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

9 Notes on Digital Cinema

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A new online journal from Colombia, Corónica, has posted a short interview with me on video, made by Juan Soto, called ‘9 Notes on Digital Cinema’. It accompanies my film on the students protests in Chile, Three Short Films about Chile.

Here is Juan’s video (in Spanish and English, with subtitles).

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/48867239#[/vimeo]

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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

Our Man in Havana

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Our Man in Havana « LRB blog

private | 10 February 2012 | www.lrb.co.uk

Alan Gross, a 62-year-old US citizen, has been imprisoned in Cuba since December 2009. He fell foul of the authorities while working for USAID, liaising with Cuba’s small Jewish community. The Washington Post earlier this month demanded his release, saying that ‘Cuba’s accusations stem from Mr Gross’s humanitarian work’. When he was convicted for ‘acts to undermine the integrity and independence’ of Cuba and sentenced to 15 years in jail, Hillary Clinton said that ‘he did not commit any crime’ but was ‘assisting the small Jewish community in Havana that feels very cut off from the world’ by improving their internet connection.

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The Comandante’s Memory

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Brilliant cartoon by Raúl de la Nuez, La memoria del comandante 2

The Comandante’s Memory (No.2)
‘Don’t rememer who sang ‘Los zapaticos de rosa’..???
The Beatles or the Rolling Stones’

(Los zapaticos de rosa is a song to a poem by José Martí)

http://cartoonuez.com/
via http://bostoonsmag.com

 

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.

Martí according to Pérez

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Screening at the Barbican on September 25, 2010

For his new film on the Cuban national hero Martí, Fernando Pérez has returned to classical narrative after a run of offbeat movies, both fiction and documentary. In Martí, el ojo del canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary), he reinvents the childhood and adolescence of Cuba’s nineteenth century national hero  José Martí,  covering the years he lived in Cuba before being sent into exile for political sedition at the age of seventeen.  Not a subject to be approached without care, since Martí is a figure, as Guiteras points out on La Joven Cuba, who is adored and put to use by contrary political tendencies to legitimise their own position. Read more