In recent years in Cuba, there has been a revived interest in the work of Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938-2003). In 2003, the year Guillén Landrián died in Miami, in Havana filmmaker Manuel Zayas made a documentary about him, Café con leche (2003), produced by the Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano’s film and television school, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión. Soon afterward, the scholar of Cuban film culture Dean Luis Reyes wrote what is, to date, the most complete essay about Guillén Landrián, published in the book La mirada bajo asedio (The Viewpoint Under Siege) (2010). In 2013, Raydel Araoz and Julio Ramos directed the documentary Retornar a La Habana con Guillén Landrián (Returning to Havana with Guillén Landrián), an extended interview with the filmmaker’s widow Gretel Alfonso in an attempt to reconstruct his life between Havana and Miami. [1] Lastly, it is important to mention the documentary Landrián (2023) by Ernesto Daranas, which recently premiered at the Venice Biennale.
These examinations of Guillén Landrián’s films are framed by the new generation of Cuban filmmakers’ re-reading of the documentarian’s work in the sixties and seventies, as well as the emergence of a new poetics of film that does not hide its indebtedness to this legacy. What does this new examination seek in works rooted in a visual tradition associated with PM by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá Cabrera Infante and Gente en la playa (People on the Beach) by Néstor Almendros? How should we think about this archaeological endeavor from the vantage point of 21st-century cinematographic culture? There is an evident attempt to establish Guillén Landrián’s work as a reference point for the new “reflective documentary” style on the Island, apart from the archaeological purpose of recovering a film aesthetic erased by the official archive. [2]
What attracts 21st-century Cuban audiovisual culture to Guillén Landrián is a cluster of different ideas. On the one hand, there is a vanguardist expressiveness and style in the filmmaker’s documentaries that is seductive in the way it contrasts with the technical conventionalism characteristic of most contemporary films produced on the Island. The filmmaker Jorge Luis Sánchez and the critic Dean Luis Reyes have shown that, even beginning with his first short films, En un barrio viejo (In an Old Neighborhood) (1963) and Los del baile (The Dancers) (1965), Guillén Landrián invoked the more experimental and innovative films of the sixties, influenced by Bazin’s realism, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the Brazilian cinema novo, the free cinema movement, cinéma vérité, and direct cinema. [3]
We do not know if Guillén Landrián read essays about the film Kino-Eye (1924) or the diaries of Dziga Vertov, but he was undoubtedly familiar with the Polish-Russian vanguardist’s book by the same title. Francisco Llinás’ translation of Vertov’s texts, published by Fundamentos in Madrid, was very popular in Ibero-American circles interested in cinéma vérité and “cámara viva” (“living camera”) in the sixties and seventies. [4] Vertov considered the Kinok cinematic style and its practitioners, the Kinoks, protagonists of a cinematographic revolution that was actually creating a profession or vocation distinct from that of a filmmaker. [5]
One of Vertov’s interests was in capturing, through live footage, the birth of a “new man” in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution. A birth that inevitably had to portray the “unwieldiness and clumsiness” of the old “bourgeois man” and even the hybridizations of the old and the modern that arise during the larval state of the nascent social subject. [6]
Vertov said:
The present film [Kino-Eye] represents an assault on our reality by the cameras and prepares the theme of creative labor against a background of class contradictions and everyday life. In disclosing the origins of objects and bread, the camera makes it possible for every worker to acquire, through evidence, the conviction that he, the worker, creates all these things himself, and that consequently they belong to him. [7]
This stylistic orientation, updated by sixties vanguardist film movements, was evident in Guillén Landrián’s work; the constant succession of close-ups of children and adults looking off into the distance that, combined with abrupt transitions in the background music, transmit a mixture of restlessness and melancholy. Guillén Landrián’s documentary-style chronicles, including Ociel del Toa (Ociel of the Toa) (1965), Reportaje (Reportage) (1966), and Retornar a Baracoa (Returning to Baracoa) (1966), utilized these vanguardist cinematographic devices to tell the story of revolutionary transformation as a rupture that engendered violence against its subject, especially in rural areas of the country. Guillén Landrián’s view of the revolutionary modernization process shared the same tones of trembling and unease evident in other testimonies from the era, such as Celestino antes del alba (Singing from the Well) by Reinaldo Arenas, some of the poetry collections published by El Puente, [8] or books about the Island of Pinos and Baracoa by leftist American travelers like Leroy McLucas, Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, and José Yglesias. [9]
Like the Russian revolution in the twenties and the Mexican revolution in the thirties, the Cuban revolution led to a socialist modernization process that removed the traditional enclaves of Catholic, bourgeois, and liberal culture from the prior republican period. Guillén Landrián shared with the writers of his generation, as well as the filmmakers of the prior generation like Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the view that this modernization process entailed a social fracture where the revolutionary power imposed a new political order through violence, absolutism, and the very same tactics used by the previous regime, like racism, machismo, and homophobia. [10]
There are moments in the writing of poets published by El Puente, for example in La marcha de los hurones (The March of the Loners) (1960) by Isel Rivero or La conquista (The Conquest) (1960) and De la espera y el silencio (From Waiting and Silence) (1961) by José Mario, that exposed this fracture. Instead of unity, conviction, or enthusiasm, these poets spoke about “separation,” “loneliness,” and “resistance.” [11] The Revolution could be a “rupture by an ideal” or even the “pain that hides where one is not free,” but it was always a socially and politically combative sort of revolution. [12] As in Vertov’s poetics of film, the class struggle was still alive and well after the Revolution: nothing was farther from socialist modernization than the supposed post-classist harmony of Stalinism. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, this was one of the clearest differences between Leninism and Stalinism: under Lenin, the authorities openly admitted to using terror as a tactic, while under Stalin, terror became a dark and obscene supplement to the political discourse that was never publicly acknowledged. [13]
Guillén Landrián’s poetics of film moved from a visual documentation of this fracture to a more decided questioning of the Cuban government’s modernization efforts, beginning in 1968, which coincided with the overt alignment of the Island’s cultural authorities with the Soviet model. His documentary essays Coffea Arábiga (1968) and Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar (From Havana: 1969! Remember) (1969) transcend the textuality of chronicle or reportage while introducing a delirious and, at times, psychedelic discourse that put the rationale of the socialist State and its leaders in their place. Even though in 1971 Guillén Landrián would return to journalistic storytelling, in the film Taller de Línea y 18 (Garage on the Corner of Línea and 18th), the threshold of representation had been crossed by a more tangible reflection of the filmmaker’s subjectivity, which was moving toward questioning revolutionary reasoning.
Guillén Landrián, along with the “Generación del 68” [14] in Europe and the Americas, justifiably grouped together Reason, Revolution, and Modernity, which challenged the Cold War’s black-and-white or binary partition of the world. Like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School in Germany, and the Tel Quel group in France, the documentarian inscribed the state socialism that was being constructed in Cuba—and based on the Soviet model—within the same process of political reification of Western rationalism. The fetishization of reason and progress that had reached its peak with the atomic bomb did not exclude the megalomaniacal projects of real socialism, whose presence in Cuba were palpable in the Cordón de La Habana, [15] the Zafra de los 10 Millones [16] in the seventies, and the charismatic messianism centered around the figure of Fidel Castro.
Like Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas, or the writers of El Puente, Guillén Landrián sketched his own portrait of the Stalinization of Cuban socialism. A sketch that would make Cuba an comprehensible space for the modernization project, in its most instrumental and developmentalist form during the Cold War. Guillén Landrián’s film essays would be a protest against the closing of that Weberian iron cage, made up of bureaucracy and mythomania, capitalism and communism, that appealed to portraying drugs, psychedelics, insanity, sexuality, religion, and rock as the irrational and repressed backgrounds of the new socialist order. Guillén Landrián’s politics of representation converged in the generation-wide exploration of the limits of the technocratic rationalism that castrated the emancipatory and utopian impulses of the counterculture. [17]
Within Cuban film culture in the sixties, Guillén Landrián’s work stands out for being situated in a specific flank that criticized pro-Soviet socialist developmentalism. In general, the questioning of this model was associated with criticism of socialism’s institutional bureaucratization, a type of criticism best expressed in fictional and documentary form by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Santiago Álvarez. Both filmmakers, but above all Gutiérrez Alea, personified using film to refute the Cuban system’s movement toward real socialism, which kept the figure of Fidel Castro safe and contrasted a heterodox and originalist idea of the Cuban Revolution against a dogmatic distortion, influenced by contact with the Soviet bloc. Guillén Landrián avoided these nuances and confirmed an organic assimilation of Communist modernization from the Cold War that Herbert Marcuse laid out in his book Soviet Marxism (1958). [18]
If in Dialéctica del espectador (The Viewer Dialectic) (1982), Gutiérrez Alea asserted that the artistry and spectacle of cinema impedes films from being subjected to an aesthetic straitjacket to make them fit into an “ideal reality” preconceived by ideology or politics, Guillén Landrián’s starting point was to ironize political discourses through art, leaving behind such preconceptions. [19] “Identification” and “distancing,” incubated from the Aristotelian tradition all the way to the social realism of Brechtian dramaturgy, while pillars of the modern strategy of representation, were deliberately abandoned by the documentarian. The premises of the creator of Ociel del Toa had less to do with the dilemmas of learned enlightenment than with a rebellion against the encrático (produced under the protection of the powers that be) rationalism that critical film culture upheld.
The rejection of developmentalism was either anti-bureaucratic, as with Gutiérrez Alea and Santiago Álvarez, or it was Third-worldist and decolonizing, in the sense of how Edmundo Desnoes, author of the novel and the script for Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) (1968), interpreted the work of Wifredo Lam. [20] But it rarely led to a central questioning of the modernizing rationale promoted by state socialism, as in the work of Guillén Landrián. This quality lent an angle of insurgence or iconographic rebellion to Guillén Landrián’s poetics of film; while this rebellion offered alternatives to the official image of power, it proposed a “sovereignty of invisibility,” similar to the one suggested by Carlos Ossa in his study of political cinema in Latin America. [21]
Facing the persistent construction of the collective subject—the masses, the people, the nation, “social organizations”—as the motor behind history and politics, Guillén Landrián put forth delirium and the toxicity of personal memory as places of enunciation. In his documentaries, there is a reading of Cuban political reality in the sixties and of the entire modern history of the Island that offers an alternative platform to understand the national or revolutionary “being.” An autonomous “visual strategy,” as Ossa writes, that is nevertheless inscribed in the community connections that created vanguardist political cinema in Latin America during the sixties and seventies. [22]
In Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar, for example, the filmmaker attempted to create a historical collage of the Cuban experience ten years after the Revolution that would encapsulate both a single decade and an entire century of modern national life. Preceded by a quote from the lyrics of the song “Mother Nature’s Son” by the Beatles, the Island’s historical milestones, condensed in Fidel Castro’s hegemonic tale of “hundred years of struggle” (wars of independence, American occupation, dictatorships of Machado and Batista, the attack on the Moncada barracks, the deaths of Che Guevara and Jesús Menéndez, the disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos…), follow each other in quick succession like flashes in a never-ending light show of power. But at the same time, the personal recollection of the documentarian did not hide the transfer of technology brought about by the connection to the Soviet Union or the forced herd mentality of revolutionary projects.
The tension between a revolutionary process inscribed in the leftist and nationalist or populist paradigm, in Latin American and the Caribbean in the middle of the 20th century, and an accelerated process of institutionalization based on the Soviet model, during the Cold War, is reflected in the text of Guillén Landrián’s films. Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar is a long interrogation into this transition; in fact, question marks constantly appear on screen, and the questions “What?” and “Why?” are reiterated when it comes to the Cordón de La Habana or the moon landing, which culminates in the superimposed voices of Nicolás Guillén and Fidel Castro. While the filmmaker reads his poem “Elegía a Jesús Menéndez” (“Elegy to Jesús Menéndez”), the Cuban leader reads his farewell letter to Che Guevara. The deaths of both men confirm the mutation of the national political project, and Guillén Landrián mixes in, during these final scenes, the voices of the dead—Guevara, Cienfuegos, Menéndez…—with those of the living—Guillén Landrián and Fidel—who represent, at the same time, two incarnations of the father figure.
Here there is a poetics and a politics of memory that highlights, once again, the role of mourning in any process of modernization, whether it be liberal or Marxist. Reinhart Koselleck has referred to this connection in a book about the cult of the dead and national memory in modern Germany. [23] Koselleck observes that in every transition toward modernity, there is a functional use of the representation of death in favor of the survivors, which generates a constant feeling of mourning. [24] This mechanism facilitates, at the same time, the capture of politics by affect and emotion, providing the State and its leaders with an inherited power over the collective psychology and national culture. Guillén Landrián’s documentaries expose, like few other artistic documents from the sixties and seventies, this relationship between mourning and politics in Cuba.
There is a poetics of memory in these films that expose the weight of the historical in the political construction of Cuban socialism. The Revolution called into question the entire history of Cuba and the Island’s place in the world. It was a change in space and time that disrupted the country’s geographical and cultural coordinates. From there, many current rituals—Fidel’s speeches, televised and print propaganda, the lists of the day’s anniversaries, the civic calendar, flowers for Camilo, the symbolic name for each year—appeared as ciphers of a new temporality.
The filmmaker warned that the “discontinuity of memory”, as Koselleck called it, had been broken with the Revolution. [25] This break did not entail a perennial anchoring in a negative representation of the past, like the one reproduced by State-run media, but rather an interrogation of the present as the assumed ending or resolution of Cuba’s history.
Guillén Landrián filmed people waiting in never-ending lines and apathetic and helpless faces, and he spliced in basic and uncomfortable questions directed at official triumphalism. All of this was surrounded by a specific moment in official discourse in Havana in the late seventies, where the banning of the Beatles added to a environment marked by growing intolerance and repression of the counterculture, as seen in the photo series My Sixties by José Figueroa, which portrays the hippie youth in El Vedado, [26] identified by Cristina Vives as one of many signs of cultural resistance against socialism’s civil homogenization process. [27] Guillén Landrián’s entire body of work is situated within this iconic subversion, a Cuban 1968 countering the advance of the aesthetic canon of socialist realism on the Island.
Several passages in Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) that Guillén Landrián inserted into Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar functioned as part of the balance of the sixties as well as an acknowledgement of belonging to an artistic film community that shared the same sense of malaise caused by the encroaching orthodox State-sanctioned ideology about Cuban culture. Guillén Landrián situated his own documentary films in the tradition of criticism of the official iconocracy—to use Iván de la Nuez’s term—of the Cuban government, founded in large part by Gutiérrez Alea in Memorias del subdesarrollo, but that, in reality, got started years earlier with PM by Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal and in Néstor Almendros’ first short films. [28] In any case, Guillén Landrián’s early homage to Gutiérrez Alea was a sign of aesthetic and political identity that came before the logic of reception of revolutionary cinema that later generations of Cuban filmmakers have espoused.
A good indicator of this is the proposed re-reading of contemporary documentary films in Cuba, as demonstrated in the film sampler Cine sumergido (Submerged Cinema) (2013), promoted by the academics Luis Duno-Gottberg and Michael J. Horswell, that circulated in 2014 among different universities in the United States. [29] The documentary essay approach of young filmmakers like Damián Sainz, Laimir Fano, Armando Capó, and Adrián Replansky show a poetics of film that has an undeniable precedent in the work of Guillén Landrián. In recent years, the documentarian’s film Coffea Arábiga has been a frequently visited place in the archive of cultural resistance in Cuba as well as an example of the limits of experimentation and vanguardism in the sixties.
The youngest Cuban filmmakers’ innovation in form vindicates the poetics of artistic or auteur filmmaking, in opposition to the commercial paradigm. Nevertheless, this gesture, prevalent in reflexive documentary filmmaking, also avoids the most common technical and stylistic resources of Guillén Landrián’s generation of vanguardist cinematography. The rejection of depoliticization in Cuban intellectual thought that has appeared across different tactical platforms over the last three decades clearly points toward the place of enunciation in the new digital and technological era, which influences the reading of these artistic documents that are relegated to the shadows of official discourse.
Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar began with direct images of the explosions of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, situating the viewer in the context of the Cold War or, more specifically, in the reality of a world under the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Island’s new documentary essays update Guillén Landrián’s localization of the Island’s storyline within the global order, which transcends peripheral demarcations like those of the Third World, developing countries, or central geographies like the West or modernity. The new Cuban documentary fights for a reinvention of cultural space, one that encompasses the Island, the diaspora, and the world that is collapsed, inside and out, by both communities, which are one, two, and several all at once and whose ritual of choice is to make the submerged visible.

Rafael Rojas holds a PhD in History from El Colegio de México, where he is a professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos. He is the editor of the magazine Historia Mexicana and a member of the Mexican academy of history, Academia Mexicana de la Historia. He is a contributor to the Spanish newspaper El País and a member of the editorial board of the magazine Letras Libres. His latest book is La epopeya del sentido. Ensayos sobre el concepto de Revolución en México (The Epopee of Meaning: Essays About the Concept of Revolution in Mexico) (2022).

[1] Julio Ramos: “Regresar a La Habana con Guillén Landrián. Entrevista a Gretel Alfonso”, La Fuga, n.o 15, Santiago de Chile, 2013, <http://www.lafuga.cl/regresar-a-la-habana-con-guillen-landrian/662>.

[2] Dean Luis Reyes: La mirada bajo asedio. El documental reflexivo cubano (The Viewpoint Under Siege: The Cuban Reflective Documentary), Editorial Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, 2010, pp. 107-149.

[3] Ibidem, p. 19.

[4] Dziga Vertov: El cine ojo (The Kino-Eye), Fundamentos, Madrid, 1973, pp. 9-10. (Translator’s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author’s references to this 1973 Spanish translation of Vertov’s work, not direct quotations of an English translation of said work.)

[5] Ibidem, p. 15.

[6] Ibidem, p. 17.

[7] Ibidem, p. 44. (Translator’s note: this extended quote in English is not my translation, but rather taken from p. 34 of Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, translated by Kevin O’Brien and edited by Annette Michelson, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.)

[8] Translator’s note: a post-revolution literary project that faced repression from the Cuban government.

[9] For more about the critical strategy of some of these viewpoints, somewhere between solidarity and dissidence, see Rafael Rojas: Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015, pp. 195-219.

[10] See Alejandro de la Fuente: A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba , The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2001; Lillian Guerra: Visions of Power in Cuba. Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012, pp. 227-255; Abel Sierra Madero: “El trabajo os hará hombres. Masculinización nacional, trabajo forzado y control social en Cuba durante los años 60” (“National Masculinization, Forced Labor, and Social Control in Cuba in the 60s”), Cuban Studies, vol. 44, Pittsburgh University, 2016, pp. 309-349.

[11] Jesús J. Barquet (ed.): Ediciones El Puente en La Habana de los años 60. Lecturas críticas y libros de poesía (Ediciones El Puente in Havana in the 60s: Critical Readings and Poetry Books), Ediciones del Azar, Chihuahua, México, 2011, pp. 183 y 250. (Translator’s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author’s quotations of this work.)

[12] Ibidem, pp. 182 y 198.

[13] Slavoj Žižek: Repeating Lenin, Zagreb, Arkzin, 2002.

[14] Translator’s note: a vanguardist movement of experimental writers.

[15] Translator’s note: the Cuban government’s proposed agricultural greenbelt around the city of Havana.

[16] Translator’s note: the Cuban government’s proposed goal of producing 10 million tons of sugar in 1970.

[17] Theodore Roszak: The Making of a Counterculture, The University of California Press, San Francisco, 1995, pp. 164-170. Before Roszak, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker had called attention to the ability of Hollywood films to deactivate the ethics of liberation via a “Dream Factory.” See Hortense Powdermaker: Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, Little, Brown, Hollywood, CA, 1950.

[18] Herbert Marcuse: Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 1958.

[19] Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: Dialéctica del espectador (The Viewer Dialectic), Ediciones Unión, Havana, 1982, pp. 39-52. (Translator’s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author’s quotations of this work.)

[20] Edmundo Desnoes: Lam: azul y negro (Lam: Blue and Black), Casa de las Américas, Havana, 1963, p. 19; Edmundo Desnoes: Punto de vista (Point of View), Cocuyo, Havana, 1967, pp. 59-97.

[21] Carlos Ossa: El ojo mecánico. Cine político y comunidad en América Latina (The Mechanical Eye: Political Cinema and Community in Latin America), Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 2013, pp. 91-104. (Translator’s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author’s quotations of this work.)

[22] Ibidem, pp. 138-152.

[23] Reinhart Koselleck: Modernidad, culto a la muerte y memoria nacional (Modernity, Cult of the Dead, and National Memory), Centro de Estudios Constitucionales y Políticos, Madrid, 2011, pp. LIV-LXV. (Translator’s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author’s quotations of this work.)

[24] Ibidem, pp. 69-87.

[25] Ibidem, pp. 39-52. For more about the role of affect in Cuban Culture, see José Quiroga: Cuban Palimpsests, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005, pp. 197-204; and Rafael Rojas: Tumbas sin sosiego. Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano (Tombs Without Rest: Resolution, Dissidence, and Exile of the Cuban Intellectual), Anagrama, Barcelona, 2006, pp. 11-44.

[26] Translator’s note: a neighborhood in Havana.

[27] Cristina Vives: “Cultura y contracultura en tiempos de Revolución” (“Culture and Counterculture in Times of Revolution”), Arte Cubano, n.o 2, Havana, 2013; José Figueroa: José Figueroa. Un autorretrato cubano / A Cuban Self-Portrait, Turner, Madrid, 2010.

[28] Iván de la Nuez: Iconocracia. Imagen del poder y poder de las imágenes en la Cuba contemporánea (Iconocracy: Images of Power and the Power of Images in Contemporary Cuba), Turner, Madrid, 2015, pp. 7-15.

[29] Luis Duno-Gottberg and Michael J. Horswell: Sumergido/Submerged: Cine Alternativo Cubano/Alternative Cuban Cinema, Literal Publishing, Mexico City, 2013.