CineMonth
Cuban Cinema History 2
The Cuban Revolution changed almost every part of life on the island, but one of the clearest signs of how seriously the new government regarded culture came only a few months after the fall of Batista. On March 24, 1959, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, better known as ICAIC, was created. The timing was significant because the new government did not treat cinema as a secondary form of entertainment to be reorganized later. Film was considered important enough to become one of the first major cultural institutions established after the revolution, and from that moment forward Cuban cinema entered an entirely different period.
Before 1959, Cuba had filmmakers, actors, technicians, movie theaters and an enthusiastic audience, but it did not possess a stable national production system capable of sustaining filmmaking from one generation to the next. The island had produced important films and remarkable artists, yet many Cuban professionals were forced to move between Havana, Mexico City, New York and other centers in search of work. Hollywood dominated local screens, while the Mexican industry offered another powerful source of Spanish-language cinema. Cuba had talent and a strong moviegoing culture, but its film industry remained fragile.
ICAIC attempted to change that situation almost overnight by making cinema part of a national cultural project. The new institution was responsible for production, distribution, exhibition and the development of film culture, which meant that it was not simply a studio. It became the center through which the country could train filmmakers, produce documentaries and fiction films, circulate movies, create newsreels and bring cinema to audiences who had rarely or never seen films before.
The people who gathered around ICAIC were not beginning from nothing. Some of the most important figures in the new institution had already been thinking seriously about cinema before the revolution. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa had made El Mégano in 1955, a short film influenced by Italian neorealism that looked at the difficult lives of charcoal workers. The Batista government suppressed the film, but its importance went far beyond its immediate political content. It demonstrated that a younger generation of Cuban filmmakers wanted to turn the camera toward ordinary people and social reality rather than continue imitating imported commercial formulas.
Gutiérrez Alea had studied filmmaking in Rome, where the influence of Italian neorealism was still strong. That experience became important after he returned to Cuba because neorealism had shown filmmakers throughout the world that cinema did not require the enormous resources of Hollywood in order to become powerful. Real locations, ordinary faces and contemporary social problems could provide the material for serious filmmaking. For Cuba, a country attempting to reinvent both society and cinema at the same time, this lesson was extremely attractive.
ICAIC therefore emerged from a combination of political revolution and artistic dissatisfaction. The new government wanted cinema capable of participating in social change, while younger filmmakers wanted the opportunity to create a national cinema that was visually and intellectually different from the commercial productions that had dominated Cuban screens. For a brief period, those two ambitions seemed to reinforce each other.
One of ICAIC’s first great achievements was the speed with which it began building a filmmaking infrastructure. Young people were trained in directing, cinematography, editing, sound and production, while foreign filmmakers were occasionally invited to Cuba to work with local crews and share experience. The purpose was not simply to import prestigious artists but to accelerate the development of Cuban professionals who could eventually make films independently.
This exchange produced some unusual results. One of the most famous was I Am Cuba, directed by Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov and photographed by Sergei Urusevsky. The film would later become celebrated internationally for its extraordinary camera movements and visual ambition, although at the time of its original release it was received much less enthusiastically in both Cuba and the Soviet Union.
The experience nevertheless had an important effect on Cuban filmmakers. Working beside experienced foreign professionals demonstrated what could be achieved visually, but it also made clear that a genuinely Cuban cinema could not depend permanently on outsiders. The country’s filmmakers needed to discover their own language, even if that meant accepting technical limitations during the process.
This desire to create a specifically Cuban cinema gradually became more important than simply reproducing the aesthetics of Soviet, European or Hollywood filmmaking. Documentary played a crucial role in this development.
The revolution had created enormous social and political changes that demanded to be recorded, and documentary filmmaking became one of ICAIC’s most active areas. Cameras traveled across the island to record agricultural campaigns, literacy programs, political events, workers, students and the transformation of everyday life.
The ICAIC Latin American Newsreel became especially important. Instead of treating newsreels simply as neutral reports of events, Cuban filmmakers increasingly experimented with editing, music, graphics and unexpected combinations of images. Political information could become cinematic expression rather than merely recorded journalism. No filmmaker became more closely identified with this transformation than Santiago Álvarez.
Álvarez understood editing as a form of thought. He could take photographs, newspaper headlines, existing footage and music and transform them into highly energetic political films. Many of his works were openly revolutionary and clearly aligned with the politics of the Cuban state, but their importance to documentary cinema goes beyond ideology. His films demonstrated how found images could be reorganized through montage to create emotional and intellectual arguments. This approach would influence political documentary far beyond Cuba.
The documentary impulse also helped shape Cuban fiction filmmaking. Directors learned to move between constructed scenes and real environments, between actors and documentary footage, and between personal stories and larger historical events. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction became unusually flexible, and some of the greatest Cuban films would eventually depend on precisely this mixture. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea became the central figure in this developing cinema.
His position was particularly interesting because he supported the revolution but never accepted the idea that revolutionary cinema should simply congratulate the revolution. He believed film could participate in social transformation by examining contradictions rather than hiding them. This attitude became essential to his later work.
A film such as Death of a Bureaucrat could mock the absurdity of bureaucracy within a revolutionary society rather than pretending that revolution had eliminated human stupidity. Memories of Underdevelopment would go much further by creating a protagonist who remained alienated from both the old bourgeois world and the revolutionary society developing around him.
This willingness to criticize from inside the revolution gave Cuban cinema a complexity that distinguished its strongest films from straightforward political propaganda. There were, however, limits to that freedom.
The relationship between artists and the revolutionary government became increasingly complicated during the early 1960s. The famous formulation that artists could create freely within the revolution but not against it established a boundary that was never entirely clear. Filmmakers could question bureaucracy, individual behavior and social contradictions, but the political system itself remained protected from certain kinds of criticism. This tension would remain part of Cuban cultural life for decades.
For filmmakers, the situation was both liberating and restrictive. ICAIC gave them opportunities, equipment, training and access to audiences on a scale that had never existed before 1959, but the same institution existed inside a political system that could determine the boundaries of acceptable expression.
Some filmmakers learned how to work productively inside this contradiction. Others eventually found it impossible. The early ICAIC years nevertheless produced an extraordinary concentration of talent. Gutiérrez Alea was joined by filmmakers including Julio García Espinosa, Humberto Solás and later Sara Gómez, while cinematographers, editors, sound designers and documentary filmmakers gradually created a professional culture that had not previously existed on the island.
Humberto Solás became one of the most important figures of this new generation. His early work already showed an interest in women as central characters, and this concern reached its fullest expression in Lucía, released in 1968. The film follows three different women named Lucía during three periods of Cuban history, allowing personal relationships, gender and political change to become inseparable.
The structure was ambitious, but what made the film remarkable was the confidence of its filmmaking. Only nine years after ICAIC was created, Cuban cinema could produce a film with visual and narrative ambition equal to the most important work emerging anywhere in Latin America. The same year produced Memories of Underdevelopment, which remains one of the defining achievements of Cuban cinema.
The film follows Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after many of the people around him leave for the United States. Instead of turning him into either a revolutionary hero or a simple enemy of the revolution, Gutiérrez Alea created a deeply contradictory character who observes the transformation of Cuba while remaining emotionally incapable of fully participating in it.
The film combines fiction, documentary footage, photographs, political events and subjective memory in a way that makes the form itself reflect the instability of the period. This was precisely the kind of cinema that ICAIC made possible at its best. The institution provided a structure. The filmmakers used that structure to experiment.
It is important not to romanticize the relationship. State-supported cinema always carries contradictions because the institution paying for films can also influence what films are permitted to say. Cuban cinema would eventually experience censorship, conflicts with artists and the departure of filmmakers who felt they could no longer work freely on the island.
Yet reducing ICAIC only to censorship would be as misleading as treating it only as a heroic cultural institution. Its historical importance comes from holding both realities at once. It created opportunities that had never existed in Cuban cinema while operating inside an increasingly centralized political system.
It encouraged experimentation while also defining ideological boundaries. It made extraordinary films possible while sometimes making other films impossible. This contradiction is necessary for understanding Cuban cinema after 1959. Another major achievement of ICAIC was its attempt to create audiences rather than simply create films.
The revolution inherited enormous differences between Havana and rural Cuba. Many people living in isolated areas had little access to movie theaters, and ICAIC developed mobile cinema units that carried projectors and screens into villages and remote regions. For people who had never experienced motion pictures, a screening could become an extraordinary event.
This effort reflected one of the most ambitious ideas behind the new cultural policy: cinema should not belong only to urban audiences or to people who could afford regular theater admission. Film was to become part of public cultural life.
The expansion of exhibition also changed the relationship between national cinema and its audience. Cuban films were no longer simply competing commercially with Hollywood imports. They were being presented as part of a broader cultural transformation, and audiences were encouraged to see themselves, their history and their political moment reflected on screen.
Whether every viewer accepted those images in the way the filmmakers or government intended is another question. Audiences are never completely controllable. A film can be created for political education and remembered for its performances. A revolutionary drama can become meaningful because of a love story.
A documentary intended as propaganda can survive because of its editing. Cinema always escapes part of the purpose assigned to it. This is one reason the strongest films of the ICAIC period remain interesting long after the political circumstances that created them have changed. They contain more than ideology.
The emergence of Cuban film theory was equally important. Julio García Espinosa’s concept of “imperfect cinema” argued against the idea that filmmakers in developing countries should imitate the technical perfection of wealthy film industries. Instead, limitation could become part of a different cinematic language, one more concerned with participation, social reality and political engagement than with polished entertainment.
Whether one agrees with every aspect of that argument or not, it became one of the important theoretical contributions of Cuban cinema to international film culture. Cuba was no longer merely producing films. It was producing ideas about what cinema could be. That distinction matters enormously.
A small country becomes influential in world cinema not when it attempts to compete with Hollywood in size but when it contributes something that other filmmakers find useful. Cuban cinema of the 1960s did exactly that. Its filmmakers helped develop a new relationship between documentary and fiction, political cinema and experimentation, national culture and international collaboration.
This influence extended across Latin America at a time when filmmakers in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere were also questioning the dominance of commercial cinema and searching for forms capable of expressing the social realities of their own countries. The creation of ICAIC therefore had consequences far beyond Cuba. It became one of the institutions associated with the larger emergence of New Latin American Cinema.
Filmmakers from different countries did not share identical politics or styles, but they shared a dissatisfaction with the idea that Latin American cinema should merely imitate the dominant industries of the United States or Europe. Cuba provided one possible model.
It demonstrated what could happen when a country decided that cinema was important enough to support institutionally. The results were extraordinary, although never uncomplicated. Within a decade of the revolution, Cuban cinema had produced filmmakers whose work entered the history of world cinema. It had established documentary traditions recognized internationally.
It had created mobile exhibition programs. It had trained a professional generation. It had developed film theory and criticism. Most importantly, it had moved Cuban cinema from a fragile series of individual productions into a continuous national filmmaking culture. This is why 1959 remains such a powerful dividing line. Before ICAIC, Cuban filmmakers repeatedly struggled to create films despite the weakness of the industry around them. After ICAIC, the central challenge changed. The question was no longer whether Cuba could sustain a national cinema.
The question became what that cinema should be allowed to say, how independent its artists could remain and whether revolutionary institutions could tolerate filmmakers whose responsibility was not simply to celebrate society but to examine it. The greatest Cuban directors understood that cinema becomes interesting precisely when easy answers disappear.
That is why the best films created under ICAIC survived long after the political slogans surrounding them began to age. They were born from a revolution, but their real subject was something more difficult: the human beings attempting to live inside it.
