elena’s review published on Letterboxd:
I hosted a film festival at my local cinema, showcasing the wonderful cinema (and music) of Cuba. The selection of films exploring different aspects of society after the triumph of the revolution, to celebrate 70 years since the assault on Moncada.
The films I showed were Santiago Alvarez’s Cyclone (1963), Now! (1965), Cerro Pelado (1966), 79 Springs (1969) and ending with Octavio Cortazar’s For the First Time (1967).
Here is the introduction I gave for the festival:
Welcome to the Cuban Film Festival. I hope you enjoyed the music outside. The aim of the festival, is to convey a culture that is distinctly Cuban. One of community and vibrancy and internationalism. Tropical socialism, or as Che Guevara once called “socialism with pachanga” - which if you didn't know, is a genre of music originating in Cuba from 1959. It very much makes me want to get up and dance with a bunch of people in the sunlight. Gives me summer vibes. Anyway, this vibrant, communal culture is expressed through their music, their cinema. Since the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, a blossoming of avant-garde art has emerged, through painting, music, photography and film, replacing the rigid style of the colonial period.
Before the revolution, only 80 films were produced, known as “rumberas” - commercial melodramas celebrating the lives of the wealthy, serving as escapist fantasies for the working class population, as well as propaganda hiding the realities of how most people lived. This has most plainly continued to be the function of Hollywood cinema as we know it today. The formation of ICAIC (the Cuban film institute) in 1959, a state-run industry would exist as a pushback against the bourgeois representation of mainstream cinema, instead depicting the conditions of the working class, as well as documenting the ongoing cultural and economic transformations as they are happening, to the outside world.
To contextualise the films themselves, to go back to 1959, several foreign newsreels still operated in Cuba, creating and exhibiting films that portrayed an unmitigated hostility to the young revolution. To counter this, the Noticiero ICAIC was born. With Santiago Alvarez appointed as director, he transformed the pedestrian newsreel into a dynamic factory of radical innovation. And with his 1963 film Cyclone, a film which sent ripples around the world, was the real beginning of his experimental trajectory.
Documenting the devastation wrought by Hurricane Flora upon the eastern provinces of the island, met with the vigorously coordinated response of the energetic young regime, there are traces of nearly all of Alvarez's key signatures. A sharp use of inter-titles, images, music and silence, fusing new live footage with found materials in an effective harmony. There is also a striking resemblance I find, between seeing the Cuban community, the Cuban nation coming together as a collective against assault by hurricane, and the Cuban nation barely two years earlier in 1961, coming together as a collective against assault by military invasion from a close neighbour – this being the Bay of Pigs invasion by the US whom the Cubans bravely defeated, no doubt freshly in the minds of audiences.
This kind of parallel of the film's content linked to a larger fight against imperialist aggression became far more direct by 1966's Cerro Pelado. The film's name referring to the titular boat of Cuban athletes training for the Caribbean Games in Puerto Rico. However, as seen in the film, the US illegally tried to prevent them from entering the competition. Through brilliant use of montage, a direct parallel of events split the screen in half, between the Cuban athletes trying to enter Puerto Rico, and the Cuban peoples' fight against imperialism. Of course, Puerto Rico itself a modern colony of the US and the film showed outright, the state repression inflicted upon its citizens.
Only a year earlier, Alvarez shocked the world through powerful bursts of imagery, similar levels of state repression in the US, particularly of black communities, in 1965's Now! Alvarez had migrated to the US for a period in the 1930s in search of work. What he must have witnessed day-to-day, may very well have been the catalyst for his life-long radical outlook.
What followed was a series of films documenting liberation movements in countries such as Chile, Laos, Peru, Argentina and Vietnam. This is an expression of the internationalist solidarity Cuba continues to show to this day. By the time Alvarez completed his 1969 effort 79 Springs, his shock at the savagery of the US had converted itself fully to rage. This is the true significance of the most famous sequence in the film, where images of the war, move from the object of violence to its literal subject, as Alvarez brutalizes the strips of film themselves. The ferocity of its visual onslaught, as well as the absolute freedom of its narrative organisation, deploying a battery of highly experimental tactics - it endures not only as a memorial to Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, but is testament to the bravery of a country's struggle against colonialism and imperialism.
The contribution of the ICAIC, is not only to create artistic cinema expressing Cuban socialism, but also allowing for the exhibition and spread of popular knowledge, of the best of cinema, from all over the world. They created the film archives of the Cinemateca de Cuba, and took part in initiatives such as Cinemóviles, which made cinema available on the most intricate sites of the national geography. In 1967's For the First Time, Octavio Cortazar documented the first screenings of international cinema in the country, travelling to rural communities and showing an audience's response to its first film: Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.