CineMonth
History of Cuban Cinema 6

The collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s created one of the most difficult periods Cuba had faced since the Revolution. For decades, the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe had been central economic partners of the island, providing trade, fuel and markets that helped sustain Cuban society. When that entire system disappeared with astonishing speed, Cuba suddenly found itself confronting shortages of energy, food, transportation, raw materials and almost every resource necessary to maintain normal life. The government called the new era the Special Period in Time of Peace, but for ordinary Cubans the phrase described years of extraordinary hardship that entered homes, streets, workplaces and inevitably the cinema.

For the Cuban film industry, the crisis was especially dangerous because filmmaking depends on materials that become difficult to justify when a country is struggling to obtain basic necessities. Film stock had to be imported, laboratory processing required chemicals and electricity, equipment needed maintenance, and even transporting a crew across Havana could become complicated when gasoline was scarce. ICAIC, which since 1959 had given Cuban cinema a remarkable continuity, suddenly had to confront the possibility that the economic foundation supporting national production might no longer be sufficient to maintain filmmaking at anything close to its previous level.

What happened next is one of the most interesting chapters in Cuban film history because the crisis did not destroy the country’s cinema. Production certainly declined, and filmmakers had to accept limitations that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years earlier, but Cuban cinema adapted. Directors, producers and ICAIC began searching for international partners, especially in Spain, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, while filmmakers learned to work with smaller budgets and more flexible production methods. The difficult conditions of the Special Period forced Cuban cinema to change economically, but they also encouraged a remarkable period of artistic self-examination.

This is where I think the history becomes particularly important. Cuban cinema had been created after the Revolution as a national cultural project, and by the beginning of the 1990s it had already survived more than three decades. ICAIC had produced fiction films, documentaries, animation and newsreels, trained generations of filmmakers and created a film culture recognized throughout the world. The economic catastrophe of the Special Period could easily have ended that continuity, yet the institution and the filmmakers around it refused to let cinema become a luxury that Cuba could no longer afford.

The solution increasingly came through co-production. Foreign financing allowed Cuban filmmakers to continue working while ICAIC contributed talent, infrastructure, locations and the creative strength of the national industry. This arrangement naturally changed the economics of production because decisions could no longer be made entirely inside Cuba, but it also connected Cuban filmmakers more closely with international producers and helped important films reach audiences abroad.

No film represents this new situation better than Strawberry and Chocolate, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío and released in 1993. The film was made during some of the hardest years of the Special Period, when blackouts were frequent and shortages affected almost every aspect of daily life. Its very existence under those conditions is remarkable, but what makes the film historically important is the confidence with which it addresses questions of friendship, tolerance, culture and the place of gay Cubans within revolutionary society.

At the center of the film is the relationship between Diego, an educated gay man with a deep love for Cuban art and literature, and David, a young communist student who initially approaches him with suspicion. Their friendship develops slowly, and through that relationship the film explores prejudice without abandoning its affection for Cuba or the revolutionary project.

This balance is essential to understanding the film. Strawberry and Chocolate does not approach Cuba from the position of someone who wishes to reject the country. Diego’s frustration comes precisely from the fact that he loves Cuban culture and wants to belong to it fully. His disagreements with intolerance are not expressions of indifference toward Cuba but of emotional involvement with its future.

That is one reason the film became so important both inside and outside the island. It presented revolutionary Cuba as a society capable of examining its own contradictions and opening a conversation about people who had previously been pushed to the margins.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea had always understood that loyalty to a revolution did not require pretending that every problem had already been solved. From Death of a Bureaucrat to Memories of Underdevelopment, his best films had examined the distance between revolutionary ideals and imperfect human behavior. Strawberry and Chocolate continued that tradition during a moment when Cuba was under enormous external and economic pressure.

The film also became an extraordinary international success and eventually became the first Cuban feature nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. For a country passing through such severe economic hardship, that achievement carried enormous symbolic importance. Cuban cinema had not merely survived the crisis; one of the films made during that crisis had reached one of the most visible stages in world cinema.

Jorge Perugorría’s performance as Diego was central to the film’s success. He created a character who could be witty, vulnerable, theatrical and deeply serious without allowing Diego to become simply a symbol of persecution. Vladimir Cruz gave David an equally important transformation, allowing his ideological certainty to become gradually more complicated as friendship teaches him something that political slogans cannot.

The film’s real subject is therefore not homosexuality alone. It is the possibility of becoming more generous through contact with another human being. This idea feels particularly appropriate to the Special Period because Cuban society itself was being forced to adapt. Economic conditions were changing quickly, international alliances were disappearing, and habits created during decades of stability no longer worked in the same way. The country had to improvise in order to survive, and its cinema began doing the same thing.

Fernando Pérez became another essential filmmaker of this period. His Madagascar, released in 1994, approached the crisis from a much more intimate and poetic direction. Rather than explaining economic hardship directly, Pérez created a film about emotional exhaustion, generational distance and the feeling that ordinary reality had become difficult to endure.

The story centers on Laura, a university professor, and her teenage daughter Laurita, whose emotional worlds seem to be moving farther apart. Laurita dreams of escape and reinvention while Laura struggles with a growing sense of paralysis. The economic crisis surrounds them, but Pérez does not need constant references to shortages or political events because the atmosphere of the Special Period has already entered their psychology.

This is one of the great strengths of Madagascar. National crisis appears through private life. A society can experience economic collapse through numbers and statistics, but individuals experience it through exhaustion, uncertainty and the gradual disappearance of possibilities they once assumed would exist.

Pérez found a cinematic language capable of expressing that condition without turning the film into social reportage. Dreams, imagination and subjective images enter the narrative, creating a Havana in which reality itself seems unstable. The title is revealing because Madagascar becomes less a real destination than an imagined elsewhere, a place representing the possibility of escape from emotional and material confinement.

This desire to imagine another place was understandable during the Special Period, when many Cubans were confronting severe deprivation. Yet Pérez does not make escape the only possible response. His cinema remains deeply connected to Havana and to people trying to understand how they can continue living within the country they know and love.

This complexity would become even more evident in his 1998 film Life Is to Whistle. By then, Cuban cinema had begun developing an increasingly personal relationship with the realities of the decade. Pérez again refused straightforward political explanation and instead followed several characters living in Havana whose desires, frustrations and emotional wounds gradually intersect.

The city becomes almost a character itself. Havana is beautiful and exhausted at the same time, filled with music, movement, decay, spirituality and humor. Pérez understands that a city experiencing hardship does not stop being alive. People still fall in love, argue, dream, dance and invent ways to continue.

This refusal to reduce Cuba to crisis is important. Foreign representations of the Special Period have sometimes concentrated so heavily on scarcity that Cuban society appears only through deprivation. Cuban filmmakers naturally knew another reality because they were living inside it. They understood that hardship could be enormous without becoming the total definition of a people.

Cinema could show scarcity and dignity at the same time. It could show exhaustion without eliminating humor. It could acknowledge uncertainty while preserving affection for the island. Juan Carlos Tabío also played an increasingly important role during the decade. After collaboratingating with Gutiérrez Alea on Strawberry and Chocolate, he worked with him again on Guantanamera in 1995.

The film is built around the transportation of a dead woman’s body across Cuba, which allows the filmmakers to create a road comedy filled with encounters, bureaucratic absurdities and observations about everyday life. The structure is deceptively simple, but it provides a way to look at the entire country while allowing humor to soften subjects that might otherwise become heavy.

Gutiérrez Alea was already seriously ill while making the film, and Guantanamera became his final feature. Seen in that context, its mixture of death, travel and comedy acquires an additional emotional layer. Once again, Cuban cinema responded to difficulty with humor.

That humor matters because the Special Period was not only a time of material hardship but a test of national resilience. People had to improvise constantly, repairing old objects, inventing transportation, reorganizing meals and finding ways to continue daily life under conditions that were often exhausting.

Cuban humor became one of the ways people survived. Cinema naturally absorbed that attitude. The films of the period could criticize inefficiency or acknowledge frustration without surrendering to despair. They understood that laughter can become a form of endurance.

Co-production was crucial to keeping these films possible. Strawberry and Chocolate, Guantanamera and other productions depended on partnerships with foreign companies, and this model would become increasingly important to Cuban cinema.

Some worried that dependence on outside financing might influence which stories could be made, but the alternative might have been far worse. Without international collaboration, feature production could have nearly disappeared during the worst years of the crisis. The ability of ICAIC to adapt therefore deserves recognition.

The institution had been created in an entirely different historical moment, when the Revolution was young and state resources for culture were expanding. Thirty years later it faced a situation in which those resources had suddenly become extremely limited. Instead of abandoning national cinema, ICAIC sought new ways to maintain it. This required flexibility from filmmakers as well.

Directors increasingly had to participate in the search for financing and understand the practical realities of international production. The old model, in which the national institution could assume most of the financial burden, was no longer possible at the same scale. The crisis therefore changed not only what films looked like but how filmmakers thought about making them. Out of that necessity came a more internationally connected Cuban cinema.

This is one of the paradoxes of the Special Period. The collapse of Cuba’s traditional international economic relationships created isolation in many areas, yet film production often became more dependent on collaboration with Spain, Mexico and other countries. Cuban cinema became simultaneously more economically vulnerable and more internationally connected. The result was not always comfortable, but it created professional relationships that continued beyond the immediate crisis.

The 1990s also produced a noticeable change in subject matter. The heroic collective energy associated with some earlier revolutionary films gave way increasingly to individual uncertainty, private relationships and questions about personal identity. This should not be misunderstood as a rejection of the Revolution.

Every generation of filmmakers sees society differently because every generation inherits different circumstances. The filmmakers of the 1960s had experienced the extraordinary energy of revolutionary transformation almost immediately. Those working during the Special Period faced the challenge of protecting the achievements of that transformation while living through severe economic hardship.

Their cinema naturally became more inward-looking. A revolution is not experienced only during the moment when power changes hands. It is also experienced decades later when people must decide how to preserve its achievements under conditions the original generation could never have predicted. This is what makes Special Period cinema so interesting to me.

The films are not merely records of an economic crisis. They document a society trying to understand how to remain itself while the world around it has changed dramatically. The collapse of the Soviet Union had led many outside observers to predict that the Cuban Revolution would also collapse. It did not. Cuban cinema became one of the cultural spaces where that survival could be observed. The industry lost resources but not imagination. Production became more difficult but did not disappear. Filmmakers found international partners without abandoning the Cuban character of their work. Audiences continued going to theaters because cinema remained part of national cultural life.

The international success of Strawberry and Chocolate became perhaps the most visible proof of this resilience. A film made during blackouts and shortages could travel from Havana to Berlin and eventually to the Academy Awards. There is something profoundly symbolic in that journey. The Special Period is often remembered through what Cuba lacked. Cinema allows us to remember what Cuba continued creating.

Fernando Pérez, Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío and other filmmakers of the decade did not possess the resources available to the generation that had worked during more economically secure years, yet scarcity forced them to concentrate increasingly on character, atmosphere and emotional truth.

In some cases, limitation strengthened the films. A filmmaker unable to create spectacle must look more closely at faces. A production without enormous resources must depend more heavily on performance and imagination. A national cinema struggling economically has to ask which stories are important enough to continue making. The strongest Cuban films of the Special Period answered that question through human beings rather than slogans.

They looked at friendship. They looked at tolerance. They looked at mothers and daughters. They looked at bureaucratic absurdity. They looked at people imagining another life while remaining emotionally attached to Cuba. This is why the cinema of the 1990s deserves to be remembered as more than a period of survival. It was also a period of artistic transformation.

By the end of the decade, Cuban filmmakers had learned that the national cinema could continue even when the economic model that had supported it for decades was no longer sufficient. International co-productions, new production methods and eventually digital technology would begin opening different possibilities. The cinema emerging from the crisis would never be exactly the same as the cinema that entered it. That is not necessarily a tragedy. National cinemas remain alive because they change.

ICAIC had given Cuban cinema its institutional foundation after the Revolution, and during the Special Period that foundation proved strong enough to bend without breaking. For me, that may be the most important lesson of Cuban filmmaking during the 1990s. The economic crisis was severe enough to threaten almost every part of film production, yet filmmakers continued finding reasons to pick up a camera.

They made films about hardship without allowing hardship to define Cuba completely. They criticized problems without losing their affection for the country. They accepted international help without surrendering their cinematic identity. Most importantly, they demonstrated that one of the achievements of the Revolution had become too deeply rooted to disappear easily.

By the end of the Special Period’s most difficult years, Cuban cinema had survived, changed and produced some of the most internationally recognized films in its history. That was more than endurance. It was evidence that the national film culture created after 1959 had become strong enough to survive even when almost everything supporting it seemed uncertain.