Women dreaming a nation
By Mariana Martínez Bonilla – december 7th, 2023
LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE
'Women Dreaming of a Nation' (2022), the most recent documentary by Cuban filmmaker Fernando Fraguela, is presented as part of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, founded and directed by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera. This year, the main focus of its curatorship is on the transnational character of contemporary Cuban cinema. In the screenings, which will take place at various international venues from December 4 to 10, the festival presents a series of feature and short films (both Cuban and foreign) that address the tensions involved in living in countries with totalitarian regimes.
This film by Fraguela, winner of the Best Documentary Award at the Malaga Film Festival for 'The Abattoir' (2021), narrates the events that took place in Cuba following the civil uprisings organized by the San Isidro Movement (MSI) in response to the enforcement of Decree 349, which regulates artistic and cultural activities in the country. Said decree was implemented after a group of Cuban artists, cultural managers, and theorists independently organized the 00 Havana Biennial in May 2018. In the face of such an initiative, the Cuban government decided to censor and repress the activities of the Biennial, but also all those developed by various cultural agents considered as opposition to the regime.
The consequences of the decree's implementation, on the other hand, were met with the participation of MSI members in various protests and complaints in the form of performances, film festivals (Celuloide Quemao), the writing and signing of manifestos, and poetry festivals, among many other activities. The Cuban state's response to the Movement's initiatives has constantly violated the human rights of its members, depriving them of their freedom and subjecting them to various forms of harassment and repression.
One of the most paradigmatic examples of this was the arrest of rapper Denis Solis on November 9, 2020, exactly one month after the Movement's headquarters in Havana was raided for alleged contempt of authority after releasing a video on social media in which an alleged police officer entered his house without a warrant. Following this arrest, MSI members organized a series of protests, considered acts of peaceful civic resistance. They were seeking a dialogue with the authorities of the Cuban Ministry of Culture. After allowing 20 representatives of the Movement to express their concerns and demands, the government implemented various campaigns of repression that were documented by the protesters.
'Women Dreaming of a Nation' recovers the testimonies of three women who participated in the events that led to the MSI strike (the creation of the 27N movement, the social outbreak of 11J, and the civic march of 15N), which included the hunger strike of some of its members and started as a result of the protests against the arbitrary sentence imposed on Denis Solis. However, the underlying issues were the constant threats and repression, along with the economic changes imposed by the Cuban government.
Thus, Daniela Rojo, mother, artist, and self-taught poet; Katherine Bisquet, writer and poet; and Anamely Ramos, university professor of art theory and history, star in this documentary. They narrate the implications and urgencies of the civil movement of organized resistance in which they participated and after which they were sentenced to exile, either because they could not return to Cuba by explicit orders of the Cuban state in complicity with other international agents or as in the case of Daniela Rojo, self-exiled in Germany as a political refugee
In the 27N manifesto, under the subtitle "The country we dream of", the artists, intellectuals, and journalists who drafted it express their desires to inhabit a country where violence, repression, and censorship are eliminated in favor of a prosperous and equitable democracy. 'Women Dreaming of a Nation' explores these desires by subverting the sexism of the official state narrative and making Daniela, Katherine, and Anamely its protagonists, not only by giving them a central place in the frame but also by positioning them as the subjects who critically enunciate the urgency of thinking about the historical contradictions of the regime and their current consequences: from the repression against Denis Solis and Luis Manuel Otero to the impossibility of reuniting with their families, or accessing unbiased information about current events on the island.
The testimonies of each of these women serenely explain, from their very particular points of view, the abundance of images coming from various Facebook live streams made during the protests and acts of resistance by the MSI, but also by other cultural and civilian agents, which the director collected. The contrast between the clarity of the words that each of the protagonists of the documentary chooses to give an account of what happened after November 26, 2020, and the blurred images of disruption and brutality makes clear the desolation of a state of affairs in which, in the face of the collective reading of a poem (an event that took place on January 27, 2021), the authorities responded violently.
The shaky, out-of-focus, and vertical images that seek to record the various moments of violence and repression remind us of those audiovisual records of the Arab Spring (2010-2012), the first revolution to be recorded with smartphones. The rapid spread of the uprisings through the Internet and the hyper-connectivity of the mobilizations managed to exceed and break any authoritarian attempt to control the flow of information. For the first time, the world could witness the social uprisings in real-time, but also the violence with which the authorities tried to control them.
In the Cuban case, the live transmissions by citizens who shared the anti-regime ideals of the MSI and by members of the Movement who were able to record the violent raid from inside the headquarters became one of the main ways in which citizens produced counter-narratives, as shown in the testimonies of Daniela, Katherine, and Anamely.
Those impoverished images, as German artist and essayist Hito Steyerl would call them, are documents that show the effervescence and convulsion of the moment that was recorded and transmitted through the smartphones of its participants, for which, as the intertitle that begins the film explains, the access to the Internet in the island during 2019 was of utmost importance. Without them, as well as VPNs to access independent news sources critical of the regime, it would have been impossible to bypass the censorship and repression that sought to silence the Movement and its protests.
Fraguela does not discard the drama of the events in 'Women Dreaming of a Nation'. On the contrary, his work takes position and offers a panoramic view of the genealogy of the events and the disagreements with a political regime that attempted to crush any attempt at uprising with all its repressive machinery. Without renouncing the expressive powers of the audiovisual medium in favor of narration, this powerfully ethical and reflective documentary, which joins a long list of reactionary works that confront totalitarianism in Cuba such as the works of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara himself, the poems of Bisquet, and the political art of Tania Bruguera, seeks to make intelligible the events that have taken place in recent years in Cuba, as part of a broader and deeper context in which women have taken the stage to lead the fight for a democratic and free state.
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