11 films about Cuba…and where to find them.
So Fidel Castro died…(on a #BlackFriday of all days!). So your social media is now ablaze in a lot of noise and casual experts demonizing or deifying Castro. But what about CUBA? What about the people OF Cuba and FROM CUBA? Well, there is a cornucopia of books and media you can lose yourself into that include a variety of films that could easily placate your hunger to answer those questions. Today I share with you what I deem are the essential movies that could help you gain a better understanding of the complicated socio-political aspects of the Caribbean Island/Nation/State named Cuba.
I have ordered them as to give you a historical and chronological perspective of how things went with “La Revolución” and the local and diasporic resistance to the communist state.
Soy Cuba (1964)
As Wikipedia states:
I Am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я Куба, Ya Kuba) is a 1964 Soviet-Cuban film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. The film was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public[1] and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States thirty years later.
Some will chuckle at the similarities with Cuba as a country: this movie was made with great bombast and forgotten only to be “rescued” by Americans in awe with the ingenious craft behind this film years later.
The movie is heavy handed and filled to the brims with propaganda but showcases a very audacious mise en scène and some insane how-the-hell-they-pulled-that-of camera work.
Inside its excessive and over the top exterior lies some hard truths and a snapshot of the reasons behind why the Cuban people rose up and took their homeland down the revolutionary road.
The movie has become available for the first time via new streaming platform Filmstruck. You can check it out by clicking this sentence.
Salut les Cubains (1963)
The victory of the Caribbean Revolution made the rounds around the world and socialist Europe was mystified by the revelation of a tropical island embracing socialism. Artist, photographer and director (an all around amazing creator) Agnes Varda was one of the many left leaning individuals to be enamored by Cuba and she decide to travel there to document the life of the Cubans in the island. She made this, still interesting (and surprisingly entertaining), half hour film document where she presents beautiful pictures of Cuba and her people with a very sincere narration of her findings on the island.
You can watch this film on Vimeo (it has English and Spanish captions!). Click here!
Thirteen Days (2000)
Have you heard that for 13 days the old USofA was on the brink of “nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies.”? Well, it turns out it was (almost) CUBA’S fault!!! (…not really…).
This movie gives the Hollywood treatment to those tense moments where Cuba was right in the middle of the Cold War making it a lot more hotter than anybody anticipated. This movie is not historically accurate, Kevin Costner’s character was not doing half the things he does in this movie for instance, but I think it crystallizes very clearly what Cuba means for the United States even now. A weird paradise island where communism made them really scared of dying on a nuclear winter so many years ago.
Thirteen Days is not available in any of the major streaming services but a decent DVD version is available for rent in Netflix, to buy from Amazon and included on the Starz Direct service (check that here).
Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968)
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea gives us a character study of a bourgeois intelectual caught amidst the revolution and his own ennui. The events of Sergio’s life unfold leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis depicted on Thirteen Floor.
Ed Gonzalez, writing for Slant, explains why this movie is important:
This stirring blend of narrative fiction, still photography and rare documentary footage catalogs the many intricacies and contradictions of a bourgeois Cuban intellectual’s loyalty to Castro’s revolution. Though Alea himself was devoted to the cause, his films forever scrutinized the self-devouring nature of Castro’s Cuba. (Alea died in 1996 shortly after the one-two success of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate and Guantanamera.) If Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba championed the need for revolution in the country, Memories contemplates the failure of the new government to recognize and negotiate the lingering bourgeois threat left in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s fall.
There is sadly no legal way to stream this movie, but Amazon has a Region2 DVD for sale (here). And you can try doing a search here.
Fresa y Chocolate (1993)
Fast forward some years and watch a seasoned Gutierrez Alea tackling one of the great transgressions of the revolution that touted the creation of “the new man”: its treatment of gay citizens. The late Roger Ebert explained it eloquently on his review of the film:
“Strawberry and Chocolate” is not a movie about the seduction of a body, but about the seduction of a mind. It is more interested in politics than sex — unless you count sexual politics, since to be homosexual in Cuba is to make an anti-authoritarian statement whether you intend it or not.
The movie has been directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, at 72 the greatest of Cuba’s filmmakers and one of its most contradictory. An early supporter of Fidel Castro and the head of the revolution’s underground film unit, he made “Stories of the Revolution” (1960) about the overthrow of the Batista regime. He founded the national film unit. Yet his own films have questioned life under Castro: The famous “Memories of Underdevelopment” (1968) is about an intellectual adrift in revolutionary Havana, and now here is a film in which Diego taps his brow and says, “This is a thinking head — and if you have ideas, they ostracize you.”
This Oscar nominated film is not available in any of the major streaming services but a DVD version is available for rent in Netflix and to buy from Amazon.
Mauvaise conduite (1984)
“Conducta impropia” is said to have been the catch-all justification for persecuting the “intellectuals, artists, writers and faggots” of Castro’s Cuba, nearly 30 exiles face the camera and remember. Footage of the 1966 defection of members of the National Ballet Company in Paris introduces an early crack in the image of the Revolution, which is variously described as indoctrination, medicine, catechism and internment, the prostitution of the body politic and a dolorous betrayal. From New York, Madrid and Paris, witnesses recall forced work camps somewhere between Stalin and Pinochet, arrests and inhuman treatment over vague accusations of “extravagance” and “vagrantism,” and the “moral purges” which led to the exodus of ten percent of the population. (Refugees cram into embassies for protection and get heckled and spat on, the government’s official story is viewed on Miami TV stations: “They’re like wild animals! To think we’d see something like this in our country.”) Reinaldo Arenas was a distinguished playwright elsewhere in the world yet a “non-person” in his own land, Caracol the transvestite burlesque queen evokes a time when plucked eyebrows and too-tight pants could land people in jail. Susan Sontag pinpoints homosexuality as an affront to Fidel’s macho façade and contemplates the Left’s need to evolve in the face of such revelations, while Armando Valladares more simply laments “how much the Revolution has changed.” Anger, disillusionment and the Cuban gift for mockery are amply evident in this one-sided but illuminating documentary, with Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal building to the image of the displaced poet at a children’s puppet show, and the fatigued eloquence of one of Castro’s former associates: “Tengo memoria, pero no tengo odio.” (I have memory, but I don’t have hate).
This documentary is essential and important to hear and see the extent of the persecution that is only hinted at in Fresa y Chocolate. As with all movies in this list, there are moments that could be considered propaganda but the testimonies here are powerful and, in some cases, poignant.
It is tragic this film is only available as a VHS tape on Amazon…but someone in Vimeo has your back.
Azúcar Amarga (1996)
And now the “modern” Cuba is angrily scrutinized by those who left. Bitter Sugar is an angry film and as propagandist as “Soy Cuba” but from the anti-regime camp. I am pretty sure Ichaso had that in mind when he decided to shoot this film in black and white and make it his generational cry of frustration.
Sadly this one is only available to buy as physical media on Amazon.
Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (1990)
A satire born from the movie division that helped to maintain a certain narrative of the revolution makes officialism tremble just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Read an excerpt from a dispatch of the New York Times at the time the movie was removed from Cuban movie theaters:
“Alice in Wondertown” which was yanked without explanation from the theaters after setting attendance records in four days of screenings, reflects an unparalleled ferment of criticism and political dissent in one of the world’s last bastions of Communism. In a wave of denunciations of one-party rule and bold, if still small-scale, efforts to form alternative political forces, Cuban intellectuals and human rights campaigners have begun what some here say is the first serious challenge to the Government’s credibility. Stark economic difficulties and suffocating control of nearly every aspect of life have badly eroded support for the Communist leadership among many Cubans. The Government, seemingly startled by the fervent reaction to the film and other signs that dissent is widening, has vacillated between its old-school campaigns to crack down on or discredit critics and a more flexible policy of accommodation. Many Cubans say the message of “Alice” and the Government’s reaction to it were hardly obscure. “This is the first movie about Cuba that has been shown here that has even begun to tell the truth,” a Cuban moviegoer said. “The Government became very nervous because they saw that everyone immediately identified Cuba in the picture.”
When you watch the film today you will surely find its satire tame, but it still speaks volumes about the absurdity of a bureaucracy that tends to eats its own tail.
Almost impossible to get…but then you can always, “Click me” *wink, wink*
Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
This definitely could be considered an “overrated and overplayed” documentary BUT watching this “pre-Castro” musicians “come back to life” many years later and have a glimpse of how “USA embargo politics” don’t help them much in regaining some of their “lost time” makes it more poignant than it should be.
You can find this one, streaming for free, here: Snagfilms or at Filmstruck over here.
Viva Cuba (2005)
Citing Wikipedia:
In Viva Cuba, a road movie fairy tale, Cremata tackles localized Cuban problems from the literal point of view of the country’s children. He lowers the camera to the eye level of the film’s protagonists, Malú (Malú Tarrau Broche) and Jorgito (Jorgito Miló Ávila).
A sort of companion to Alicia en el pueblo de las Marvillas but with a tone that better conveys the decadence of the old ideas (in both revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries). It also marks the advent of an independent film movement in Cuba…
The movie is available via new streaming platform Filmstruck. Click here!
Juan de los Muertos (2011)
And basically that picture up there conveys a lot of why this film is on this list and is the last one on it. This one is not subtle and definitely not perfect by any means, but needless to say, zombies are everywhere and there is a genius implication of where they came from and how the Cubans don’t realize what a zombie is because of how disconnected they have been for “regular pop culture” but at the same time they have been behaving like zombies from some time now…when you see it you will understand.
Here you can see all your options regarding where you can get your #JuanOfTheDead fix (click the hashtag).
I hope you enjoy the list and it helps you to have a better picture (pun intended) of the complexity that is Cuba and how it goes beyond what you think when you think about a guy named Fidel…
Do let me know if you think this list can be expanded and why and do share your thoughts!
(Bonus- Letterbxd list for future reference below)
