Carlos Cruz's Second Act

In the United States it is said that censorship in Cuba is very severe and that you cannot criticize the social system in any public way. At the same time, Cuba has produced films that portray frustrations with that system, such as Memories of Underdevelopment, Death of a Bureaucrat, Strawberry and Chocolate, and Guantanamera. How do you measure the ability of Cuban cinema to express the reality of Cuba?

The Cuban Institute of Cinematic Art and Industry [ICAIC] is a body created and supported by the Cuban government. Two years after its foundation in 1959, [Fidel Castro made a speech] that has to be known as "Words to Intellectuals." One phrase from that speech defines some borders in Cuban culture dealing with what the capitalist world calls "freedom of expression."

The phrase in question was: "Within the revolution, everything; outside of the revolution, nothing." This phrase ... was uttered in 1961, the same year that the Cuban revolution declared itself to be "a dictatorship of the proletariat." For that reason if you want to make a film with the ICAIC against the ideas of the Cuban revolution, or against socialism as a system, or a film asking that Fidel Castro be overthrown or beheaded, you can be sure you won't be able to film one single frame for ICAIC....

Censorship exists in Cuba, no doubt about it. But it is much less than is alleged. I think Cuban censorship finds its greatest challenge -- and has made mistakes multiple times, of course -- in trying to decide who criticizes the errors of the revolution in order to rectify them and, in doing so, make the revolution better, and who criticizes the revolution with the idea of erasing it from the face of the Earth.

What has been clear for some time to the government and artists is that an apologist art, complacent and uncritical, is a species of very dangerous boomerang, much more dangerous in the long run than the most blatant and furious criticism. Years of discussions of all kinds between government officials and artists have won, not only for filmmakers, but artists in the plastic arts, writers, theater artists, singers, and others, the right to criticize what deserves criticism, among the Cubans on the island. I would be lying if I didn't tell you that at times nerves have gotten overheated and Torquemadas of all kinds have unjustly and wildly attacked creative artists who have aired their doubts and disappointments, but the waters have always eventually been calmed.

Films can be made that bother the "establishment," or part of it; films that show artists or phenomena that aren't agreeable to that establishment and which it would prefer not be shown to the public. But in the long run, a sense of the common good has won out, and all such films, absolutely all of them, have been shown commercially. [Note: Alicia in the Land of Wonders was seen by very few members of the general public in Cuba.]

In addition to the four films you mention in your question, I would add Adorable Lies, Plaff!, The Elephant and the Bicycle, Madagascar, Alicia in the Land of Wonders, Think of Me, Vertical Love, Thirst, The Wave, and Life Is to Whistle. In all of them, there are explicit criticisms.

Those who insist there is fierce censorship in Cuba, when they see the films that have been made and exhibited by the ICAIC, are left without solid arguments; and they are left to insist, feverishly and rabidly, that this is just another maneuver by Castro to appear like a civilized leader before the world. There are so many political resentments on both sides of the Florida Straits that it is useless to ask people on either side to tell you the truth. There is censorship everywhere of different degrees and shades. Not even Hollywood is free of it. Don't the major studios decide what is politically correct and incorrect in American movies? All of us in this world have our Senator [Joseph] McCarthy and our Hays Office [the office that censored American films in decades past]. Economic and political interests decide all of this. The ICAIC would never fund a film like Bitter Sugar [the 1996 anti-Castro film by Cuban exile Leon Ichaso], and Miami won't put one single cent in a film that supports the Cuban revolution. That's life."