CineMonth
History of Cuban Cinema 3

The 1960s and 1970s were the years when Cuban cinema stopped looking for a national identity and began creating one with remarkable confidence. The Revolution of 1959 had given filmmakers something that had never existed on the island before: a permanent institution devoted to producing, exhibiting and developing Cuban films. ICAIC provided the structure, but institutions alone do not create great cinema. What made these two decades extraordinary was the arrival of filmmakers who understood that revolutionary cinema could become far more interesting than political illustration. They wanted films capable of participating in the transformation of society while remaining adventurous, critical, poetic and unmistakably cinematic.

For me, this is the period when Cuban cinema became one of the most exciting national cinemas in the world. A relatively small Caribbean country, which before the Revolution had lived under enormous economic and cultural pressure from the United States and had struggled to sustain an independent film industry, suddenly produced work that filmmakers and critics around the world had to take seriously. Cuba did not attempt to build a miniature Hollywood. Its greatest achievement was precisely the opposite: it developed a cinema whose energy came from Cuban history, Cuban music, Cuban faces and the social changes taking place across the island.

The importance of ICAIC cannot be separated from this achievement. Created only months after the triumph of the Revolution, the institution gave filmmakers access to equipment, production support, laboratories, distribution and an audience. Just as importantly, it created a community in which directors, cinematographers, editors, musicians, writers and documentary filmmakers could work together over many years. Instead of making one isolated film and then waiting indefinitely for another opportunity, artists could begin thinking about cinema as a continuing cultural practice.

This continuity allowed an extraordinary amount of experimentation. Cuban filmmakers watched Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, Soviet montage, documentary traditions and the emerging cinemas of Latin America, but the most interesting directors did not simply imitate any of them. They borrowed freely and then transformed those influences through their own circumstances. The Cuban Revolution had changed the social landscape so rapidly that conventional filmmaking often seemed inadequate to describe it, and this encouraged directors to mix fiction with documentary footage, professional actors with ordinary people, political history with private memory, comedy with social criticism and carefully composed images with the apparent spontaneity of events happening directly in front of the camera.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea became the central figure in this new cinema. He had supported the Revolution and helped establish ICAIC, but what makes his work endure is that he never confused support with unquestioning praise. He understood that a society attempting to improve itself needed artists willing to examine its contradictions. His films repeatedly demonstrate affection for revolutionary ideals while remaining alert to bureaucracy, hypocrisy, passivity and the persistence of old habits inside a supposedly new society.

His 1966 comedy Death of a Bureaucrat is a perfect example. The story follows a man trapped in an absurd bureaucratic nightmare after a worker is buried with his labor card, which the family then needs in order to receive benefits. What follows becomes increasingly ridiculous as administrative rules collide with common sense. Gutiérrez Alea clearly believed in the new society, but that did not prevent him from laughing at the bureaucratic machinery developing inside it. In fact, the humor is more effective precisely because it comes from someone who wanted the system to work better rather than someone standing outside it waiting for it to fail.

Two years later, Gutiérrez Alea made Memories of Underdevelopment, a film that for me remains one of the great works of Latin American cinema. The protagonist, Sergio, is a wealthy and educated man who remains in Havana after his wife and many of his friends leave for the United States. He watches the revolutionary transformation around him from a position of emotional distance, convinced of his superiority to almost everyone he encounters while remaining incapable of committing himself to anything meaningful.

What makes Memories of Underdevelopment extraordinary is that Gutiérrez Alea refuses to turn Sergio into a simple political villain. Sergio is intelligent enough to recognize many weaknesses in the society around him, but he is unable to recognize the emptiness within himself. His sophistication becomes another form of paralysis. The film therefore challenges the audience to understand a man whose intelligence does not automatically produce moral clarity.

The form of the film is as important as its protagonist. Fictional scenes are combined with photographs, newsreel footage, political events, memories and fragments of documentary reality. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis exist alongside Sergio’s private relationships, making personal alienation and national transformation part of the same cinematic experience. The editing refuses to separate history from everyday life because for Cubans living through those years the two could hardly be separated.

This is one reason the film remains so alive. It does not present revolutionary history after everything has been settled. It captures a society still discovering what it is becoming. That uncertainty gives the film an energy that conventional historical dramas rarely possess.

The same year, 1968, produced another masterpiece in Humberto Solás’s Lucía. If Memories of Underdevelopment examines revolutionary Cuba through the consciousness of one alienated man, Lucía looks at Cuban history through three women living during three different periods. Each woman is named Lucía, but each belongs to a different social world and historical moment.

The first story takes place during the war for independence from Spain in 1895, the second during the political struggles of the 1930s, and the third after the Revolution. Solás changes the visual style of each episode, allowing form itself to reflect the historical period being represented. The first section has the emotional intensity of romantic tragedy, the second moves with a different political and social energy, while the third introduces humor into the conflict between revolutionary transformation and the persistence of male domination.

The third Lucía is particularly important because the Revolution may have changed laws, institutions and economic structures, but it could not instantly erase attitudes that had existed for generations. A man may support revolutionary change in public while continuing to behave like the unquestioned master of his wife at home. Solás understood that social revolution would remain incomplete if relationships between men and women did not change with it.

This ability to examine unfinished transformation is one of the great strengths of Cuban cinema from this period. The best filmmakers did not behave as though January 1959 had magically solved every problem. They treated the Revolution as a process rather than a completed event. Racism, sexism, class differences, bureaucracy and inherited cultural attitudes remained subjects worth examining because changing a government can happen much faster than changing the habits people carry inside themselves.

Sara Gómez took this idea even further. Her importance to Cuban cinema cannot be measured simply by the number of films she completed, because her career was tragically short. She died in 1974 at only thirty-one, but the work she left behind gave Cuban cinema a perspective that had been missing. As a Black woman filmmaker interested in race, gender, class and everyday life, she looked at revolutionary society from a position different from that of the men who had dominated directing.

Her feature One Way or Another, completed after her death and released in 1977, remains one of the most remarkable Cuban films of the period. At its center is a relationship between Yolanda, a teacher, and Mario, a factory worker, but Gómez uses their romance to examine much larger questions about education, masculinity, poverty and the transformation of marginalized communities.

The film moves freely between fiction and documentary. Real neighborhoods and social conditions enter the dramatic world, while documentary passages provide historical and sociological context. Gómez was not interested in using fictional characters to hide reality. She wanted the people and environments around them to remain visible.

The relationship between Yolanda and Mario becomes especially revealing because revolutionary values conflict with deeply rooted ideas about male behavior. Mario can participate in a society promising equality while still carrying expectations about women that belong to an older patriarchal culture. Gómez understands that the Revolution creates opportunities for change, but people must still do the difficult emotional work of changing themselves.

Her approach makes One Way or Another an essential film not only in Cuban cinema but also in the history of feminist filmmaking. Gómez does not isolate gender from class or race because the lives of her characters do not separate those experiences so conveniently. She observes how social conditions overlap and how personal relationships become places where political change is either fulfilled or resisted.

Documentary cinema was equally central to Cuba’s golden age, and no name is more important in that history than Santiago Álvarez. His work deserves a separate article in this series, but it is impossible to discuss the achievements of the 1960s and 1970s without recognizing how radically he expanded the possibilities of political documentary.

Álvarez could build a film from almost anything. Photographs, newspaper clippings, television footage, music, typography and existing images could be reorganized through editing until they acquired completely new energy. He did not believe documentary needed to pretend to be neutral. His films announced their political position openly and then used every available cinematic device to make that position emotionally powerful.

What separates Álvarez from ordinary propaganda is invention. The editing has rhythm, anger, wit and sometimes a sense of musical performance. His films are arguments, but they are also experiments in how images can be made to speak to one another. A photograph that appears ordinary in one context can become explosive when placed beside another image and accompanied by unexpected sound.

Music played an enormous role in this period of Cuban cinema. Leo Brouwer, who became internationally celebrated as a guitarist and composer, created music for numerous Cuban films and helped give ICAIC productions a distinctive sonic identity. Cuban filmmakers understood that music did not need to remain safely beneath dialogue as emotional decoration. It could disrupt an image, argue with it or create another layer of meaning.

This relationship between music and cinema drew naturally from Cuban culture, where rhythm had always been central to artistic life. The Revolution did not invent Cuba’s musical richness, but ICAIC gave filmmakers new ways to bring that richness into cinema. Jazz, Afro-Cuban traditions, experimental composition and popular music could all become part of the language of a film.

Animation also expanded substantially under ICAIC. Juan Padrón would later become one of the best-known figures in Cuban animation, but the foundations for that development were created during the earlier decades when the country began treating animation as part of national film culture rather than merely children’s entertainment. Cuban animation gradually developed its own humor, visual style and relationship with history, eventually producing characters such as Elpidio Valdés, whose adventures transformed national history into popular entertainment.

The development of cinema was not limited to Havana’s filmmakers. One of the most important achievements of revolutionary cultural policy was the attempt to take movies to people who had little or no access to theaters. Mobile cinema units traveled to rural areas with projectors, screens and generators, bringing films to communities that had previously been excluded from regular moviegoing.

There is something deeply moving about this aspect of Cuban film history. Cinema, which before the Revolution had been concentrated largely in urban commercial theaters, was treated as something that should belong to everyone. A farmer or child living far from Havana could experience a projected film without needing to travel to a city. Film exhibition became part of the larger attempt to expand access to education and culture throughout the island.

This policy also created a different relationship between filmmakers and audiences. A national cinema becomes more meaningful when people from different regions and social backgrounds can actually see it. ICAIC was not simply producing films for festival audiences or cultural elites. It was helping create a public capable of responding to Cuban films.

The international ambitions of this period were equally important. Cuba became one of the centers of what came to be known as New Latin American Cinema, a broad movement connecting filmmakers who wanted Latin America to develop cinematic languages independent of Hollywood domination. The filmmakers involved did not share a single style or political program, but they believed strongly that the continent should represent its own histories and realities rather than allow foreign industries to define them.

For Cuba, this idea had particular force because the country had lived for decades in the shadow of the United States. Before 1959, American economic interests, tourism and popular culture exerted enormous influence over Cuban life. The Revolution changed the political relationship, and cinema became one of the places where cultural independence could also be asserted.

This did not mean rejecting everything from abroad. Cuban filmmakers were among the most internationally curious artists of their generation. They admired Eisenstein, Buñuel, the Italian neorealists, the French New Wave and many other filmmakers, but admiration did not require imitation. They could learn from international cinema while insisting that Cuba should look at itself through Cuban eyes.

That distinction gave the films their confidence. The 1970s brought changes in tone and production, but some of the period’s most interesting work continued exploring the unfinished questions of revolutionary society. Films examined the relationship between individual freedom and collective responsibility, the changing role of women, racial identity, rural life and the difficulty of overcoming cultural habits inherited from the past.

Julio García Espinosa also became one of the major thinkers associated with this cinema. His idea of an “imperfect cinema” challenged the assumption that filmmakers from developing countries should measure themselves against the expensive technical perfection of Hollywood. He argued for a cinema that valued participation and social engagement over polished surfaces and passive consumption.

The importance of this argument goes beyond whether every filmmaker agreed with it. Cuba had reached the point where it was not simply producing films admired abroad; it was contributing ideas to international debates about the meaning and purpose of cinema. A country that had struggled to maintain basic film production before the Revolution was now influencing how filmmakers throughout Latin America and beyond thought about their art.

This is why I regard the 1960s and 1970s as the golden age of Cuban cinema. The greatness of the period does not come only from a list of masterpieces, although Memories of Underdevelopment, Lucía and One Way or Another would be enough to secure Cuba an important place in film history. What makes the period exceptional is the larger culture that allowed such different films to appear within a relatively short time.

There was fiction, documentary, animation, satire and experimentation. There were filmmakers concerned with revolutionary history and filmmakers concerned with intimate relationships. There were men examining the failures of masculinity and women bringing experiences to the screen that Cuban cinema had previously neglected. There were films made for international festivals and mobile projectors carrying cinema into the countryside. All of this happened in a country whose pre-revolutionary film industry had repeatedly struggled for continuity. The transformation is extraordinary.

Within less than twenty years, Cuban cinema moved from the margins of international film culture into the center of some of its most important artistic and political conversations. It produced filmmakers whose work is still studied, restored and rediscovered around the world, while creating an institution capable of preserving national production and introducing generations of Cubans to films they might otherwise never have seen.

What I admire most about this period is that its greatest films were confident enough to support the Revolution without turning human beings into slogans. Gutiérrez Alea could believe in the Revolution while making fun of bureaucracy. Solás could celebrate enormous social change while recognizing that patriarchal habits survived it. Sara Gómez could embrace the possibilities of revolutionary society while insisting that racism, class and gender still required attention.

That is not a weakness of revolutionary cinema. It is one of its greatest strengths. A revolution that changes society also gives artists new realities to examine, and the filmmakers of Cuba’s golden age understood that their responsibility was not merely to show what had been achieved but to participate in what still needed to be changed.

Their films therefore feel alive rather than ceremonial. They contain enthusiasm, contradiction, humor, anger, beauty and doubt, all existing within a culture attempting to create a more independent future after decades in which so much of Cuba’s economic and cultural life had been shaped by forces outside the island.

The political Revolution gave Cuban filmmakers an institution and a new sense of possibility, but the filmmakers themselves transformed that opportunity into art. ICAIC provided cameras, production and access to audiences, yet it was Gutiérrez Alea, Solás, Gómez, Álvarez, García Espinosa and their collaborators who discovered what those cameras could do. By the end of the 1970s, the question was no longer whether Cuba possessed a national cinema. The world had already received the answer.