A Cinema of Underdevelopment

If Titón cannot be mocked, he did his own share of mocking, and several of his films are ironic and satirical social comedies. His first big international success, Death of a Bureaucrat (La muerte de un burócrata, 1966) is about a country that has made a revolution and decided to become socialist. It therefore insists that its bureaucrats provide equal treatment for all, including the dead: a corpse gets itself unburied for the sake of bureaucracy, and then finds that bureaucracy won’t let it be buried again.

The country where these events take place is a hilarious mixture of revolutionary Cuba and the Hollywood land of comedy — the anarchic comedy of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx brothers, and Jerry Lewis. His final film, Guantanamera (1995, codirected by Juan Carlos Tabío because Alea was already ill with cancer), is another black comedy about death. An old woman from Havana dies in Guantánamo, at the other end of the island; because of fuel restrictions, her body is returned to the capital in a relay of hearses and bureaucratic muddles.

Both films reflect his great admiration for Luis Buñuel, whose anti-clericalism he shares (though not his surrealism). But his knack for serious comedy is only one side of his aesthetic personality, which was shaped in the early 1950s by Italian neorealism. Like several other pioneers of New Latin American Cinema, he went to study filmmaking in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale, then became one of the founder members of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), the Cuban film institute, which was created immediately after the revolution of 1959.

The ICAIC was where he directed his own and the institute’s first feature, the eminently neorealist Stories of the Revolution (Historias de la Revolución, 1960). Several films followed before Death of a Bureaucrat, yet like other filmmakers, he soon found that the new reality of the Revolution outstripped the neorealist camera. He would scout for a location and then, returning to film there, discover that the place had been transformed — a private mansion had become an art school; a car showroom now sold furniture for workers who had received houses under the Urban Reform.

Comedy was one way of dealing with this rapidly changing world, but after Death of a Bureaucrat, his next film was an existential drama. It established his name as one of the most daring directors not only in Cuba but in the whole of Latin American and indeed world cinema. Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias de subdesarrollo, 1968) is a film that overturns all expectations, this time by taking on not Hollywood but the modernist fragmentation of European new wave cinema, merging fiction and documentary, fictional characters and real people, to explore the social ruptures produced by the Revolution.

In the process, he abandons the formulaic categories of official revolutionary ideology by presenting an alienated protagonist, the very opposite of Che Guevara’s “New Man,” whom he doesn’t even expect his popular audience to like. Sergio (wonderfully played by Sergio Corrieri) is a skeptical but patriotic bourgeois, a handsome machista with a literary temperament and an independent income in the early years of the Revolution.

He watches his wife and best friend quit the country for Miami, flirts with women, and attends a roundtable discussion about literature and the Revolution where the real-life contributors include the author of the novella on which the film is based, Edmundo Desnoes. Ending at the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film is a shape-shifter, in which the Cuban audience discovers itself as never shown before, in the act of breaking down the vocabulary of its own existence.

Foreign audiences were also fazed, but when the film reached the United States, the New York critic Andrew Sarris was mistaken when he described it as the work of a Soviet-style dissident, and Titón responded by accusing him of “tendentious ignorance.” Memories is indeed a critique, but not of communism. Rather, as the title indicates, it addresses the persistence within all social classes of underdeveloped habits of thinking that impeded the communist project.

Revolutionary Experiments

Sarris was also wrong in supposing that Alea was out of favor with the Cuban authorities. On the contrary, he was at the very center of the ICAIC, engaged in debates and collaborations in an atmosphere of heady effervescence and iconoclastic experimentation where it was unimportant whether or not someone was a card-carrying Communist. Titón was not.

He saw the film institute as more than a production house — it was an artistic community to which he owed the very possibility of making his own films. At the same time, as he told me in one of our many conversations, he held that the artist should maintain a distance from power and regarded the party as a kind of church threatened by sectarianism.

As a good Marxist, he was drawn to history and especially, as a Cuban, the history of slavery, which he explored in two films. The first, A Cuban Struggle Against the Demons (Una pelea cubana contra los demonios, 1972), based on the work of the Cuban cultural anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, dramatizes an episode dating from the mid-seventeenth century in which the religious fanaticism of a priest leads his community astray.

A Cuban Struggle Against the Demons is a delirious experimental film that draws much of its aesthetic inspiration from the tropicalist allegories of Titón’s friend, the Brazilian Glauber Rocha. It was not a success with Cuban audiences or abroad, but in my view, it deserves rediscovery.

The camera is much better behaved four years later, in The Last Supper (La Ultima Cena, 1976), a subtle, ironic anticlerical fable set in a time just after the Haitian Revolution of 1795. An allegory of the religious hypocrisy of a plantation owner, brilliantly played by the exiled Chilean actor Nelson Villagra, toward his slaves, the film is a tour de force of black comedy.

The slaveowner invites his slaves to enact the Last Supper in an echo of the beggars’ blasphemous celebration of the Eucharist in Buñuel’s Viridiana. Here, it becomes an extended, sinuous Hegelian dialogue between master and slave, and a masterclass in the deconstruction of ideological cant.

In Up to a Point (Hasta cierto punto, 1983), Alea returns to the present and turns his camera on his own milieu and the persistence of machismo. An experiment in improvisation which is not entirely successful — Titón described it to me as having been “successful up to a point” — it nevertheless belongs to the main thrust of his oeuvre.

The film pays homage to Cuba’s first woman director, Sara Gómez, whom he had mentored and who died before being able to edit her first feature, One Way or Another (De cierta manera, 1977). He completed One Way or Another together with his friend and fellow ICAIC founder member, Julio García Espinosa.

In Alea’s film, a scriptwriter and a director are planning to make a film about machismo among Havana dockworkers. But the scriptwriter becomes embroiled in a fraught relationship with Lina, an unmarried mother who works there. The relationship comes to an end because he won’t leave his wife, the actress who is slated to take the lead role in the prospective film.

Like Gómez, Alea mixes fiction and documentary, juxtaposing the fictional love story with video footage of real dockworkers in a workers’ assembly, originally shot as part of research for the film, around which the fiction is then woven. Lina (forcefully played by Titón’s wife, Mirta Ibarra) delivers the film’s moral, when she tells her lover that machismo is everywhere, not just among dockers, criticizes the absence of women in a crew making a film about machismo, and warns him not to confuse her with the fictional character of his proposed movie.

Feeling and Thinking

Alea’s international reputation allowed him to draw international coproduction funds for a couple of workmanlike films of no political import, love stories based on scripts by another friend, Gabriel García Márquez, and again featuring Ibarra. Then came his last great masterpiece, Strawberry and Chocolate (Fresa y chocolate, codirected by Juan Carlos Tabío, 1993), in which, for the first time in Cuban cinema, the central protagonist is gay.

The film confronts the persistent homophobia of the Communist Party. The title derives from the ice cream parlor where Diego, a gay photographer (in a wonderfully flamboyant performance by the straight actor Jorge Perugorría) picks up the card-carrying heterosexual student David (sensitively played by the gay actor Vladimir Cruz). It is also a metaphor for the story of their friendship, which Alea turns into a hardcore political film, brimming with explicit dialogue about censorship, Marxism-Leninism, patriotism, and aesthetics, as well as sexuality.

In Strawberry and Chocolate, it is a cultured “bourgeois” homosexual — although their relationship remains unconsummated — who educates the ideologically challenged peasant student. Diego’s sense of Cuban culture is all-inclusive and the opposite of chauvinistic. The crux of the matter for Diego is that to be gay is not just a question of sexuality. What the party represses is the imagination in which a Cuban poet like Julian del Casal, who was stigmatized in the nineteenth century as a homosexual, rubs shoulders with John Donne, Constantine Cavafy, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, and Federico García Lorca.

The party can only think of art in terms of either propaganda or mere decoration, yet as Diego insists, “Art is not for sending messages, it’s for feeling and thinking. Messages are for the radio.” This is not just about homophobia, but also a critique of aesthetic puritanism and the suppression of artistic voices considered by authoritarians as deviant.

Strawberry and Chocolate aggravated a festering sore, a repressive strain of machismo, which in the 1960s led to a brief period — which David at one point defends as “lamentable but understandable” — when the Cuban authorities sent homosexuals to work camps along with long-haired hippies and other “social misfits.” This was an open secret that had never been publicly discussed before.

The Cuban audience flocked to see the film, and it provoked a commotion that took on the dimensions of a sociological phenomenon. Abroad, it repeated the achievement of Memories twenty-five years earlier, which was to center attention on Cuba by breaking the stereotypes to which the island was subjected in the media at large. As a Spanish film critic wrote when Strawberry and Chocolate screened at the Berlin Film Festival: “This poor film, made for threepence, surpassed the opulent films of the West in aesthetic and moral richness.”

Titón never repeated himself, even in his minor films. Each is an original response to the demands of the subject matter, ranging from high experimentalism to classical poise, slapstick to serious debate. His comedies are biting, or in the case of Guantanamera, a valedictory film, wistful but without a trace of sentimentality, a trait entirely alien to his character. In the dramas, his realism is unremitting, and he fiercely defends his independence.

If this gives the lie to notions of the ICAIC as a tool of propaganda that was subject to censorship, he did not engage in self-censorship for the sake of an easy life, either. The conflicts between his characters, who are never stereotypes, are direct representations of ideological struggles in the society.

One way or another these struggles continue, exacerbated by intensified pressure from the enemy to the north that places ever greater strain on the viability of the communist project. Alea’s films are a testimony from within to the contradictions that make it so difficult to achieve, contradictions still at play today.