Don’t expect a happy ending: Cuban films in Castro’s twilight

• Autores: Juan Orlando Pérez González
• Localización: Avanca / Cinema 2012 / Cine Clube de Avanca (dir.), 2012, ISBN 978-989-96858-2-6, págs. 532-538
• Idioma: varios idiomas
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • More than half a century after Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba, the Communist-ruled island nation is yet again onthe verge of a great change. Fidel’s younger brother, Raúl, is leading a timid reform of the regime to avoid or at leastdelay the inevitable transition towards democracy. There is still no real political debate in Cuba’s state-owned media,but in other modalities of public discourse, such as film, literature and the visual arts, it’s possible to see evidence ofa re-examination of the country’s recent past and its uncertain future.Films such as Ticket to Paradise (Gerardo Chijona, 2010), Habanastation (Ian Padrón, 2011) or Juan of the Dead(Alejandro Brugués, 2011), offer a richer, more accurate and thorough panorama of Cuba’s social reality and thecountry’s political options than anything that can be read in the Party’s newspapers or in the anti Castro publicationsof the Cuban exile. Artistically uneven, these films, and others released in the last couple of years, are more or lessopenly assessing the legacy of the 1959 revolution and the social and moral legitimacy of the Castro regime, andredefining the meaning of nationhood for a country that is questioning its very identity. This paper examines theideological, narrative and aesthetic coincidences and contradictions among these films, in order to better understanda critical moment in Cuban history.