Carlos Cruz's Second Act

Once the film began rolling, the crowd became raucous. "Some people attacked the film from the audience, almost from the moment it began," Cruz recollects. "You could tell this was all planned. People had been told what to think about it before they saw it, and to protest it. When it was over, a woman sitting right in front of me, who I didn't know, turned and said to me: “Excuse me, but that film is a piece of poison.' I answered her: “Excuse me, but I disagree.'"

One of the most vociferous critics of the film was a onetime Revolutionary Youth Party official, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, who is now Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations. Alicia was shown for only four days in Havana and two other nights outside the capital, and very few Cubans managed to see it before it was withdrawn from circulation. "Films in Havana always debut on Thursday," says Rios. "It ran until Sunday. Every performance was packed with government supporters. After Sunday it was replaced by the movie Alien."

Cruz claims that his life changed after Alicia. "I wasn't blackballed at that point," he says. "But sometimes the pressures aren't open. There are subtleties. Word would reach me that I had to be careful."

Word from whom? Cruz shrugs. "Who knows? You collide with a structure, and that structure doesn't just have one face, a recognizable face. You never see who it is who is unhappy with you. But you just know that they are."

Actor Miravalles, who satirized Castro in Alicia, doesn't remember it that way. "I kept working. I always worked while I was there," he says. "I don't remember things the way Carlos does. Those things didn't happen to me. But I wasn't political."

Rios, however, remembers it much as Cruz does. "A guy named Patricio -- we never knew his last name or his exact title -- used to hang around the film people all the time," says the former film critic. "He was supposedly there “to take care of you,' help you, but he was watching you, too. Those kinds of people are all over the place in Cuba."

One day in the late Eighties, Rios himself ran afoul of the government after giving some magazines to a visiting American academic, whom he later was told was a probable CIA operative. "Patricio came to my office, sat down before me, put his pistol on the desk, and told me I shouldn't have done what I did," he recalls. "That's the way it worked." An article Rios wrote a few years later in the magazine Gazeta de Cuba so angered censors that they barred him from publication for six months. He finally left the island in 1992.

In the aftermath of Alicia, the ICAIC fell into chaos. Garcia Espinosa lost the support of Castro for allowing the film to be made and released. At the same time, says Rios, he lost the backing of ICAIC members for refusing to support the film, as many other members had. He was removed from his post.

The person chosen to replace him was Alfredo Guevara, who was summoned back from Paris. Cruz returned to the relative safety of the stage in 1992 and 1993. He performed Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at the Rita Montaner. Then in 1994 he was picked by director Tomas Gutierrez Alea to star in the film Guantanamera.

"Titon," as Gutierrez Alea was known to his friends, had written and directed two of the greatest Cuban films of the revolutionary era, Death of a Bureaucrat in 1966 and Memories of Underdevelopment in 1968, and is considered by most critics to be the finest Cuban director.

His most recent success had been the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), about the relationship between a gay Cuban man and the straight young communist with whom he falls in love and who is assigned to spy on him. The gay man, played by Jorge Perugorria, openly criticizes the banality of the Cuban cultural bureaucracy but refuses to be labeled a counterrevolutionary or to leave the country.

In Guantanamera, which was released in 1994, Cruz plays Adolfo, a provincial bureaucrat in the Ministry of Funerals faced with the problem of transporting the corpses of citizens who die away from home. Given Cuba's gasoline shortages, the burden of ferrying a body across the country for burial is onerous for the province in which a person dies. Adolfo comes up with the idea of transferring the corpse from one hearse to another at the border of each province so that the costs are shared.

"When the central government hears of your brilliant plan," one of Adolfo's co-workers tells him, "your career will be made in Havana." Of course it isn't. In the film the aunt of Adolfo's wife dies, and her body gets lost on its journey home. Meanwhile his wife falls in love with a truck driver who makes money in the black market.

That portrayal of the bumbling bureaucrat eventually earned Cruz a blackball from the Cuban film industry -- but very little else. "I was called to film 40 times," he complains, "and I made the equivalent of $300. The government would circulate this film all over the world and make money in dollars, but we made nothing" Although this was standard treatment for Cuban actors, Cruz refused to accept it.