28 October 2024

This blog post was originally published in Spanish in Fantasma material magazine (2024). When the editors, Dean Luis Reyes and José Luis Aparicio, asked a number of critics and researchers to share their thoughts on the current situation of Cuban cinema for the magazine's first edition, Dunja took the opportunity to reflect on how her research had evolved from a study of national identity in 21st-century Cuban film to a comparative project that uses film to consider coloniality and ecology in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. This is a translation co-produced by Dunja and Emily Hunsberger. 

I've gone back and forth, but I plan to respond to these questions—valid and valuable as they are—by not responding. I'm hardly the right person to venture a description of current Cuban cinema. But beyond that, I'm not sure how much I’m interested in trying to do so. I'll try to explain what I mean. I'm thinking about an article that Walfrido Dorta wrote—it's hard to believe—twelve years ago, titled, “Olvidar a Cuba: contra el ‘lugar común’” ("Forgetting Cuba: Against the 'Common Place'").^[1] A phrase that frequently comes to mind for me is “noria perpetua” ("perpetual waterwheel"), which my colleague used to describe the movement of Cuban literature around the setting and central significance of the island.

I am guilty of the same approach, as the metaphor used to organize my monograph,^[2] published in 2018, is precisely that of the repeating island. Antonio Benítez Rojo^[3] helped me think about the combinations of the new and the familiar in Cuban fictional films produced on the Island, "after" the Special Period of economic crisis in Cuba in the mid-1990s and in light of the technological, institutional, and ideological changes at the beginning of the 21st century. I argued that Cuban cinema continued to function as a screen—employing the double meaning of the word in English—that both displays as well as hides anxieties about the question of national identity. By presenting the idea that Cuban cinema was reproducing an island, at the time I was referring not to an essential sense of cubanidad (Cuban-ness), but rather a cubanía^[4] (Cuban-ship or Cuban-dom) that is desired but never achieved. Following chaos theory, which inspired Benítez Rojo, I ended up concluding that, despite the force of entropy reflected in a cinema that seemed to operate "exposed to the institutional elements" and work with the remains of a (national) shipwreck, the films that I analyzed were proof that this "Caribbean machine" still had some energy left in it.

Of course, the situation becomes more complicated when the somewhat pathological energy of anxiety encounters or enters the market. I was in the midst of researching that book when 17D—the day it was announced that the Obama administration had re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba—renewed the global appetite for all things Cuban that had been sparked during the Special Period with Buena Vista Social Club, et al. Some of the new elements that I noticed in Cuban cinema during those first fifteen years of the 21st century—for example, the importance of the child as a supposedly "universal" figure, or the use of tropes like the vampire or international genres like the zom-com—could be understood in light of this context. It was a type of cinema that found itself—ever since the 1990s, but more and more over time—obliged to communicate with an international audience and compete in a global market. On the other hand, I also analyzed films that worked within and played with a decidedly national framework, from the way they were produced to their themes. In this way, they attested to the fact that it is not just the capitalist market—which eats up fungible "differences"—but also the State and its institutions that encourage the reproduction of the repeating island. In fact, the reorienting of official discourse after the Battle of Ideas (a set of social programs introduced by the Cuban government in 1999) toward cultural nationalism, on the one hand, and humanist values, on the other, facilitated the insertion of this "island" into the market.

I also wrote about the relationship, at the time, between Cuban cinema and the past; while one of the films I looked at made an allegory of the national situation by showing how the needs of the present required unearthing and selling the past (Se vende [For Sale] [Jorge Perugorría, 2012]), the other nurtured and upheld the idea of a nation as an affective community that goes beyond ideological, geographical, and temporal borders (José Martí: el ojo del canario [Martí, the Eye of the Canary] [Fernando Pérez, 2010]). The current situation is putting the most recent configuration of what is "Cuban" to the test. While it is not new, it seems to have renewed relevance in the context of a diaspora that is more numerous and diverse than ever. In a text that I wrote with Zaira Zarza,^[5] we applied Ruth Goldberg's^[6] suggestion that current Cuban cinema is not characterized as a movement, but by movement itself, to think about the relationship between 21st-century Cuban cinema and the diaspora in terms of films about exits and returns and films made in Cuba about migration and exile. In this way, we tried to reflect not only the blurring of borders by movement and technology, but also the indisputable specificity and confining outlines of the current Cuban context. For me, Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift) (José Luis Aparicio Ferrera and Fernando Fraguela Fosado, 2020) is a particularly significant case: despite its production offering the possibility of thinking about a Cuban cinema that encompasses both Island and diaspora, its narrative arc demonstrates that this assumed community is impossible or at least incomplete. If an imagined affective and creative Cuban community exists, identification is constantly endangered by the effects of mistrust and pain.

On the other hand, digital platforms and social media have turned out to be key to connecting Cubans within the Island and creating moments of unity and solidarity with the diaspora, as was the case with the 11J protests and marches in cities from New York to Berlin. By bringing greater visibility to experiences of violence and repression on both the national and international levels, they have brought a sense of urgency to and made possible the creation of films that respond to injustices, both recent and historic, committed in the name of the Cuban Revolution. The dialogue and connections facilitated by these media and the initiatives geared toward documenting and archiving—such as the Enciclopedia del Audiovisual Cubano (an encyclopedia of Cuban audiovisual media - ENDAC);^[7] the “Memorias” ("Memoirs") of the Asamblea de Cineastas Cubanos (the Cuban filmmakers association - ACC) and their new magazine, Alterna;^[8], and Cine Cubano en Cuarentena (Cuban Cinema in Quarantine),^[9] among others—have revealed that these experiences are only the most recent in a long-standing chaotic constellation. Both before and after the proposal of the law on filmmaking (Ley de Cine), filmmaker groups including the government-appointed working group, the Cardumen (Shoal of Fish), and Asamblea de Cineastas Cubanos continue to organize and mobilize, demanding solutions to "fundamental problems" that "return like a nightmare and become more and more intense."^[10] The repeating island here is that of censorship and internal and external exile, injecting more energy into the machine that fragments at the same time as it connects. As long as this remains the case, the same categories will keep being reproduced: Cuban cinema and diasporic cinema, institutional cinema and that more fluid other that is neither confined nor immune to its limits.

What we know for sure is that the primacy of the personal, the sensory, and the affective; the attention to the marginalized and the residual; and the displaced relationship that generations born since the 1980s have with Revolutionary ideals and promises—all these factors have expanded the definition of what is "Cuban" in cultural production over the last two decades. They have questioned their relationship with the State and the "Revolutionary" without dissociating from it entirely, as the context and available media have made it both necessary and possible to create new archives and new stories that respond either directly or indirectly to the teleology of the Revolution. As Reynaldo Lastre, Nils Longueira, Isdanny Morales, and I suggest in a current work in progress,^[11] non-institutional Cuban cinema—understood within a wider panorama of digital media—attests to and multiplies a tangled timeline in which change coexists with continuity, and the past is present. It is an entanglement that can be understood in Benítez Rojo’s terms, as a chaotic pattern that repeats with variation, in which time takes on the shape of a spiral. Even though the repeating island has its dizzying charm—and I have spent half of this text talking about "Cuban" cinema right after proposing precisely to not respond to these sorts of questions—everything depends on the framework in which we place it. Spirals cause motion sickness, and anyone who has suffered from anxiety—whether identity-related or existential—knows how tiring it can be.

So, in recent years, I've set out to rethink the framework in which I place Cuban cinema. In addition to being an individual impulse related to my personal experience and weary emotional state, it's a challenge that could very well be justified on an industry level (with the decay of the Cuban film institute [Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos - ICAIC] and the rise of digital formats in every phase of a film's life cycle, the means of production and distribution of Cuban cinema on the island are beginning to look more like those of other places), a geographic level (the wave of migration continues to decenter the Island, linking the "Cuban" experience with that of other groups), and a technological level (greater access to the internet, computers, cell phones, and social media blur borders without eliminating them, fostering diversification of themes, forms, and audiences). I'm aware of the privileged position that allows me to react in this way to my fatigue. As I've tried to make clear, today there is a type of Cuban cinema that explicitly assumes responsibility for this context that is so tiring and wearisome for Cubans on the island but also for those outside the island, by documenting what is happening or offering personal, alternative visions. But, for me, distancing myself from the violent machine that reproduces both censorship and exile, on one hand, and accusatory or remedial responses, on the other, has been the first step toward conceiving other possible frameworks to understand new particularities—or new ways of understanding the particularities of the Cuban context. What would happen—I asked myself—if I were to think about Cuban cinema without getting immediately tangled up in identity-related or Revolutionary discourses?

We take the same starting point as Benítez Rojo, but a different turn: Cuba is an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. As such, it is among the so-called Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which, given their low altitude, size, scarce resources, and geographical position, "are on the frontlines of the climate crisis."^[12] This global crisis has unequal effects on different parts and populations of the world, and the social sciences and humanities have made it clear that this is not only due to geographical factors, or rather, that geography cannot be separated from historical, economic, political, and cultural factors. If we examine SIDS closely, we see that their vulnerability to climate change is also a product of coloniality, which Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres defines as follows:

Coloniality... refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism...  The project of colonizing America... became a model of power, as it were, or the very basis of what was then going to become modern identity, inescapably framed by world capitalism and a system of domination structured around the idea of race. This model of power is at the heart of the modern experience.^[13]

To this list of elements framed by capitalism and race, we could add something that is both implicit as well as suppressed by "intersubjective relations:" ways of inhabiting, thinking about, and relating to "nature." For Malcolm Ferdinand, a theorist from the French island of Guadeloupe, the Caribbean both enables and forces us to see the fracture between colonizer/colonized as inseparable from the one between "human"/"nonhuman nature."^[14] Both fractures have complemented one another to facilitate and justify the oppression, exploitation, and extraction of colonized human beings as well as that "other" we understand as "the environment." Under coloniality, both "nature" as well as racialized populations continue to be thought of as "resources" that are interchangeable and disposable and meant for the enrichment and development of the metropolis(es). This arrangement has brought us to the current climate crisis: planetary in scope, but experienced in different ways throughout the world.

What would it mean to think about this intersection of coloniality and ecology in a (post)socialist context that is supposedly antiracist and anticolonial, like that of Cuba? This is one of the questions that drive the comparative focus of my current research project. Cuba shares geographical conditions and ecological vulnerabilities with the Greater Antilles. It also shares with the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico the historical experiences of Spanish colonialism and settlement, relatively late development of their sugar industries, and the imperialism of the United States—factors that have marginalized them within the field of Caribbean studies, which is focused more on Anglophone and Francophone contexts. At the same time, the enormous differences between the governments and economic systems of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, inextricably related to their very different histories of independence, have impeded their comparative study.^[15] Nevertheless, it is precisely this combination of similarities and differences that leads me to posit, with greater urgency, the possible benefit of a comparative focus to a wider understanding of ecology, as the set of relationships among organisms, and between organisms and the environments in which they live.

"But what does all this have to do with cinema?" one may very well ask. Both ecology and coloniality are sensory and relational phenomena: they have to do with what we might call, after French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the distribution of the sensible.^[16] Both coloniality and the climate crisis are phenomena that entail narratives: ways of relating (or not) the present with the past and of imagining the future. Cinema combines these three elements; for me, it is the most evocative medium for exploring and even beginning to unpack the intersection between ecology and coloniality. Through framing and editing, films are able to condense and connect spaces and scales; through perspective and suture, they are able to create and displace the identification with and between human and nonhuman elements; through sound design and cinematography, they are able to address multiple senses and point to other—embodied—ways of knowing; through camera movement and rhythm, they are able to evoke unique experiences of time.

I close with an example of a Cuban work that I am analyzing alongside a few other Puerto Rican and Dominican films to think about time as it relates colonial ecologies. Abisal (Abyssal) (2021), by Alejandro Alonso, could very well be understood within a chaotic movement, a repeating island, highlighting the entropy of socialist aesthetic forms and the teleological promises of the Revolution—a perspective implied in an article by Jorge Yglesias, for example.^[17] My approach does not contradict this potential analysis, but rather suggests zooming further out. In fact, I think that the strikingly framed shots in which workers stick their heads out of windows or appear outlined in front of or inside enormous ships that look like fossils or giant rocks, demand such a change in perspective. Just as theorists and scholars have suggested that the so-called "Anthropocene,"^[18] the current geological era, is characterized by the impact of man [sic] on the Earth, it is also characterized by a heightened awareness of ecological interrelatedness, causes and effects, past and present. Following the lead of thinkers that maintain that it is impossible to understand the present without considering colonialism, the plantation system, and slavery,^[19] I propose that the interrelationships that these images point to have to do with colonial histories of trade, labour, and their debris.

Toward the beginning of Abisal (Abyssal), the viewer can make out the words "Caribbean Line" on the side of one of the ships. There is a map on the website of this shipping company that seems especially revealing to me; ^[20] I suppose that, in an attempt to create a more compact and legible graphic representation of their routes, the designers connected Europe with the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, completely erasing the African continent. The resulting map is reminiscent of the routes that the colonial powers—especially Spain—used to extract resources and riches from the so-called New World and along which Cuba served as an important destination and nexus. But it is also, paradoxically, a visual representation of the erasure of the kidnapping, killing, and enslavement of those beings on whom the extraction of these riches depended; in other words, the extraction of natural resources in the Americas depended on the prior extraction of human and nonhuman nature as "resources" from the African continent. Centuries later, in the supposedly socialist and anticolonial context of contemporary Cuba, racialized workers dismantle for scraps the enormous ships belonging to an industry that continues to reinforce and extend the global color line:^[21] a racialized labor exploitation system that deems certain bodies and certain ecosystems disposable and that serves to erase these processes and their "debris." In this film, and in the current century, instead of extracting resources from the earth through monoculture or mining and exploiting workers through slavery, colonial ecologies seem to manifest themselves in the relegation of discarded materials and disposable lives to Bahía Honda, on the north coast of Cuba.

This approach allows us to think about—or better yet, to experience—the strange temporality of the film as something more than "a chronicle about the eternal end," as Antonio Enrique González Rojas describes it in his evocative analysis.^[22] We become aware that the passivity of "erosion, disintegration, the disappearance of what is real, the dissolution of that which is solid" that is associated with the entropy of the promises of modernity coexists with an active process of "ruination."^[23] When we broaden our geographic and temporal frameworks, we are able to see how the present as it is lived among this wreckage actually nurtures and revives a global system of human and environmental exploitation.

When I consider Abisal (Abyssal) alongside Dominican films like Verde (Green) (Alfonso Morgan Terrero, 2020) and Puerto Rican ones like Celaje (Cloudscape) (Sofía Gallisá Muriente, 2020), I begin to perceive a shared sense of entangled temporality, of multiple apocalypses—past, future, and eternally underway, but experienced in different ways according to each context and its unique geopolitical factors. Even though I am only just beginning the project, this perspective is helping me return to Cuba by leaving behind the common(-)place.

[1] Walfrido Dorta: “Olvidar a Cuba: contra el ‘lugar común’” ("Forgetting Cuba: Against the 'Common Place'"), Diario de Cuba, December 21, 2012, <https://diariodecuba.com/de-leer/1356084148_85.html>.

[2] Dunja Fehimović: National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema: Screening the Repeating Island, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018.

[3] See. Antonio Benítez Rojo: The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, translated by James E. Maraniss, 2.^da ed., Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1996.

[4] I base my thinking on the distinction between “cubanidad” and “cubanía” that Fernando Ortiz made in his talk “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” ("The Human Factors of Cubanidad"), first published in 1940. The text is available here <http://www.habanaelegante.com/Panoptico/Panoptico_Ortiz.html>.

[5] The text appears in The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, edited by Jacqueline Loss and Vicky Unruh, and published by Cambridge University Press.

[6] See. Ruth Goldberg: “Under the Surface of the Image: Cultural Narrative, Symbolic Landscapes, and National Identity in the Films of Jorge de León and Armando Capó”, New Documentaries in Latin America, Vinicius Navarro and Juan Carlos Rodríguez eds., Palgrave Macmillan US, New York, 2014, pp. 59-74.

[7] See <https://endac.org/>.

[8] Both the “Memorias” ("Memoirs") (<https://endac.org/download/asamblea-de-cineastas-cubanos-memorias-2013-2023/>) as well as the magazine (<https://endac.org/download/revista-alterna-1-abril-2024/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2JF1Cbl1lFxaRN8ctzMbKztxD2fEhuG1igcsfQPW7x4PxLdBWrWU7ewvY_aem_AeJPOqEbkQhvbDufw_8gxhrTNm6ZcwFcVDdZnP375bImr7oDwCIHir7TpOUrMgJv26axzVbhfGb-cCSUusFvOFB8>) can be downloaded from the ENDAC website.

[9] See <https://rialta.org/cine-cubano/>.

[10] Asamblea de Cineastas Cubanos: “Declaración de la Asamblea de Cineastas Cubanos” ("Declaration of Asamblea de Cineastas Cubanos [the Cuban filmmakers assocation]"), August 15, 2023, <facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02dLeQrEKPnjYUf7MK4fdxxbj6cuuWkRxMAgsgtJTB8cp8z3uWrLpbonZKPsESvC5Nl&id=100093480919395>.

[11] The project is related to the colloquium “Abordar el pasado: Memoria y Revolución en los medios y el cine cubano del siglo xxi” ("Addressing the Past: Memory and Revolution in 21st-century Media and Cuban Cinema"), which took place from April 7 to 9, 2022, and was relayed in the pages of Rialta Magazine, <https://rialta.org/coloquio-cine-cubano/>.

[12] <https://www.undp.org/es/latin-america/pequenos-estados-insulares-en-desarrollo>.

[13] Nelson Maldonado-Torres: “On the Coloniality of Being”, Cultural Studies n.^o 21, vol. 2-3 (March 1, 2007), pp. 240-270.    

[14] See. Malcolm Ferdinand: Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, Polity, Cambridge, 2021.

[15] For more details about this claim, see Ada Ferrer: “History and the Idea of Hispanic Caribbean Studies”, Small Axe, vol. 20, n.^o 51, January 11, 2016, pp. 49-64.

[16] Mónica Padró's translation of The Politics of Aesthetics was published by Prometeo ediciones in 2014 under the title El reparto de lo sensible: Estética y política.

[17] Jorge Yglesias: “Abisal” ("Abyssal"), Rialta Magazine, December 12, 2022, <https://rialta.org/abisal-alejandro-alonso/>.

[18] See, for example, texts by Timothy Morton, such as Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), or by Stacy Alaimo, such as Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016).

[19] In this sense, the writing of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Kathryn Yusoff, and the aforementioned Malcolm Ferdinand, among many others, is key.

[20] See <https://www.soreidom.com/>.

[21] To learn more about the concept of the “global color line” and the relevance of the thinking of W. E. B. DuBois to Latin America, see the article by José Itzigsohn: “¿Por Qué Leer a W.E.B. DuBois En América Latina?” ("Why Should We Read W.E.B. DuBois in Latin America?") (April 9, 2021), Nueva Sociedad | Democracia y política en América Latina, <https://nuso.org/articulo/por-que-leer-a-web-du-bois-en-america-latina/>.

[22] Antonio Enrique González Rojas: “‘Abisal’ o la fuga de lo concreto” ("'Abyssal' or the disappearance of what is real"), Rialta Magazine, December 22, 2023, <https://rialta.org/abisal-fuga-lo-concreto-documental-alonso-resena/>.

[23] See the volume edited by Ann Stoler: Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013).