Carlos Cruz's Second Act

As artists began speaking more openly about their own professional frustrations and about problems in society, even the 1989 Communist Party Congress adopted a theme that reflected that spirit of challenge: "With ears open and tongues loose."

Cruz's tongue was among those loosened. "At that point," he says, "I had more than other people because of the occasional dollars I made. There were things in the stores, and I could buy them. But there were also tremendous inequalities in Cuba. If you had dollars, your life was totally different.

"You also had the fact that while foreigners could go certain places in the country, Cubans couldn't, even if they had dollars, like I did at times," he adds. "People I worked with on coproductions had access to parts of Cuba that I didn't."

And not all Cruz's friends were enjoying the success he was. "Many artists lived in total poverty," he recounts. "No home, no clothes, no nothing. I never stopped believing in what the revolution was supposedly about: equality. But there was, and is, no equality in Cuba."

But things were going so well in Cuba, Cruz offers, that nobody cared if he and others complained. Thanks to the Soviet Union, the economy was stronger than it had been for years, and more room existed for criticism. So Cruz was permitted to work in movies such as Jibaro, A Successful Man, Mascaro, and The Beauty of the Alhambra, all of which were relatively uncontroversial films.

Then in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and Cuba eventually lost the billions of dollars in subsidies it had been receiving from the Soviet Union. The island's economy went into the tank. After a time of relative affluence, serious shortages hit again in what was called the "special period," one of the worst in Cuban revolutionary history. Combined with a restless generation of young artists, it would spawn films critical of the regime -- and one that was unremittingly so.

The title character in Alicia is a theater teacher sent to work in the schools of a town called Maravillas, an imaginary place where the Cuban government has exiled workers and students, even children, who have run afoul of the system. In Maravillas the citizens are bombarded with the constant message -- in the media, in graffiti, in the official speeches -- that life in Cuba is wonderful. Meanwhile garbage wafts through the air, swarms of cockroaches infest buildings, and loudspeakers mounted along city streets intermittently belch and vomit, interrupting their saccharine messages. Exotic animals -- camels, crocodiles, and chimpanzees -- roam the streets. A zoo had been planned for the town, explains one character. "They sent the animals, but the cages never showed up."

Actor Reynaldo Miravalles, who now lives in Miami, plays the director of a sanatorium. His rambling orations are similar to Castro's, and he specializes in preparing mud baths designed to "cure" the misfits. Late in the movie, the mud is replaced with human excrement.

Cruz plays a petty bureaucrat named Perez, who is sent to Maravillas after having accused his bosses of incompetence. He has been driven crazy by a series of anonymous notes telling him what a wonderful person and public servant he is. The hypocrisy of those messages is so great that he finally shouts out in bald confession: "¡Yo soy un hijo de puta!"

"It's the only Cuban film that makes fun of everything that the revolution -- or at least Fidel Castro -- stands for," says Alejandro Rios. "The way health programs work or don't work, the problems with education -- everything -- and in a really sarcastic, bitter way."

Cruz recalls the making of the film. "The idea was to criticize some aspects of the revolution," he says. "And it went aspect by aspect until it ended up tearing apart everything. There was nothing really left to salvage. That's why the movie is so scathing."

Jesus Vega worked as an assistant to Alicia director Daniel Diaz Torres. "Everyone who worked on the film came up with more and more ways to say things we wanted to say -- more and more images," he explains. "Daniel kept saying, “That's too dangerous. That's too dangerous!' But he couldn't go back. Our intention was to find those symbols, to show people that those symbols of the revolution were really bad and a kind of dogma."

It was a stroke of luck that the film escaped censorship. "The director of the ICAIC, Julio Garcia Espinosa, trusted [Torres], who was a member of the Communist Party," says Rios. "He sent it off to Berlin without even seeing it."

After screening in Berlin, where it was well received, Alicia was allowed to debut in Havana in June 1991, at the Cine Chaplin. That night itself could have been a scene in the film, says Cruz. It was nightmarish. "The Cine Chaplin in Vedado is where they always debut Cuban films, and there was always a certain public there," he recalls. "But this time almost none of those people were in attendance. Instead the government, in particular, the state security, filled the place, people both in uniform and not in uniform."