National Identity In 21st Century Cuban Cinema

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.

With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959. Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S. cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans' sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not be realized, the stage was set for revolution.

"New readings by major exile scholars on the unsettling but weighty question of defining who the Cubans are, what constitutes their national identity, and how they might define themselves as Cubans with respect to their distant island culture. The perspectives presented cover the fields of history, political science, sociology, art, music, literature, anthropology, religion, and gender studies."--Ivan A. Schulman, University of Illinois This anthology brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines who look at one main question: What constitutes Cuban identity? Encouraged to go beyond received ideas and time-worn methodologies, they offer revisionist perspectives that argue for a "Cubanness" marked more by tension and diversity than by harmony and similarity, more impure than pure, more elastic than static. By examining issues often misrepresented or simply ignored in the past, sources and voices contribute to a fluidity that resonates with the collection's title. Contents Interpretations of National Identity, by Damián J. Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt I. The Nation as Historical Narration 1. Reconstructing Cubanness: Changing Discourses of National Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora during the Twentieth Century, by Jorge Duany 2. Rethinking Tradition and Identity: The Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, by María Elena Díaz 3. Rethinking Race and Nation in Cuba, by Ada Ferrer II. The Nation as Incomplete Desire 4. Cuba and Lo Cubano, or the Story of Desire and Disenchantment, by Damián J. Fernández 5. Between Myth and Stereotype: The Image of the Mulatta in Cuban Culture in the Nineteenth Century, a Truncated Symbol of Nationality, by Madeline Cámara Betancourt 6. Boleros, Divas, and Identity Models, by José Quiroga 7. Post-Utopia: The Erotics of Power and Cuba's Revolutionary Children, by Ruth Behar 8. Cuban CondemNation of Queer Bodies, by Emilio Bejel III. The Nation as Metaphor 9. The Nation without a Story, by Antonio Vera-León 10. Bondage in Paradise: Fredrika Bremer's Travels to Cuba and the Inscape of National Identity, by Adriana Méndez Rodenas 11. The Sea, the Sea, Once and Again: Lo Cubano and the Literature of the Novismas, by Nara Araújo 12. Gallery of Cuban Writing, by Rafael Rojas IV. The National as the Transnational 13. The Musicalia of Twentieth-Century Cuban Popular Musicians, by Raúl Fernández 14. Lo Blanco-Criollo as Lo Cubano: The Symbolization of a Cuban National Identity in Modernist Painting of the 1940s, by Juan A. Martínez 15. The Trouble with Collusion: Paradoxes of the Cuban-American Way, by Max J. Castro Damián J. Fernández is associate professor and chair of the International Relations Department at Florida International University. He is the editor of Cuban Studies since the Revolution (UPF, 1992) and the author of Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Madeline Cámara Betancourt is assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at San Diego State University, Imperial Valley. She is the author of Vocación de Casandra: La poesía de María Elena Cruz Varela.

Contemporary Cuba is opening up to the rest of the world. Its colonial past and the Communist revolution have left a lasting imprint on society, yet there is a tangible sense of rapid change which is reflected in the island's national cinema. New screen technologies and digital distribution media have supported the efficacy and global reach of Cuban filmmakers whose work, somewhat in lieu of adequate distribution and traditional screening facilities in Cuba itself, is often disseminated via 'flash' (USB memory sticks).Channelling an energetic DIY attitude through grassroots movements and ad-hoc resourcefulness, the new filmmakers of Cuba have inspired the editors of this book to embrace their contagious enthusiasm through essays on authentic Cuban cinema. Whilst the book provides a comprehensive overview of the history behind current practices, it also moves beyond this to examine key case studies as well as 'snapshots' of individuals working within the industry today. Chapters celebrate the shared creativity as well as diversity of Cuban cinema, including both productions of the Cuban Film Institute's (ICAIC) as well as those from the industry margins. The films discussed demonstrate a driving cinematic force through social criticism, the emphasis of debate and historical change through film, reassessments of gender relations, the use of new technologies and much more.

New chapters express ongoing concerns about freedom of expression, the role of the Havana Film Festival in restoring Havana's central position in Latin American cinema, & the changing audience for Cuban films.

From Cuba with Love deals with love, sexuality, and politics in contemporary Cuba. In this beautiful narrative, Megan Daigle explores the role of women in Cuban political culture by examining the rise of economies of sex, romance, and money since the early 1990s. Daigle draws attention to the violence experienced by young women suspected of involvement with foreigners at the hands of a moralistic state, an opportunistic police force, and even their own families and partners. Investigating the lived realities of the Cuban women (and some men) who date tourists and offering a unique perspective on the surrounding debates, From Cuba with Love raises issues about women’s bodies–what they can or should do and, equally, what can be done to them. Daigle’s provocative perspective will make readers question how race and politics in Cuba are tied to women and sex, and the ways in which political power acts directly on the bodies of individuals through law, policing, institutional programs, and social norms.

From the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1950s, Havana was a locus for American movie stars, with glamorous visitors including Errol Flynn, John Wayne, and Marlon Brando. In fact, Hollywood was seemingly everywhere in pre-Castro Havana, with movie theaters three to a block in places, widely circulated silver screen fanzines, and terms like “cowboy” and “gangster” entering Cuban vernacular speech. Hollywood in Havana uses this historical backdrop as the catalyst for a startling question: Did exposure to half a century of Hollywood pave the way for the Cuban Revolution of 1959? Megan Feeney argues that the freedom fighting extolled in American World War II dramas and the rebellious values and behaviors seen in postwar film noir helped condition Cuban audiences to expect and even demand purer forms of Cuban democracy and national sovereignty. At the same time, influential Cuban intellectuals worked to translate Hollywood ethics into revolutionary rhetoric—which, ironically, led to pointed critiques and subversions of the US presence in Cuba. Hollywood in Havana not only expands our notions of how American cinema was internalized around the world—it also broadens our view of the ongoing history of US-Cuban interactions, both cultural and political.

In Fidel between the Lines Laura-Zoë Humphreys traces the changing dynamics of criticism and censorship in late socialist Cuba through a focus on cinema. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban state strategically relaxed censorship, attempting to contain dissent by giving it an outlet in the arts. Along with this shift, foreign funding and digital technologies gave filmmakers more freedom to criticize the state than ever before, yet these openings also exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped the Cuban public sphere. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution, and how such efforts came up against new forms of suspicion in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Offering insights that extend beyond Cuba, Humphreys reveals what happens to public debate when freedom of expression can no longer be distinguished from complicity while demonstrating the ways in which combining anthropology with film studies can shed light on cinema's broader social and political import.