Intimate Spaces and Migrant Imaginaries:

Sandra Gómez, Susana Barriga, and Heidi Hassan

by Susan Lord and Zaira Zarza

In 1986 the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV) was established in Cuba as a new space of cinema making—the “Utopia of the Eye and the Ear of the School of Three Worlds,” as Fernando Birri called it. Weathering the Special Period, bureaucracies, and blockades, and the weather itself, the EICTV is an “island on the Island” and has graduated some of the most inventive and committed filmmakers from Latin America, Cuba, and elsewhere. It has been the most welcoming place in Cuba for young women filmmakers, providing encouragement, connections, and mentorship that were difficult to find in the more traditional environment of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). When we began this project, we were writing with reference to an institution with a vigorous past and future through which we would be able to trace and track the development of young Cuban filmmakers, particularly women and those who found themselves living outside of Cuba. However, in July 2013 the EICTV was hit with a set of very serious conflicts with the Cuban authorities, leaving its future uncertain. As Michael Chanan (2013) and others have reported,2 the conflict stems from a system of selffinancing (the selling of beer for profit) and has resulted in the resignation of the school’s Director, the imprisonment of personnel from the financial office of the school, and the suspension of the coming year’s admission.

Why these measures were enforced at that time, when the practice had reportedly been going for 15 years, was anyone’s guess. But that it happened during the early years of the new economic reforms—of the cuenta propista (private small business)—was a terrible irony, for the “no small beer” economy, as Chanan calls it, permitted the EICTV to finance its way through the Special Period, making it a place of international collaboration, friendship, and creativity like nowhere else in the world. We begin here not to dwell on the scandal but to highlight the precariousness of even the most apparently protected spaces of creativity in the face of political power and economic patterns. Additionally, and for the context of our essay, given that the EICTV is also an international space through which women filmmakers can make connections otherwise very difficult to forge, the precariousness has a gendered dimension.

In the following pages, we discuss the school as a space of creation for women filmmakers who represent for us a generational and gendered consciousness about belonging and displacement and who all studied at the EICTV. We argue that the Cuban filmmakers who studied at the EICTV have more than just access to international filmmakers and circuits; they also develop a transnational or translocal aesthetic that, in the cases of our filmmakers, is articulated through the production of onscreen spaces of intimacy and thresholds of belonging. We work with the idea of the EICTV as the first step for most filmmakers toward transnational cinema production in Cuba— an intense cosmopolitan hothouse mirroring something of the early years of the ICAIC. We describe vectors of internationalism in relation to instruction, distribution, and production through the analysis of the politics of the institution and its alumni, sponsors, program of studies, publications, etc. We analyze examples of this transnational idea through biographical notes and textual analysis of films by graduates of the EICTV: Heidi Hassan, Sandra Gómez, and Susana Barriga. Finally, we pose questions about diaspora, intimacy, territoriality, space, and belonging for this generation.

The works of these filmmakers’ represent different connections to place, depending on contexts, the specific experience of the filmmakers as migrant subject, the narrative structure, or the use of documentary form. We temper the language so as to reflect these differences: the authors are practicing translocality as part of a transnational set of economics and politics insofar as they have to physically and legally move between nationstates. In this case, we understand their transnationalism as the actual fact of border crossing and their translocality in relation to their networks, references, and possibilities of place-making. The internationalism of the school then supports transnational practices of the filmmakers and that transnationalism is expressed through multiple translocal imaginaries.

From the school of three worlds to the school of all worlds

The Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión is considered one of the most prestigious film schools in the world for several reasons: the reputation of the founders of the school who were active members of the New Latin American Cinema Movement, the low price of tuition compared to other institutions of its sort, and the way through which its graduates have changed the panorama of Latin American cinema in the last 25 years. And while the school’s first directors were founders of the New Latin American Cinema, as is the case with Fernando Birri and Julio García Espinosa, the new policy is that graduates from the school should now become leaders of the institution in periods of four years. The case of the EICTV is a great example of how spaces—made by collective human agency in the forms of institutions, social action, and political mobilization—contribute to the formation of identity.

The EICTV started as “The School of the Three Worlds” in 1986, and by 2000 it had become “The School of All Worlds.” The utopian dimension of the early project was expressed by Fernando Birri: “so the place of Utopia, that by definition is nowhere, will be somewhere...[We are about to initiate] the Utopia of the eye and the ear of the School of Three Worlds” (Birri, 2005, 121). When it began, students had free education since the “three worlds” referred to the students of the Third World who participated in a tuition-free two-year program that included room and board. Numerous changes in the global and national finance-scapes, including the crisis of the Special Period, made it impossible to sustain this utopian impulse. EICTV was renamed “School of All Worlds,” and an economic differential was introduced. Now all students pay tuition—even Cubans, although they pay only a token fee. There are two types of expensive post-graduate international workshops offered only to people not in the regular program; and the program is now three years long.

Important migrant filmmakers such as Heidi Hassan and Sandra Gómez graduated from the International Film and Television School in 2001 and 2003, respectively. They both studied there to become directors of photography, while Susana Barriga finished her courses in 2006. All three then graduated from the “all worlds” version of the school and were raised during the Special Period of the post-1989 crisis. Therefore, these young women are not part of the initial nation-building process of the Revolution and have used cinema and the EICTV as spaces for distance and criticism. The EICTV itself can be used as a weathervane of changes in the politics and social value of “internationalism.” As Nicolas Balaisis suggests, the EICTV became “more generic and less overtly political...more easily absorbed by international students...pursuing a career

in a global industry, and not necessarily committed to political cinema and Third World solidarity” (2013, 196). Authors such as Ann Marie Stock, Laura-Zoe Humphries, and Susan Lord and Caridad Cumaná have further written about antecedents and influences of this generation of film artists.

In the last 20 years the school has had 616 students from over 20 countries in the regular program. Only 39 of these students are women, but 31 of those graduated after the year 2000, which could indicate a slow transition toward an epoch of increasing gender equity in the last decade. This analysis is reinforced by the appointment of the first female director of EICTV, alumna Tanya María Valette Castillo from the Dominican Republic, who was the school’s leader between 2007 and 2011. While 93 of the graduates are Cubans, at least 30 percent of them currently live abroad.

Included in the cultural program of the Cuban Revolution as the academic project of the Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (FNCL or Foundation of New Latin American Cinema), EICTV is a school that has transnational engagement as one of its defining principles. For example, there cannot be two students from the same country in any of the departments, a rule that creates multinational classrooms. This engineered diversity generates a space for cultural exchange, where different nationalities, accents, creeds, and cultures—and aesthetic influences—coexist. International workshops and talks are given by filmmakers,3 and the inauguration of a new faculty specifically for TV and new media in the academic course 2012–2013 has expanded the learning possibilities of the students, who can now delve into the audiovisual universe of global social networks and online platforms.

While the school works closely with ICAIC, it mainly runs several projects of exchange with international institutions and associations that sponsor thesis projects and academic exercises. Students can raise funds to produce their film thesis if they exceed the budget limit set by the school. But for a number of years they have been financially supported by several institutions such as UNESCO, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), IBERMEDIA (a program that supports film projects from Latin America, Spain and Portugal), the regional project CINERGIA (a fund for the promotion of Central American cinema), the Cuban and Brazilian Ministries of Culture, and Cinecolor (a postproduction studio in Mexico), just to mention a few.

The students’ funding is provided through scholarships, film materials, and the satisfaction of other production and post-production needs. The school also takes part in multicultural projects such as “Ser un ser humano” (“To be a human being”), an internationally funded film venture that gathers students from six film schools in various continents to create documentary portraits of local communities. Agreements were made with international workshops and film festivals, as well as academic exchanges with universities. Collaborations with workshops such as the Sector Industria, the Doculab, and the Talent Campus—all sections of the Guadalajara Film Festival—included students as well as alumni within five years of their graduation. Coordinated with the support of the Berlinale Talent Campus, the Guadalajara Talent Campus is a training event for emerging filmmakers, film critics, and actors from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. During its celebration, the participants are offered a networking space to foster creative exchange among them. Sector Industria, on the other hand, helps young film producers to develop film projects in pre- and post-production status through the Guadalajara Film Market and Producers Network. Doculab has become an inspirational learning experience that brings together documentary makers in a sort of laboratory where works in progress are shared, “dissected,” and discussed among peers. NUEVAS MIRADAS also emerged as an idea of the film school to provide a forum to discuss works in progress during the Havana Film Festival. At first, it included EICTV students’ projects as well as alumni’s, but now it is open to Latin American film producers in general.

Academic exchanges have been made with Woodbury University in Los Angeles, the film school in Oporto (Portugal), the Universities of Guadalajara (Mexico), and Santiago de Compostela (Spain), among others. As a result of this learning experience, new films have been produced in the host country. The documentaries Extravío (2008) by Dainellis Hernandez and The Illusion (2007) by Susana Barriga, funded and coordinated by Salford University, in England, are examples of this opportunity to share knowledge and experiences, and build new visions of space from different perspectives.

As an extension of Cuba’s Department of Foreign Relations, the Office of Film Festivals coordinates the participation of film works made by students in national and international film gatherings, showcases, homages, etc. A committee of experts selected by the school meets regularly to vote on the best shorts produced by EICTV every semester, and then translators and technicians from the postproduction department work in the subtitling of those materials into English. The Office of Film Festivals has a database of nearly 700 film-related events around the globe and it applies to many of them on behalf of the students. EICTV films have been shown at Cannes, the Berlinale and in the San Sebastián, Cartagena, and ClermontFerrand film festivals. Because of these institutional policies, the EICTV has become a platform for the international visibility of these filmmakers. And while this may seem normal elsewhere in the world, it is rare in the Cuban context and has positive impact on the professional lives of Cuban students and graduates.

At the same time, the school introduces a differential economy of cultural education that did not exist in Cuba before. It responds to the flows of international economies more than to those of the national economy of the island, and it is the only institution in the Cuban education system where students have to pay to learn. Regardless of the many sacrifices of the EICTV community, it has become a privileged space for its students in relation not only to other college students in the general educational structure in Cuba but also to other film students in the country who graduate from the Facultad de Arte de los Medios de Comunicación Audiovisual (FAMCA) at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). The school is a special zone—an island within the island—outside of “national” curriculum and expectations, potentially distancing the student from the pedagogical and institutional spaces of nationalism.

“Portable Homelands”: Digital Technologies of Place

As Homi Bhabha has written, “The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no space is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers” (Bhabha, 1992, 88). The “emotional geographies” (Davidson et al., 2005; Massey, 2004) or the “affective nature of the politics of place” (Thrift, 2004) yields new intensities in the global communication networks: the fronteras of belonging to a place are virtualized through Skype, MSM, Cuballama texting, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, etc. and rematerialized through networks forged both at the EICTV and across different localities and economies (internet festivals, located festivals, distribution of works through informal economies, production across borders through file storage systems online, and, of course, the old-fashioned analogue world of friendships). In this “portable homeland” (Ortega, 1998, 11), the new media makers are practicing in the context of what Appadurai calls the digital differential (1996)—the 2000’s version of Naficy’s sense of the video letter (Naficy, 2001). This is where the digital dilemmas, as Cristina Venegas has written of the new Cuban cinema, make a very important contribution to international, transnational, and translocal understandings and affiliations: “The profound crisis of the Special Period transformed the nature of Cuban filmmaking. Cuban cinema could no longer be contained within the boundaries of the island nation or sustained by the industrial model established in 1959 ...Adaptation to digital technology and its network connectivity demands political and economic adaptation” (Venegas, 2010, 138). As much as this new media activity of contemporary filmmakers participates in the flows and mediascapes of economic globalization, they are also performing their cultural citizenship in a manner directly associable to the first generation of post-1959 filmmakers: not in aesthetic language necessarily, nor even within political or moral terms, but certainly in the sense of invention, critical investment, and the claiming of cultural production as a space of citizenship practice (see Vidal, 2010).

The experience of place-making in the work of the three women we will examine here, Sandra Gómez, Susana Barriga, and Heidi Hassan, share translocal migrant imaginaries and gendered positionality, as well as expressions of deterritorialized intimacies within urban spaces. The nexus of home, family, and nation that conditions gendered subjectivity is intersected in the Cuban context with revolutionary obligations, promises, and violence. (The symbol of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas—Cuban Women Federation—was of a woman with a baby in one arm and a rifle in the other.) Hence within the patriarchal nationalism of a revolution that promised women equality and autonomy in Cuba but gave them limited access to significant roles in cultural production, a space such as San Antonio provides a particular set of possibilities for production and mobility. This condition offers cinematic and spatial tools to explore the affect of displacement and remapping of the Antilles. Thus for Barriga, Hassan, and Gómez, the Cuban experience of globalization is also expressed as emotional geography, born of four waves of ideological and financial crises (with the Revolution and the blockade that resulted in the first wave of exiles, largely in Miami; with the “Mariel Boatlift” in 1980, when 125,000 left the Island as exiles; with the Special Period of the 1990s; and with the globalization of the 2000s). Where is this geography actually located? The use of the Island as Antilles—a dispersed, fragmented collection of landforms—can be found across the history of Cuban art to express a variety of themes related to history, sovereignty, longing, migration, political critique, insularity, and so forth. This visual culture provides emotional and political keys for understanding the expression of economic and political internationalism, from colonial through postcolonial state formations. While all three filmmakers are contiguous to this tradition, the more sustained and conflicted expression of citizenship at work in the gendered geopolitical imaginary is that of deterritorialization.5 The filmmakers also participate in particular documentary traditions. Barriga and Hassan are clearly situated in the “first person” or “personal” documentary mode of representation, where the politics of place, self, and social subject are investigated through the lens of a situated and self-reflexive imaginary, one facilitated by the intimacies permitted by new digital technologies that are light, small, and concealable. Gómez is more difficult to place, for one feels as if the spaces she films are the intimacies of her own life, but she does not appear in image or voice. She participates more closely in what Keith Beattie refers to as documentary display (this will be discussed further below). We suggest the works by these three filmmakers can also be read as revised city symphonies of the diasporic subject whose return home is brief and transitory. Each filmmaker locates this deterritorialized imaginary in geo-aesthetic terms: Barriga’s camera frame in the London tube stop and its search for her father; Sandra Gómez’s space of the borderland as a utopian open city, locating her practice on the Malecón as an intimate geography; Heidi Hassan’s character’s whispers through the streets of Geneva, whispering through us to her mother and child who are back in Cuba.

Three Women/Three Worlds

Susana Barriga, born in 1981 in Santiago de Cuba, received a degree in Social Communication at the University of Havana and graduated from EICTV in Documentary Direction. She works as a producer of short films and she is a radio and TV journalist. Barriga’s The Illusion is a first-person, hand-held video about the filmmaker’s journey to London, England, where her father lives, having left Cuba when she was a child. They meet; their encounter is strained with his paranoia; he doesn’t permit her to film him. She leaves. But this simple description of the narrative tells us very little because, as in most first-person reflexive documentaries, the action and the affect are filmic: the framing, the sound, the mise-en-scene, the timing of the edits, and the voice are built to produce an emotional geography of displacement subtended by longing, fear, and hatred.

The video opens with a shot of a London street at night; a male figure stands at the edge of the sidewalk, just off-center in the medium distance, amid the ambient street noises. The camera tries to track him as he moves out of frame and as another figure walks in front of the lens. A woman’s voice-over quietly says, in Spanish: “Sometimes I try to remember his face. And again I see this image; the only one I’ve got of him.” Just as she speaks the final words, the camera locates him in the shadows and holds him there while the voice continues: “I wanted to make a film about happiness, but I only have diffuse memories whose meaning is still unknown to me.” A male, English-speaking voice-off interrupts this reflection with a demand that she turn the camera off. In response to his voice, the camera moves and we become aware that she is in a tube station. A moment earlier, her surveilling gaze and intimate speech seemed protected, almost cloistered, in a familial (although estranged) space that her camera can create. But with the voice-off, she becomes an immigrant, a stranger, lost to language and to the image. The shift in place-making, from here to there, from home to elsewhere, opens her to a different vulnerability—one of laws and states and borders. And the angry man, not wanting to be filmed, expresses a different vulnerability, too. They are both without hospitality in one of the most cosmopolitan cities. In the ensuing minutes the man becomes more insistent; there is some jostling of the camera, and he says: “what is she doing filming people.” To which she says “no, él es ...él es mi papá.” But the man doesn’t understand her; his fear and anger erupt into a physical assault. We hear another man ask if she needs the police and ambulance. The open credits begin, intercut with a stationary camera recording slightly obscured people as they walk through the tube station. And then the camera appears to move, but it is in fact stationary, and we realize we are on the train, leaving the station. Leaving the father. And the title The Illusion appears. With this beginning, we are at the end, at the end of the journey, at the end of the film. This book-end structure, used in many narrative films, usually provides measures for transformations and resolutions. But here it functions, as we will see, more as a looping device, a circuit of communication and displacement, a melodramatic repetition of bad timing.

Once the train leaves the station, we cut to a black screen with a voiceover that explains the following: in 1995 (just after the worst of the Special Period), the father wrote to his daughter, Susana, his “dear and unforgettable daughter.” The narration of the letter continues as the soundtrack for her movement underground on the tube. She arrives at a glass apartment door through which we see indistinguishable shapes and colors; cut to black as a man’s voice-off quiets a dog. Once inside the apartment the camera is stationary, framing a detail of the furniture, and again the father is present as a voice-off: “My daughter, if I knew you were coming I would not be so surprised.” Their conversation swings quickly from surprise and tenderness to accusation and paranoia. He begins to interrogate her. He tells her to stop filming; instead, she puts the camera down, leaving it running with both sound and image, but he is offscreen. While at the apartment, we hear him accuse her of having privilege, of being paid by the Cuban government because otherwise they wouldn’t let her leave; he won’t answer her questions; he tells her he doesn’t want her to come back. After a very intense yet painful few minutes, they leave the apartment and go to the tube station. The encounter in the apartment is intercut with her voice-over in the subway, reflecting on her dreams for the encounter. The film ends with the beginning, which is the end: in the entryway of a London tube stop where Barriga stands aiming her camera at the distant and indistinguishable figure of her father. The camera is at once seeking, yearning, and surveilling; here, her intimacy is tangled with her displacement and the risks of “foreign-ness.” The structure of the film forms a loop, a repetitive and inescapable structure that mirrors her father’s psychic territory, his paranoia fueled by his generation’s hatred and mistrust. As Laura-Zoe Humphreys has written about this film:

“At moments of particular emotional intensity, the film cuts to shots of passengers on the London underground whose isolation echo the distance between father and daughter. Through voiceovers, Susana relates the fantasies she harbored of this family reunion ...Susana’s father “knows who she is”—and this identity has more to do with Cuban politics than with her longed-for status as daughter.”

But here, although in London, the imaginary of belonging to Cuba drives the disorientation and estrangement. In her father we can see the crystallization of the hatred of authority insofar as he holds the Cuban government accountable for everything that happened in his life. Then, with this narrow-mindedness, he is unable to see that familial relations are distinct from ideological forces; and he is unable to see the distinction between his generation’s suspicions of “those who stay” and his daughter’s generation’s desires for connections between “those who leave and those who stay.” The refusal to permit his daughter and her camera to lift their gaze is driven by the emotional geography of not being home. The geopolitics of alienation from her father and the alienation of the father from himself in this intense paranoia of the exile make sense both because England is not Cuba and because London is not Havana—in other words, the geopolitical and emotional alienation both about nation and about a locality that is familial and strange.

Sandra Gómez situates both her documentaries, Las camas solas (2006) and El futuro es hoy (2009), on and around El Malecón: a four-mile stretch of public space (Havana’s “social living room”). The Malecón is at once an intensely present (spatially and temporally) and illusive place, made from contesting or non-identical cultures of time occupying the same space, thus turning that space into a place—a place at once public and agonistic and intimate. In Sandra Gómez’s work, this physical space of the Malecón is a complex place of representations, histories, possibilities, temporalities, and identities: the unseen beyond the horizon is Miami; the fishing boats and rafts are also after-images of losses, such as the Marielitos and other balseros.

El futuro es hoy (The Future is Today) is a riff on the city symphony documentary, composed of portraits of several people who live near, work on, or in other ways inhabit the Malecón. There is a fisher whose labor of bringing his raft down to the water opens the film; an old woman seamstress whose sewing machine, she believes, is connected to Fidel and will work as long as he is alive (and when it stops working, she solemnly drapes with a cloth); a guard at the Plaza Tribuna Anti Imperialista, whose solidary and deliberate work is filmed with long takes; a family that holds a fiesta on the water side; a woman who is a doctor by day and a rocker by night, and other residents. The structure is diurnal and, using long takes with medium shots and some close-ups, is built by intercutting the stories of the these people. Some speak in a direct documentary address; others look out over the horizon; others are filmed going about their daily work. Goméz has stated that the most important person in the film is the fisherman, whose image of persistent yet fragile existence opens and closes the film: “His raft makes us think of the stone of Sisyphus and to see him enter the sea without knowing what he will do evokes the idea of an escape. Among the characters he is one who expresses himself in a pure, radical way; he simply says what he thinks and his sincerity is emotive” (Sandra Gómez in Ávila López, 2010; our translation). The people she interviews are between the past and an uncertain future—a social and political liminality that permits or produces the possibility for certain enunciations, such as what we hear from Yoss, a well-known writer who describes capitalism as a space where the floor is filled with snakes but the ceiling is limitless, whereas in socialism the floor is free of snakes and such dangers but the ceiling is only two feet high.

The Malecón has a complex history as representation and in representations of space and place—from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s mark in the 1960s, in Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), to Fernando Pérez in the Special Period, when he makes the Malecón a space of profound intimacy and inward/psychological subjectivity in his films La vida es silbar (Life is to Whistle, 1998) and Madagascar (1995). There are also foreign films, such as Who the Hell Is Juliette? (1997), by Carlos Marcovich, where the Malecón is a border story between modernity and postmodernity, revolution and globalization, and also embodies the transcultural history upon which Cuba is built. Cuban artist Manuel Piña’s 1993 photo series Aguas Baldías (Water Wasteland) and his large-scale installation from that series of an extreme close-up of the wall of the Malecón as limit-horizon, permitting only a relative fraction of sky, have become very important works for the critical reflection on the sign structures and social practices that produce histories and counter-genealogies of utopic spaces. Finally, tourism imagery has always been part of the Malecón, but especially during the Special Period such imagery has delivered the Malecón as commodity: a space of light and play and freedom— signifying differently depending on which side of the Malecón you come from, ideologically, geographically, economically. The Maine Monument, built during Machado’s rule, was the first monument built along the Malecón. Several others followed over the next decades. This monument, along with the “westward expansion” toward the new American wealth, functioned in part to reorient the gaze, turning Havana’s face fully toward its new master. Since the Revolution, the Malecón has been the site of a range of public practices, displays of solidarity, new monuments and the removal or transformation of old ones (the American eagle atop the Maine was removed, with an unrealized promise from Picasso to replace it with a dove): from Carnival and baseball celebrations, to displays of military might—such as was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis—and a farewell procession for revolutionary “Che” Guevara, to public demonstrations against the measures taken during the Special Period, most notably the “maleconazo” on August 5, 1994. In 2000, while the US courts were reviewing Elián González’s case, an area in front of the US Interests building on the Malecón was turned into Plaza Tribuna Anti Imperialista. It shows the national hero José Martí, holding a child and pointing accusingly at the US diplomatic office. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans rallied and paraded there over the issue of Elián. This is also the site where more recently a massive crowd of young Cubans came to a heavy metal rock concert, an event Sandra Gómez records and includes in El futuro es hoy. The plurality of those on the Malecón is met in the structure of the film:

The variety of views expressed in the film is important to me, as I believe it reflects reality of life for Cubans who at this moment in time have conflicting ideas. Some of them are hoping for change while others would like things to continue as they have been and still are ...In these historic times, when opposing attitudes are vehemently expressed within a society, there arises a risk of division. The mother and son who live at the Malecón, for instance, have contrary views. From the outset, I chose characters who were in some form or another associated with the Malecón. The final scene, in which they are all united at this location, is an image which I had not envisioned from the outset, but now concludes the film like a hope—maybe utopian—that Cuban society can remain united. (Gómez, 2010)

Gómez thus presents the Malecón as a site of both public eventness and intimacy. It is also a place of ritual and of heterogeneous, uncontrollable forms of everyday life. The social living room and the bedroom, the flaneur’s boulevard and a classroom, it is a place of grief and celebration as well. Gómez’s careful aesthetic and ethnographic attention brings this film closest to a form of documentary citizenship: a space of in-betweens, of belonging to no one and to each other, an image of responsibility at the edge of utopia. As a documentary practice, we can see this work as a revision of the ethnographic elements of the city film tradition. Writing about Forest of Bliss by Robert Gardner, Keith Beattie states: “The locus for this revision is a mode of documentary display in which the capacities of ‘showing’ (operative within and through visual components, informed by aural features) take precedence over formal attention to ‘telling’ (expository claims concerning the experiential). This process is common to city films, including city symphonies, though in Forest of Bliss the ‘showing’ of display—which is marked to a degree not necessarily evident in other city films—results in a work of sensorial and affective intensity” (Beattie, 2008, 52). The Malecón in El futuro es hoy is a space of display, toward the camera, toward each other, toward the future and across the frontera of belonging.

In a world where dominant historiographies and uneven distribution of wealth mark unequal power and exchange, migrant communities are subject to designations that come from a history of colonial administration in the current global economic systems. Their experiences are long processes of unsettlement and recombination. The politics of most diasporic populations are then based on constant practices of unlearning and relearning both realities and imaginaries in search for cultural accommodation.

The tensions of identity in relation to gender are a fundamental part of the discourse of diaspora consciousness. Tierra roja (Red Land, 2007) by Heidi Hassan proposes a revision of the experience of a woman of color in a white-dominated community. She depicts the female subject under the light of a new migratory context where domination, power relations, and alienating circumstances remain central. In Tierra roja the protagonist is a nameless young female emigrant in Geneva trying to adapt to a foreign environment. She is a single mother, a woman of color. The structure of the film alternates between that of an epistolary novel composed by the letters she writes to her parents and daughter still in the “homeland” and the self-reflections of the protagonist—a voice-over monologue in the form of whispers as if the character would not be allowed or would not want to speak out loud; as if she were fully aware of the silenced subaltern subject she has become. The woman on the screen could also be considered a sort of alter ego of Hassan, who has been living first in Switzerland and later in Spain since 2002. As many Cuban film authors, she approaches female identity through autobiographical films. Yet, in a circumstance that would encourage physical deterritorialization, the psychological utterance of the character is that of a continuous contact with her homeland. The bureaucratic laws that used to run the migratory policies of the Cuban nation and the family-based sense of the island’s culture reinforce the drama of distance and adjustment.

In the contemporary contexts of global flows, connections with the birthplace are established through the convergent and divergent interactions with family, tradition, and culture. Halfway between the individual and the communal, the intimate realm of families is the main instance around which culture is organized. “As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or as grown sons and daughters return from their time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships become volatile, new commodity patterns are negotiated, debts and obligations are recalibrated, and rumors and fantasies about the new setting are maneuvered into existing repertoires of knowledge and practice” (Appadurai, 1996, 43–44). In Tierra roja, the care of the woman’s aging parents, her daughter’s first love experience, and her friend’s problems are not hers to share anymore. As a mother and daughter in the diaspora, she has to constantly negotiate the status of her affective relationships, her parents’ emotional support, and her child’s confidentiality. From a distance she tries to intervene in her daughter’s curfew; through her sister, she found out the teenager has a boyfriend; and she keeps on asking about her father’s medical tests’ results. Halfway between pragmatism and grief, the character states in her whispered monologue:

“Do you really think you will recover the time you have lost? ...Those days do not belong to you anymore ...Your daughter had her first love affair with a boy of whom you will know only the name. Someone else will comfort her. Your parents will get sick and you will arrive only for their funeral, but no one will judge you because thanks to the money you sent they have lived decently.”

Her “difference” as a place of contestation and struggle helps the viewer to recognize identity as no longer a unitary entity but a process of constant building and transformation. The lead role of Tierra roja portrays Stuart Hall’s “recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular story, out of a particular experience [and] culture ...We are all...ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are” (Hall, 1996, 447). The space she moves in is completely anonymous. It is a non-place since the film never shows physical signs that make it distinguishable. Both Cuba and Switzerland as physical locations are never mentioned and there are no references to the date when actions occur, which delocalizes and detemporalizes the narrated experience. As a voyeur from the street, the camera captures her in the balcony while she cleans up windows or does her laundry. The woman is never shown in her domestic space, maybe as a sign of her lack of one she can call home.

Every time the protagonist talks to herself, even if it happens through a discourse developed in a space of intimacy and self-narration, she does so by using the second person singular, as if she were talking to another self, as if her “self” from the past condemned her “self” from the present. The consequences of her decision to stay abroad cause a feeling of guilt that leads to the use of language as a palliative for relief. Throughout the film, her behavior is never staged for the camera. She doesn’t speak to the audience or to the filmmaker as imagined others. Hassan simply observes her. Although it becomes the performance of her identity away from home, her gestures, movements, and dressing patterns are far from only reproducing signs of the authentic. They are more likely a form of self-determination even when her own diasporic condition constrains her performance.

In her correspondence, the protagonist of Tierra roja uses expressions such as “I’m so sorry,” “forgive me,” “promise me,” “don’t forget me,” and “don’t stop loving me.” She trades and pleads but never demands. Curiously, not once does one hear back directly from her folks or child. So her channels of communication are unidirectional, which accentuates her loneliness. There is also a contrasting ambivalence between the verbal discourse and the visual image. Sometimes her letters are calm and she is in distress, other times she laughs wide and loudly while her thoughts are quiet and hopeless. In several occasions the camera drifts away from her when she is actively exchanging with the environment in which her “‘full’ self (and its underlying history) will never be present” (Shome, 2009, 709).

Her identity shapes not only through language but also through the politics of the body, the physical expression and style, because the textures of individuality can be outlined by different affective modes of bodily experience. But Hassan avoids any form of fetishism when utilizing the character’s attributes as a manner of cultural defense. The way she moves spontaneously and talks and feels with and through her body; the way she looks and the bright colors she wears (red, green, blue), her curly, natural hair falling on her shoulders or picked up in a ponytail, her red necklace made of tropical red seeds and long earrings—all this reaffirms her Caribbeanness. She looks good but not at all does she use Western codes of representation in the lived materiality of her body. Her dry colored skin does not acclimatize to the cold weather; her wide hyperbolic laughter causes disturbance; her only close female friend is a black woman with whom she finds a bit of herself at home, a place where she says “time does not go by, a bitter-sweet land.”

It is too obvious to ignore the use of color as a discursive visual tool. Red is for sure the selected one since it is present from the title—Red Land—to somehow every scene of the short film. It might have been the symbol of Communist ideals present on the political scene of the filmmaker’s island for so long. But also because of its relation to blood, passion, and strength, it could be a sign of potential emancipatory hopes as well as daily-life struggles. The woman’s skirt and shoes, necklace, cardigan, and hoodie are all red in many of the shots. In the only sequence where all seems gray inside the frame, she finds a small red board among some debris as an iconic figure to hold on to.

Films like this help to undermine polarized visions on the panorama of the Cuban diaspora. With them, as Imre Szeman puts it, “the transnational opens up new conceptual and theoretical spaces for imagining ...social formations and cultural practices which (at least potentially) might exceed what many feel to be the parochialisms and paternalisms of the nation and the politics of the nation-state era” (Szeman, 2006, 200). But still, although the epoch of the reaffirmation of national identities seems to be over and there is a consciousness that defends the display of ideas, identities, and communities beyond physical cartographies, the reproduction of local cultural practices and constant national longings for spaces and imaginaries persist among many ambivalent Cuban diasporic populations.

No es el fin/Open Endings

In this public space of the image, in the context of Cuba, the appearance of women as social and political subjects has often symbolized certain victories within a national-revolutionary narrative. The intimacies afforded by intersecting questions of gender, race, family, private space, and so forth with narratives of homeland, nationhood, and national identity offer women filmmakers and their audience and social subjects a complex threshold of citizenship. The works of Sandra Gómez, Susana Barriga, and Heidi Hassan are central to this new formation of citizenship in the era of globalization.

This new trend of diasporic filmmakers strays both from the exilic tradition of Cuban cinema associated primarily with the work of Miami-based exiles Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal and from the cinematic internationalism of Cuban cineastes such as Santiago Álvarez. In contrast to the anti-Fidel exilic cinema of the 1980s, these new films can be seen in Cuba today, although in limited ways. They are also made in or produced by countries other than the United States, which decentralizes the notion that considers this nation as the nuclear base of Cuban migrancy. Evidently, these audiovisual artists have a different claim on nation, ideology, and belonging and do not experience “defection” and “dissidence” as a central part of their migratory experience.

Mainly based on different depictions of an altered city and fragmented subjectivities, these and other contemporary independent films whose makers passed through EICTV offer alternatives to the ways resistance can be understood in a context in which the media and the use of public space are strictly government controlled. They constitute a fight for a space of expression for these decentered figures and become a platform for their more profound research and, perhaps, for their gradual recognition within diverse cultural systems. They propose a profound rethinking of the “construction of difference,” articulate renewed and more appropriate politics of the subject’s representation, and slowly take the first steps toward what could turn out to be a “cinema without borders.”

EL FUTURO ES HOY (2009): A Poetic Look at Generation Y or 90

by Enrique Avila López

Mount Royal University, Calgary

This article analyses Sandra Gómez’s Cuban documentary El futuro es hoy, which has won awards not only in Cuba but also in Europe. The article first studies in detail the content of this short film, whose main theme focuses upon the current situation in Cuba and, specifically, what the seven protagonists think about their future in the island. The article then situates Sandra’s work within the hispanic cinematic context. the conclusion is that the film is derived from both film and literary influences and argues that it has a poetic character observed in her particular way of portraying the current state of affairs in Cuba. finally, the article places her work within the so-called ‘generation y’ or ‘90’ in Cuba.

El futuro es hoy (2009) is a short 35-minute documentary based on an idea, photography and direction of Sandra Gómez (1976–) shot in Havana between 2006 and 2008. It is the second documentary by this young director graduated from the International School of Film and Television in Havana (2004), who moved to Zurich (Switzerland), where she has been living since 2005. It is in Switzerland where, thanks to the producer Peacock Film, Sandra receives funding for her films. Therefore, this is a film that has not been financed by the Cuban government, but which has won awards in Cuba as well as receiving international awards.1 Significantly, Sandra’s cinema seems to be born with a vocation to highlight what Cuban and cubanidad mean in Cuba today.

In her first documentary Las camas solas (14 minutes, 2006), her commitment is already evident, with its obvious sensitivity to the current reality of Havana, which is portrayed through a dismal episode in the recent history of the capital – the devastation of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The catastrophe caused the Cuban government to shelter many families as a result of the damage, leaving dilapidated buildings and ‘single beds’, as the title poetically suggests. However, Mother Nature does not seem to be the only culprit in the state of deterioration that is Havana and Cuba in general. Starting, perhaps ironically, using a natural accident, the beauty of this film lies in the ability of Gómez to introduce a sad and dilapidated city. The urban area of Havana is portrayed in a way that evokes tears not only because of the hurricane but unfortunately mostly, and here comes the political message, because of the evident need for an urban renewal that was claimed in the 1960s as one of the specific projects of the Cuban revolution, but is yet to come. Within this historical context, the attempt to enact a ruined city goes beyond the purely aesthetic: the poetics of Las camas solas contains a political message, albeit initially, ambiguous.

Using as a pretext the destructive effects of Hurricane Ivan, Las camas solas shows a social attitude committed to portraying the lack of new homes in Havana. However, Sandra’s commitment is in principle ambivalent. On one hand, it could be argued that Hurricane Ivan is read as not just an accident of nature but rather it symbolises a Cuban government that comes to act as a permanent cyclone, generating sorrow and distress. This position would be an example of the group of Cuban intellectuals, already mentioned by the scholar Linda Howe, who are not afraid to examine the ways in which government restrictions have distorted ‘our understanding of post-revolutionary Cuban cultural history’ (Howe 2004: 14).

However, the work of Sandra Gómez could also be interpreted through a Marxist prism: this is a documentary that represents another case of artistic freedom, coinciding with utopian values promoted by the Revolution and, in this particular case, by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC founded in 1959 by the Cuban government). Since the 1960s, the ICAIC has been promoting films that include criticism of many aspects of the Revolution. As the critic John Hess has suggested, this would be the reason why many Cuban films continue to fascinate viewers both inside and outside Cuba (Hess 1999: 207).

This article will attempt to unravel the commitment seen in the work of Sandra Gómez. Specifically, it focuses on the analysis of the documentary El futuro es hoy, which, it is argued, is filmed with great poetic sensibility, in the sense that it shows us a harsh reality but is sensitive at the same time. The main conclusion drawn is that Sandra Gómez is confirmed as a Cuban filmmaker able to sensitise the audience to poetic truths through highly personal manner of filming, which is characterised by going beyond mere criticism, becoming a filmmaker–writer of her time.

El futuro es hoy begins with music that seems to scream for help, without explicitly saying so. A cry that soon becomes a topic during the screenings of this documentary that portrays the daily life of a Havana still anchored in the past and with an uncertain future, as seen through its seven protagonists. If La nada contidiana (1995) written by Cuban exile Zoé Valdés (1959–) reflected that ‘lacunae in the discourse of the Castro regime’, as observed by scholar Lahr-Vivaz (2010: 304), here we find that the camera of Sandra Gómez seems again to investigate about the daily nothingness in Cuba.

The first sequence begins with a young man carrying a piece of wood, first from the top of a building and, later, through the streets to the seashore drive of the Malecón. Once there, we realise that the wood is actually a cork large enough to use as a floating seat. His words are the first voice of the film and are spoken with a smile that reminds us of the typical Cuban ‘choteo’ as a form of resistance, widely used in Cuban literature (Cooper 2006: 34–5). His speech is the testimony of a fisherman who is mocking the system knowing that you know, as he says, that ‘cork fishing has always been forbidden’ (all English translations are mine 00:02:50).3 After several shots where we see the young fisherman preparing himself to fish, the documentary goes to the next character that appears strolling along the Malecón: “Well, my name is José Armando Hernández. Right now we are here in the gallery, which is where I work. My job in the tribune is to protect the tribune as any other workplace. We normally do a tour, various tours observing the tribune to make sure that nothing has happened to it. all that.” (00:03:40)

Here, I cannot omit the Havana public reception. I had the great fortune of being in Havana during the Festival of New Filmmakers ICAIC February 2009, when Sandra Gómez was awarded the SIGNIS Prize. This is a Cuban Catholic organisation for communication, and it is the second award that she received from them; the first one was given for her previous work with Las camas solas (2006). I vividly remember the laughter that this character caused every time he intervened. In fact, José Armando is the only character who is not marginal, in the sense that he is an official and, as such, does not criticise the system. Instead, he always praises it, causing heavy laughter from the audience. This reception is important because it testifies that Cuba seems to be changing. As we remember the essayist Sujatha Fernandes referring to the film by Humberto Solás (Miel para Oshun 2001), the Cuban audience often appropriate the films and then discuss them and talk about everyday problems and readings that make a movie often ‘go beyond what the filmmaker intends’ (Fernandes 2006: 43). The documentary El futuro es hoy oversees Cuban society and was awarded in Cuba, so at first you might think it follows the aesthetic-political patterns of the revolutionary cinema of the 1960s called in Cuba ‘imperfect cinema’. However, for the academic Catherine Davies, Cuban cinema in the 1980s had already lost its critical skill becoming ‘non-political Perfect Cinema’ (Davies 1997: 346), in the sense that cinema freed of ideology proved to be less critical and more aesthetic (Davies 1997: 347). So the question to answer is to what extent would Sandra Gómez’s documentaries be (post) revolutionary? Are they in a tradition of critical realism?

This problem is the essence that lies poetically behind El futuro es hoy, since the question Gómez posed is ‘what is the future of Cuba?’ This is not categorically answered by the film, although at the same time it certifies that something is happening in Cuba. For this particular aesthetic, the ambiguity of Sandra Gómez attracts us. Despite not having an explicit political agenda, she was already very incisive towards the government, in her first documentary, portraying the lack of new homes. She is a committed voice who joins her compatriot Alina Rodríguez (1985–) with her documentary Buscándote Havana (25 minutes, 2006), since both filmmakers seem to express outrage, but also show that Cuba is being more open to criticism of its harsh social reality. We should also remember the documentary Ex Generación (32 minutes, 2009) by Aram Vidal Alejandro (1981–), who explores the lives of a group of young people, all under 35, and with a great cultural and emotional attachment to their country.

El futuro es hoy shows the daily routine of seven different people, two of them in favour of the Castro regime (the official and the old person) and five expressing uncertainty about a possible change of government. Each answers separately what they think about their personal future and how they see the future of Cuba as a nation. Two questions that are very relevant, especially for the transfer of power (July 2006) from brother to brother, that is, from Fidel Castro to Raúl Castro, which at the time the film was made was creating a great deal of speculation about Cuba’s political future. Against this background, after 50 years of revolution, it is not surprising to observe many Cuban artists already impatient with the perpetual official promise ‘of a better future’ (Howe 2004: 23).

Within this historical-political context, the scene with the official is even more telling, when we see José sorting the keys and looking through the window, giving the impression that it is a terribly boring job, but the most important is that it constitutes an evidence that the life of a Cuban official is very different from the rest of the Cubans. He gets a basic official salary (200 pesos equivalent to $8) while for the fisherman to fish illegally means to obtain a few more pesos to eat a little better, or simply eat. The significance of this scene is to imply that the official does an empty and often useless job caring for the ideals and values of the Revolution, which is represented by black flagpoles and a deserted square both of which are primarily appearances, because almost no one believes in them. So when the officer looks through the window, it is half faded with a big sign that says, ‘Patria o Muerte’ (00:13:10). The fact that is shown blurred through a glass, half illegible, but still recognisable, is also a metaphor.

This use of symbolism is emphasised in the next shot, which is the first interior scene where a man is typing on his computer in a bedroom. The camera shows us posters of The Beatles and, perhaps sarcastically, the cover of the album Life after Death by Iron Maiden (00:05:17). This inner tinted portrait of life and death in allusion to the bedroom also echoes the space which Cubans call between life and death. This particular way of using the camera brings to mind the words of the artist Coco Fusco (1960–), “I have often heard Cubans in the throes of despair speak of their existence as being buried alive. there are many there and here who have been forced at one time or another to inhabit a luminal space between existing and living.

In addition to showing different images of music and comics, this sequence reveals an intimate space. Specifically, we have a 40-year artist (1969–),5 whose first words count as an irony of his life as a writer in Cuba: Some of my books have been censored. I have been censored phrases and other publications have been simply unnoticed, due to an edition of only 1,000 copies for a country of eleven million people with a million or so readers surveyed, it is a drop in the ocean. (00:05:25)

This author, whose name is not mentioned, perhaps to protect his identity, sees the future as immediate future, since there is no room for dreams medium to long term: ‘Think what you do in four or five years is a utopia. Difficult is to think what you will do in four or five days, and a normal worry is what I will cook tomorrow morning’ (00:06:04). This reflection matches the aforementioned upset of many Cuban intellectuals who see a semi-moribund Cuba.

As the short film progresses, we realise that there is no future for many people in Cuba, because their main concern is simply to survive. As the writer says, ‘Everyone is waiting to see what happens. Everyone is in a stand-by, in a holding pattern to see how the game is decided’ (00:08:43). This agrees with the daily struggle of many other Cuban writers who will describe precisely in their works hunger6 and despair during the so-called ‘Special Period’ (due to the severe crisis of the 1990s). This is seen, for instance, in Cien botellas en una pared (2002), a novel written by Ena Lucía Portela (1972–), who belongs to what is known as the ‘Generation Y’, like the filmmaker and even if we stretch the parameters, the writer who appears in the documentary. For Ana Serra, Portela’s narrative ‘displays an opaque, difficult-to-understand style, challenging all conventions and morals and criticizing intellectual institutions in Cuba’ (Serra 2011: 269). Under a Cuban context, Yoani Sánchez is without doubt the most representative figure of the so-called Generation Y, who describes them in her awarded website as ‘born in Cuba in the ’70s and ’80s, marked by schools in the countryside, Russian cartoons, illegal emigration and frustration’ (Sánchez n.d.). Other distinctive attributes of this particular Generation in Cuba is the fact that they challenge social taboos and abject poverty, two themes that can also be observed in Gómez’s cinematography.

The situation of impasse in Cuba is portrayed by Gómez when she shows us the Malecón with many people sitting, as if waiting for something to happen: a cinema style that in this article we define as poetic, due to her acute sensitivity but also because of her ambiguity. On one hand, the writer provides us with an interesting reflection on this long wait:

“I always compare socialism and capitalism with two rooms. Socialism is a room with a safe floor, no cheating, no holes or false areas or ruins or quicksand, but the roof is one meter tall. you cannot lift your head further. Capitalism would be like the same room with a floor full of alligators, poisonous snakes, tarantulas, mines, holes, traps ... but just no walls, no roof. You can go up as high as you want and/or can, always remembering that you can fall and sink forever. The long paternalistic state of Cuba has been protecting us from the fall, but also disabling us to climb.” (00:18:15)

The writer’s voice is quite lucid. Apart from adding a note of clarity and humour, also his speech constitutes a testimony by the Cuban intelligentsia of what it means living in Cuba today. His political thinking goes against the revolutionary government, which is dismissed as ‘nanny state’, and later he speaks of an ‘authoritarian leader’ who directs the destinies of Cubans. Inserting his provocative comments immediately incites a public debate, which again characterises the particular method of Gómez. By introducing the writer in this scene, one could argue that the director is defending a type of cinema with no major function other than to make the viewer think and, even more clearly, a type of film that does not serve as propaganda to legitimize the regime. In this sense, we can relate her film style with the Cuban branch of hyperrealism, whose aesthetic ‘documentary emphasized direct contact with reality’ (Sosa-Velasco 2010: 276). When asked about the future of Cuba, the writer’s reply is worth noting:

“What the Cubans could win is freedom of choice. I think that Cubans are not used to choosing. at first one would notice a high percentage of absenteeism, but maybe just the opposite occurs. and after so many years of an authoritarian leader directing the destinies of this nation, Cubans accept that they are adults and may decide it is time to decide for themselves what they want to do.” (00:19:11)

Furthermore, the possibility of change that the writer contrasts predicts with the view of the official, who sets the tone of counterpoint: ‘We currently continue a normal life. Continue as usual’ (00:08:56), which provoked another moment of laughter in the audience. This contrast between potential change and continuous stalemate reflects the situation where Cuba is, according to some, in the process of change but, according to others, without the possibility of future changes. By doing this, the camera tilts Gómez towards a cinema of ‘development’, which encourages or at least suggests a forward-looking perspective. This way of filming which combines participatory techniques, particularly where we see how different characters express their own ideas, is reminiscent of the concept of the ‘active spectator’ promulgated by the ICAIC, where the state and all institutions of art and film had the main task of promoting the role of active debate. However, we also believe that her cinema technique is more tied to the notion of ‘artistic public spheres’ developed by Fernandes (2006: 14), in the sense that her film, like the essayist, also tries to capture the dynamics of contemporary cultural production in Cuban society, which are both within and outside the limits of state power and cultural markets.

Another character who is sincere to the lens is the father who has been living at the same address for 37.5 years (Malecón between Belascoaín and Gervasio). His main concern is his children: what they will have when they start a family and what can he do from now on for the future of his children? He also foresees the chance now more than ever of a possible change in Cuba when he tells us:

“Note that this is the first time in the history of this country where suddenly the main figure promoter of this whole project of revolution is not present and because it’s actually something curious, and half the people are already accustomed to the idea that he is not here, or that he is like in the movies, a voiceover.” (00:08:10)

This character is also interesting because he looks like one out of the film Barrio Cuba (2005) by Humberto Solás (1941–2008), where a number of people try to work on despite their circumstances and whose characters embody ‘the loneliness, abandonment and existential shipwreck’ (Presas 2010: 306). After several viewings of different streets, all sad due to their deteriorating condition, the camera pulls back to the first character, the fisherman with a cork chair who has caught several crabs and observes the city from his clandestine vantage point, distanced from the capital, but not as far as the ocean liner that appears in the distance. He confesses that his life remains one of fishing illegally:

“Well, there is a prohibition and inspectors tell you that you cannot fish because you are violating article such and such. they scold you the first time and the second time they fine you for 1,500 or 2,000 pesos. that is my concern, because I live from the sea.” (00:09:39)

The future for this fisherman is just fish. For the writer, to be able to eat every day; for the father, to think that his children have a better future, and the discordant note is given by the official, who does not aspire to any future because ‘we continue as always’ (00:08:56). Another scene that generated laughter was the intervention by the official, stating that the Cuban people are people that do not support repression, that do not admit impositions, and because of that I can say that here there is not going to be any change, because we will still be revolutionaries and always fighting for a better future for the people. (00:15:58)

At this point of the documentary, Cuban society is perceived as divided between those who support the regime and those who criticise it. This evidence of a frustrated society and the palpable damage in Havana reminds us of the documentary Suite Habana (2003) which, apart from being a trustworthy document of poverty in both levels – material and spiritual, the film of Fernando Pérez (1944–) accommodates the ‘rage and pain, bitterness and hope, and also joy’ (Sancristóbal 2010: 329), all descriptors which can be also applied to Gómez’s documentary.

After the scene of the official for whom ‘change here will not happen’ (00:16:15), there is a group of people who set up a tent in the rocks of the Malecón. Upbeat music starts to play and everyone brings food. “This tent is set up for shelter and to enjoy the sea. It is a safe haven for friends and neighbors; we put on music, bring drinks and we enjoy it. When you come here [tent], all your worries go away, because this is refreshing. you sit here and everything is gone from your mind, and you feel free.” (00:12:21)

This tent could be interpreted as a symbol of the arrival of democracy that seems to becoming stronger in Cuba today. Perhaps the beginning of a new space in which it is allowed to express different social relations. However, this semi- clandestine tent contrasts with the obsolete dreams of a revolution manifested by an old woman who appears on screen holding a sheet of newspaper where the headline reads, ‘Girls who learned to dream’ (00:14:56), referring to the era of the 1960s, when each woman received a sewing machine. To this old seamstress, the future involves the sewing machine, because as she says, ‘The machine sews yet so Fidel can still work’ (00:27:10). This scene is full of nostalgia and irony at the same time, as it can be seen that the machine hardly works and, as we know, Fidel relinquished power to his brother Raúl in July 2006.

The deterioration of Cuba occurs at all levels. Hence, the protagonist of the tent discusses his future, which according to him is the cemetery, because he thinks there is nothing in Cuba: ‘The future here is uncertain. Here there’s nothing. At least we have no hope of anything’ (00:29:08). This uncertainty manifests itself not only in older people. It also appears in young voices as in the young doctor, who sees the future of Cuba ‘a little uncertain, in the sense that measures changes at times and do not really know how the future will be’ (00:29:22). Similarly, the scholar Lisandro Pérez (2008) reflects in his essay on the topic, ‘Reflections on the Future of Cuba’, where more than a break he foresees a continuity (p. 90). For the academic Archibald Ritter (2010), Cuba’s future is impossible to predict and stresses that the modest economic changes of the 1990s characterising the ‘Special Period’ have led to a ‘gerontocratic paralysis [that] might endure well into the 2010s’ (p. 229).

If the future of Cuba, or of any country, lies in its youth, it is worth noting the expertise of the director to portray this particular youngster (medic and rocker in her spare time) walking down the street, perhaps to reflect that the lives of many young professionals who are stagnating in Cuba, rather than contemplating movement, as seen as a common feature in most of the protagonists. That is, one could summarise that the lives of these seven Cuban characters adhere to an irritating monotony, because nothing seems to change, but stoically they are waiting for something to finally happen.

However, it is also interesting to note this doctor’s way of leisure. Like many young Westerners, she enjoys listening to music and going to concerts, but maybe the big difference is that young Cubans seem to expect a change that is coming, as poetically suggested when she appears looking at the sky with a blank stare on the Malecón. She puts on the rock music she likes and the camera captures images of waves breaking on the jetty, another poetic image that seems to suggest that something will break soon, metaphorically alluding to the boiling situation in which Cuba has been since 2006, when the health of Fidel Castro worsened considerably. This poetic and political reading is even more obvious at the end of the film, when the seven protagonists are walking on the unmistakable Malecón, where the sensitivity of the director again intentionally shows different people in the same space looking for hope, as she says, ‘maybe it is a utopia that Cuban society will remain in solidarity’ (Peacock Film). This thinking is similar to the view of Fernandes (2006), for whom the new Cuban filmmakers seek to assimilate emerging new values such as tolerance, humanity and self-cultivation into a political vision that promotes nationalism ‘as the basis of a shared new order’ (p. 43).

By age and by personal tastes, Gómez confesses that she feels closer to the young doctor-rocker, but feels that the most important character is the fisherman, because he begins and ends the film. His raft makes us think of the stone of Sisyphus and to see him entering the sea without knowing what will happen evokes the idea of a leak. among the characters he is one that expresses himself in a natural way, radical; he says just what he thinks, and his sincerity is touching. (author’s unpublished interview with Sandra Gómez)

Thus, several types of individual paths are portrayed in the film, forming a vision of different forms of existence in Cuba and a particular emphasis is given to future generations. In this regard, it is noteworthy that a younger generation has emerged, which is more in tune with the demands of a new audience characterised especially by young people. For the critic Paulo Antonio Paranaguá (1997), the unprecedented critical factor of these young filmmakers is that they come from another ‘milieu, outside of the established film production institutions’ (p. 182).

Within a purely Cuban cinema context, we find that the work of Sandra Gómez belongs to the generation of the Cuban-1990s (born between 1970 and 1980) that the specialist Ann Marie Stock characterises by performing street theatre. Due to lack of funding from the government, these new filmmakers take to the streets, they will reconsider what it means to be Cuban in times of transition, and especially this generation of the 1990s questions, assimilates risks ‘and poses challenges’ (Stock 2009, 24), as is evidenced by Sandra Gómez’s documentaries. Paraphrasing the documentarist and academic Michael Chanan, Gómez’s work would belong to what he calls ‘third cinema’, expressing a new culture and societal changes (Chanan 1997, n.p.). We understand third cinema as liberating film which can be found not only in third world countries ‘where cinema was not dominated and controlled by the Hollywood majors and their lackeys’ (Chanan 2004: 380). This is a film against social injustice, that the academic Guneratne Anthony claims as being ‘to arms against social injustice and post-imperial exploitation’ (Guneratne and Dissanayake 2003: 4). Michael Chanan describes this new generation not as an artistic movement but as a wave of activity, where the camera remains rooted in social reality and directors ‘have their own take of the world’ (Chanan 2007: 12).

Sandra Gómez’s cinema is an evolution from the 1960s to the new millennium, where new technologies greatly define this new trend worldwide known as ‘Generation Y’, also characterised as being a generation that often seeks the future beyond the border. Living outside Cuba, Gómez typifies the image of the nomadic and transnational filmmaker that has become another common feature of the new Hispanic cinema due to the forces of globalisation. The short film The Illusion (2008) directed by the Cuban Susana Barriga (1982–) is another example of this new Cuban cinema, where international cooperation is essential to thematise the intercultural component, interposing two cultures in The Illusion (the Cuban and English).10 However, unlike the latter, it is interesting to note that the content of the documentaries of Sandra Gómez is located exclusively within a single culture, Cuban, so that her documentaries are confined to a single geography. In fact, the main theme of her work is her curiosity and concerns for Cuba. That is, in the documentaries of Gómez exists a search for an aesthetic – a poetic that, as Yvette Sánchez says, referring to this particular generation of nomads: ‘you can tell from these exiles the need of reaffirmation, to conjure ties with the homeland, legitimize nationality, to narrate their country’s key social and political reality’ (Sánchez 2000: 165).

Gómez’s work resembles that of her contemporary Tania Bruguera (1968–), because both resist ‘the pressure of directly criticizing the socialist system’ (Ramsdell 2009: 207). If you stick to the axiom of Fidel Castro ‘within the Revolution, everything, against the Revolution, nothing’, then you can better understand the difficulty of the positioning by Sandra Gómez. However, if we follow the division of the Cuban artist Menéndez Aldito (1970–), who summed up the problem by saying that a counterrevolutionary artist criticises all the problems of the revolution without offering any solution, because he believes that the only solution is to change the political system, while a revolutionary artist criticises the problems of the revolution and tries to offer solutions because he believes in Revolution (Cited in Sosa-Velasco 2010: 281).

Then we argue that Gómez’s documentaries are closer to a revolutionary stance, in the sense that her films show the sub-Cuban reality, as if her camera was a shoot of awareness, which unites with her fellow Sara Gómez and Julio García Espinosa, who already claimed precisely this ‘awareness’ in the 1970s, a phenomenon widely studied by Michael Chanan in Cuban Cinema (2004: 208). The cinema by Gómez exemplifies an example of ‘cinema survey’, as it investigates and asks questions about the problems confronting the country. Her documentaries are inscribed within the revolutionary film aesthetic of the 1970s, a period that spawned the concepts of ‘cinéma vérité’ and ‘direct cinema’, which Gómez applies so that she becomes chronicler doing ‘film story’. If we apply the nomenclature of Bill Nichols (1991), her films would be within what he terms as ‘observational’ because it does not intervene in the action (p. 38), although the camera has such a degree of provocation that could be said that Gómez is an artist ‘provocateur’. However, the provocative nature of her films is not new in Havana, as we found a precedent for her irreverent questions about the future of Cuba in the documentary Todos los hombres son mortales (1988), directed by the Argentinean María Civale, who at the streets in Havana was not afraid to ask the burning question of the ‘succession of the maximum leader’ (Paranaguá 1997: 183). Apart from the Cuban influences already mentioned, Gómez’s way of filming also distils a belligerent tone, which perhaps is inherited from the pioneers of the so-called ‘New Latin American Cinema’ such as Fernando Birri, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in Argentina and Leon Hirszman and Glauber Rocha in Brazil.

On one hand, applying the strategies proposed by Bill Nichols, because her film attempts to educate the viewer, Gómez’s work would belong within what he calls ‘political reflexivity’ (Nichols 1991: 69). On the other hand, if we follow the four basic trends proposed by Michael Renov, then her documentaries belong to category two: ‘persuade or promote’ (Renov 1993: 21), since persuasion appears as a key component. When asked if she herself is considered a provocative artist, Gómez answers with the following: the revolution has had very great merits for the country that are undeniable. But it has also had the great defect not to being questioned or doubted. If the revolution had integrated the questions, then it would have become something with what I can identify myself one hundred percent. therefore there is a critical attitude, as there would be against any form of state. the ‘cinéma vérité’ is certainly something beautiful, which has a real reason to exist. Why make movies if not to find those moments of truth? (author’s unpublished interview with Sandra Gómez)

The beauty of Sandra Gómez’s documentaries consists of her great ability to show the harsh Cuban reality without explicitly criticising it, hence her poetic sensibility. Her poetic voice suggests reminiscences from the poet group ‘Orígenes’, which was ‘marginalized after the Revolution for being too aesthetic and critical, [because its role] was to free art from all political and journalistic influence in order to promote a pure and clearly Cuban art’ (Finzer 2009: 234). The work of Sandra Gómez promotes Caribbean cinema and, more specifically, a Cuban project, because she makes a cinema in which she portrays Cuba’s current problems, but with the difference of being a cinema produced or financed externally, in her case by Switzerland, which makes us wonder what García Canclini questioned back in 2002 in his essay Latinoamericanos: ‘what does it mean to be American?’ (García Canclini 2002: 12). If the Cuban poet Nancy Monrejón (1944–) described in her poem ‘Marina’ (from Paisaje célebre 1993) a Cuban landscape with dilapidated buildings, crumbling streets and half zombie characters because of the circumstances, Gómez’s cinematography now seems to continue in the same aesthetics but in the era of globalisation and without losing a bit of Cuban identity. In fact, this new generation is characterised primarily by the use of new technologies.

By age and common interests, Sandra Gómez’s work belongs to Generation Y in Cuba. Although living in Switzerland, she often keeps in touch with her native country through her favourite Cuban blogs, which are the following: Generación Y (Yoani Sánchez), Octavo Cerco (Claudia Cadelo) Habanemia (Lia Villares) and more particularly, the influence of Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and his two blogs: Lunes de Post-Revolución, in which he publishes reviews of Cuban cultural life, and his English blog Boring Home Utopics, where he publishes pictures of Havana on a daily basis. Finally, we should also mention the independent Revista Voces, which appears only in digital format, where young writers and intellectuals reflect on the Cuban reality (author’s unpublished interview to Sandra Gómez).

El futuro es hoy immerses us in the profound “habanera” reality of the new century which, however, for many of the characters does not seem to have changed much since 1959, that is to say, Cuba has already 51 years of revolution as this documentary exquisitely witnesses. As objectively as possible, combining different voices, this film revolves around the dialectic between the needs of the director to engage with her own history and, on the other hand, the misfortune of many of her protagonists unable to intervene in their own future. That is the great value of the poetic and sincere gaze of its author, Sandra Gómez, who, through her particular way of using the camera, seems to make it another character who knows all ins and outs of the impasse being experienced by Cuba currently. Hence, her provocative and irreverent title, The Future Is Today, which sounds like a rebel yell from the new generation of Cuban filmmakers. At the end, it will be the public who will have to imagine the end of the film, that is, the future of Cuba.