Published Tuesday, November 28, 2000, in the
Miami Herald
In class, focus is on fictional media giving factual account of island
life
By Elaine De Valle. edevalle@herald.com
For several weeks, a small group of students have spent their Friday
evenings in a dark room on a college campus watching several noted Cuban films,
studying scenes and dissecting dialogue.
They've been looking for truth in fiction.
Though there are only two documentaries shown during the course -- "Acting
the Cuban Reality'' at Miami-Dade Community College's Wolfson Campus -- the
island's movies weave a more factual history of the past 40 years than do
traditional records, course instructor Alejandro Ríos says.
"What we have seen in Cuba is that the usual forms of communication --
the newspapers, the radio, TV -- cannot serve their function and have been
replaced by movies,'' says Ríos, who also directs the Cuban Cinema
Series, which has become hugely popular, drawing standing-only crowds to the
campus auditorium on one Saturday night each month.
Because state-controlled media is unreliable as a source of news and
information, Ríos says films have become increasingly critical as an
unofficial record of the deteriorating conditions in the last socialist bastion
of the Western Hemisphere.
"Cuban reality itself is counterrevolutionary,'' Ríos says. "It's
a mirror. You put a camera in the streets and start filming, and you're going to
get things that are against the revolution.''
The films show the long lines in which Cubans must stand to get the few
goods available to them, the division between those with dollars and those
without, the lack of freedom of expression or choice, the government repression.
HIDDEN MESSAGES
But they do it mostly with hidden messages and double entendre. In Mayén's
favorite film so far, La vida es silbar (or Life Is to Whistle), people who hear
the word libertad -- liberty -- faint. The viewer is left to wonder why. In Pon
tu pensamiento en mí (or Think of Me), the characters live in an atheist
society, yet they pray for food.
"You have to read between the lines, but the messages are there,'' said
Martín Mayén, 37, of El Salvador. "Because there is no
freedom of expression, movies are being used as a form of expression to say what
you can't say on TV or in books or even on the street. Film has more liberty of
expression using satire and drama.''
Those messages, however, aren't too clear, said Nat Chediak, founder and
director of the Miami Film Festival, which included the controversial Silbar
this year even when it meant losing county funding. He said the class is a "wonderful
informational tool'' for people to start to learn about Cuba, but, Chediak said,
the films don't go far enough.
"Cuban cinema lags very far behind the kind of films that were being
made in the 1980s in Iron Curtain countries,'' he said. "Those were bolder,
more counterculture, more effective of producing change.''
Actors, directors and other moviemakers in Cuba, he said, are limited. "They
can only be critical to a degree, because there must always be a pretext by
which it's done. By the very fact that it's supported by the state, it is a
reflection of what the state wants to portray outside.''
Still, Ríos said that he believes the old adage that a picture is
worth a thousand words.
Even Fidel Castro knows this, he said. It is why the ICAIC, the Cuban
Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry -- the Cuban version of the U.S.
Academy of Cinematographic Arts -- was the first cultural institution founded by
the revolutionary leaders in March 1959, two months after overthrowing the
government.
"Fidel and the revolution know the power of the image, and they knew
they had to control that from the beginning,'' Ríos said. "More than
words, more than newspapers. Those still had some freedom until about 1961.''
CENSORED WORKS
But although the government eventually lost its grip on creative content and
directors, they kept control over distribution: Some of the films studied in the
course were censored on the island. Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in
Wondertown) was pulled from island theaters after three days. El encanto del
regreso (The Delight of Homecoming) -- the story of a man who returns home from
the Cuba-supported war in Angola and finds another battle in his homelife -- was
shown in Cuban theaters one day before it was banned.
The productions studied in the course were all made in the last decade, or
since 1989. Among them, the recent La vida es silbar and Lista de espera
(Waiting List), are critically acclaimed.
More well-known movies, such as the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and
Chocolate, which chronicles a friendship developed between a gay
anti-revolutionary and a young heterosexual communist, cannot be shown because
of copyright laws. That film and many others have been co-produced by companies
in Spain and other countries.
FOREIGN INVESTORS
"Cuban cinematographers have been forced to look for foreign
investors,'' Ríos said. He also wanted to leave room for films that had
not been as widely received, he adds.
"If you can go to Blockbuster and rent it, I'm not as interested as in
others,'' he said.
This is the sixth semester the class has been offered. The students are
diverse and include Argentines, Peruvians and Cubans.
Although many have already seen some of the films, the discussions give them
a different perspective.
"They say, 'I have seen this movie, but you put it in context and I
understand it a lot better,' '' Ríos said.
"These have become movies to read, to decipher. The day we have to do
the story of Cuba, of what happened in the last 41 years, we cannot leave out
the importance of Cuban film -- in favor of and against the revolution.''
Family of five crosses Straits under cover of darkness
Sandra Marquez Garcia and Arnold Markowitz.
smarquez@herald.com
A Cuban family dropped off the coast of Virginia Key in a pre-dawn smuggling
operation Monday said they fled the communist island because they could not
afford medical care for their eldest daughter, who has a congenital heart
defect.
Miguel Gorayeb, 50, an architect who said he spent 10 years working for
Cuba's nuclear power plant, and his wife, Ana Amelia Pérez, 35, a former
supermarket clerk, said their daughter was referred to a medical clinic that
normally treats foreigners.
"I would need to pay $15,000 if I wanted to have her operated on
again,'' Pérez said. "That is why I left Cuba.''
The trip was still costly: They paid a smuggler all of their material
possessions -- including a car, color television, refrigerator and clothes
washer -- in addition to $5,000 cash.
Louris Gorayeb, 13, was born with part of a heart valve missing, her parents
said. After a visiting French doctor operated on her four years ago, the girl's
lips and fingers no longer turned blue from lack of oxygen and she was able to
climb a flight of stairs.
But the girl's long-term prognosis depended on an additional operation, and
Louris had not been examined by a cardiologist in a year, her parents said.
Making matters worse, her parents said, Dr. Luis Arango, one of the doctors
who had overseen Louris' treatment at the William Soler Pediatric Hospital in
Havana since she was an infant, defected earlier this year. The team of
specialists who worked with him was transferred to a clinic that treats
foreigners -- and the couple said they were told they would have to pay "like
any other'' if they wanted an operation for their daughter.
"The doctors mean very well,'' a weary Pérez said. "They
want to help you, and they want to practice their profession. If they don't have
a syringe or a towel, what can they do?''
A Cuban diplomat who answered the phone at the Cuban Interests Section in
Washington, D.C., Monday afternoon said a spokesman was unavailable to comment
on the case.
Rosa Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Jackson Memorial Hospital, said emergency
room doctors examined Louris, but she was unable to disclose specifics about the
girl's medical history.
"The only thing I can tell you is the condition: It is good,'' Gonzalez
said.
Juan Carlos Pérez, the girl's Miami uncle, said doctors performed a
number of tests on Louris -- including a sonogram and an electrocardiogram --
and gave her an appointment for next week.
"I think it will be necessary to operate,'' said Pérez, an
electrician. He said the family had not yet discussed fees, but he said a social
worker told the family the hospital might be able to help pay for the treatment.
Family members said they began planning their escape two months ago after
meeting a Havana-based smuggler.
On Friday night, the plan became a reality. The couple rounded up their
three children -- Louris, 10-year-old Michel and 2-year-old Ana María --
and headed to the central bus station in Havana where they waited 10 hours until
they got seats on a bus to Matanzas. From there, they caught a jitney to Cárdenas,
they said.
Saturday night was spent walking up the coast with one of the smuggler's
agents who kept in touch with a fast boat on his cellular phone. Even in the
pitch darkness, they stopped constantly, making sure they weren't being
followed.
"I have lost about 20 pounds worrying about getting stopped at sea,''
Gorayeb said.
Before boarding the boat at 11 p.m. Sunday, Pérez said she gave a
bottle of milk to her youngest child, Ana María, and then climbed into
the bottom of the craft, where she held tightly to her three children.
The couple said they were unable to say how long the trip took -- the boat
stopped to pick up five more passengers -- but once they departed, they traveled
as "fast as a lightning bolt.''
When the boat came to a sudden stop, the smugglers ordered everyone off in
waist-deep water about 200 meters off land, they said. The family hesitated at
first and became separated from the other passengers.
Making their way in the early-morning darkness, they walked aimlessly,
getting their first glimpse of high-rise apartment buildings and the Miami
Seaquarium before "a man in a red car'' pulled over and offered to call
authorities.
The man -- a chief building official for Key Biscayne -- could not be
reached for comment.
Miami-Dade Police found the family at about 5 a.m., waiting on the
Rickenbacker Causeway, near the docks of the University of Miami's marine
science campus.
"Somebody brought them there in a go-fast boat and told them to walk to
shore and call the police. They flagged down the first driver they saw,'' said
Detective Nelda Fonticiella.
The couple plan to live with Pérez's brother, Juan Carlos Pérez,
and his family in Miami until they find jobs. The siblings had not seen each
other in six years, and Juan Carlos said he was struck with how much his
sister's situation had changed. Gorayeb said his family's standard of living
declined after he tried to emigrate legally from Cuba six years ago.
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