Background: “El cine de Nicolasito está escapao” 

I am referring to this phrase, which means “Nicolasito’s films are out of this world,” merely to point out that part of their escape (being “escapao”) [2] is due to their genius. And their return is also an escape. 

After spending a few years collecting dust in the archives, the films of Nicolás Guillén Landrián (also known as “Nicolasito”) began to be seen again at the beginning of the current century. More than one critic has recognized the importance of this moment for contemporary Cuban cinema. [3] Without a doubt, the return of Guillén Landrián’s films is perhaps the most significant event in Cuban cinema since the fall of socialism. It is itself an escape that has incited a variety of ways of fleeing, staying, and returning among new Cuban filmmakers, who started to make films after the Special Period of economic crisis in Cuba in the mid-1990s. I am highlighting this event not only to reaffirm what other critics have pointed out, which is Guillén Landrián’s significant influence on new filmmakers, but also to encourage reflection on Cuban cinema’s new coordinates based on the processes of escape and return. 

I use Nicolasito’s films as a starting point since their thematic and formal elements proceed from an escape that questions the revolutionary scripts and the epic focus of films sponsored by the Cuban film institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos – ICAIC), a similar questioning present in much of recent Cuban audiovisual art made both inside and outside Cuba. This cinema contemplates the return of images depicting the reality in Cuba that, for a long time, were exiled from the cinematic imaginaries of the Revolution. If Guillén Landrián’s images bring anything to the reflection on current and future Cuban cinema, it is precisely their insistence on the importance of doubt as well as with their movement in and out of exile, which is a parallel to the processes of escape and return. 

Curiosity about the escapes and returns of Nicolasito’s films encourages important questions for Cuban filmmakers working today, both on the Island and in other parts of the world: What imaginaries of escape and return is contemporary Cuban cinema creating? To what places and events is 21st-century Cuban cinema returning? What paths is it avoiding? What are its new routes? What conditions does Cuban cinema today imagine that will make returning, staying, and fleeing possible? 

One of the consequences of the Cuban Revolution has been the vast number of people that have been displaced from the Island for political or economic reasons. There is no doubt that these human movements, these escapes and expulsions, leave their mark on audiovisual art, a medium based on the reproduction of moving images. Taking into account the displacement of Cuban cinema and its creators, about which many critics have written,[4] we must ask ourselves: Under what conditions is Cuban cinema today returning to Cuba, to its institutions, to its stories, to the eyes and ears of the Cuban people and the rest of the world, and, finally, to the new social, cultural, and political realities that can incubate new stories in the event that the country experiences a regime change? I do not intend to offer an exhaustive answer to these questions. What I intend to do is try to follow the trail of several recent Cuban films, including some currently in production, to suggest two theses about contemporary Cuban cinema’s escapes and returns. 

First thesis: Currently, the archive constitutes one of the primary ways in which contemporary Cuban cinema imagines its escapes and returns. 

The transition from analog to digital media has facilitated revisiting film archives and critically scrutinizing them. [5] This transition has dramatically transformed the function of the ICAIC: the most notable moments for the institution in current times have to do less with its role as a production house, distributor, and exhibitor of films and more with the fact that it is a repository of images of the Cuban Revolution that, in one way or another, have entered the global public sphere, crossing localities, national borders, and regional flows. The return of Nicolasito could be considered key to this process. His films, which successfully make use of archival footage, had to be rescued from the shelf, much like what has happened with many other Cuban cultural icons who are contributing to the rethinking of the politics of memory on the Island. [6] 

The intersectional way the images from the ICAIC archives circulate has opened them up to critical examination and being remixed with other images and archival footage, eroding the univocality that these images held in so many past representations of the Cuban revolution. We can verify this archive fever in Cuba, la Bella (Cuba the Beautiful) (Ricardo Vega, 1997), created with fragments from the ICAIC news service; Entropía (Entropy) (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2013), composed of images taken from El Paquete Semanal; [7] and Landrián (Ernesto Daranas, 2023), which examines the archives of the filmmaker from Camagüey. 

Some of the ICAIC archives have come to light after being liberated from secrecy, stirring up nightmares like the misleadingly named Quinquenio Gris (the Gray Years), [8] exemplified by El caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair) (Pavel Giroud, 2022). The film sets a scene where the viewer listens to recordings of public confessions filmed in a scheme devised by the Cuban State Security Agency and is invited to decipher what is being said between the lines. In Giroud’s documentary, a hidden spectral power is always watching, as it is rumored that these images from the ICAIC were destined for none other than the eyes and ears of “el comandante” (Fidel Castro), whose ghostly presence is felt and made tangible through the repetitive hounding of mea culpa rituals. By bringing archival footage from the ICAIC to the screen as a performance by the State Security Agencies, El caso Padilla contributes to the effort, as discussed by Cuban poet Antonio José Ponte, [9] to bring visibility to the violence the Cuban government commits against dissidents; it also functions as a film adaptation of Ponte’s confession as recounted in his book La mala memoria (Bad Memory) (1989). 

Utilizing polyphonic assemblages in his series of films inspired by Antonio Benítez Rojo’s essay La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island) (1989), Eliecer Jiménez Almeida immerses us in the soundscapes of revolutionary Cuba to create a listening experience where the voices are of Cubans living in Miami. The timbre of the voices of Fidel and Raúl Castro are added to the political crackling of the Cold War and its aftermath, accentuating the experience of a national history as an acoustic, bilingual, border-crossing chaos that cannot be relayed if the voices of exile are left out. 

The passion for discovering other audiovisual collections that do not belong to the ICAIC creates new uses for archival footage among Cuban filmmakers. The use of archival documents and images in productions about Ciudad Nuclear [10] in Cienfuegos establishes a dialogue that reconsiders the roles and uses of the archive in recent Cuban cinema. In the cases of Natalia Nikolaevna (Adrián Silvestre and Luis Alejandro Yero, 2014) and La bahía (The Bay) (Alessandra Santiesteban and Ricardo Sarmiento, 2018), the question of the archive is put forth as a representation of documents; on the other hand, in E=MC2 (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2013) and La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century) (Carlos Quintela, 2015), the use of archival audiovisual materials poses questions about the relationship between the archive and memory, power, censorship, the reinterpretation of the past, and the matter of the future. These films mobilize nuclear archives to release a new type of energy, one that questions the past and rethinks the exhaustion of Cuban revolutionary utopian discourse and the future of the archives. As portrayed in Quintela’s film, the fictional Ciudad Nuclear represents an alternative, catastrophic, postapocalyptic future that has nothing in common with the promising future suggested by the Tele Nuclear images filmed in the 1980s, when the “project of the century” was being built.

Second thesis: Cuban cinema, even when it explores the reality in Cuba, should be examined taking into account its condition of foreignness.

In Inside Downtown (Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Jorge Egusquiza, 2001) as well as Café con leche (Manuel Zayas, 2003) and El fin pero no es el fin (The End But It’s Not the End) (Jorge Egusquiza and Víctor Rodolfo Jiménez, 2005), Nicolasito himself, with his French-like air, returns with all of his foreignness in order to tell the story of his life and work between Cuba and Miami. His final return to the Island takes a turn toward funereal courtship in Retornar a la Habana con Guillén Landrián (Returning to Havana with Guillén Landrián) (Raydel Araoz and Julio Ramos, 2013).

Instead of thinking about it as a national cinema, I find it more productive to think about contemporary Cuban cinema as a type of cinema whose escapes and returns are related to its condition of foreignness. During the Cold War, Cuban filmmakers traveled to other parts of the world to film conflicts between capitalism and socialism, but that experience of international solidarity with countries like Vietnam and Chile has very little to do with a close inspection of the routes that Cuban-ness travels in the contemporary world. While foreign filmmakers’ perspectives about the reality in Cuba abounded during the Special Period, since then many Cuban filmmakers have left the country, finding themselves forced to forge the paths that would constitute their reality in other parts of the world. This process of exodus, which has been increasing since the beginning of the 2020s when the Cuban regime relaxed its migration laws, has encouraged Cuban filmmakers to reflect on and respond to this condition of foreignness. 

In some films, the exploration of foreignness is linked to a staging of archival images captured in Cuba by foreign filmmakers. In the case of Untitled: Cuba en el ojo de Rick Ray (Untitled: Cuba in the Eyes of Rick Ray) (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2024), a film that has been completed but not yet released, the director samples archival images of Cuba in the Special Period taken by American filmmaker Rick Ray to present an autobiographical story from that time that contrasts with the events captured by Ray’s camera. Jiménez Almeida appropriates the foreigner’s gaze to accentuate the estrangement that the Cuban narrator feels during everyday rituals whose visual documentation cannot capture the complex dynamics of hunger, sickness, and death that were a very real part of the Cuban experience during the Special Period. The first-person narration is a testimony that offers a partial and alternative answer to the enigmas of a reality that foreign eyes capture with a certain evocative grace, but perhaps quite superficially. The gulf between the story narrated by a Cuban man and the footage taken by a foreign filmmaker amplifies the polysemic nature of these images that never were meant to be more than panoramic views and filler for a remote and marketable reality. The private nature of these commercial images, available as merchandise for sale (stock images), finds new meaning when the Cuban filmmaker agrees to buy them to be able to tell the story of his personal experiences. In this way, Jiménez Almeida’s film, perhaps without meaning to, is a commentary on the commercialization of Cuban memory since the Special Period, as it portrays how not even the memories from that time are exempt from monetary exchange; the very act of remembering depends on the transactions of buying and selling.

In the documentary A media voz (In a Whisper) (Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez Fernández, 2019), two Cuban filmmakers dip into their personal archives in exile to create an epistolary dialogue about time, which is experienced as a sort of foreignness of the past, present, and future. The longed-for return to Cuba and to filmmaking becomes more and more elusive as it intersects with the melancholy left behind by the collapse of the society in which these filmmakers grew up. The foreignness of the future is experienced up close and personal in an exile that accentuates the landscape of alternate lives that do not coincide with the futures they dreamed of for themselves, their friends, or their community. To hear one’s own foreignness in the voice of another, “in a whisper,” gives us a turn, albeit incomplete, to speak; it creates distance from the feigned self-sufficiency of those who put Cuba into words from a place of revolutionary univocality and an authoritarian and nationalist perspective. The stories of these two women who cannot have children invite us to rethink how Cuban film can return to the Island from the diaspora: the repatriation of images, as it would be called in international relations jargon about the trafficking of cultural artifacts. Perhaps a differentiated approach to listening, in a whisper, like words meant to wound or to comfort, could lead us to ask: What would it mean to rematriate or dematriate the voices of Cuban exile in the 21st century?

Another way of exploring foreignness in contemporary Cuban cinema is by recognizing its current condition as a multilingual cinema. For a while now, several Cuban filmmakers, in films that have already been released—Los lobos del este (The Wolves of the East) (Carlos Quintela, 2017)—or currently in production—Life and Death in Kasensero (Ernesto Sánchez Valdés), tell stories about human beings that inhabit the world in other spaces and other languages. These films escape the internationalist imaginary that was prevalent in Cuba during the Cold War, when many filmmakers were content to reduce the other to a geopolitical pawn in the global chess game among the superpowers. Perhaps the voice of the other is heard subconsciously, and those echoes send a new auditory experience back to Cuban cinema. This new way of listening interrupts the monolingualism of an authoritarian regime characterized by an oversaturation of timbres and discourses. What do these insistently foreign soundtracks send back to the Cuban people? Perhaps very few points of return, but at the same time, an infinite number of starting points. This deterritorialization of Cuban cinema, embodied by the vocal cords of other residents of the globe, leaves us with the sensation that the relationships between the Island and the diaspora, the nation and the rest of the world, Cubans and their neighbors, are more and more uncertain every day, which means we will have to renounce being trapped in an island bubble, in an earthly certainty. In other words, if Cuban cinema “está escapao,” [11] along with Nicolasito in Lawton or in Venice, in days past or days to come, it is because it still manages, even today, to disturb the unsuspecting viewer that insists on the fixed nature of meaning. 

Juan Carlos Rodríguez received a PhD in Latin American Studies from Duke University. He is an associate professor at Georgia Tech. He is the co-editor of the essay collection New Documentaries in Latin America (Palgrave, 2014) and the book series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, for the University Press of Florida. He is working on a project titled “Cinematic Ruinologies: Cuba, Documentary and the Ambiguous Rhetoric of Decay”.

[1] Translator’s note: The phrase “está escapao” is a Cuban expression in Spanish that describes something or someone as extraordinary, in the manner of saying something or someone is “out of this world” or “one of a kind” in English.  The literal meaning of the verb “escapar” is to escape, so the literal meaning of the participle “escapado” (“escapao” in colloquial pronunciation) is “escaped.”

[2] Translator’s note: See footnote 1.

[3] See Reyes, Dean Luis: La mirada bajo asedio. El documental reflexivo cubano (The Viewpoint Under Siege: The Cuban Reflective Documentary), Editorial Oriente, 2012; J. L. Sánchez: Romper la tensión del arco: Movimiento cubano de cine documental (Breaking the Tension of the Arc: Cuban Documentary Film Movement), Ediciones ICAIC, Havana, 2010; Ruth Goldberg: “Under the Surface of the Image: Cultural Narrative, Symbolic Landscapes, and National Identity in the Films of Jorge de León and Armando Capó”, in V. Navarro and J. C. Rodríguez (eds.): New Documentaries in Latin America, Palgrave, New York, 2014; J. Ramos, and D. Robbins (eds.): Guillén Landrián o el desconcierto fílmico (Guillén Landrián, or Cinematic Unease), Almenara Press, Leiden, 2018. 

[4] See Dunja Fehimovic: National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema: Screening the Repeating Island, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Laura-Zoë Humphreys: Fidel Between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham and Londres, 2019. 

[5] See J. Barron: The Archival Effect: Found Footage and the Archival Experience of History, Routledge, New York, 2014; C. Russell: Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, Durham, 2018. 

[6] See Rafael Rojas: Tumbas sin sosiego: Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano (Graves Without Resting in Peace: The Revolution, Dissent, and Exile of Cuban Intellectuals), Anagrama, Barcelona, 2006. 

[7] Translator’s note: El Paquete Semanal is a collection of digital material distributed in Cuba since 2008 as a substitute for broadband Internet.

[8] Translator’s note: The Gray Years were a period of intense cultural repression in Cuba in the 1970s.

[9] See Antonio José Ponte: Villa Marista en Plata (Villa Marista in Silver), Editorial Colibrí, Madrid, 2010.

[10]  Translator’s note: Ciudad Nuclear is a half-built Soviet nuclear power plant whose construction halted with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992.

[11] Translator’s note: See footnote 1.