Veritas
By Mariana Martínez Bonilla – december 3rd, 2023
LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE
Veritas (2021), the documentary directed by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, will once again reach international screens through the IV INSTAR Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, which will be held from December 4 to 10 in different venues, both on-site and virtual, in Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Cuba, and France.
At the time, the film was part of the official selection of some festivals, including the art fair Documenta 15 (Germany). Within the framework of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, the 67-minute film responds to the proposal of the Institute of Artivism for the revision of the transnational character of Cuban cinema in dialogue with other cinematographies with a critical view of the context of authoritarian repression.
In Veritas, the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion during the Cold War is told through the testimonies of some of its protagonists from the invading side. Thus, sixty years later, and from exile, the men who survived the attempt to overthrow the very early state of affairs established with the revolution face a series of questions about the loneliness, humiliation, and abandonment to which they were subjected by the United States after being at the center of the political complexity of what is also known as the Battle of the Bay of Pigs.
Through the use of archival footage and interviews with veterans of the 2506th assault brigade who, despite having been trained and equipped by the U.S. government, were defeated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), this audiovisual document is an attempt to tell the story from a place of enunciation that seeks to shed light on the events that were silenced and/or distorted both by Cuban official propaganda and by the U.S. government, which betrayed the ideals of the exiles who enlisted for the battle.
Neither mercenaries nor traitors, as they were labeled at the time, the combatants of the Battle of Giron occupy a paradoxical place in Cuban history. And this is shown in the different testimonies gathered by the director. The narratives of these men, despite being marked by the particular contradictions of those who abandoned their homeland to fight for it and ended up back in exile after being looked down upon and denigrated by their compatriots, are not characterized by the lapidary adjectivation of the actions of the political powers behind the struggle.
Without the mediation of a narrator who tries to establish logical connections between one testimony and the other, who offers hard data on the invasion, or who takes a position on the facts related in the testimonies, the various interviews are strung together to narrate a panoramic account of the groups' arrivals on the island through the rugged territory of the Girón beach.
None of these voices refers to what happened according to categories or concepts coined by hegemonic rhetoric. They strive for a sincere and clear enunciation of both the places and the events: the different sides of the conflict are narrated from the singular point of view of the survivors, each of whom describes punctually and clearly all their actions and functions in the battle, from their arrival in Guatemala to the betrayal by then President John F. Kennedy.
In addition, there is a large number of archival sequences that do not propose a relationship that puts those testimonies in tension through some operation of critical distancing or that allows the images to return our gaze by showing us their reverse sides or what was left out of focus, in the background or the abyss of their margins. On the contrary, these images are established as a way of illustrating what the voices narrate: from the accidental landing in the bay to the bloody confrontation with Cuban troops.
At times, it seems like the men interviewed are describing what the images show. Thus, the meaning of this relationship is presented as univocal and denies the possibility of a reading capable of problematizing the oral narration of the multiple narrators who appear on the screen in a fixed medium shot location, looking towards whoever is positioned next to the camera and showing themselves in all their vulnerability. Their emotions are made explicit not only through the tone of their voices, that rage or crack, but also through their facial expressions and tear-filled eyes.
On the other hand, Veritas also includes some color images, contemporary shots of Havana, as well as of the Bay of Pigs and other regions, which seem to be there with no other intention than showing the territorial characteristics where the men landed or to show the current conditions of the country that the group of men remembers with nostalgia.
At a formal level, Veritas does not present itself as a risky proposal and this is, perhaps, its great mistake. It seems that the director has chosen to offer a documentary that gives preference to the need to show the witness by broadcasting, as clearly as possible, the story through which this specific fragment of history that concerns their personal memory is incarnated and put on screen and that, in relation to the stories of other individuals, ends up configuring a collective memorial structure around a particular event.
In contrast, the exploration of the powers of the medium with which it works is relegated to the epilogue that closes the documentary. Announced through a montage that links an aerial shot of the ocean space between Cuba and the United States with archival images of how the members of the assault brigade were received in the U.S. after their liberation, this final part presents some of the veterans engaged in everyday activities (swimming, playing golf and dominoes, etc.), while their voices tell us what they miss most about their life on the island: the summers, the smell of the land, their families. Afterward, each of these men offers a final reflection on their participation in San Blas and the implications of the search and struggle for a free country on both a personal and collective level.
Perhaps one could speak of this audiovisual work as the beginning of a crusade to express those other points of view on the stories narrated (or silenced, as the case might be) through the hegemonic rhetoric of post-revolutionary Cuba. Thus, the value of Veritas as a document is not found in its form but in its content since the director and his production team, through the arduous task of gathering and synthesizing the testimonies of the exiles, set an important precedent for the revision of Cuban history and its contradictions and, above all, it offers itself a sharp counternarrative of the Cuban history and its contradictions to think critically about the operations of meaning mobilized in works such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Santiago Álvarez's Death to the Invader (1961), a short documentary film, part of the Latin American ICAIC Newsreel, which narrates from the Cuban-revolutionary point of view the invasion of Bay of Pigs, glorifying the performance of the FAR in the face of the "pro-Batista Yankee" invasion.
You can read the original note here