HAVANA — Scratch a Cuban, uncover a paradox.
To spend time in this crumbling but still heartbreakingly beautiful city, to talk to Cuban filmmakers during the just-concluded 17th Festival of New Latin American Cinema, is to hear the same words repeated over and over: contradictory, paradoxical, inexplicable, miraculous, dichotomy. "It's more difficult to explain what happens in Cuba in rational terms than to live here," says prominent director Gerardo Chijona. "If you're going to go by common sense, forget it."
To examine this small island's film history is to discover how far from conventional expectations everything is. Isolated and beleaguered by an American economic blockade that is almost as old as its 37-year-old revolution, Cuba should never have been able to muster the resources to develop any kind of film industry or to play host to a prestigious international festival dedicated to the socially conscious Latin cinema.
Yet, starting in the late 1960s, when Tomas Gutierrez Alea's "Memories of Underdevelopment" and Humberto Solas' "Lucia" astonished international audiences with their skill and brio, Cuba rapidly established itself as a world cinematic force.
And along with the industry the festival in Havana grew in the 1980s into the biggest, most important showcase for Latin American films, complete with Dionysian all-night parties that showcased the best in Cuban music. Helmut Newton shot the festival for Vanity Fair, Bob Rafelson slept in George Raft's celebrated circular bed at the Hotel Capri, Treat Williams flew in himself, Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in his private plane, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro took up so much of Jack Lemmon's time that the actor commented, "Anyone who can make me shut up for three hours has got to be extraordinary."
"During my years, cinema was born in the middle of the circus, the show was in the streets," says Pastor Vega, who ran the festival from its inception through 1990. "Everybody overseas thought that people were not happy here, that Cuba was a big jail. I decided to make a festival that was a film, theater, music, alcohol and sex festival, all together at the same time. In my opinion, that was cultural."
But all that was before what is known in Cuba as "the special period." Beginning in 1990 the tightening of the American blockade combined with the collapse of the Soviet bloc (which had accounted for 85% of Cuba's foreign trade as well as billions of dollars in foreign aid) to bring the island's economy to nearly a standstill.
The legalization of the American dollar as local currency in 1993 introduced a two-tier economic system to a society that had prided itself on its egalitarianism, making those without access to greenbacks feel like refugees in their own country and leading to too-true jokes with punch lines about bellboys making more money than brain surgeons. If Cuba had somehow managed to have a film industry and a festival before, surely this deepest of crises would bring everything to an end.
And Cuba's continuing economic miseries have made a difference in how its citizens see films. Estimates are that about half of Havana's movie theaters have been closed, victims of everything from persistent blackouts to weakened public transportation due to the lack of gasoline to projectors so ancient some are reportedly held together with string.
As a result, most Cuban movie-going has transferred to television, especially a heavily watched Saturday night double bill that features hot items from Hollywood like "Forrest Gump" and "Jurassic Park," all conveniently bootlegged off satellite transmissions. Enrique Colina, whose film analysis program on Cuban TV has lasted 27 years ("I will ask for the Guinness record, especially if there is money," he laughs) says that "if relations with the U.S. become normal, it will be a big problem for the mass audience, because we couldn't show these films."
The special period has also affected Cuba's prestigious Three Worlds International Film and Television School, where Francis Ford Coppola is fondly remembered for the day he cooked 4,000 gnocchi and fed the entire student body. Fernando Birri, the legendary Argentine director who was a founder of the New Latin American cinema movement and the school's first director, was back this year to celebrate his 70th birthday. "Cuba is changing and the school will, too," he somberly told the students at a cake-cutting party. "The revolution is like a flame that seems about to be extinguished but stays alive. The flame is different, but it does not go out."
Yet, despite all these problems, the paradoxical truth is that, like the bumblebee that shouldn't be able to fly but does, Havana's film festival is not only surviving but--helped by the country's ever-expanding tourist industry (more than 600,000 non-U.S. tourists spent an estimated $850 million in 1994)--is actually prospering compared to where it was three and four years ago.
