Tag Archive for: Cuba

No small beer at Cuba’s Film School

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This is a revised version, incorporating feedback received.

At the beginning of July, the EICTV, Cuba’s world renowned film school at San Antonio de los Baños was hit by a bombshell when the current director, the Guatemalan Rafael Rosal, announced his resignation, following revelations about corruption involving illicit sales of beer.  Three members of the school’s workforce were arrested, but there’s no evidence that Rosal personally benefitted. According to Rosal himself, speaking to me in Havana before leaving for England with his English wife and children, he had been obliged to resign as a scapegoat for a practice that had been going on for at least fifteen years, and which had reached the point where it was heavily subsidising the school’s operation, which costs US$1.4m a year. No small beer. He didn’t mention to me that he was asked to resign by the student body.

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Alfredo Guevara (1925-2013)

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Here is a photograph of two Guevaras. With the death of Alfredo Guevara, the one on the right, at the age of 87, who was no relation to the Guevara on the left, Cuban cinema has lost its great champion. Alfredo was the founder of the Cuban film institute, the ICAIC, which was set up in 1959 just three months after the overthrow of the dictator Batista by the rebels led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. A kind of Cuban John Grierson, Alfredo similarly had no difficulty in combining cinema and political commitment, but he had the advantage over the Scots pioneer of documentary that his backer was not a senior civil servant in a bourgeois democracy, but the leader of a popular revolution who had been his friend since student days.  Read more

Cuba in Aberystwyth

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Welsh hills covered in snow as the train snakes across country on the way back from Aberystwyth. Went there for a symposium on Cuban cinema, with scholars and filmmakers over from Havana, and other participants mainly based in UK universities; although these were not necessarily Brits, because after all, the academic world is thoroughly international. Indeed our intellectual culture (such as it is) benefits enormously from the attraction that Britain seems to have for scholars from all over the world (which becomes a problem when a Government starts playing political games with student visas). Read more

Changes in Cuba; independent video thriving

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In 2002 the Cuban filmmaker Fernando Pérez made a compelling documentary called Suite Habana which portrayed the melancholic mood of the Cuban capital at the start of the 21st century. Ten years later the mood is rather different, as I discovered on my first visit to Cuba for three years, for a Seminar on Cuban Cinema in the department of history at the University of Havana. Reforms introduced over recent months which allow people to open small businesses, buy and sell their homes (instead of swapping them) and various other measures, have begun to alleviate the sense of hopelessness of the past two decades, at any rate among the students I met, who nevertheless remain critical of a regime they all consider thoroughly paternalistic. Read more

Memories of Memories

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With Memories of Overdevelopment the young Cuba film-maker Miguel Coyula has made a remarkable sequel to one of the classic films of the Cuban Revolution, Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Intriguingly, the new film, like the old, is based on a novel by the Cuban author Edmundo Desnoes—who settled in New York after quitting Cuba in 1979—which itself is a sequel to the first novel. Coyula himself is one of the new wave of independent Cuban film-makers, born in Havana in 1977, graduate of Cuba’s international film school in San Antonio de los Baños, who went to show his highly experimental digital shorts in New York in 1999, where he was offered an acting scholarship and stayed. This would seem to place him closer to Desnoes than Alea, who remained in Cuba where he died in 1996, but it’s still surprising: an avant garde film by a 33-year-old in collaboration with an eminance grise of 80.

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Showing at Riverside Studios, Monday 22 Nov 2010

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11716185[/vimeo]

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Fidel: past mistakes & advice to Ahmadinejad

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Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic reports a meeting with Fidel Castro in which Fidel made some extraordinary statements about the failure of Cuba’s economic model and his own past mistakes, including his position at the time of the missile crisis in 1962. He has not renounced his revolutionary principles. Goldberg writes: ‘When I asked him, over lunch, to answer what I’ve come to think of as the Christopher Hitchens question – has your illness caused you to change your mind about the existence of God? – he answered, “Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.” ‘ However, he admits that Cuba’s economic model doesn’t work. He also had some very pointed things to say about Iran’s Ahmadinejad who he says should stop slandering the Jews, while his advice to Israel is to give up its nuclear arsenal. The links can be found on my other blog, Michael’s Digest.

Forthcoming

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Neoliberalism and Global Cinema Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique
Edited by Jyotsna Kapur, Keith Wagner
 Using film, this study investigates the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Includes Michael Chanan, ‘Cuban Cinema: A Case of Accelerated Underdevelopment’
Forthcoming, Routledge, April 2011

Cuba 2, Venezuela 1

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Cuba 2, Venezuela 1

Three DVDs have turned up, two about Cuba and one about Venezuela, which portray different perspectives on revolutionary politics in Latin America at different stages. Mike Wayne & Deirdre O’Neill’s Listen to Venezuela is a lengthy report on the Venezuelan process by a pair of leftist intellectuals on an academic research scholarship, dense with information about what is really going on there. With our memory on the future (Con la memoria en el futuro) presents the veteran Cuban documentarist Octavio Cortázar looking back shortly before his death in 2008, revisiting the territory of his 1974 documentary, With Cuban Women (Con la mujeres cubanas), asking if women’s lot has genuinely improved and machismo is on the decline. Filmically the most satisfying, Andrew Lang’s Sons of Cuba is the work of a young British film-maker, an agile portrait of a boxing academy for youngsters in Havana. Read more

Cuba in Paris

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From Buenos Aires to Paris, for a conference on culture in Cuba. Unfortunately the organisers invited Cuban speakers from both Havana and outside, without realising that those from Havana would not attend, not out of individual choice but because it’s policy — the Cuban government operates a ban on allowing its artists and intellectuals to appear in public alongside those who have opted to leave the country and call themselves exiles. Since the final session is given over to a couple of the latter, Abilio Estévez and Zoé Valdés (although Estévez, who now has Spanish citizenship, goes back on visits), the conference ends on a downer. It’s certainly instructive to hear what they have to say, but it’s impossible to enter into dialogue with them, because they tend to have a rather fixed perspective. Read more

Cuba: untold stories

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Back from the Cuba Research Forum event in Nottingham. Came away thinking once again, as many times before, that Cuba is a mass of paradoxes. A small country which punches far above its weight in international politics, in dire economic straights but ruled by a strong regime which still upholds the communist ideology. This regime, which now officially admits that people don’t earn enough to live on, has prioritised social welfare, and the country has seen no essential fall in its exemplary rates of life expectancy nor any rise in infant mortality compared to before the collapse of 1991. This is not say the system is not under strain, but these rates are among the best in the world. (Cuba’s infant mortality rate is actually lower than that of the USA; meanwhile, opponents of Obama’s health reforms protest, among other things, that covering 46m uninsured Americans will ‘cost too much’—in the richest country in the world.) Read more