supply of illegal satellite dishes. In other words, Cuba was not to be excluded from the new audiovisual technology any more than it had previously been isolated culturally, and in the 1990s, just as the official film culture was entering into crisis, the new generation was embracing the new audiovisual technology. They did so out of necessity: as Ann Marie Stock puts it, in her recent study On Location in Cuba, talent and successful graduation from university or art school or film school (the ISA as well as the EICTV) did not at this time of economic collapse translate into a job, because the country’s largest employer, the state, was broke. Lacking a professional home, they were out on the streets. “To break into filmmaking, they would have to pound the pavement.” [13] And they did so, becoming adept at what was colloquially known as resolviendo and inventando, or in colloquial English, ducking and diving, and in short, just as in other countries, Cuba began to develop an active independent video sector. Inevitably, digital convergence led them on a path that led to the Internet, where today it is possible to find a good many examples on video sites like YouTube, as well as a growing band of bloggers. It is true that they face the problem that Cuba’s Internet service suffers restrictions both internal and external. Internally there is surveillance, whereas from outside, the U.S. refuses them an underwater cable link (a new one is now under construction with Venezuela). Consequently, many of these videos and blogs are not hosted on the island. Stock suggests that the official attitude of the state is nowadays much more relaxed than it used to be, whatever the anti-Castro propagandists claim, but this seems to apply to the videographers, who are regarded as belonging to the cultural sphere, whereas bloggers, who are seen as illegitimate journalists, are sometimes harassed.
One of the important players on this scene has been the EICTV, the international film school whose students, most of them coming from other Latin American countries and going out onto the streets to film short documentaries, began to tackle subjects that were novel and challenging; they began to break taboos, and the Cubans found this infectious. The EICTV is an NGO, but support also comes from state-sponsored cultural associations like the Asociación Hermanos Saíz; the writers and artists association, UNEAC, to which it’s affiliated; and the ICAIC itself, which nowadays runs an annual festival for the independent sector. There are also other NGOs in the field, like the Movimiento de Video, mainly devoted to amateur video and dating back to 1988, and the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, mainly devoted to video art. And then there’s the ISA (Instituto Superior del Arte)— Cuba’s other film school. In 1999, a documentary called Secuencias inconclusas (Unfinished Sequences) by Amanda Chávez, a student graduating from the audiovisual department, portrayed the conditions at the ICAIC in no uncertain terms. Coincidentally (or maybe one of those coincidences that, as Adorno would say, is not entirely a coincidence) the Institute’s president, Alfredo Guevara, resigned shortly afterwards to concentrate on running the international film festival; his successor, Omar González, was the first head of the ICAIC who was not a filmmaker but a professional cultural administrator. His policies have been liberal, even if not very effective.
Stock dates the birth of what she calls ‘street filmmaking’ to around 1990, although not surprisingly, given the context, it took a few years to gain momentum. The term is a loose one, because this is a movement whose output ranges from video art for galleries and clubs to short items for television, not excluding very low-budget drama. Rather what it designates is a certain spirit that defies the easy and reductive assumptions of foreign journalists, with their lazy picture of Cuba as a country caught in a time warp, vestige of the Cold War, victim of American intransigence but forever suffocating under an ideological conformity that no one any longer believes in except for an aging leadership. However, as Stock sees it, whereas the street filmmakers do not tend to see themselves as part of the old project of revolutionary cinema in the same way as their elders and predecessors, they are nevertheless quick to credit Cuba’s rich film tradition as a significant source of inspiration; especially its tradition of exuberant experimentation. Their attitude to revolutionary politics is often ironic, impatient, and dismissive of the political rhetoric that Cubans call teque, but this doesn’t make them counterrevolutionaries: they don’t need to oppose the system of governance, because if they are within it, then according to the old principle everything is permitted—but has to be fought for and constantly renegotiated.
Street filmmaking functions to a great extent outside the institutional structures, yet their stance towards the industry is not an oppositional one. In fact, the two sectors overlap, and their intersection results in video films like Monte Rouge (2004), a comedy sketch by the humorist Eduardo del Llano poking fun at Cuba’s secret police. Del Llano has industry credits as cowriter of several ICAIC films, including the troublesome Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas, but also more regular co-production fare like Kleines Tropikana and Hacerse el sueco (both Daniel Díaz Torres, 1997 and 2000); not to mention La vida es silbar. Monte Rouge was made with the unofficial support of people in the film institute. What then upset the authorities—although this hasn’t stopped del Llano’s progress—is that the film was soon being seen in Miami, where they claimed it was a clandestine piece of work.
Stock settles on the designation ‘street filmmaking’ after considering other terms people have used for works of the video generation, including cine aficionado (amateur), and cine submergido (submerged, underground, alternative). It is all of these, and more. And it isn’t just a movement of the young. There is the veteran ICAIC director Enrique Pineda Barnet, who saw how domestic copying and homemade media are easily exchanged between the communities on either side of the Florida Straits, and in 1997, demonstrated how to turn this into a minor art form with his experimental short, First, designed to be seen in both Havana and Miami at the same time (it has since been seen around the world). A prime example of what Stock calls “a conception of cubanía characterised by transnational linkages and responsive to global processes.” [14]
Not long afterwards, another director of the first generation, Humberto Solás, who had once wielded the largest budgets in Cuban film production, came to the conclusion that the only way forward was to completely change tack. With the ICAIC in the midst of a funding crisis, he shot Miel para Oshún (Honey for Oshún) in 2001, and other films subsequently, on DV. He saw this as a solution both individual and collective, and gave support to the call for ‘no-budget’ cinema. Reviving a term used across Latin America in the 1960s, in 2003 he founded a Festival of Cine pobre (cinema of poverty) in the town of Gibara on Cuba’s northeast coast, an unlikely location far from the center of official film culture in Havana, but the town where he’d found colonial streets for a scene in Lucía, and used again for a location years later in Miel para Oshún. By the time he died five short years after founding the festival, the event had become a magnet for the independent video movement and expanded into a lively and diverse arts festival.
Among the younger generation is the example of Pavel Giroud, whose output before graduating to feature films included installations, music videos, commercials, and promos for clients ranging from Cuban beers to Cubana Airlines to the Spanish Cultural Centre. [15] What is happening here is that a combination of conditions, including the growing tourist industry and the penury of Cuban television, created need on the one side and opportunity on the other for independent producers eager to earn a modest income to support their own free creation. In one account I’ve been given, Cuban television played an unplanned role in solving the problem for the independent video artist of how to make a living. Just as desktop video began to be taken up by a new generation of aspiring filmmakers, the state broadcaster, the ICRT, found itself lacking production resources and short of content, and thereby open to suggestion. It worked like this. A client, who might be a musical group, a theater company, a government department, or a magazine, wants some publicity, or has a campaign to run, or would like to disseminate its activities. If they went directly to television, the response would be, “very interesting, but we don’t have the resources.” But someone came up with the idea of offering them ready-made material, and the television people said, “Okay, we’ll have a look.” The result is now a regular supply of items ranging from thirty-second spots to the short programs that Cubans call ‘videoclips.’ Television is happy because they get free content. The clients are happy because they get wider publicity at a very reasonable cost. The videographers are happy because they’re able to make a modest living and just about finance their own work.
One last example, perhaps the most emblematic, and another film made as a graduation piece for the ISA. Dedicated to “Cuban families wherever they may be,” Video de familia (Family Video, 2001), by Humberto Padrón, is a dramatization of what Knauer calls the audiovisual remittance—in its purest form, the home video-letter, addressed to missing family members, in this case filmed by a family that has gathered in Havana to make a video to send to the eldest son in the United States—father, mother, grandmother, and the absentee’s two siblings. Because this is a home video, they all address the camera directly, thereby drawing the viewer into the family’s private space in an entirely novel way, leading up to the moment when the sister lets slip that her absent brother is gay, provoking the horrified repudiation of the father’s old-style Communist homophobia. It’s a very clever work indeed, which I’m tempted to read in the kind of Lacanian terms favored by Slavoj Žižek. That is, the response of the father, who of course represents the big Other, is to declare his absent son persona non grata in the family home, in other words, to banish him from the symbolic order. But this is a somewhat redundant gesture, because the absent son has done that already by removing himself to the United States. In short, the family as allegory of the nation.
Realignment
My contention is that the trajectory of Cuban cinema and its transformation into a new audiovisual public sphere is not just instructive but in a certain way exemplary. By extending and increasing participation in public expression, it demonstrates, sometimes in surprising ways, but in a manner comparable to what is variously seen elsewhere, the same potential of the small media of audiovisual culture to produce a democratizing effect. The result everywhere is a challenge to the political system, not necessarily by direct provocation but through opening up a parallel public sphere born of new forms of participation and interaction. This is a process that is also at work in the interstices of the metropolis, and that the established body politic is bound to find disturbing.
Crucially, the independent video movement in Cuba is part of a wider realignment of the political culture. According to the political scientist Rafael Hernández, editor of the polemical journal Temas, because the 1990s was hit by crisis, there has been widening debate in different media on a whole range of previously taboo subjects—from discrimination or the black market to the debacle of socialism in Eastern Europe—producing a diversification of discourse across a range of participants, including writers, artists, social scientists, teachers, community leaders, churches, professional associations, NGOs, environmentalists, religious figures, political leaders, and ordinary citizens.[16] This is a process in which (just like everywhere else) digital communications demonstrates a capacity to subvert the vertical control of the official media, and this has contributed to a significant shift in ideological position taking. The state retains control over the public media, but there is now another sphere that operates through both email and the circulation of digital media.
A striking demonstration of the new situation occurred early in 2007, when Cuban television broadcast a series of apologias for forgotten figures from the early 1970s, culminating in an interview with a certain Luis Pavón, who was in charge of the National Council for Culture during the period that Fornet later dubbed el quinquenio gris, the five gray years, an episode that the program omitted to address. Almost immediately emails began to circulate starting among artists and intellectuals criticizing the producers. By 2007, according to official figures from the Ministry of Communication and Informatics, Cuba had 260,000 computers online (mostly in institutions, schools, universities, youth associations, etc.), and nearly one million email accounts; there were fourteen hundred registered Cuban domains, and sixty-seven registered e-magazines. At one point in this e-campaign, I was told, the circulation list reached some fifteen hundred names (each of whom, of course, sent the messages on to others). [17] A public debate was held under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, with scores more people turning up than the hall was capable of accommodating, even after the venue had been moved; and in the end the television station was forced to admit that the programs had been a mistake. As Hernández pointed out to me, that people felt free to participate in this electronic debate, knowing full well that it was being monitored by the authorities, was a clear indication that the balance of ideological forces had already shifted definitively away from the hard-liners, the Communist fundamentalists nowadays known, with typical Cuban humor, as the Talibans.
Hernández dated the beginning of the apertura or opening to the mid1990s, when the term ‘civil society’ reentered Cuban political speech. A concept that had disappeared from orthodox Marxist discourse in the Soviet Union was now acknowledged in the highest echelons of the Party, finding its way in 1996 into a report by none other than Raúl Castro, which referred to la sociedad civil existente en Cuba and la sociedad civil socialista cubana—in effect an acknowledgment by the state that society is not homogenous and monolithic, and the official ideology need not treat it as such any longer. This, then, is the political context that has allowed independent video to thrive, making links across an increasingly connected world, in which, as Stock puts it, the old dichotomies that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ and ‘here’ from ‘there’ must be jettisoned. [18] The result might be seen as a new form of García Espinosa’s idea of imperfect cinema, which flourishes outside the marketplace or around its edges, and now, in the interstices of cyberspace. But this is not only what is happening in Cuba. What makes the growing links of cyberculture possible is a technological infrastructure created and dominated by global corporations whose products penetrate the market in Cuba despite the blockade, either legally or illegally. But we are all in the thrall of the same gods of virtual heaven, whether in actually existing communism or actually existing democracy.
Notes
1 Fidel Castro, 1972, p. 276. For the circumstances of this speech and their relation to cinema, see Michael Chanan, 2004, pp. 133–141, which should also be consulted the historical detail summarized in the present chapter.
2 Christopher Hull, 2009.
3 Chanan, 2004, p. 114.
4 Chanan, 1980, p. 2.
5 Quoted in Cristina Venegas, 2009, p. 38.
6 Ambrosio Fornet, 1997, pp. 11–12.
7 Fornet, 2007, p. 127.
8 Personal communication.
9 Venegas, 2009, p. 38.
10 Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, 2004, pp. 2–3.
11 See Venegas, 2009, p. 41; for a fine study of the co-production process at large, see Libia Villazana, 2009.
12 Lisa Maya Knauer, 2009, p. 167.
13 Ann Marie Stock, 2009, p. 15.
14 Ibid., p. 13.
15 Ibid., p. 181.
16 Rafael Hernández, talk at Florida International University, October 22, 2009, and email message to author.
17 Personal communication from Desiderio Navarro.
18 Stock, 2009, p. 16.
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