However, in early July, the landscape changed radically, both in the economy in general and the film world in particular. The situation became much worse than I would’ve expected.
The fear was that Venezuela’s crisis was finally affecting Cuba: that we’d once again be hit by the fatum of Cuba’s economy, which always ends up depending on a sole benefactor, and that the Venezuelan oil tankers would stop coming, as had happened before with Soviet ships. People spoke of the start of another Special Period, although the government denied it and, meanwhile, announced oil rationing measures and financial difficulties due to the country’s lack of liquidity.
I was rocked by the moment’s similarities to those far-off 1993 days. As we say in Cuba, El cuartico está igualito—the room is exactly the same—and suddenly there we were, a group of people trying to tell a fictional story when reality is rattling and teetering everywhere, with the returning suspicion that we are once again dedicating our lives to conquering futility.
Filming on Los buenos demonios was stopped—twenty-four hours after it began—due to lack of fuel. Despair and uncertainty overpowered the entire team, which had been working for months. We all expected a difficult filming process, with the same limitations as usual, and moreover, it was the hottest time of the year, with children on vacation in an already-noisy city. But no one expected that kind of blow. We wondered, and asked the director, if we’d be able to continue. The director wondered, and asked the ICAIC administration why, if we’d been able to shoot during the most critical time of the Special Period, we couldn’t do so now.
Finally, we found a way to continue filming, but with the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, because the ICAIC wasn’t what it used to be and was in no condition to defend its productions with the same strength as before.
That institution, which had proved to be so efficient in the sixties at distributing movies to the most remote corners of our country, among other things, is now an obsolete dinosaur, a hypertrophied and dysfunctional bureaucratic structure that everyone, even in the government itself, knows must be modified and radically updated.
The issue is the method to be used for those modifications. The first step came from the upper echelons, with a very conservative Transformer style far removed from the approach of the filmmakers, who advocated for one that was more fast and furious. After feeling they were being pushed into the background, they’ve now been meeting for three years, in open and spontaneous assemblies in a process that has been more furious than fast and has made evident the need for a film law that would regulate audiovisual productions in Cuba within the context of these new realities.
At this political-economic and institutional crossroads is where we began filming Los buenos demonios, sensing that the “exorcism” would be no easy feat. The project had faced, from its inception, inordinate obstacles. The first was the death, in September 2013, of its creator and the person who was supposed to be its director, Daniel Díaz Torres, which took everyone by surprise and left his collaborators incredibly frustrated. His lifelong friend Gerardo Chijona grabbed the baton and decided to finish the movie in his name.
No one found it strange that a project undertaken by Daniel had such disproportionate issues, because disproportion had plagued him during many moments of his life. Daniel was a good man, but he’d been turned into a demon. In 1991, his controversial movie Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas catapulted him to the center of the country’s political and cultural scene. The film is a satirical metaphor that gathers and exaggerates the worse defects of the socialist society that Cuba had been attempting to build; it was made “to disturb and provoke active reflection” (in the words of the director), but it was very badly received by the “guards” of the revolutionary ideology, hardly inclined to an exchange of ideas and lacking a sense of humor. The historic moment was conducive to ideological radicalism: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern European socialist bloc had left Cuba in a desperate situation. At screenings of the film, Communist militants took over movie theaters to repudiate it, sometimes violently, and it placed Daniel on the scandal’s marquee, facing censorship like never before.
It also led to the first big crisis for the ICAIC, when the government considered merging it with the television office and abolishing it as an independent entity. Filmmakers resisted, and the always-latent tension between them and the country’s political leadership was exposed. Daniel’s moral integrity was of enormous help in resolving the conflict, and it allowed him to continue living and working in Cuba. His honesty was so evident that even those who had demonized him had to accept it.
Somehow the process was reversed and Daniel went from being a demon to being good. That’s why, now, twenty-five years later, those of us who knew and loved Daniel believed that finishing Los buenos demonios in his memory was an act of poetic justice.
It is said that during those difficult times in 1991, when poor Daniel was being shaken by all types of forces that wanted the film to be censored, one day he and Manolo Pérez, the head of a creative group inside the ICAIC, went to see Alfredo Guevara, the fabulous president of the institution, newly arrived from Paris. Guevara was also a good and bad demon. Good for everything he did in favor of Cuban and Latin American films in general (the so-called New Latin American Cinema, which he defended to his death), and bad for many other reasons. He was always a powerful man, and he’d been called upon to appease his people and put out the fire. After founding the ICAIC and doing many important things as president, he’d been away for a while in Paris and was now returning to save us all, like a musketeer, with his cape on his shoulders.
Among the president’s strange characteristics was that he always traveled with his small, hairy dog, so soft it seemed like it was made of cotton, in his arms, and it had likely also come from Paris. The president’s image became so associated with the little dog, named Bacus, that it’s said that when the elevator doors slid open on the ICAIC’s seventh-floor office and Bacus walked out, people straightened up as if it were the president himself, although these may be water-cooler stories.
What isn’t a water-cooler story is the meeting between Daniel and Manolo and the president (or at least it hasn’t been denied by the only one of them who is still alive). The president received them standing behind his desk and didn’t invite them to sit down. They explained the issue that had brought them there while the president listened, serious yet somewhat absent, although they were speaking of nothing less than the national cinema’s survival. Suddenly, the president interrupted them with just one phrase in an imperative tone: “Get up here!” Daniel, overwhelmed as he was by the potential consequences of what was unfolding and in hopes of finding a confident and wise voice that would tell him what he had to do, looked at the table trying to find a free spot to climb up on, and he was about to do so when Bacus jumped onto the president’s chair, clarifying the situation. Daniel breathed a deep sigh of relief when he realized he’d just avoided one of the most compromising moments of his career. The president is no longer with us, and neither is Daniel. I doubt Bacus is still here, because it’s been twenty-five years, and Manolo admits he doesn’t remember that day but says that the dog thing could’ve happened. The limits of reality are always vague in Cuba. In any case, I prefer to see it as a story that should have been true even if it wasn’t, because it does a far better job at explaining the things from our past that have brought us to our current problems than many other analyses. The president had lights and shadows, and one of his demons, perhaps not one of the most aggressive ones, was his indifference, which hurt me personally: it kept me from attending the 1995 Oscar ceremony, the year Strawberry and Chocolate was in the running for Best Foreign Language Film, the only Cuban film that has ever been nominated.
The Academy invited the directors of the nominated foreign films, not the actors, to the ceremony, although the actors did everything they could to be there, paying their own way (which was impossible in our case) or being invited by producer
s or distributors. My costar Jorge “Pichi” Perugorría and his wife got in touch with Miramax, our movie’s U.S. distributor, and the Americans said that they would be delighted to have the actors attend, but that they could only pay for our stay once we arrived on American soil, so we had to pay for our tickets.
It cost three hundred dollars to get to Miami. Pichi was able to round up the cash, but I didn’t have enough and had no one to ask. The president had requested a visa to travel to the United States and attend the ceremony, but it had been denied, which seems to have greatly affected him. That’s when Pichi came into the picture to intervene on my behalf, telling him I had a U.S. visa because they’d given it to me when I traveled to a festival in Puerto Rico, and all I needed to attend the movie’s grand night, a movie I was a key part of, was the three hundred dollars for the ticket to Miami. The president said that he couldn’t take care of this request at the moment because he had a migraine.
I didn’t travel to Los Angeles and I was likely one of the few, perhaps the only, participating actors from the nominated movies who watched the ceremony on TV, in a remote satellite dish factory in Santa Clara to which I had to travel several miles by bicycle.
Attending the Oscars would have been a magnificent reward for the effort and all the difficulties we experienced while making this film, something I would have never even dreamed of that night in Havana’s bus terminal; however, to be rabidly positive, after seeing all those uptight people in their tuxedos and ties, I think I was much more comfortable watching the ceremony in my shorts and T-shirt.
The film didn’t win, and fifteen years later, in December 2010, Nikita Mikhalkov came to the Havana Film Festival—he was the director who had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year, beating Strawberry and Chocolate with his movie Burnt by the Sun. He was honored at the festival’s closing ceremony, and in his thank-you speech he spoke a little Spanish, explaining that his nanny had been a Spaniard.
Outside the Teatro Karl Marx, it was pouring rain when Pichi and I saw Nikita, who’d been surrounded by people all night long, completely alone and waiting for his car. He’s an impressive, tall, and elegant guy, and even taking shelter from the rain under the theater’s tiny eaves, he couldn’t conceal the confidence and poise emanating from each of his gestures. We approached him and asked him very seriously if he knew who we were. A light cloud of worry crossed his face and we realized that he was discreetly looking for an exit to escape these two guys who, with a far from mollifying appearance, were harassing him against the theater’s façade. That’s when we said, “We’re the actors from Strawberry and Chocolate, the movie you took the Oscar from in 1995.” After a brief effort to recognize us, he burst out laughing, hugged us both at the same time with his Russian bear paws, and whispered, “Since I’ve come to Cuba, everyone is telling me the same thing.” I think that the fact that everyone in Cuba thought that the Oscar should’ve been ours, and that they blatantly said it to the winner—well, that was our real award.
Nikita Mikhalkov is also a good demon. With a stunning body of cinematographic work, he’s ended up flirting with politics, becoming the Russian film institute’s president, and making very unfortunate comments about homosexual rights. (Perhaps he hesitated to hug us because of our movie’s theme?) However, the scene of the three of us embracing under the Teatro Karl Marx eaves has undeniable cinematic value. And if I had to choose an ending for the film fragment that this guajiro (I’m also a guajiro, although I’m from Santa Clara) has been capable of making with his life up until now, I’d probably choose this one.
Yet it’s a false ending; Mikhalkov got into his car and left, and we stayed back there a while longer watching the enormous downpour over Havana. We then also gave each other a hug, which to us (and possibly to the Cuban audience) was more significant than the one with Mikhalkov, and said good-bye.
I remained alone, watching the water fall, and thinking about how the only thing that keeps us alive and fighting is our next project and the need to tell stories that can help people live and experience their own “personal movie.”
I glanced around in search of something to protect me from the rain and found a piece of cardboard. Picking it up, I recalled the bus terminal. In the end, that night had been a perfect way of ensuring I’d have an ascending career: everything that came after, necessarily, had to be better.
In September 2016, as I protect myself with a similar piece of cardboard, I exit the production car in front of the ICAIC studios in Cubanacán. It’s been raining for four straight days, and water is filtering through the studio’s roof in abundant leaks that continuously ruin the scenes’ sound. It’s rumored that the foreign company that repaired the roof and was supposed to maintain it had to leave Cuba after not being paid, and now it was a lost cause. It’s also said that this happens frequently, yet once again, these could be water-cooler stories, although my first day of filming had to be canceled because the location where we were scheduled to shoot, the Sierra Maestra restaurant at the Habana Libre Hotel, had a piece of its roof fall off due to the rain.
I look up at the sky searching for an explanation, only to find an imperturbable gray. Seems like things will remain the same. I think of Daniel and in my mind I say to him, “See if you can do something up there, my friend. Try to at least find a vice president, and even if you have to climb on his table, give us a hand, we’re almost done . . .”
I enter the studio. Chijona is waiting for me with the team, stoically weathering the storm with hurricane-proof determination. And so begins the last week of shooting Los buenos demonios.
GLAMOUR
AND REVOLUTION
BY WENDY GUERRA
TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MYERS
1.
If we study images of Havana from the early 1960s, if we return to our parents’ and grandparents’ photos from the early decades of the Revolution, we can sense a certain air of effervescence, an elegance, much like the ambience treasured by the French in their own black-and-white albums from the sixties.
Slightly later, the cliché of the barbudo, the bearded revolutionary—along with the delirium that awoke guerrilla norms like a virus in those early years of new life and prêt-à-porter—made it impossible to find the time or space for contemplating or attending to the self. Starting in the 1960s and ’70s, the body became an instrument of work, defense, and reconstruction.
Ideology mined aesthetic spaces: the image of an overly made-up woman clashed with the revolutionary thinking. An elegant compañera didn’t suit the times. She needed a uniform and an olive-green face if she was to make her way through those hard years as part of the whole.
The economic circumstances following the missile crisis (namely shortages), as well as the sexist prejudices imposing ideo-aesthetic limits that were permitted in those years, worked against the preservation of revolutionary female beauty. The “New Man” couldn’t possibly be beautiful.
Legend has it that the famous Cuban model Norka Korda—wife of the photographer Alberto Korda, who took Che Guevara’s most emblematic portrait—paraded about the House of Dior in Paris before returning to Cuba, in the years of real political commotion, to don military trappings and face each dearth and drama that the crisis caused.
How have we succeeded in both resisting and safeguarding our beauty, coquetry, and tropical glamour amid genuine deprivation? How can we convertir el revés en victoria, as the revolutionary maxim goes—turn the setback into a victory? And how, beyond the slogan itself, can we continue to be beautiful, making use of natural, organic recipes in a country like Cuba: devastated, bereft of resources, where sun, salt, and diet conspire against our physical harmony?
RECIPES FOR RESISTANCE
Cucumber face mask
Avocado hair mask
Mascara made from shoe polish
Tanning lotion made from butter and iodine (assuming there’s butter and iodine)
Grapefruit peel steak as a substitute for meat
Toasted p
eas to supplement scarce coffee beans
Dresses made from recycled suit linings, slips turned into miniskirts
(The list goes on forever.)
2.
LITERACUBA
I spent my teenage years at art school, boarding in a coed dormitory. Hurricanes or bad weather would often collapse the partition walls or compartments used to separate girls from boys, and it was then that the sexual restrictions melted away. The map of gender differences was gradually erased and our promiscuity became essential: a vital ingredient in our collective memory.
In Cuba we use the word blúmers for underwear, underpants, panties. I remember the clothesline hung across the dorm—a place where sleeping or showering was truly a group endeavor, with certain touches of drama, mischief, creative delirium, and absolute ignorance of the defenselessness we’d subjected ourselves to. This sense of resistance is what still unites its alumni, many of whom are now dancers in the Royal Ballet, visual artists with work in the permanent collections of MoMA or the Reina Sofía, or prominent actors and playwrights in Cuba: we all grew up together in a state of extreme overcrowding.
The blúmers exposed over the bunks. A public intervention into our few brief private affairs, betraying our biographies.
Do Cubans have private lives? No. The private is still seen as suspicious here. Each and every one of those blúmers tells a story, narrates a status. People say there have never been social classes in Cuba, but our underwear says something different.
We grew up in a country where you could buy one set of underwear a year. To do so, you used a ration book: coupons O-22 or E-13 or A-12. These coupons also enabled the purchase of cloth, needles, thread, and cotton sheets—which meant you had to choose between underwear and sheets to cover yourself with. If you wanted anything else, you had to get married. The state provided a set of basic items, as well as drinks or sweets, to those who wanted to hold a wedding amid such financial strain. How many friends got married just so they could get hold of an iron, a box of beer, some of the famous Cuban sponge cake, blankets, bedspreads, some underwear? Only matrimony would grant you this special privilege. I received many marriage proposals just so the men in question could procure some of these essential items. I always refused.
Cuba on the Verge Page 7