1

Roberto Valera’s impressionist musical score for Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s film Ociel del Toa invokes, from the very first scene, the spirit of Claude Debussy’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun).  The soundtrack underpins the image of the film’s protagonist, a young man from Cuba’s Oriente region [1] with the face of a faun—androgynous, high cheekbones, deer eyes—that reappears under a different guise in the works of the painter Guillén during his Miami period. The artist’s later canvases show how he dipped back into the canon of beauty that marked the beginning of his career. 

Ociel himself has said that it was Nicolás who selected the little white hat he wears in the documentary, a precious version of a Borsalino. The character is transformed by this affected accessory into a young charioteer that sails the Toa River in his cayuca. [2]

Like much of Guillén Landrián’s work, Ociel del Toa is spliced with intertitles. The first one explains that the protagonist is sixteen years old, is active in the state militia, went to school up to the third grade, and has been working on the river for ten years. Following this initial intertitle is the first close-up of his face, accompanied by text revealing his name: Ociel. We see alternating shots of his chest, legs, and arms in movement as he maneuvers the pole that propels the boat. 

In this voyeuristic montage, the lens takes pleasure in several fragments of the body being examined, as Livio Delgado’s cinematography alludes to the portraits of Sicilian youth by Wilhelm von Gloeden [3] (1856-1931). I do not believe it would be a reach to say that, from a contemporary perspective, Ociel del Toa invites a queer reading, and that Landrián’s way of approaching “the Beautiful” is the first of its kind in Cuban cinema.

The subject of the film is constructed by juxtaposing close-ups that show Ociel’s white tee shirt; an angle where the naked chest of the other crew member of the cayuca is exposed and suggests a future glimpse of the protagonist’s body, once he is past adolescence; a cowboy shot showing Ociel in a tank top and a gallant little hat; and a wide-angle establishing shot of the Toa River. 

We’re by the river. There is a boat and two water-dwelling creatures: the story indirectly alludes to a mythical dimension, a fable filled with satyrs and afternoon fauns.

The second intertitle precedes the image of a family seated around a table. Four children, one of which is Ociel, and another, a former combatant who became a driver after the Revolution, the only one that isn’t part of the world that revolves around the river. Ociel is also shown lying in bed in a languid interior scene set in darkness. 

One notices the type of food served, the simple fare typical of the era: it’s 1965, the “Year of Agriculture” [4] in the revolutionary calendar. The agrarian imagery is succinctly captured in the peeled yams, the white ceramic dishware, the Amerindian features of Ociel and his people. 

Ociel is the Ariel of Landrián’s filmography, a being of air and water. An ancestral spirit that is somehow manifested in the very word “toa,” an indigenous word meaning frog: Ociel is an amphibious and ambiguous creature.

His strange features could be considered batistiano (in the manner of Batista) in nature. Fulgencio Batista [5] (1901-1973), originally from Banes in the eastern region of Cuba, was also something of a frog man. Ociel is a projection of Batista as an adolescent, Batista the railroad switchman: Fulgencio via indigenous endogenesis.

Ociel’s cayuca moves down the river. The hypnotic rhythm of the poles is like writing in the space dappled with sunlight. The water is the indelible ink of this film-poem. The sequence lingers on the details of a mechanical exercise that transforms into an inscription system: [6] the tips of the rods are used to write on the water. For Nicolás Guillén, cinematography is a substitute for writing. 

2

The second movement opens on a boatman named Filín, a robust young man with a thin mustache and wearing a beret, the counterpart to his comrade, the young Ociel, who is clean-shaven and wearing a little Rococo hat. 

Guillen’s eye inspects the interiors and the interiorities of family life, and the documentary approach takes on a critical function by witnessing a lost time that, when it was filmed, was presented to the camera as a time regained. 

Guillén Landrián’s documentary approach suggests a dialectical reversal: the costumes, the manners, the food, and even the paradoxical physical integrity of what is real, are insinuated to the gaze of the contemporary viewer as possibilities. It’s not about a primitive state but a counterfactual one: Ociel del Toa does not speak to what is irreversibly consummated, but rather what is eternally possible. 

From the distance of a revolutionary eon, Toa is Arcadia, an artificial paradise, a Cythera [7] to which it’s impossible to go back because, like a mirage, its futurity is presented as the already-fulfilled: the insurmountable Cuba that we left behind. Thus the revolution flows into a vicious cycle. 

Due to this reversal, Ociel del Toa is a work of propaganda that turns against the propagandist, namely, the State and the ICAIC, the government institute of “Art and Industry” that attempted to take on anything and everything. [8] 

Alfredo Guevara, [9] before Fidel Castro, leaves nothing outside the Revolution, which is governess and giver of the arts, science, and technology. Schooling, food, family, procreation, transportation, death, work: the universe of Toa is rediscovered and revealed by the Cuban film institute’s Eye of Sauron, the same that is currently “rediscovering” Guillén Landrián. 

The didascalia [10] that the filmmaker inserts into the film was intended to re-educate the masses about what “birthing” meant from that point forward. La era está pariendo un corazón (The Era is Giving Birth to a Heart), the song by official troubadour Silvio Rodríguez, would come out three years later, in 1968, but the screams of labor, the wheezing of the age that engendered a frog, can already be heard in the soundtrack of Ociel. 

There is a little explored eschatological dimension to Guillén Landrián’s art: What other filmmaker has recorded the half-submerged legs of a Saint Christopher with the weight of an era and a superstition as young as a little girl resting on his shoulders? [11] After a long pregnancy (1959-1965), Cuba miscarried an ouroboros [12] and Guillén was there to see it. His trip to Toa is a pilgrimage, a trip to the seed of everything: the Toa is the Tao.

3

“Es bueno que esto lo vean en La Habana” (“It’s good that they’ll see this in Havana”), declares another intertitle, and Landrián takes the Toa to Havana, with its aquatic waltzes, its young Neptunes, the kerosene lamplight on the Borsalino, and the halftones of the criollo Levant. 

Landrián’s documentaries from this period are miniatures, sketches of an unprecedented daintiness in Latin American cinema. The cinematography is mannerist, picturesque at times, and each work is an amber encasing where the eternal Cuban-ness is commemorated and embalmed. 

Ociel is the successor to Caravaggio’s paintings of Bacchus, and, like those Baroque satyrs, the boatman of Toa and his entourage are the work of a twentysomething visionary. Within Cuba’s Eastern bazaar bursting with succulent images, Guillén Landrián seems to be exclaiming, along with Allen Ginsberg in Howl: “What peaches and what penumbras!” 

According to legend, when Nicolás finished shooting the film, he brought Ociel to Havana in real life. The strange episode, which stoked the fury of Julio García Espinosa, [13] is evoked half a century later by the elderly Ociel and the cinematographer Livio Delgado in Ernesto Daranas’ film Landrián. After all, it wasn’t good for certain details about the production to be seen in the capital, and the slip-up led to Ociel being banished from the capital and returned to the river. 

4

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says “a literary genre is declared born as a body;” in Ociel del Toa we attend the birth of a film genre. 

The body of Ociel marks an era; if ever the Revolution embodied a sort of renaissance, the young militiaman seduced and forsaken by the ICAIC’s cameras would come to be its David. Like an Etruscan marble statue, the young boatman is restored and returned to his pedestal by the curators of Aracne Digital Cinema S. L. and the historical repair shop of Ernesto Daranas.

The substantialism in Landrián’s films, his cabinet of curiosities containing venerated bodies, those Byzantine portraits on the walls of the mausoleum that would become the Republic of Cuba, they all recover the depth of the chiaroscuros, the silky sheen of the whites, the lyricism of the paper pennants waving over the town’s main street that Guillén Landrián, superb set designer that he was, placed there like an Arc de Triomphe for Ociel to pass through.

It’s a sensualism that reaches its climax in the segment titled “La fiesta del sábado por la noche en casa de Hilda, la mujer de Tomás” (“The party on Saturday night at the home of Hilda, wife of Tomás”), where Ociel is transformed into a young woman. The wife of Tomás is the unfolding of Ociel. Thus the hermaphrodite jumps out of the embers of a wood-fired stove and a new inkling of gender/genre is born in the alembic of film. 

The bodies twirl to the sound of primitive music, and Ociel dances with his double, the ideal woman formed from his rib. There is a physical, almost metaphysical, likeness between Ociel and his feminine counterpart, coupled together in the dance and manifested by the Dionysian power of the music. 

This passage is P.M. (1961) reduced to a single sequence and focused on the emblematic figure of the young man. The song repeats, “Me muero de amor” (“I’m dying of love”), as a Kuleshov-like montage, interlaced with scenes of the revelry, flashes past on the screen: Hilda peeling malangas, [14] grinding a mortar and pestle, or laughing at the camera. 

We see real maravilloso [15] portraits of partiers and drunks before returning to Hilda, delightfullooly dressed in a blouse with tulip sleeves, the kitchen her stage. It’s a classic shot where Guillén portrays her with bare arms and her head leaning against her shoulder, clinging to a wooden post. They are glorious moments that turn this sixteen-minute film into a Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) free of the pamphleteering of Mijaíl Kalatozov’s 1964 film.

5

The underdevelopment that Landrián’s films show has little to do with the disenchanted intellectual’s crisis of conscience in Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment). 

The fact that Nicolás Marcial Guillén Landrián, the latest in a long line of outsized figures from the cultural aristocracy of Camagüey, examines the customs of Blacks, Whites, and Taínos along Cuba’s eastern borders, and remixes French situationism, batistiano aboriginalism, and Italian Neorealism in the smorgasbord of revolutionary art and industry is the definitive artistic event of the year in which the historical blockbuster of Castroism reaches The End. 

Underdevelopment had triumphed and taken over the Palace as ersatz Stakhanovism: [16] Ociel del Toa comments on the debacle with a soundtrack that incorporates radio static, the loudspeakers’ fury, and the concrete music by Roberto Valera. In Landrián’s head, the revolution is noise: the only thing lying between this racket and the discharge of electroshocks was a turn of the dial. 

Cockfights, yodeling, and screams at point-blank. A new intertitle informs the viewer, laconically: “…van a quitar los gallos” (“…they’re going to take away the fighting cocks”), and the ominous tone of the verb “quitar” (“take away”) creaks, for the first time, in the sound wave of modern Cuban-ness.

Ociel del Toa is an etymological treatise and a real-time investigation into the way the Revolution expressed itself: “Pero si no hay gallos, habrá otra cosa, peor es la muerte…” (“But if there are no gamecocks, there will be something else, death is worse…”). Guillén Landrián’s finely tuned ear registers even the slightest variations in official discourse, the oscillations of commitment, the obsequiousness with which the dictatorship is received and accepted like a divine being from the Oriente.

A goddess who, like any exotic deity, insists on proscribing and vulgarizing only to later impose a new canon, which is then left in the hands of dubious arbiters of taste: Servando Cabrera’s corpulent militiamen, Raúl Martínez’s heroes in make-up, an effete Cuba, gaudy and overdone. [17] Ociel del Toa distances itself from this contingent of social climbers.

The fighting cocks are “taken away” as if they were pieces of a political game. “There will be something else:” samples of conformity, in its natural expression, are collected on the ground, from the subject’s plain manner of speaking. Because the revolution, in the art of Landrián, is always a stereophonic and graphological phenomenon: a distortion of discourse. It’s a heroic feat that, in the quarter of an hour that Ociel del Toa occupies, the portrayal of fighting cocks sits alongside a semiotic investigation. 

A piece of black cardboard with white letters contains the next caption, tinged with irony: “Ahora los domingos los campesinos tenemos plenaria de educación” (“Now on Sundays, we campesinos [18] have educational assemblies”); once again, the omitted question imposes itself: This was progress? The disappearance of the fighting cocks and the arrival of the campesino assembly, was a social triumph? The answer to every question lies in the realm of the undecidable.

6

A procession advances along a path; the common people carry a sign painted on a piece of canvas: “La comisión #5 JAUCO saluda la plenaria municipal con las metas sobrecumplidas” (“JAUCO Commission #5 salutes the municipal assembly for exceeding its goals”). 

Elsewhere I’ve analyzed the function of signage in Landrián’s films, the line of tachisme [19] that runs through his work. This snapshot of a sign functions as another intertitle and is the negation of a pro-assembly policy whose true message is implied by the absurdity of the writing, the enunciative function as a mechanism of coercion. 

Sixty years later, Cuban viewers will understand that no goal was exceeded, not then and not ever. That the new regime never aspired to exceed, let alone fulfill, its promises: the painted word and its history on film are evidence of its flimsy scheme.

In 1965, the bureaucratic automation of a collective of farmers located in a remote fluvial enclave intended to confuse the ones carrying the signs, deceive the ones holding the banners: “exceeding,” in the vocabulary of Landrián’s films, is a wrong notion and fake news. Landrián’s films reveal a new kind of transvestism: the hidden tool of political disinformation in the Revolution’s didactic apparatus. 

7

“Fundamentally, it is no more than an image of light (Lichtbild) projected on to a dark wall,” says Nietzsche of the Apolline qualities of Greek tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy, 

The midday hour, which falls like a thunderbolt on the people of Toa, replicates the same Greek effect. “Se cruza el río y el monte” (“One crosses the river and the mountain”) and at “11 am,” another intertitle announces the beginning of the assembly. The women walk along the path covered with white towels; the repeated presence of Ociel provides space-time coordinates and continuity. 

A woman striped by the shadows of a palm tree sells cold drinks at an improvised stand and says she wants to “be a Communist youth.” Communism is named for the first time in the onscreen text. Next the church is mentioned. The aspiring Communist “goes to church with her aunt,” which is now a sin. The portrait of the young woman and her aunt is one of the figurativist masterpieces of Landrián and Livio Delgado. 

At the Protestant church by the Toa River, the festive music transforms into a Lutheran hymn: “¡Hay vida, hay vida en Jesús!” (“There’s life, there’s life in Jesus!”). What the lens captures, between songs, is the Apolline abundance of Cuban-ness, a shadow projected onto the luminous background of the past, a complex and plural life that, due to the dictatorship’s lens effect, seems completely foreign to us now. 

Only the most eloquent and philosophical Latin American filmmaker of the mid-20th century could return to us the Cuba that once laughed, sang psalms, and walked on water. Nicolás shows us the things we lost: a Black preacher, a collection plate covered with a lace cloth, the shared communion ritual. The great power of this extraordinary memento mori is not of the earthly realm, but of the kingdom of the Most High: “Yo quiero más y más de Cristo, yo quiero más de su poder” (“I want more and more of Christ, I want more of his power”). 

The last intertitle is in the form of a question: “¿Ustedes han visto la muerte?” (“Have you all seen death?”); but Ociel has never seen it and his childlike face betrays incredulity. The men attending a burial wear hats and white shirts, simple people neatly dressed and taking pains to appear as civil as possible in public. 

Death is in front of Ociel del Toa, but he doesn’t see it. The assembly and the burial exchange masks during the final moments of the film: the ones that attend the dance, the house of worship, and the funeral will die in jails and African wars before the end of the century. Before the decade is over, others will be banished. Mothers, aunts, and cousins will disappear from the map. The final question also lacks an answer. 

The young boatmen plow through the Toa’s current, the waters that separate life and death for both a place and an era. Ociel’s cayuca is Regla’s little motorboat in P. M. elevated to a theological plane. 

The scene of the final passage becomes, in turn, a corollary of the documentary Nicolás: el fin pero no es el fin (Nicolás: The End But It’s Not the End) (2005) by Jorge Egusquiza Zorilla, which could serve as an outro for Ociel del Toa.

Right before dying, Nicolás addresses Egusquiza’s camera. It’s his last chance to explain himself: 

“The national problem has always been very hostile for me. Not because of racism, because of being Black or Chinese or White, but because of a problem with the Island’s geography, which has always seemed a little dramatic to me. The way it’s long and cut into two extremes. I don’t know if everyone’s happy they were born on an island. I’m not.”

Néstor Díaz de Villegas is a poet, editor, and essayist. His most recent book is Poemas inmorales (Immoral Poems) (2022). He lives in Varese, Italy.

[1] Translator’s note: The Oriente is the eastern region of Cuba.

[2] Translator’s note: a cayuca is a small dug-out canoe used in the Caribbean.

[3] Translator’s note: von Gloeden was a German photographer known for nude photographic studies of Sicilian boys stylized to evoke ancient Greece.

[4] Translator’s note: Beginning in 1959, the Cuban revolutionary government instituted a calendar where every year was given a symbolic name. 

[5] Translator’s note: Batista’s regime was overthrown by the Cuban revolution in 1959.

[6] Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, Stanford University Press, 1992.

[7] Translator’s note: In Greek poetic tradition, Arcadia refers to an idealized rural setting; in Greek mythology, Cythera is the birthplace of Aphrodite.

[8] Translator’s note: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), is the Cuban government’s film institute, whose name literally translates to “Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry.”

[9] Translator’s note: Guevara was considered Cuba’s “film czar” and the founder of the ICAIC.

[10] Translator’s note: an Italian word meaning caption, subtitle, or stage direction.

[11] Translator’s note: Saint Christopher is a Christian martyr said to have carried a child across a river before the child revealed himself as Christ.

[12] Translator’s note: an ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.

[13] Translator’s note: Espinosa was a filmmaker and Cuban cultural apparatchik who helped found the ICAIC and served as Vice Minister of Culture.

[14] Translator’s note: a tropical root vegetable.

[15] Translator’s note: Real maravilloso, which literally translates to “marvelous real,” is a term coined by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier to describe a sort of magic realism specific to the way of life in Cuba.

[16] Translator’s note: a Soviet movement intended to increase worker productivity.

[17] Translator’s note: Cabrera and Martínez were Cuban painters.

[18] Translator’s note: campesinos are people in rural communities that live on and work the land.

[19] Translator’s note: a French style of abstract painting that sometimes included brushstrokes similar to calligraphy.