In current times, Cuban filmmakers are experiencing and interpreting the affective and emotional significance of exile in different ways. Melinda Meyer DeMott defines “emotional exile” as when emigrants can legally return to their country of origin, but due to the radical cultural shifts they undergo while living in exile, they feel that it would be emotionally impossible for them to return. [1] Using this notion as a starting point, I believe that the different types of affective exile for Cubans today do not necessarily entail physical displacement or the impossibility of returning to their place of birth. On the contrary, they consist of different psychological and emotional states that vary in intensity and reach, ranging from trauma, pain, and living without a sense of future direction at home to the joy of experiencing individual ideas of freedom somewhere else. They can include feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and disappointment in the face of political and socioeconomic crisis or the excitement of finding solidarity in diverse communities coming together in a shared fight for social justice. These states and spaces are not specific to the often fluctuating and multi-located ideas of “homeland” and “receiving society.” They can also be found in cyberspace through social media and other online locations. What we can say for certain is that, in Cuba’s case, the many kinds of physical, emotional, and economic self-uprootings have grown exponentially in recent years.

Since the arrival of the new millennium, interest in studying affects, emotions, feelings, and sensations has increased among academic thinking and research in the humanities and social sciences. Affect as a space for thought and action is characterized by its inherent ubiquity. Nothing exists that does not traverse human relationships or come from a place marked by affect or that generates an affective response. The Argentine professor Cecilia Macón has observed that one of the issues highlighted by this phenomenon is that there is no such distinction between emotion and reason. Emotions do not degrade the logic of arguments, but rather make up a fundamental part of our participation in the public sphere. They can legitimize oppression or, inversely, become gestures of emancipation, but they are an unavoidable part of debate, agency, public order, and collective action. [2] The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was already studying the nature and origin of affects in the 17th century, [3] and some of his followers, Brian Massumi among them, distinguish between affect and emotion, understanding the first as an intense experience that underlies intention and leads to emotion. [4] For the feminist Sara Ahmed, on the other hand, the analytical distinction between sensation or affect and emotion runs the risk of separating emotions from the lived experiences of being and having a body. [5] In this sense, the schism between affect and emotion requires re-examining the oppositional fallacy of nature vs. culture that ignores the overdetermined aspect of bodily processes. [6] Ahmed is interested in the enormous possibilities of societal action mobilized by emotions like pain, shame, fear, and disgust. From her feminist and queer perspective, Ahmed, along with Canadian academic Anne Cvetkovich, is opposed to the so-called “affective turn.” They are in agreement that, taking into consideration the long history of feminist and queer struggles and their interest in the politics of the body, biopower, and intimate, domestic, and everyday spaces, the apparent new turn toward emotion, affect, and sensation is nothing new under the sun and has been alive and active for a long time. It is from this emotion-centered angle that I have been leading a years-long research project on diasporic Cuban cinema or cinemas.

In 2011, I left Cuba to begin a doctoral program at Queen’s University in Canada. After spending years as an international student, postdoctoral researcher, and contract worker, I decided to stay. Under an auto-ethnographic lens, my dissertation was focused on the work of first-generation Cuban émigrés that have been living and working outside the Island since 2000. The seminal book by Iranian academic Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, helped me understand that these young Cubans were telling diasporic stories of displacement and integration. While deeply intertwined, Naficy’s notions of cinema of the exile and diasporic cinema are distinct. In his view, diasporic cinema tends to be more aesthetically experimental and focused on the networks of hybridity and mobility born of the migration process. Filmmakers’ relationship with their place of origin is mainly expressed in a suggestive way, and the filmmaking process is collective both in origin and destination, feeding a sense of communal memory. Given that diasporic consciousness is horizontal and multi-located, diasporic cinemas are symbolically and materially linked not only to their homeland but also to native and migrant communities in their receiving countries. Furthermore, introspective narratives and self-representation strategies are regularly used to highlight the creator’s stance and the first-person perspective of a cinematic work.

According to Naficy, cinema of the exile is more traditional in terms of aesthetics and story line. There is an obsession with the homeland, since filmmakers face the impossibility of returning and, therefore, feel an intense desire to do so. Their relationship with their place of origin is produced in strictly political terms and addresses issues where duality and polarity are highly relevant. Narratives of looking back, loss, and absence and the tendency of filmmakers to portray the place of their birth and other people besides themselves are often found in these films. The resulting films also tend to be feature-length works created by acclaimed directors. Naficy writes that the work of diasporic filmmakers is expressed more in terms that are strictly artisanal rather than political. Their films are more accented than those made by exiles due to the plural and performative nature of identity. While films of the exile are accented mainly by binarism and subtraction, diasporic films are accented more by multiplicity and addition. [7]

A decade ago, this analytical framework functioned well as a way to dissect what was happening in the cinematic panorama of the Cuban diaspora at the time. But the case of the most recent Cuban exiles is different than the “traditional” exile experience that we historiographically divided into three waves of migration in the 20th century: the one in the early 60s during the first years of the Revolution; later, the widely stigmatized Mariel Boatlift in 1980; and lastly, the balsero crisis that reached a climax in 1994 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disappearance of the socialist bloc, and the crisis of the Special Period. These and other more recent departures and arrivals, for example, complicate the definition of Cuban-American identity, which is heterogeneous and often misinterpreted.

It has been extensively studied how the 21st century has been witness to ongoing exoduses, both voluntary and involuntary, temporary and permanent, in relation to globalization, advances in technology, communications, and transportation, violent conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In Cuba, these displacements have reached an apex in the last few years with a new “migration stampede,” as it has been referred to in several media outlets, or as the academic Jorge Duany called it, “a Silent Mariel” due to its gradual onset and the contrast between its discreet coverage in official media and its conspicuous presence on social media. [8] This migratory era is characterized by new routes that include initial arrivals to Guyana, Nicaragua, and Russia, since Cubans can enter these three countries without costly and burdensome visa application processes. Now these countries have developed an entire network of economies to support human trafficking.

The peak of this “fourth wave” came about in the context of a worldwide pandemic and general structural crisis brought on by, among other things, the long-awaited economic reform in Cuba. This reordering led to the consolidation of the currency, runaway inflation, and devaluation of government salaries. These precarious living conditions have made the majority of Cuban families dependent on remesas (remittances sent by family living abroad), and the country’s population is soon going to become one of the oldest in the world. 

A series of political events also led to this Silent Mariel. For some recent migrants, everything began in May 2019, when around 300 members of the LGBTQIA+ community, activists, and allies took to the streets to protest the cancelation of the “Conga contra la homofobia” (“Conga Against Homophobia”), an event organized by the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. [9] Months later, the violent interruption of the hunger strike organized by the San Isidro Movement led artists, musicians, scientists, journalists, and academics to gather in front of the Cuban Ministry of Culture building to criticize the government’s increased repression and censorship of citizens. During this peaceful protest, the group of intellectuals known as the 27N Movement denounced the surge in repression in Cuba and demanded a seat at the table where decisions were being made concerning the production and circulation of their art. But their presence was considered a provocation, and the authorities ignored their requests for dialogue and transparency in the spirit of civic reconciliation. Three months later, a smaller group gathered once again at the entrance of the Ministry of Culture, but received no response. Lastly, the mass protests on July 11, 2021 stirred up new and intense controversies about the future of Cuba.

Before and during these events, many filmmakers were already experiencing, both professionally and personally, a kind of affective exile—or internal exile—within the Island’s geographic borders. This was the case with Claudia Calviño and Carlos Lechuga, now based in Spain, and the teams behind Santa y Andrés (Santa & Andrés) (2016) and Vicenta B (2022) that have been making affectively exiled films for years in Cuba. Censored by the authorities that regulate public movie theaters in Cuba, both films are odes to political outsiders and historically marginalized characters. The first film centers on the friendship between a lonely woman employed at a state-owned farm and a gay writer that lives in relative isolation due to his dissident stance vis-à-vis the government. Vicenta B follows an Afro-Cuban santera that loses her faith and the ability to communicate with the Orishas after her only son leaves the country. Her story is an ode to the strength of our mothers and all the maternal figures that we have left behind in our diasporic journeys. Even though the film’s producer, Claudia Calviño, does not consider herself an exile, she does attribute her resettlement abroad to political reasons. Films like Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift) (2020) by José Luis Aparicio and Fernando Fraguela and Nadie (Nobody) and Corazón azul (Blue Heart) by Miguel Coyula, met a similar censored fate in Cuba.

For many of these filmmakers, emigrating at this stage of life is, on the one hand, a positive thing because they have enough life experience to help them become integrated in their receiving societies. Despite the obstacles, they built their careers in their social and cultural comfort zone, in their own backyard. At the same time, emigrating is very difficult after these personal and professional journeys, because there is so much more to let go of. As radicalization on the Island intensifies, some filmmakers are not permitted to return, but many of those who are able to decide not to or only return because of family commitments. The translational networks for the future in Cuba that were established—and projected—during the fruitful Obama era have become drastically reduced or completely paralyzed. While Cuban émigré filmmakers enjoy the privileges of wider access to essential goods and freedom of expression, they experience a kind of subaltern condition intensified in the diaspora, as finding a voice and a space in another country often requires new skill sets to break into foreign film industries: financing agencies, film festivals, distribution channels, etc. Meanwhile, a set of works—forgotten or ignored by the majority of academic analyses of Cuban cinema—has come to the surface to enrich the creative panorama of the Cuban transnation or “Greater Cuba” as Ana López so brilliantly describes it [10]

For example, the documentary A media voz (In a Whisper) (2019) by Patricia Pérez and Heidi Hassan addresses the aesthetics of border crossing through an epistolary and archivist treatment that explores the role of friendship, the place of memory, and the filmmakers’ irrevocable love for cinema when they are reunited and join creative efforts fifteen years after leaving Cuba. Hassan and Pérez had different experiences of migration. Patricia’s path included an illegal border crossing. Her last flight out of Cuba led to her living for years as an undocumented immigrant in Spain. Like a nomad, she went from market to market using stereotypes of cubanía (Cuban-ship or Cuban-dom) like making mojitos and dancing salsa to earn a living. In this sense, the filmmakers remind us how these moments of departure are an affective and a bodily experience. Heidi’s transition from Cuba to Switzerland is portrayed allegorically when we see her swimming one day in the Caribbean Sea and later emerging from underwater in her bathtub in Geneva. Although more realistically portrayed, Patricia’s border crossing remains tactile and embodied in one of the key moments of the film that recounts her road trip from Holland to Spain.

The Cuban filmmaker Luis Alejandro Yero speaks about “networks of affect” as a fundamental aspect of his films. He explains that, with the new dynamics of the film industry, much of the artisanal cinematographic work among colleagues has been lost. And, when films are made without major financing, this artisanal work among friends has a different kind of materiality that allows for lightness, greater freedom, and not being accountable to anyone. In this way, these films can compete in the same spaces as others that cost 10 million euros to make. Yeto recognizes that his level of mobility is a privilege that allows him to tell these stories and create these networks. His analysis is very close to what Anne Marie Stock recognized as street filmmaking in a prior generation of Cuban filmmakers including Arturo Infante, Pavel Giroud, and Lester Hamlet, who had to work in close collaboration without support from Cuba’s film institute that had backed the majority of films produced in the country since 1959.

La opción cero (Option Zero) (2020) by Marcel Beltrán investigates the critical role of digital technologies and social networks as a survival mechanism for émigrés and a vital tool for interstitial storytelling. The film portrays the risky journeys that Cuban refugees undertake to attempt to enter the United States and seek asylum, crossing borders from Guyana to Brazil and going through Colombia and Panama. A story such as this will not be found any time soon on official public screens in Cuba. Loud and Clear (2016) by Daniellis Hernández shows women refugees that live somewhere in between legality and justice in Germany; the director works with the social justice organization Women in Exile to document the resettlement of political refugees, mainly Black African women, in their receiving societies. Lastly, the balance between intimacy, social life, and political struggles lies at the center of Otra Isla (Another Island) (2014) by Heidi Hassan, a film about Sabina Martín Gómez, a migrant “woman in white” that reaches Spain as a political refugee and ends up homeless, living on the streets for eight months as her seven-member family camps out in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a sign of protest.

Queer and Black lives in exile have been affectively portrayed on screen in films such as Llamadas desde Moscú (Calls from Moscow) by Luis Alejandro Yero, where undocumented gay Cuban migrants live in the physical and digital realms between Cuba and Russia. In the same way, the film Sexilio (Sexile) (currently in production) by Lázaro González shows how the Mariel Boatlift was also an important queer migration instigated by institutional and state-sanctioned homophobia. Sexilio, a living counter-narrative archive, uses cinematographic devices to portray the trauma and erasure of thousands of queer Cubans that were expelled from their country in 1980. This hybrid investigation highlights the extent to which racism, homophobia, the difficulties of resettlement, and the AIDS epidemic were cruelly intertwined with the longed-for freedom of the Marielitos.

Aida Esther Bueno Sarduy, with her film Guillermina (2019), opens the trilogy titled “Referencia biográfica: afrocentramiento y emancipación de la mirada de las mujeres negras” (“Biographical Reference: Afro-Centering and Emancipation of the Viewpoint of Black Women”) that follows the stories of the enslaved women Anna Borges do Sacramento and Joaquina de Angola, among others, who fought to obtain their freedom in Brazil. Guillermina uses animation and archival footage to recreate the memories of separation and yearning of a white exile raised by a Black woman domestic worker in Havana in the 1950s. Pieza inconclusa para Martha Ndumbe (Unfinished Work for Martha Ndumbe) (2023) by Daniellis Hernández is a poetic, political, and intimate film that seeks to reveal and reconstruct the hidden and fragmented story of an Afro-German woman that lived in Berlin in the 1930s and died in a Nazi concentration camp. The list of films and affects goes on.

In March 2023, with the support of the French Embassy in Cuba and its program “Fondo de Solidaridad para Proyectos Innovadores (FSPI) – Apoyo a nuevos cines y a la industria cinematográfica cubana” (“Solidarity Fund for Innovative Projects – Support for New Cinemas and the Cuban Cinematographic Industry [FSPI]”), the Casa Velásquez in Madrid hosted a gathering of Cuban filmmakers. The event brought together over thirty directors and producers based in Spain. [11] Apart from identifying concrete opportunities with European co-producers, these artists and filmmakers gathered and recognized themselves as part of a new diasporic community. In her talk as a guest speaker, Heidi Hassan proposed transforming the double negative of “neither from here nor there” into a more inclusive alternative: “both from here and there,” a wider, more plural, and multi-located interpretation of Homi Bhabha’s [12] idea of in-betweenness or W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness that Paul Gilroy took up later in his analysis of the Black Atlantic. [13]

While some of us are currently living in affective exile, some are sick of waiting for changes that never come, and others are convinced that there was little to be expected in the first place, many Cuban émigrés are experiencing the emotional, psychological, and material cost of our departures, and we are learning to understand the impermanence of belonging and the constant search for home not as a threat but as a possibility. This ambivalence has inspired and will continue to inspire extraordinary intellectual and creative work born from this discomfort zone, an essential component for developing transcultural, translinguistic, and sociopolitical knowledge. Finally, the diasporic condition and the affective nature of those experiencing exile can create a more complex sense of citizenship and rhizome-like narratives of home, being, and becoming.

Zaira Zarza is a professor of film studies at Université de Montréal and has worked on programming for the Toronto International Film Festival and the Cartagena Film Festival. In 2019, she directed the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Film Festival in Boston. Her research encompasses economies, narratives, and archives of the cinema of Latin America and the Caribbean and their diasporas.

[1] Melinda. A. Meyer DeMott: “Expressive Arts: A Group Intervention for Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seekers and Young Adults,” in Elizabeth M. Altmaier (ed.): Reconstructing Meaning After Trauma, Academic Press, San Diego, 2017, p. 159. 

[2] “PALABRAS EN LLAMAS: Sara Ahmed presentada por Cecilia Macón” (“WORDS IN FLAMES: Sara Ahmed presented by Cecilia Macón”), Dcember 27, 2022, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tjLj0c33y4>. 

[3] See Baruch Spinoza: Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order, translated by Michael Silverthorne and edited by Matthew J. Kisner, Cambridge University Press, 2018. 

[4] For Massumi (2015), affect is an aspect of life that is process-oriented, relational, and intersectional. It is managed through our bodies and taps into our inherent capacity for transformation. It is an open treshold of potential (Brian Massumi: Politics of Affect, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2015, p. 3) that occurs in all of our interactions, no matter the scale. Emotion, on the other hand, is a partial expression of affect that resorts to a limited selection of memories and only activates certain reflexes or tendencies. Similarly, Eric Shouse suggests distinguishing between the two terms when he asserts that affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, whereas emotions are social. Affects are pre-personal. An affect is an unconscious, intense experience that cannot be fully expressed in language because it is always prior or external to consciousness. An emotion, on the other hand, is the projection or display of a feeling. (Eric Shouse: “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”, M/C Journal, vol. 8, n.o 6, 2005, <https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/2443>. 

[5] See Sara Ahmed: The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 40.

[6] Clare Hemmings, quoted in Sara Ahmed: The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 12.

[7]  See Hamid Naficy: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, vol. 1, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001, p. 14.

[8] Jorge Duany in Lioman Lima: “‘Es un Mariel silencioso’: los miles de cubanos que usan Nicaragua como ruta para llegar a Estados Unidos” (“It’s a Silent Mariel: The Thousands of Cubans that Use Nicaragua as a Route to Get to the United States”), BBC Mundo, March 22, 2022, <www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-60788280>. 

[9] “Cuba Cancels Annual Conga Against Homophobia March”, May 8, 2019, BBC News, <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48199835>. 

[10] Ana López: “Greater Cuba”, in Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. López (eds.): The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, pp. 38-58.

[11] “Encuentros profesionales de cineastas y productores cubanos en España” (“Professional Gatherings of Cuban Filmmakers and Producers in Spain”), February 23, 2023, French Embassy in Cuba, <https://cu.ambafrance.org/Encuentros-profesionales-de-cineastas-y-productores-cubanos-en-Espana>.

[12] According to Bhabha, these in-between spaces “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovate sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics, London and New York, 1994, p. 2).

[13] See Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995.