Locus. My primary interest is in locating Cuban cinema. It is clearly no longer found in the historical mode of institutional production that led to “ICAIC authorship,” as Michael Chanan [1] calls the space for creation that, with support from the State, obtained greater visibility and paved the way for master classes on national cinema beginning in the 1960s (the ICAIC is the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, the Cuban film institute). The Cuban government’s cultural apparatus now has priorities that transcend producing complex imaginaries, and the more authoritarian it becomes, the less it needs to support cinema with “systemic heresy” at its center or “to expand the borders of what is assumed to be revolutionary” [2] as a way of questioning power. 

On the other hand, the unprecedented visibility of the cinema of the exile and from the margins, as well as repertoires buried by censorship [3] and exclusionary cultural policies, are evidence of the existence of a vast and diverse legacy of works and filmmakers that challenge the symbolic hegemony of institutional cinema. Cuban cinema itself over the last twenty years, excluded from the majority of official distribution circuits on the Island, is a key participant in debates about the current state of national cinema.

Many of the films produced in Cuba today come from an exiled position, due to both the ways in which they are financed (minor co-productions, with little to no commitment from the industry and private or public micro-investments from several countries) as well as their artistic impulse (auteur films that often operate outside the protocols for global circuits related to national cinema). Corazón azul (Blue Heart) (Miguel Coyula, 2021) is a perfect example of a film more interested in a search for aesthetic sovereignty than it is in belonging to a cultural or national locus.

The current post-national version of Cuban cinema is characterized by the expansion of the spaces where it manifests itself as well as the multiplication of its styles and aesthetic agendas. Its current transnational brand, which has become more accentuated in the last three years following the unprecedented migratory exodus of Cubans from the physical country, including many younger filmmakers, is expanding through a discourse that conjures the country’s image from numerous different wormholes: memory (La tierra de la ballena [The Land of the Whale] [Armando Capó, 2024]; La línea del ombligo [Belly Button Trail] [Carla Valdés León, 2023]); representation of the migrant experience (La opción cero [Option Zero] [Marcel Beltrán, 2020]; Un hombre bajo su influencia [A Man Under His Influence] [Emmanuel Martín, 2023]; Llamadas desde Moscú [Calls from Moscow] [Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023]); examining traumas from the past and their mark on the identity of those that reside in the present (Seguridad [Tamara Segura, 2024]); exhumation of archival footage that reveals the destructive machine of totalitarianism (El caso Padilla [The Padilla Affair] [Pavel Giroud, 2022]; Landrián [Ernesto Daranas, 2023]); production of a counter-history that gives a voice to independent civil society on the Island and their acts of resistance to totalitarian authority (Mujeres que sueñan un país [Women Dreaming a Nation] [Fernando Fraguela, 2022]; En San Isidro [In San Isidro] [Katherine Bisquet, 2024]; Cuba y la noche [Cuba and the Night] [Sergio Fernández Borrás, in production]); and the total or partial disappeance of any physical trace of national identity, in order to evoke it in a psychogeographical dimension (Diario de la niebla [Diary of the Mist] [Rafael de Jesús Ramírez, 2015]; La historia se escribe de noche [History Is Written at Night] [Alejandro Alonso, 2024]; Abisal [Abyssal] [Alejandro Alonso, 2021]; Los viejos heraldos [The Olden Heralds] [Luis Alejandro Yero, 2018]; Tundra [José Luis Aparicio, 2021]). 

In aesthetic terms, present-day Cuban cinema reveals the definitive breakdown of the institutional dialect, which is grounded, generally speaking, in realism, anthropological and sociological examination, and the will to produce an imagined community steeped in Castroism. The reinvention of Cuban cinema’s identity is happening via an open debate with tradition and the canon, and a dispute about redefining what qualifies as national, something that is re-imagined and re-appropriated as each filmmaker sees fit. 

Politikós. The first two 21st-century generations of independent filmmakers in Cuba have taken it upon themselves to tear down the totalitarian fiction of institutional cinema. The context of social and political change that they illustrate and expose with their films connects with the radical transformation of the social contract on the Island, the loss of the totalitarian State’s dominion over its artists, and the emergence of a sovereign civic agent outside the ideological control of official doctrine.

Instead of negotiating with power, like institutional cinema used to do, today’s filmmakers promote, as avant-garde Cuban artists working in the visual arts and literature did before them, “the ciudadanización of history. History as a common good, in other words, as public property mishandled by the authorities that is being recovered and opened up for community use.” [4]

Borrowing Rafael Rojas’ description of marginalized Cuban literature following the upheaval of the socialist Revolution, it is easy to detect in the stylistic tendencies of current cinema the closure of a canon (that of Cuban cinema during the totalitarian period) and the testing out of a new tradition that views the country as “a vestige of the past that reappears in a ghostly and metamorphosed manner.” [5]

Ethos. Current Cuban cinema pledges its allegiance, above all, to language. Free from commercial obligations, excluded from open circuits for national circulation, and with no official marketing apparatus to promote their distribution, we have before us films that are nomadic, that identify completely with the idea of “accented cinema”, [6] that hablan en cubano (speak in Cuban) for a global audience, including Cuban natives living on the Island or in the diaspora, and that translate an experience shared by many communities under similar circumstances. As Naficy describes it, this emergent genre is characterized by the displacement of its creators, their alternative means of production, and a style that is anything but fixed, as a result of this displacement.

Dean Luis Reyes is a film critic and professor. He has published Contra el documento (Against the Evidence) (2005), La mirada bajo asedio. El documental reflexivo cubano (The Viewpoint Under Siege: The Cuban Reflective Documentary) (2012), La forma realizada. El cine de animación (Shapes Come True: Animated Films) (2015; A forma realizada. O cinema de animação, Portuguese translation by Savio Leite, 2020), Werner Herzog: la búsqueda de la verdad extática (Werner Herzog: The Search for Ecstatic Truth) (2016), and El gobierno de mañana: la invención del cine cubano independiente (2001-2015) (The Government of Tomorrow: The Brainchild of Independent Cuban Cinema [2001-2015]) (2020). 

[1]See Michael Chanan: The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba, Indiana University Press, 1986.

[2]See Rufo Caballero and Joel del Río: “No hay cine adulto sin herejía sistemática” (“There can be no adult films without systematic heresy”), Temas, n.o 3, La Habana, July-September 1995.

[3]This is a reality that the mega-showcase Land Without Images: The Absent in Cuban Cinema, curated by José Luis Aparicio as part of artivist organization Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR)’s participation in Documenta Fifteen (Kassel, Alemania, 2022), put on display.

[4] See Rafael Rojas: Breve historia de la censura y otros ensayos sobre cultura y poder en Cuba [A Brief History of Censorship and Other Essays on Culture and Power in Cuba], Rialta Ediciones, Santiago de Querétaro, 2023.

[5] Ibídem, p. 50.

[6]  See Hamid Naficy: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton University Press, 2001.