Dunja Fehimovic

National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema tours early 21st-century Cuban cinema through four key figures—the monster, the child, the historic icon, and the recluse—in order to offer a new perspective on the relationship between the Revolution, culture, and national identity in contemporary Cuba. Exploring films chosen to convey a recent diversification of subject matters, genres, and approaches, it depicts a changing industrial landscape in which the national film institute (ICAIC) coexists with international co-producers and small, ‘independent’ production companies. By tracing the reappearance, reconfiguration, and recycling of national identity in recent fiction feature films, the book demonstrates that the spectre of the national haunts Cuban cinema in ways that reflect intensified transnational flows of people, capital, and culture. Moreover, it shows that the creative manifestations of this spectre screen—both hiding and revealing—a persistent anxiety around Cubanness even as national identity is transformed by connections to the outside world.

This article compares the critical perspectives on society, education and morality found in Sara Gómez’s classic De cierta manera/One Way or Another (1974) and Ernesto Daranas’ more recent Conducta/Behaviour (2014). Considering the films’ engagement with cinematic traditions from Italian neo-realism to melodrama, it argues that Conducta displays a return to a cinematic ‘old school’ in terms of its emotional appeal, its focus on a transcendent individual and its tendency to turn the social and physical context into aesthetically-appealing backdrop. Given the overdetermination of both children and teachers in Cuba’s history, the analysis shows the conversion of Daranas’ teacher, Carmela, into a sanctified, syncretic heroine, and her pupil, Chala, into a choteo-imbued, macho, miniature Hombre Nuevo/new man. Thus, the critical, imperfect and collective qualities of Gómez’s rapidly transforming revolutionary society are displaced in Daranas’ film by a melancholy aesthetic, a quasi-sacred aura and a coercive kind of care. The problem, therefore, does not necessarily lie in this film’s use of ‘old-school’ narrative techniques, but rather in their deployment to cement values of ‘authentic’ revolutionary spirit and ‘true’ cubanía – in other words, to reinforce the appeal of the ‘old school’.

Recognition of the national and international contexts in which Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata, 2005) and Habanastation (Ian Padron, 2011) were made and marketed highlights the coexistence of a pragmatic, tactical approach to filmmaking with the expression of specific, national concerns. Indeed, the two elements are inextricable, since both directors exploit the association of children with universality and the apolitical in order to pursue both personal and national goals, so that these films for children, about children must be seen not as child's play but as contracandelas: strategic and affective responses to uncertainty and threat.

This article focuses on the current shifts in expressions of Cuban national identity by considering the articulations of cubanidad and cuban ́ıa in recent documentary films from Cuba’s Muestra joven. Rather than suggesting a disappearance or deterioration of national identity, these three examples of contemporary Cuban cinema evidence a more fluid, sentiment-based articulation of Cubanness that can be considered the island’s  ́elan vital. This analysis of representations of the ongoing transformation of Cuba deploys theories and terms conceptualised by Georg Sorenson in The Transformation of the State: Beyond the Myth of Retreat (2004) in order to posit how cubanidad is aligned with the modes of citizenship (the official), which is a sense of Cubanness defined by a rationality that may be imposed, while cuban ́ıa is affined with a sentiment fuelled by intuition (the personal). Thus we propose that just as the Muestra joven embodies the current vacillation and movement of Cuban cinema between citizenship and sentiment, so deMoler (Muestra 2004), Model Town (Muestra 2007) and La E ́poca, el Encanto y Fin de Siglo (Muestra 2000) indicate a process of reinterpretation and rupture in a context of flux instead of rigidity.

Cuba’s remarkable success in generating international solidarity and soft power has been largely premised on its ability to react to changing circumstances and harness them to its advantage (Bustamante and Sweig, 2008). Such has been the case with the Cuban response to the hugely unpopular US embargo, creating narratives of victimhood and resistance which, although they may appear contradictory, have in Cuba’s case worked in complementary, mutually reinforcing ways. Similarly, officials and creators harnessed the communicative and promotional potential of culture in order to help Cuba weather the profound crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Bloc; specifically, a number of films made since the 1990s have simultaneously reinforced the romantic image of a rebellious Cuba and addressed the desperate need for hard currency by promoting the island as touristic idyll. This unlikely combination has been echoed in a new reliance on international co-production, subjecting a previously politicised, national cinema to the demands of the neoliberal marketplace. The resultant compromises are evident in two recent films: Habana Blues (Benito Zambrano, 2005) and La película de Ana (Daniel Díaz Torres, 2012), international co-productions that embody – in narrative and production – the coexistence of compromise and resistance. Both films tell stories of creative Cubans who must decide on the terms of their personal and professional relationships with foreigners. By analysing these examples, this paper shows that this combination of political, cultural, and market imperatives in Cuban cinema creates a paradoxical Cuban ‘brand’. Defined largely by the idea of authenticity in resistance to an encroaching global capitalism, this brand speaks to Cubans whilst advancing economic agendas that rely on tourism, and, at the same time, reinforcing soft power based on international solidarity.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a pivotal shift in the functioning of art in Revolutionary Cuba, as economic instability and touristic openings facilitated a new degree of contact with international collectors and curators. Shaped by experiences of economic hardship, political disillusionment and the mass exodus of an influential generation of artists in the early 1990s, Cuban visual artists still working on the island today are also experiencing, more than ever, the economic and cultural benefits of being ‘de moda’. If the international art market’s interest in un- or anti-commercial art soon revealed the paradox that ‘the noble, non-profit and “revolutionary” artist was convertible (just like any other) into a marketable entity’ (Weiss 2007: 192), then in the wake of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba, this problematic is more visible than ever. This paper will focus on the 12th Havana Biennal (held in 2015) and in particular on an exhibition area entitled ‘Zona franca’ to examine the relationship between consumption (Cuba as free trade zone) and ethical issues (art as offering honest, open expression) established by the work of artists such as Nadal Antelmo, Luis Gómez, and Reynier Leyva Novo.

As well as enjoying runaway popularity both abroad and at home, Conducta (Ernesto Daranas, 2014) has sparked debates about morality and education in contemporary Cuba. As is indicated by its title, the film problematises concepts of good and bad behaviour, and extensive journalistic coverage has focused on the way it sheds light on marginality, poverty and stagnation in Cuban society. This paper will examine its critical perspective in comparison with Sara Gómez's classic De cierta manera (1974), which focused on a teacher based in Havana's poorest neighbourhoods in the early Revolutionary period. In doing so, this analysis will reflect on the symbolic weight of the barrio, the child and the teacher as ciphers for the difficult physical and social development of both city and citizens at different stages of the Revolution. Comparing the films' engagement with filmic traditions from Italian neo-realism to melodrama, and considering the overdetermination of both children and teachers through Cuba's intellectual, political and cultural history, this paper will suggest that the quasi-sacred aura of these figures in Daranas's film evokes a coercive potential of care at odds with the self-critical, participatory and evolving perspective espoused by De cierta manera.

By analyzing the domestic spaces in La guarida del topo (Alfredo Ureta, 2011) and Jirafas (Kiki Álvarez, 2013), this paper will suggest that these films function as explorations of disconnection and drifting, creating a vision of a Cubanness caught between the defensive den and the dissolvent power of the sea. Just as the border both separates and connects, connection or disconnection typically imply the existence of something beyond, outside, or other with which to connect or, moreover, from which to disconnect. In other words, disconnection – or the defensive den – contains, in dialectical fashion, the latent possibility of reconnection as the other face of a two-sided coin. However, the social, interpersonal and epistemological disconnections facilitated by the domestic spaces in these films suggest the erosion of a Hegelian dialectics that works from clearly defined, opposing entities and resolves them into a coherent whole. Although this synthesising process is always incomplete and so infinitely repeated, it relies on contradiction to produce its object. As the home is infiltrated by the outside, disconnection in Jirafas and La guarida del topo fails to align with a distinct outside of difference that might then be reintegrated, but rather troubles productive models of identity and difference. With these models under pressure, disconnection starts to look a lot like drifting: an anomic survival that recalls the indifference, chaos and fluidity of the sea. By presenting us with recluses and drifters inhabiting permeated and permeable domestic spaces, these films dissolve and reconfigure any recognisable mise-en- scène of Cubanness.

Echoing a wider trend within Latin American cinema, over the last decade Cuban films have highlighted the child as both a new protagonist in and target audience for the island’s production. Juan Carlos Cremata’s Viva Cuba (2005) seemed to mark the beginning of the tendency, and has certainly been the most internationally successful of these films, whilst Habanastation (Ian Padrón, 2011) was envisaged as an unofficial, indirect sequel. Most recently, Ernesto Daranas’ Conducta (2014) has sparked fervent debate about education, values and marginality in Cuba, sweeping up multiple awards along the way. In all of these films, the figure of the child is foregrounded in order to explore issues of morality and citizenship which, in Cuba’s political context, inevitably reflect on socialist codes of conduct and most specifically on Che Guevara’s model of the Hombre nuevo, or ‘new man’. By comparing the representations of the child protagonists in these three films, I will analyse how they establish the child as a model of moral conduct or good behaviour, and how this model subsequently reflects on the state of the nation as a whole. Recalling the symbolic weight of the figure of the child in Revolutionary Cuba and with specific reference to Guevara’s ‘new man’, I will suggest that these child protagonists represent a ‘niño nuevo’ – an updated model of citizenship for contemporary Cuba.

Fernando Pérez’s ‘biopic’, José Martí: el ojo del canario (2010), is a period piece aiming to restore to life a figure long memorialised and marmorealised in Cuban literary, visual and political cultures. The director attempts to make the past present, but the filmic strategies used to revive the national hero and encourage identification simultaneously reinforce his irretrievable absence. Martí’s simultaneous presence and absence mark him out as a spectre in Derridean terms: a word made flesh, a corporeal entity that carries an injunction. Using emotional appeal and identification to bring the young José Julián to life, the film commands contemporary audiences to feel connected to Cuba’s history, its suffering, its apóstol, and above all, to feel Cuban. If it is the successful injunction to feel that reanimates Martí, connecting him and his incipient struggle with contemporary Cubans and their national identity, it is the same emotion that heightens and perpetuates the sorrow associated with his death. Paradoxically, by prolonging the figure’s affective impact, the film confronts the viewer with the painful fact that, like the past as a whole, Martí has been irrevocably lost. By considering El ojo del canario in the light of Lacan’s redefinitions of melancholy and mourning, this paper will argue that the spectrality and emotional power of this filmic Martí mark him out as both an expression and a product of melancholy.

A recognition of the national and international contexts in which Viva Cuba and Habanastation were made, marketed and viewed highlights the necessity of recognising the coexistence of a pragmatic, tactical approach to filmmaking with the expression of specific, national concerns. Indeed, the two elements are inextricable, since both Cremata and Padrón exploit the association of children with universality and the apolitical in order to pursue both personal and national goals. On the one hand, they promote their own work and encourage its acceptance at home, simultaneously establishing a space for Cuban culture in the international sphere. On the other, they participate in a complex, political and specifically Cuban discourse on children. It is in this sense that we must not mistake these films for children, about children, for child’s play. Instead, we can recognise the hearts, kites and play of both Habanastation and Viva Cuba as engaging in a screening – both displaying and covering over – of fears about the nation, its elusive origin and uncertain future.

The release of Fernando Pérez's celebrated 'biopic', 'José Martí: el ojo del canario' (2010) has been closely followed by two more creative explorations of the past: 'Se vende' (2012, Jorge Perugorría) and 'Esther en alguna parte' (2012, Gerardo Chijona). The preoccupation with the past evidenced by these films suggests the continuing need to reinterpret and reconstruct history in order to create and consolidate identity in the present. In particular, they suggest a turn towards the micro-relato, in which the individual plays a greater role by actively helping to link past to present. This can be seen in a creative reinterpretation of icons and history as well as in a championing of survival that involves recycling or a reconfigured understanding of the past. Such approaches to the past may be seen to deconstruct a grand narrative of History, but they also perpetuate the model of survival and ‘lucha’ on which Cuban national identity is largely based as well as recalling the creative reconfigurations of the national ‘ajiaco’ (Ortiz). Ultimately, all are pretexts to talk about and re-create contemporary Cubanness in a contemporary context of uncertainty and transition.

In May 2013, a group of Cuban filmmakers gathered in Havana to discuss internal proposals for change being formulated within the ICAIC and suggest potential solutions to the problems faced by the industry. The group's Acta de Nacimiento underscores a desire to expand production beyond the state and nation, addressing the troubled legal status of independent filmmakers, and to reestablish links with other Latin American cinemas while reaffirming commitment to ICAIC's historic vision. Their suggestions are inextricable from wider reforms that have taken place in Cuba since 2006, but can also be seen as consequences of predating processes such as the democratisation of film through digital technology, and the longer-standing crisis of the Special Period.

This paper analyses this turning-point in Cuban cinema, establishing parallels between the actions of both ICAIC and the aforementioned 'Grupo de trabajo' in dialogue wtih two recent feature films produced in Cuba: Alfredo Ureta's La guarida del topo (2011) and Kiki Álvarez's Jirafas (2013). Whilst the former is a co-production between ICAIC, ICRT and the filmmakers' own Aurora Productions, the latter has been explicitly identified as an 'independent', 'alternative' project. Both films eloquently express the coexistence of and clashes between different practical and theoretical models of filmmaking in contemporary Cuba. Dwelling in particular on the blurring of the inside/outside divide, these films underscore the difficulties and rewards entailed by an opening up of the film industry that has been underway for a number of years and is arguably only now being confronted head-on.

As figures of the undead, both the zombie and the vampire can be seen to provoke hysteria - calling on protagonists and viewers to question the very notion of identity as well as their own specific identities. Whilst they have long been figures in European and North American popular culture, 2012 saw the international release of Cuba’s first zombie film, Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead), directed by Alejandro Brugués. Widely interpreted by the media as a groundbreakingly and perhaps surprisingly critical work, the zombie invasion depicted raises questions of what it means to be human and more specifically, what it means to be Cuban. Using theories of Latin American, Caribbean and Cuban culture and identity from authors such as Ortiz, Pancrazio and Benítez Rojo, I will argue that the zombie acts as an emblem of distorted ‘cubanía’ shambling towards a dissolution of identity, and that the protagonist’s quest to exterminate these monstrous neighbours represents the reassertion of a ‘cubanidad’ or coherent Cubanness. Furthermore, by examining Brugués’ zombies alongside the cartoon vampires of Juan Padrón’s 1985 classic Vampiros en La Habana and its 2003 sequel, Más vampiros en La Habana, in the light of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, I will suggest that far from being fantastic, the monster (zombie or vampire) represents something very Real, and ultimately inherent to Cuban national identity, seen not as essence but rather as process or unresolved tension.

The now familiar model of the nation ‘as narration’ suggests the importance of memory and history in the construction of national identity. The concept of a coherent, unitary and essential national identity emerges by constructing a serial, linear time in which cause and effect are traced back from the present in order to logically explain and produce national identity as it is understood now (Anderson 1991). The fact that memory too can be seen as possessing a ‘narrative quality’ (Donald 2000) invites analogies between individual memory and collective interpretations of history and time as national narrative. Alejandro Ramírez’s deMoler (Muestra de Nuevos Realizadores 2004), Laimir Fano’s Model Town (Muestra 2007) and Juan Carlos Cremata’s La Época, el Encanto y Fin de Siglo (Muestra 2000) all establish a link between individual memory and history as a collective figuring of memory. The tendency of these films to approach the past through individual memory implicitly acknowledges the inherently unstable nature of national time that allows it to be reconfigured. Whilst this recurring emphasis on the individual and marginal rather than the collective and explicitly national has led writers such as Stock to proclaim a postnational shift in non-ICAIC works like these, I shall suggest, in more nuanced terms, that they are in fact looking for new ways to express the continual, albeit difficult, survival of Cuban national identity. From these films, seen as islands in a chaotic and varied archipelago of Cuban production, ‘pueden percirbirse los contornos de ‘una isla que se “repite”’ (Benítez Rojo 1998) that is Cuban national identity, not as essence but as unresolved tension between difference and its disavowal.

By analysing Marcovich's film in terms of travel writing, tourism and jineterismo as a specific form of sex tourism, I intend to show how he highlights the continuity of colonial-style power relations  in the contemporary world. The filmmaker also takes advantage of the persistence of discourses that construct both Cuba and young women like the protagonist, Yuliet, as ‘others’ to be ‘discovered’ and understood in order to develop a ‘strategic threat’ of mimicry from these discourses’ very ambivalence. Marcovich reproduces the unknowability and instability of the ‘other’ and exaggerates it, thus deploying mimicry as ‘an opening for agency’ (Huddart, 76). He tries to construct, within his film, a space of freedom where his subjects can contest or evade attempts to pin down their identity. In this way, Marcovich problematically positions himself as part of a largely equal power relationship with his subjects, presenting them as mimics within his larger project of mimicry of neocolonial forms of ‘knowledge’ and stereotypes.

Call for Papers: Branding Latin America
University of Cambridge, 8-9th April 2015

Branding is the deliberate projection of a consciously-constructed image or identity, the marketing of the self to the other, the selling of specificity. The emergence of nation branding as a concept in the mid-1990s (Simon Anholt, 1996) corresponds with an attempt to reassert control over the perception and production of the nation, carving out a niche in which a supposed specificity will protect the nation from being subsumed by the amorphous forces of globalization, as well as allowing it to compete in the international neoliberal marketplace. Competitive nation branding can thus be seen as both a part of and response to the processes of globalisation variously theorised by Arjun Appadurai, Néstor García Canclini and Walter Mignolo, amongst others.

Today, nation branding surrounds us in the form of tourism brochures, national logos and festivals promoting particular nations’ images and, perhaps more importantly, goods. But in Latin America, the specificities of creation and promotion can hardly be dated so recently nor confined so narrowly to the tourism sector. Whether it be the ‘boom’ of Latin American fiction in the 1960s, the image of the ‘latino lover’ still propagated by various film industries or the reputation for drug-trafficking and violence attributed to numerous Latin American nations in turn, the political, economic and cultural history of Latin America calls for a broader understanding of branding. These examples prompt us to ask: Who is branding whom, how is this branding achieved, and why?

Branding is also a painful act of marking, a declaration of possession and an enduring assignation of value. Bringing to mind both the tactics of globalised capitalism and the literal stamping of slaves by their owners, the concept of branding unwittingly carries within itself the trace of violence and pain by which it is arguably inevitably accompanied. This conference thus also aims to consider: What scar tissue is formed? What might be the unintended effects of and unexpected responses to branding?

The branding of a nation involves an ongoing struggle over economic, political, cultural and affective capital between multiple parties, from both inside and outside the nation. Examples of such struggles in literature include the Mexican Crack Generation, which points us towards movements of reaction and resistance to branding and complicates the one-way model of the culture industry traditionally depicted by theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer. Meanwhile, the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon draws our attention to the workings of branding in the creation and consumption of 'World Music', showing how branding can result from international economic and cultural exchanges which may be collaborations, but also imaginings and impositions.

Scholarly work on the topic of branding has typically focussed on issues relating to marketing and PR. This conference seeks instead to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to interrogate the aims, functioning, effects of and resistance to branding in Latin America. We welcome contributions from postgraduate researchers and scholars working in or across various disciplines and academic fields, including but not restricted to: Politics, International Relations/Development, Economics, Sociology, Tourism, Geography, Literature and Languages, Music, Visual Arts, Film, Photography, and Cultural Studies.
Deadline for abstracts (250 words): 1st December 2014.
Note: Abstracts and presentations can be written and delivered in English, Spanish or Portuguese. Each paper will be limited to 20 minutes.
Email: BrandingLatinAmericaConference@gmail.com

Convenors: Dunja Fehimovic (University of Cambridge), Rebecca Ogden, Par Kumaraswami (University of Reading)