maeve66 | (Reply)

From:

maeve66.livejournal.com

Hi,

anandav -- yeah, I haven't seen that yet, though I want to. Have you, of more recent Cuban films, seen Guantanamera? It's LOVELY -- and also has a small musical connection. I never saw Strawberries and Chocolate, the one that was supposed to herald an opening in Cuba around sexuality, but Guantanamera was amazing. First, it shows how absolutely beautiful Cuba is. Second, it shows how people CAN protest the bureaucracy and lack of multiparty democracy, without being either squashed like a bug, or being tools of the CIA. Third, I saw it in a seedy little theater across from the Art Institute of Chicago, and there was a family seated in front of me -- maybe three generations of one family. One gusano family. The little kids had never seen Cuba, never been there, and it was clear that they thought it was gorgeous and wanted to know why they had no contact with the land. And the older generations were very moved and also very conflicted throughout the whole movie. Fascinating.

The plot (skip this, I guess, if you want to see the movie, though I doubt I remember it well enough to present any spoilers) follows an old man who JUST MISSED a fateful re-encounter with the Love of his youth, an opera singer famous in the island. She dies, and he wants her buried all the way across the island in her original home town. So there's a crazy progression across the island, trying to get her home. The bureaucracy interferes in various ways, and there's a younger man who is trying to facilitate all of this, who is a Party member. I think he's a nephew or something. He looks a lot like Daniel Ortega, I think deliberately.

The criss-cross journey stops in most of the provinces or states or whatever, and meets up with people from different political persuasions and walks of life, and shows what life is like for lots of different Cuban people, both rural and urban. And there's a really powerful scene at the end of the movie where the Ortega-esque guy imagines himself, or has a vision of himself, standing on a pedestal and speaking to a crowd, like a revolutionary statue or icon. But (if I remember this clearly) the camera pulls away to show that he's standing, totally isolated and alone, on top of a grave monument, in a cemetery.

I loved that movie, and people who are snottily critical of Cuba without knowing jack about it... I always want them to see it. I'm not saying there aren't criticisms to make. Just that, as Americans, whose country has done its best to put a heel on their neck, I don't think we have as much space to do the criticizing as, say, the Mexicans.