Carlos Cruz's Second Act

The sagging economy also contributed to artistic atrophy. Veloz remembers an attempt to film Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra for Cuban television. "We were doing it in three parts, and we taped the first two," he says. "When it came time to tape the last part, we were told there was only one videocassette left and that it had to be saved for some speech Fidel was going to give. In the end we never did tape it. People saw the first two parts of the play and never the third."

And there were bizarre regulations, according to Jorge Abello, who worked in Cuba as a television editor and, later, for the film Alicia. "It was explicitly understood that if a news program or government newsreel that was shown in theaters used the image of a dog, it could not be followed directly by an image of Fidel Castro," explains Abello, who left Cuba in 1992 and is now an editor at Channel 51 (WSCV-TV) in Hialeah. "It was absolutely prohibited."

In 1984, the same year he won his award for best young theater actor, Cruz landed his first movie role, in the romance A Time to Love by Cuban director Enrique Pineda Barnet. The film was set during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Cruz played a militia member accused of cowardice who later defuses a land mine and saves his comrades.

Like most other Cuban films of that decade, A Time to Love contained no controversial elements. The new head of ICAIC may have had something to do with this. The flamboyant Alfredo Guevara, who had guided the institute since its inception, was removed in 1981, after approving the making of the film Cecilia, which became scandalously expensive to produce. His old friend Fidel awarded him a sinecure, as representative to UNESCO in Paris. Film director Julio Garcia Espinosa became the new chief of ICAIC.

"Espinosa gave ICAIC his style," says Alejandro Rios. "He said Cuban filmmakers had to do a lot of popular films, comedies -- and to go back to the roots of Cuban history."

If the Eighties proved to be no golden era for Cuban film, it certainly was the most comfortable for Carlos Cruz. He was in his thirties then and remembers those years and the improved Soviet-supported island economy fondly.

"We would gather at the bar in the garden of the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists in Vedado," he recalls. "We would order out for food, drink our beer, and sit there for hours talking. There was enough money for us to get together at someone's house, cook some meat, drink, play some music, dance. Yes, things were good then."

A movie star by now, he continued to live the peculiar version of success enjoyed by some on the island. He'd been married and divorced twice, but because of a housing shortage, had always lived with his parents in Marianao. And though he still made about ten dollars per month in Cuban pesos (at least officially), he sometimes made extra money from foreign producers, which afforded him a better lifestyle than most Cubans.

"There were lots of coproductions in the Eighties with other countries, because that had become the way of financing films in Cuba," he explains. "The actors from the other countries would get paid in dollars or francs or whatever, but we were usually paid, officially, in Cuban pesos, which really were worth almost nothing. The foreign actors were assigned these luxury trailers, and sometimes they treated the Cuban actors like dirt. Occasionally the foreign partners would take pity on you and pay you something under the table, but not all the time."

He made almost nothing for his work in A Time to Love, and on top of that, the film was seen as a valentine to the political system. Cruz bridles when asked how he felt playing the part of a revolutionary hero when he himself felt differently. "To begin, when I take a role, I do my job," he declares. "I play that character the best I can. But also I am a patriot, and I am a revolutionary, a real revolutionary. I believe in equality, education, health care for all, and that people should live like human beings.

"I'm not sorry at all that I lived the revolution," Cruz continues. "But when some people can't be actors or baseball players or whatever because they don't think like someone else, that is not revolutionary. When one person has too much power, that is not revolutionary."

Given such thinking, Cruz was bound to have trouble with the Cuban cultural bureaucracy. But that day was still a ways off.

Toward the end of Eighties, a new chorus of critical voices was heard in the Cuban film community. The relative comfort of the decade had led to a cultural complacency, says Rios. "The new young people in the film industry got the old guys, who were sleepy, to wake up," he points out. "The Eighties generation came of age with the dissident movement," those Cubans who began to speak out against Castro's one-party government. "It was wonderful. It was legendary. The revolution of the past was the past. This was a new generation."