Each one has his or her own real life behind those imaginary lives, and his or her own movie behind the one that reached the peasants.
My movie began one dawn in February 1993.
I reached Havana’s bus terminal, which was closed in the small hours before daybreak. For some time, the terminals would close after midnight; no more buses would leave until the following day due to the fuel shortage. I headed toward the back of the building, where unlucky travelers huddled together with all the wildlife that, previously, when the terminal remained open, used to spend the night unnoticed in the waiting rooms. There were quite a few panhandlers, who had begun to appear in Havana more frequently. The area was packed, or at least the best corners to spend the night were, so, thanking my lucky stars for finding a piece of cardboard, I occupied the only available spot, under an incandescent lamp. I tried to sleep, but it was nearly impossible, not just because of how uncomfortable it was, but also due to my excitement about the unfolding events of the last few days.
I had reached Havana a couple of hours earlier, in a bus coming from Cienfuegos, a south central city, where I worked in a small experimental theater group. As soon as I arrived, I headed straight to my friend Susy Monet’s house—she was an actress and former colleague from Grupo Teatro Escambray. This was the group that brought the theater to the mountains in 1968, hence the name, and where I began my professional life twenty years later.
Although I no longer worked with Susy, and we didn’t see each other often, we were still close friends. I’d sent her a telegram announcing my arrival: I’m going to make a movie and need to stay at your place because the production team can’t get me a hotel room until a few days from now.
She didn’t have a phone, and back then we didn’t even dream of e-mail, so I resorted to the traditional telegram method, which worked quite well despite the challenge of never knowing if the recipient had received your message. Susy hadn’t received it, and her house was closed when I arrived. I had no one else to turn to in those small hours, so I returned to the terminal to spend the night.
Since I couldn’t sleep, I grabbed the script from my backpack and began to read: “Sequence 1: Havana. Exterior. Day. Free Cinema: Havana streets, a city where the macho is king . . .” The kick of a drunkard lying next to me, and his aggressive growl as a response to my complaint, convinced me that the script’s first line hit the mark, and I realized how useless focusing on reading would be. Meanwhile, the bulb’s light, like that of a torture chamber, was excellent at not letting me sleep but awful at allowing me to read . . . and I already knew most of the script by heart. So I decided to use it for a more practical purpose and covered my face with it. I remembered the meeting I had had a few days earlier with my theater group colleagues. The director had announced it as a simple fifteen-minute gathering to be held after our workday. It would be one of the most important meetings of my life, although I didn’t know it at the time.
My group was one of those small “projects” that propelled Cuba’s theatrical practice in the late eighties and early nineties, which up until then had been supported by stable companies. The projects were based on training, improvisation, and a series of ideas mainly taken from Eugenio Barba’s books. We had enthusiastically welcomed the theories of the great Italian director and researcher, creator of the theater anthropology concept and considered by some to be the last great revolutionary of Western theater. We lived and breathed the theater. At the time, we had spent almost a year preparing for a performance following a process in which the actor’s work became so personal that he or she couldn’t be replaced by anyone else. If someone left the project, the entire group would be forced to start practically from scratch. The day of the meeting, we all sat on the floor and the director told my colleagues that I was going to share a circumstance about which they would have to make an immediate decision. I told them that the situation was very simple: the best film director in Cuba had called to offer me a feature role in his next movie, which had an extraordinary script, and I thought I had to go, even though this would affect our work as a group, because it signified my chance to enter our film history. I also said that, in any case, I was ready to abide by the collective decision. And I meant it. The director simply added: “Everyone knows what this means. I just want each of you to say what you would do if you were me and what you would do if you were him.” They all said that if they were me, they’d go make the movie, and if they were him, they’d allow me to go.
I still think that if my colleagues had said no, I would’ve turned down the project and possibly given up my movie career. It wouldn’t have been strange because, according to some of my friends, I’ve done everything to impede my career, starting with my decision to be the only one of my graduating class to go work for a theater group in the mountains, while the rest remained in Havana trying to make their way in the movie and television business. Even years later, when I felt the need to diversify my film work, I had no better idea than to write scripts, possibly the most arduous and unrewarding job in the industry. I think I have a fatal propensity to always choose the longest road. It must be a trauma acquired during my years of study—my acting professor, who’d studied in Moscow, placed so much emphasis on the process being more important than the result that I think we graduated without knowing how to accomplish anything.
When I finished the academy, overwhelmed by such an accumulation of theory, I felt I couldn’t sit and wait for the movies or television to give me a shot: I wanted to immediately put into practice everything I had learned, to apprehend and comprehend it. And I thought theater was the right place to get my feet on the ground. That’s why I left for the mountains.
And so I had wanted to make it to the capital with my feet on the ground, and in effect there I was, but instead of my feet I had my back on the ground in the capital—on the floor of the capital’s bus terminal, that is.
I slept a bit and opened my eyes at daybreak, when the terminal opened. I got up, washed my face with a tiny trickle of water that dripped into the sink of the dilapidated and fetid bathroom, and, skipping breakfast, I headed straight to ICAIC.
When I reached the production office door, on the corner of Nineteenth and Sixth Streets, in Vedado, I was greeted by the movie’s casting director. She looked me up and down with an expression that went from disbelief to astonishment. My appearance was pitiful: a pair of threadbare red pants, a striped shirt in the same state, and curly, sun-damaged, practically shoulder-length hair. I was so thin that my eyes and mouth took up my entire face.
The casting director couldn’t believe that the person in front of her was the same one she’d spoken to several times over the phone during the week, and the one who would play a character that everyone had imagined would look quite different. She made sure I was me by asking for my ID card, then indicated I should wait by the door. I later found out that she’d gone to see the director and had said he was completely crazy. The director, without batting an eyelash, told her to let me in. I entered and was face-to-face with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who gave me an affable welcome. And that was the start of my first day at work on Strawberry and Chocolate as well as the beginning of my movie career.
I was twenty-seven years old, with five years of professional theater experience and around two hundred Cuban pesos in my pocket, which, at the real exchange rate, meaning in the black market, amounted to around two dollars. I had pesos rather than dollars because back then, prior to the legalization of the dollar in Cuba, I could’ve gone to jail for having that sum of money in dollars.
Let me note that, although in a practical sense I may have looked it, I was not someone who was impoverished, marginal, or unlawful, but rather a university graduate who worked every day in the career of his choice, with the maximum available salary for that position. I was as well or even better paid than many professionals. But, as I said, it was 1993, the darkest time of the Special Period.
The casting director didn’t know me because the extremely
extensive and complex main actor selection process had been personally led by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, aka Titón. He was an exceptionally sensitive man and, rather than testing his actors, he tested his own ability to communicate with them. That’s why he ended up choosing protagonists with completely different traits from those originally intended. Every actor in Cuba knew that the movie’s leading characters were a university student and a homosexual a few generations his senior, therefore Titón was searching for a twenty-year-old actor and another one over forty. I had gone to the audition two months earlier, aspiring to play David, the young student, and there Titón said that I fit the role well, but I was too old at twenty-seven.
Each character presented great challenges when it came to choosing the actor, and David’s challenge was his youth. They needed a very young performer, but with the experience and sufficient training to endure the pressure of carrying the movie on his shoulders. However, despite those difficulties, the first actor chosen by Titón was for David’s role: a twenty-year-old guy, still a student, good looking and “well-fed,” like Michelangelo’s David. The team breathed a sigh of relief and easily got used to his image for the David in the movie. However, when rehearsals started, things didn’t go so well, and Titón cried out for them to call me. I was saved by that rehearsal process, which allowed for the young actor’s weaknesses to be revealed in time. If they’d gone straight to shooting, it would’ve been much harder to stop the film to replace him.
This rehearsal process, in some cases very intense, is one of the peculiarities of the way we work in Cuba. In other places, at least according to my experience, it isn’t given the same importance, or barely even exists. I remember once, when we were filming Che, el argentino, I heard Steven Soderbergh, the director, mention that once, during filming, Al Pacino had asked him a question. He said it as if it were exceptional, because in Hollywood it is exceptional, but to us having questions is essential. We’ve always had to shoot with very few takes given the lack of money, especially when we filmed on celluloid. The raw material was extremely expensive; therefore, the intense communication and preparation between director and actors was indispensable so that they could arrive on set having done everything possible ahead of time. It may be a homespun way of working, stemming from need, but it’s given us good results, especially in terms of the actors’ work.
I remember reading back then in some magazine that Robert De Niro “warmed up” after take twenty-three. Big American productions don’t have our issues—we’ve always had to film, even the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate, in two or three takes per shot. Cuban actors always have to be “warmed up” by the time they arrive on set.
Twenty-something years and twenty-something movies later, in late June 2016, I arrived in Havana from Madrid to begin shooting Los buenos demonios (The good demons), a movie to be directed by Gerardo Chijona, my friend and the only Cuban director with whom I’ve filmed of late. Although I would’ve loved to continue working in my country, in order to talk about the issues that really matter to me and to address my native audience, during the last fifteen years I’ve worked mainly abroad. Projects with other Cuban directors, whom I also admire and respect, haven’t materialized. The reasons remain unclear. Sometimes I feel that there’s a subtle disconnect, because I work abroad, and in the worse cases some score-settling—although this is more subjective—with and on behalf of those who always work in Cuba.
Yet perhaps one of the keys can be found in the way Chijona himself approached me to see if I’d participate in his previous film, La cosa humana, shot in 2014, our second film together after Un paraíso bajo las estrellas, made fifteen years earlier.
Although we had become friends after that first experience, when he thought of me for a character in La cosa humana, he sent me messages to confirm a meeting with the casting director, the same one from Strawberry and Chocolate, with whom I have also been friends for years. I called him to ask why the two of us didn’t just talk about it, since we knew each other well enough to do so, and he replied that he first needed to know how much I wanted to get paid, because he had a small budget and couldn’t afford a high fee.
That may be the reason why I haven’t been able to work with other Cuban directors: people think that you won’t accept the tacit agreement on minimum payment that is standard for acting in Cuban movies and even for directing and producing them. Very cheap movies, with such a low budget that it often influences the artistic quality—that’s the only way Cuban films have managed to survive the last few years.
I told Chijona that I wanted to shoot in Cuba again, to tell me how much he could offer and that I would adapt to whatever he said. And that’s how we did it. At the time I couldn’t help but think about the first time we’d worked together, in 1998. I recall it as if it were an old western flick: I’m sitting in my car parked at the end of an empty block. Chijona’s Lada drives down from the other end and parks around three hundred feet from where I’m waiting. We both get out and stare at each other (the wind howls and kicks up dust devils; we both squint and the neighbors shut their windows). He raises his hand first and tells me not to move. We sit in my car. He tells me that the conversation we’re about to have is not happening. And if I ever repeat it, he will deny it. (Therefore, I will not reproduce it here.) Minutes earlier, I had quit his movie due to a salary-related argument. Chijona came, spoke, gave me his word, and I returned to the set. I think it was the first time I had an up-close look at the superhuman effort a director has to make in Cuba in order to shoot his movie under local conditions.
The salary issue always comes up, an unresolved problem in Cuban films. First off, hierarchical movie salaries don’t fit well with the socialist philosophy where everyone is a simple worker. Second, our precarious industry doesn’t give actors much to choose from, so they normally accept whatever they’re offered. Everyone knows a movie actor receives the best pay for the movie he or she doesn’t want to make. They’d pay to make the one that they are interested in. For the one that they aren’t, they ask for double the salary, and that’s what they get paid.
In 1998, after the worst of the Special Period, Cuban films had started to get back on their feet thanks to coproductions. That’s when Cuban actors discovered that foreign producers were being asked to pay them a sum of money that never actually reached them. And the situation blew up just when we were working on Un paraíso bajo las estrellas.
To make matters worse, there was the two-currency issue: Cuban institutions pay in the “weak currency” and have very reluctantly been forced to add some of the “hard currency” in some industries with foreign investments and potential markets abroad, such as films. Begrudgingly accepting some market laws is the only way these institutions have managed to survive with minimal credibility. Additionally, during those years the difference between the official exchange rate and the one on the street was overwhelming, and that was the reason I left Chijona’s movie (before the car scene), when the production company’s director told me that they were paying us a lot because in fact the official exchange rate was one Cuban peso to one dollar. Taking into account that the exchange rate on the street was one hundred pesos to one dollar, I took this as an insult and said I was leaving, until Chijona came to my rescue.
Those differences in the exchange rate, five years earlier, in 1993, meant that for filming Strawberry and Chocolate, as lead actors, we earned the maximum allowed by the current rates, around four thousand Cuban pesos—with that money, shortly before, I could’ve bought a Soviet car—which at the street exchange rate amounted to less than forty dollars for three months of intense work. It may seem like a ridiculous figure, and it is, although to me, having started the film with only two dollars in my pocket, ending it with forty was not bad at all. In three months I had multiplied my capital by twenty!
Even those minuscule rates had been a victory because it’s said that they were even smaller before, and that they went up thanks to the day the great actor Reynaldo Miravall
es was shooting a movie and discovered that the horse he was riding was making more than him. The owner had provided the horse on the condition that what they paid him be equivalent to what he could get from the horse’s doing any other type of work, and it’s likely that if the owner of the horse had found out that the owner of a cat, whose only role was to sleep on an armchair, made more than him, he also would’ve gotten upset. However, both owners, likely simple townsfolk, would’ve perfectly understood that the viewers wouldn’t be going to the movies to see the cat or horse, but rather Miravalles.
It is said all this went down in 1978 during the shooting of Los sobrevivientes, by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea—although I wasn’t there, there’s almost no one left to ask, and I honestly don’t remember Miravalles on a horse—and, to add to the animal tales, participating in that film were some Russian borzoi dogs belonging to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, whom Alea had met by chance, obviously not knowing who he was, while Mercader was walking his dogs down Fifth Avenue in Havana. Alea had asked to use them in his movie (Los sobrevivientes involves an aristocratic family that owns exotic animals), and Mercader himself accompanied them on set.
I arrived in Cuba in June 2016 to shoot Los buenos demonios. After six months of working in Spain, my main professional base outside of Cuba, I carried a suitcase filled with costumes for the movie and the sense of optimism that we had breathed since December 2015, after the normalization of relations with the United States, which culminated in the reopening of the embassies. The first half of 2016 had been amazing in Havana, which had turned into history and entertainment’s main stage. Parading through here were everyone and everything from Barack Obama to Chanel’s latest collection to the Rolling Stones, and it all seemed to signal extraordinary things to come. Movie professionals were already cautiously optimistic because Americans were beginning to shoot on the island, with a Fast and the Furious and a Transformers film as their first productions.
Cuba on the Verge Page 6