On Change, Fear and the Persistence of Dreams
“No man is an island…” John Donne
My mother and father came to the US, from Mexico and Cuba respectively, to create lives for themselves on their own terms, to live their dream. They were young, brave, optimistic and naïve. Their reality was often bitter-sweet, but they didn’t complain. As a child, I experienced the world through their struggle and their dream slowly permeated my own, while feeling fundamentally foreign to it and to the world they brought me in to. Though I love Mexico, visit often and am enriched by its culture, I am not fully of it. Equally proud of my Cuban heritage, I only finally visited Cuba for the first time in November, on my 41st birthday.
For over 50 years Cubans have been the subject of an extraordinary social experiment. They inhabit the surreal and absurdist yet beautiful world of a Dalí painting. The buildings, their gorgeous, eclectic architecture eroded by the eternal trade winds, impossibly propped up by wooden crutches and the will, persistence, and memory of the people who live in them.
Cuba is in the throes of a new experiment, no less revolutionary than the last, one that will force their clocks’ hands reeling forward to the present economic and technological reality. Ready or not. As if waking from a dream, or a nightmare depending on who you ask, most Cubans are eager and optimistic about their future, ready and willing to courageously exert their right to self-determination.
I wondered if they really new what they were asking for. Their headlong embrace of change seemed naïve at best, suicidal at worst, yet perfectly rational. As an outsider I wanted to be charmed by the romance of their revolution, the socialist utopia and their defiant stand against the corrupting influence of predatory capitalism. Of course, this is a fantasy. While Cuba seems to us to be quaintly trapped in time, the Cuban people are busy dreaming new dreams and are undaunted by uncertainty.
Uncertainty and self-doubt are subjects I know a great deal about. Fear of failure, or success, whatever the reason, I got good at the hard and painful work of quelling my dreams. I found excuses and disguised them as pragmatism. They seemed frivolous and I never gave myself permission to fully believe in them. Perhaps I came to Cuba looking for permission. I know I can never be from this place either, but as my mother’s homeland has provided insight into my character, I knew my father’s had something to reveal to me too.
In the lobby of the offices of the Institute of Cuban Art and Cinema Industry (ICAIC) the walls are covered floor to ceiling with the screen print posters for the films of Cuba’s cinematic legacy. With the exception of “Fresa y Chocolate,” I have never seen any of this films. The Café Fresa y Chocolate, located directly across the street from the ICAIC building, serves as the unofficial headquarters of the Cuban film industry. The cafe is a small dark bar with a few tables and chairs, a TV screen or two behind the bar playing a soccer game on this afternoon, and a very bright white conference room/salon, incongruously adjacent to the bar, partitioned by a glass wall.
I heard ICAIC ran a gift shop in the back of the conference room and was disappointed to find it closed for business. Commercialism still struggles to find a footing on the island, for now. But as I watched a professional three camera TV operation being setup, I learned that I was in time for an official meeting or discussion of some kind.
This was a pretty sparse rectangular space, with unadorned white walls and fluorescent lighting. There was no podium or stage for a panel, just metal folding chairs haphazardly arrayed in five rough rows.
I thought that three cameras seemed like overkill for the size of the space and the size of the expected audience. I found myself seated in the back and center of the room before people began to arrive. The arrivals looked like a representative sample of Havana. Adults young and old, men and women, black, white and brown, all seemed to know each other very well and all were in one way or another involved in the Cuban film scene.
As the chairs filled in around me, I was very conscious of the fact that as the complete and utter outsider and stranger in this tight audience, everybody must have been wondering “who the fuck is this guy?”
The cameras’ red lights turned on, the audience was still settling in, talking among each other when the meeting was casually called to order by the first of many that afternoon to hold the microphone. The tone of the gathering was conversational and very interactive, but there was a palpable tension and anticipation in the air. At this point I still had no idea what the meeting was about, when I noticed a man in a panama style hat, wearing a shirt that read “Censored” and black tape in the form of an X on his mouth, shooting video of the event on his camera phone.
The topic was state censorship. A handful of people read long, eloquent, erudite and passionate essays, mostly in opposition to, but some in favor of, government censorship policies. Those opposed argued that the policies are administered by an anonymous and faceless bureaucracy against whose edicts there is no recourse or redress of grievances. Filmmakers shared many accounts of projects, taking years of effort to complete, sanctioned for nebulous reasons.
Under the glare of the multiple TV cameras and the rising emotions of the audience, I began to feel like a voyeur sitting in on a family fight. And that’s what this was. It was the whole of Havana’s active film industry coming together to collectively figure out how they would proceed and operate as artists and creative people under current circumstances. These are not dissidents. They are members of a government institution. Most of the people in the room where passionate defenders of the original ideals of the Revolution; ideals which some argued, the regime has lost sight of.
As an American, the conversation they were having was incredible to me. Though I sat in their midsts, I never felt more isolated and humbled. These are truly brave people. Artists challenging and questioning the moral authority of the regime, exercising their right to express themselves while exposing themselves to persecution and soberly accepting the consequences of their actions in the face of what is known to be a terrible price.
Just to make a movie? Is it worth the price of freedom? A question I never had to contemplate. A question each one of those filmmakers didn’t give a second thought to.
After about three hours, which felt like six, I left the meeting overwhelmed, in awe, anxious, shook to the core. My personal fears and doubts never seemed more petty. I learned what it meant to dare greatly. I witnessed a spectacle of courage that for me was uncommon, but for them was just another day in the life. This was a demonstration of the power and strength of colleagues coming together in a, albeit austere but physical, not virtual, space to be affirmed as members of a collective, with individual opinions and ideas, but nonetheless supported and strengthened by the community which makes persistence of each possible.
