by Attilio L. De Alberi.
LA Weekly, March 2, 2001.
"The weak submit, while the strong go forward: This is a task for the
strong." Those words, by José Martí, appear on a notice board
in the 1993 Oscar-nominated Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate. Next to the
notice board is a mailbox into which Diego, the films main, gay character,
fatefully drops the letter in which he complains to the authorities that his
best friends artwork has been banned.
The film, co-directed by the late Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,
a.k.a. Titon, and by Juan Carlos Tabío, marked a new phase in the history
of Cuban cinema. The story of an unorthodox friendship between a member of the
Communist Youth movement and a gay dissident, set in the late 1970s, the film
also symbolized a "new dialogue" between Cuban filmmakers and the
Castro government.
Cuba may be one of the worlds few surviving Communist states, but it
has precious few of the cast-iron ideological trappings and symbols associated
with the former Soviet bloc. It occurred to me, while I was in Cuba recently for
the 22nd International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, that José
Martí is more of an icon in Cuba than either Marx or Lenin. Busts of the
venerable patriarch of Cuban independence are everywhere, as are his quotations.
If communism in Cuba were abandoned tomorrow, a fierce sense of national pride
and autonomy would remain. As the landlord living next door to the apartment I
was renting in Old Havana told me, "Im not a Communist, but I cant
tolerate anybody outside my country telling me what to do."
Both the festivals opening and closing nights took place in the
2,000-seat Karl Marx Theater in the presence of "El Comandante"
himself. (At 77, Fidel Castro appeared to be in good form, and was certainly
ubiquitous I saw him three times in two weeks.) In his poetic opening and
closing speeches, festival president Alfredo Guevara (no relation to Che)
addressed both the crowd and Fidel himself as friends and brothers, rather than
as comrades, and went so far as to venture an analogy between El Che and Jesus
Christ. He insisted on the importance of strengthening and developing Latin
American culture in a world dominated by the United States: If Latin America
couldnt conquer "the northern giant" economically, it could
nonetheless infiltrate it spiritually. "I have nothing against Mickey
Mouse," Guevara remarked later, "but Im against globalism as
banalization."
Although the majority of films presented at the festival were Latin
American, a selection of new French, Spanish, Italian, German and Canadian
cinema was offered as well. There was an homage to actor Vittorio Gassman; a
Robert Bresson retrospective; a series on the Jewish presence in Latin American
films; and an overview of contemporary international cinema. There was also an
impressive number of American films in the festival (Being John Malkovich, Agnes
Browne, Legacy, Ghost Dog, Cookies Fortune, Girlfight, among others), as
well as a delegation from the Sundance Institute. Interestingly, despite Russian
President Vladimir Putins arrival in Havana just before the end of the
festival, not a single Russian film was shown. A cabdriver joked that the only
thing Russians have left on the island are their ancient Volga and Moskwitz
cars.
Along with health care and beating the U.S. in all sports, education is a
traditional imperative in Fidels Cuba. Cinema is seen as a crucial element
in the formation of culture, and both Martí and Castro stressed, in their
different ways, that without culture there can be no freedom. Indeed throughout
the festival, theaters were filled to capacity, while policemen kept eager
filmgoers left outside at bay. (Tickets cost just 10 cents each.) In the
afternoons, you could find housewives in line who not only knew all about the
actors in a film, but were savvy about the director and writer as well. A
cursory reading of any Cuban film publication reveals a high level of
intellectual sophistication.
The engine of Cuban cinema is the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria
Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Like Cuba itself, the ICAIC seems to have
overcome the extreme difficulties of the so-called "Special Period,"
when the demise of the Soviet bloc brought the islands economy to its
knees. At the height of that unhappy phase (199395), film production
almost came to a halt. So it was with understandable pride that the institute
announced a slate of six new feature films some already completed, some
scheduled for completion for the coming year.
The Cuban economys painful recovery over the last five years only
partly explains Cuban cinemas current renaissance. Since the early 1990s,
the ICAIC has successfully explored the path of co-productions, not only with
Latin America (read Mexico), but also with Spain, France and Germany. Its
a choice that mirrors the states own mushrooming economic ventures with
foreign partners, especially in the field of tourism. For example, both
Strawberry and Chocolate and Guantanamera, Aleas last film (co-directed
with Tabío), were co-productions. The key to survival, for both Castro
and Cuban cinema, has been flexibility one born of necessity, perhaps,
but also of a pre-existing attitude that predates the Special Period and its
apparently insurmountable constraints. To understand the true meaning of this
flexibility might also help us to answer the Big Question: To what extent is
there artistic freedom in Cuba?
At the logistic center of the festival the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, in
the modern part of Havana Jorge Luis Neyra, a young film critic for the
politics and culture weekly Invasor, insisted that "Cuban cinema always
enjoyed expressive freedom." This, he explained, was the result of the
dispute within the ICAIC, at the end of the 1960s, between Blas Roca, a top
member of the Communist Party, and Alfredo Guevara.
The debate, according to Neyra, focused on what kind of cinema Cuba wanted
to create. More specifically, the question was whether to establish some form of
Soviet-style socialist realism, or to allow for a cinema that was less rigid and
more deeply rooted in Cuban culture. Guevara won the debate, and thus a Cuban
cinema was born in which the merits and failings of the political-economic
system could to some extent be shown.
Evidence of this freedom could be found in the film festival itself. In Juan
Carlos Tabíos Lista de Espera ("Waiting List"), one of
two Cuban long-feature entries (it won the Best Screenplay Coral Award), a group
of passengers is stuck in a provincial bus terminal while waiting for a spare
part to arrive. The film wittily attacks the inefficiencies of the system while
showing that a sense of solidarity, as well as a rediscovered inventiveness, are
possible ways out of the ordeal. "If on the one hand solidarity is the road
to happiness," the director stated, "one should also be ready to break
the rules."
The other long-feature Cuban film presented (and winner of the Audience
Award) was Hacerse el Sueco, directed by Daniel Diaz Torres. The film is a
straightforward comedy about an enigmatic self-described Swedish literature
professor staying with a Havana family, the head of which is a former cop who
fought with Fidel in the first days of the revolution. Through him, Torres
presents a compassionate portrait of an aging generation of Cubans stuck in a
world of nostalgia and obsolete rules.
"If a society does not show its contradictions, it cannot grow,"
said Torres. "Here in Cuba we have a tradition of aesthetic independence.
That includes a dynamic appreciation of societys changes. Probably the
Cuban Revolution, along with Cuban cinema, survives because it is far from
static." Another reason for this survival, the director told me, is humor. "In
Cuba, we are lucky because we have a great sense of humor, as well as a joie de
vivre that is in direct contrast with the somberness I have observed in my trips
to the former socialist countries of the East." Or, as a Cuban friend
reminded me, "We might be poor, but were certainly not miserable."
Cuba obviously has a vested interest in letting the world know of its
willingness to change. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the festival opened
almost simultaneously with the unveiling of a monument to the once-reviled John
Lennon (again, Fidel was there); or that this was followed by a concert at the
Tribuna Antimperialista José Martí on the Malecon, right next to
the tall gray building from which, in lieu of an embassy, "American
interests" in Cuba are represented.
Still, dont expect a film like Julian Schnabels Before Night
Falls, the story of the persecution of homosexual Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas,
to be produced with Castros blessing. Not, at least, for now. |