The sentence that serves as the first part of the title of this text is (almost) obviously ironic (it’s a distortion of what Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said about Francoism). The quote cannot be attributed to any filmmaker or film critic, but we can imagine a moment in which it might be said. It is a hypothetical moment (less and less far off into the future) when we will be overcome with nostalgia for the full and straightforward existence of an enemy to oppose and create discourses against; an adversary that guarantees heroic feats and provokes partisan narratives. An antagonist like this also provides readily accessible dichotomies to organize the reception of film-related discourses (institutional cinema vs. independent cinema; national cinema vs. diasporic cinema, among others) that give us the peace of mind that everything is in its place, on one side or the other of the political, cultural, and imaginative spectrum. Many Cuban films have been made with the internalization of these dichotomies as a starting point. The circumstantial need to internalize these extremes and to produce partisan narratives cannot be denied; it would mean ignoring a certain historic and symbolic “truth.” But we can certainly desire and imagine a landscape in which these dichotomies are less and less useful for giving an account of the state of Cuban cinema. Such a landscape can be imagined and desired right now, thanks to narratives, imaginaries, latencies, and glimpses of it.

While certain dichotomies could continue to be of use (as long as examples can be found of films that fit on one side or the other of these extremes) and facilitate the construction of a critical discourse, ideally the Cuban cinematic imagination and the criticism that analyzes it would detach themselves from these dichotomies and fly their proverbial coop. It is not that leaving dichotomies aside will eliminate the circumstances that led to them (the hegemony of the Cuban film institute [Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos – ICAIC]; censorship; punitive laws and regulations; laws that offer a certain air of openness and aim to guarantee financial support while screening for ideological compatibility; etc.); rather, it is that these circumstances have been substantially and rapidly changing in recent years. The symbolic institutional capital of the ICAIC is in a state of utter crisis, as many have argued. The migration of the majority of young Cuban filmmakers is ongoing and expanding. The lack of public spaces to show Cuban films is acute. The symbolic and physical places where film-related discourses are produced have multiplied along with the imaginaries of these films, bursting through the seams of the dichotomies.

I agree with the assessments of Dean Luis Reyes and Ángel Pérez, two of the most notable critics of recent Cuban cinema. Reyes has pointed out that it is “a cinema that would like to spend less time obsessing over the intellectual elite in order to offer a concept of a nation” and, instead, “produces personal poetics, films that are small but intensely focused on self-expression and experimenting with language.” He asserts that it is a cinema that is transnational, delocalized, diverse, and nomadic, from a referential and ideological point of view. [1] Pérez has maintained that the Cuban directors in the 21st century “operate with the idea that film is an incarnation of their own truth.” [2] 

I salute the desires of a filmmaker like Carlos Amílcar Melián, [3] director of the unsettling El rodeo (The Rodeo) (2020) as well as writer of the no less unsettling Tundra (2021), directed by José Luis Aparicio, and the excellent documentary Mafifa (2021), directed by Daniela Muñoz Barroso. They are difficult and challenging desires: “I’m looking for something with a complexity that is not dependent on nor an accessory to the theater of Cuban political operations” and that does not have “a high degree of thematic dependence on [Cuba’s] political legacy.” Melián says that the films made by his colleagues Aparicio, Muñoz Barroso, and Carlos Quintela are born out of “the dribbles from the Cuban authorities’ field of influence.” 

As part of this desired landscape, which is becoming more of a reality rather than a mirage, seeking broader distribution of this type of cinema will be necessary. Cuban filmmakers should mobilize so that their work is accessible to a wider audience. To create an audience beyond a handful of interested academics and critics, we have to multiply the channels where people can access these films. I am fully aware of the need to earn back the financial investment required to make a film, especially when it is not a commercial one. I am also aware of the timelines and agreements required for showing films outside of festivals, but today there is rapid access to audiovisual materials. The average viewer’s audiovisual consumption memory is very short because they are constantly bombarded by offerings. This day in age, the number of recent Cuban films available via streaming services (at least in the United States) is negligible. There is no reasonable explanation for having to wait to see a film made in 2021 or 2022, for example. Under current conditions, the audience for these films is rather small; it is often limited, as I said before, to critics and academics, who make up an important but very small-scale audience.

I would like to imagine this categorical map of recent Cuban cinema as an exercise that helps to dismantle the dichotomous topography. It is brief and accidental, because it comes out of an inspection of the films that is itself accidental.  It is provisional, because it is as transitory as the cinema of which it speaks. It is modular and has moving parts, like an imaginary Erector set.

• • Deficient testimonies, crisis of perception. Disappoint expectations of documentaries. Boycott the supply of documentary truths. Manifest sensory insufficiency. “With memories I complete a few sounds that come to me from the world;” “I reconstruct sounds that are out of earshot;” “my ear stops wanting to hear [in the silence]” (Mafifa, Daniela Muñoz Barroso, 2021). Turn absence into plenty. “The complete woman remains absent” (Mafifa). Walfrido Larduet, lost in hallucinatory landscapes, with no trail to follow, is looking for a woman that he isn’t sure exists (Tundra, José L. Aparicio, 2021).
  • The strange. “That which should not be there” (Mark Fisher: (“Lo raro y lo espeluznante” (“The Strange and the Terrifying”), p. 12). The giant slimy creatures in Tundra. The elusive inhabitants of the ruins in El proyecto (The Project) (Alejandro Alonso, 2017).
  • Orientalism, as in Cuba’s Oriente. Returning to the Cuban Oriente. Denaturalize it, take its epic nature down a notch, get closer to it. Mafifa; El rodeo (Carlos Melián, 2020); La música de las esferas (The Music of the Spheres) (Marcel Beltrán, 2018); Entre perro y lobo (Between Dog and Wolf) (Irene Gutiérrez, 2020); Limbo (Rafael Ramírez, 2016). “For me, it’s a place where I can dream things up” (Carlos Melián).
  • Ghost, specter, otherworldliness. The wandering and hard-to-grasp specters and the ghostly, voiceless discourse in El proyecto. The phantasmagorias of the broken-down ships in Abisal (Abyssal) (Alejandro Alonso, 2021). The shadows on the walls inside the ships. The mist that absorbs everything and the “ghosts in the void” in Diario de la niebla (Diary of the Mist) (Rafael Ramírez, 2016). The hazy and ghostly memory of the absent uncle in El hijo del sueño (Son of a Dream) (Alejandro Alonso, 2016). The characters in El rodeo. The war veterans in the afternoon and nighttime in the Sierra Maestra mountains (Entre perro y lobo).
  • Hieratism-subjectification. The defeated faces of the veterans and the faces of the people listening to a blind man sing in Entre perro y lobo. The faces of the musicians and the people listening to them in the final sequence of Los perros de Amundsen (Amundsen’s Dogs) (Rafael Ramírez, 2017). The faces on the two elderly people in Los viejos heraldos (The Olden Heralds) (Luis A. Yero, 2019). The faces and dialogue in El rodeo. The silent faces of the parents in La música de las esferas. The faces in Limbo. Produce subjectification from a place of disjuncture and disidentification, from a place of foreignness.
  • Self-absorption, oneirism, estrangement, denaturalization. Break the parasitic bond with what is real. Randomly shuffle the territories of hallucination. Inject a virus into the most important masters. Replicate altered states. Walfrido Larduet looks at the ceiling and thinks he sees a giant slug with tentacles (Tundra). The religious leaders of the Oriente count their dreams (Limbo). “Your compositional apparatus is based on an unutterable flow of discourses, on dilapidated territories of language” (Los perros de Amundsen). “The mist cancels out this territory every night and vomits it up the next day” (Diario de la niebla). 

• De-allegorization. De-signalize reception and interpretation via the interruption or suspension of the allegorical narrative and the introduction of secrecy and obscurity. A work to counter the “paranoid reading” (Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Fidel Between the Lines, p. 88). Tundra; El proyecto; Abisal; Limbo; Los perros de Amundsen; Diario de la niebla.

• • Secrecy, obscurity, mystery, silence. Refuse the logic of revelation. Gladys Esther Linares Acuña’s enigmas of identity in Mafifa. The spatial enigmas of place in El proyecto. The enigmas that Walfrido Larduet cannot comprehend and the worm creatures as enigmas in Tundra. Akira Nimura’s psychological enigma and the wolf’s perpetual evasion in Los lobos del Este (The Wolves of the East) (Carlos Quintela, 2017). The escape from psychologism and the obscurity of the characters in El rodeo. “The dragon wings where the secret was deciphered for me” (El proyecto).

• De-archiving, exposure to the elements. Interrupt the archive’s “force of law, of a law which is the law of the house… as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution” (Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 7). Uproot the residency of the realist and allegorical archive. Venture out into the elements to be symbolically exposed to them, with no enemy at hand. Refuse the possibility of being archived and recorded under the power of the archons (Derrida). Los perros de Amundsen; Las campañas de invierno (The Winter Campaigns) (Rafael Ramírez, 2019); Diario de la niebla; El rodeo; Tundra.

• The terrifying. The “landscapes partially deprived of human elements” (Mark Fisher, Lo raro y lo espeluznante, p. 13). A terrifying sensation arises “if there is a presence when there should not be anything there, or if there is no presence when something should be there” (ibidem, p. 75). The uninhabited hallways in El proyecto. The creatures in Tundra.
• Minimalism.

Amish Territory, July 2024.

Walfrido Dorta is an essayist, critic, and professor at Susquehanna University. He has published essays and articles in cultural and academic magazines and books in the United States and Latin America. His most recent texts analyze Cuban amateur and exploitation cinema.

[1] See Dean Luis Reyes: “Una muestra de cine cubano en Alemania” (“A Showcase of Cuban Cinema in Germany”), Rialta Magazine, July 25, 2022, <https://rialta.org/una-muestra-de-cine-cubano-en-alemania/>.

[2] See Ángel Pérez: “El nombre de un acontecimiento: cine independiente cubano” (“The Name of a Happening: Cuban Independent Cinema”), Rialta Magazine, October 6, 2020, <https://rialta.org/el-nombre-de-un-acontecimiento-cine-independiente-cubano/>.

[3] See Dean Luis Reyes: “El rodeo o la invitación a poblar un gran solar que permanece vacío. Entrevista a Carlos Amílcar Melián” (“The Rodeo, or An Invitation to Settle an Immense Lot that Remains Empty: An Interview with Carlos Almícar Melián”), Rialta Magazine, October 21, 2021, <https://rialta.org/el-rodeo-entrevista-a-carlos-amilcar-melian/>.