National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema

Screening the Repeating Island

Dunja Fehimovi?, Dunja Fehimovi?, Dunja Fehimovi?

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319931036
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema tours early 21 st -century Cuban cinema through four key figures—the monster, the child, the historic icon, and the recluse—in order to offer a new perspective on the relationship between the Revolution, culture, and national identity in contemporary Cuba. Exploring films chosen to convey a recent diversification of subject matters, genres, and approaches, it depicts a changing industrial landscape in which the national film institute (ICAIC) coexists with international co-producers and small, 'independent' production companies. By tracing the reappearance, reconfiguration, and recycling of national identity in recent fiction feature films, the book demonstrates that the spectre of the national haunts Cuban cinema in ways that reflect intensified transnational flows of people, capital, and culture. Moreover, it shows that the creative manifestations of this spectre screen—both hiding and revealing—a persistent anxiety around Cubanness even as national identity is transformed by connections to the outside world.

© The Author(s) 2018

Dunja FehimovićNational Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93103-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Screening the Repeating Island

Dunja Fehimović¹

(1)

School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Dunja Fehimović

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

A horde of zombies shuffles along the Malecón in the blinding midday sun; two children travel through Cuba’s luscious landscapes and iconic sites, only to face uncertainty amid the violently crashing waves; a young José Martí kneels in a schoolyard in the pouring rain, his arms outstretched in cruciform shape; a hermetic, middle-aged man peers into a black hole in his apartment floor, clucking to retrieve his lost pet chicken; three young people sit naked against a wall, dejectedly sharing a cigarette as they await eviction. These are just some of the most striking images seared into the viewer’s mind by recent films from Cuba—films which take us from surreally altered iconic Havana sites and wondrously reimagined countryside to morbidly comic family tombs and dark, dank dens inhabited by anomic, anonymous characters. As Cuban filmmakers and critics have repeatedly told me over the last few years, no unifying trend, no coherent generation has emerged over the last decade and a half of production. Rather, the recent multiplication of points of view, subject matters, genres, and modes of production is reconfiguring a previously institutionalised, national cinematic landscape described in accounts of film and the Revolution. The result of these changes has been the emergence of an ‘aquatic’, ‘sinuous’ system more attuned to Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s distinctive vision of the cultures and histories of the Caribbean ([1989] 1996). In other words, when seen in relief against a broader picture of Caribbean culture, a certain order emerges from the Chaotic panorama of contemporary Cuban cinema, so that it starts to appear as a ‘discontinuous conjunction’ of ‘uncertain voyages of signification’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 2).

Adopting and adapting the then-new paradigm of Chaos theory, Benítez-Rojo’s revision of the region departed from a critique of the fact that the characteristics of fragmentation, instability, isolation, uprootedness, heterogeneity, syncretism, contingency, and impermanence usually ascribed to the Caribbean are also seen as the main obstacles to any global study of its societies. Rather than attempting to circumvent or explain away these characteristics, the author turned them into the central object of investigation by focusing on ‘processes, dynamics, and rhythms’ rather than results, objects, and definitive conclusions. Finding in the complexity of the Caribbean patterns of nonlinearity, differential repetition, and connections between different scales, Benítez-Rojo concluded that: ‘within the (dis)order that swarms around what we already know of as Nature, it is possible to observe dynamic states or regularities that repeat themselves globally’ (1996: 2). On first glance, it may seem that the resulting analyses of Caribbean social, economic, and cultural systems such as the plantation or the carnival are at best only tangentially related to a study of twenty-first-century Cuban cinema. However, faced with the shifting political, social, and economic landscapes of the island—even before the recent convulsions associated with US Presidents Obama and Trump—Benítez-Rojo’s approach demonstrates how, ‘for the reader who is attuned to Chaos, there will be an opening upon unexpected corridors allowing passage from one point to another in the labyrinth’ (1996: 3).

By identifying ‘the repeating island’ as the guiding metaphor of this account of Cuban cinema from 2000 to 2014, I make a claim for the utility of a practice of viewing and reading that, like Benítez-Rojo’s seminal text, ‘aspires to be repetitive rather than definitive’ (1996: xi). Considering the author’s native Cuba to have shaped his understanding of the Caribbean as a region characterised by a dynamic of differential repetition, we begin by zooming in on one fractal in an endlessly expanding pattern, finding in the largest island of the Caribbean the attributes that are visible in the whole. From this new perspective, the apparent disorder, inconsistency, or overdetermination of recent Cuban film is ‘neither wholly disorganised nor absolutely unpredictable’ (1996: 313), but rather subject to certain repetitive and self-referential patterns. Specifically, by tracing the contours of this repeating island, we start to notice how, time and again, Cuban cinema of the twenty-first century attempts to screen—simultaneously displaying and concealing—an anxiety over national identity. This enduring dynamic exposes a ‘repetitive and rhythmic insufficiency which, finally, is the most visible determinism to be drawn in the Caribbean’ (1996: 28).

This foundational, constitutive lack, void, or insufficiency is a common thread, twisting and changing but nevertheless continuously running through the variety of recent cinematic production from the island. In discussing national identity in twenty-first-century Cuban film, therefore, Screening the Repeating Island refers not to some imagined or hypostatised essence of Cubanness, but rather to a consistent anxiety regarding the origins, nature, completeness, and future of national identity. Such an anxiety may not be unique to Cuba. Its expression, however, is: acquiring particular forms and new manifestations at specific historical and sociopolitical junctures, the shape of this repeating island shifts but, at the same time, remains the same, reinforcing the differential repetition that bridges the apparent chasm between Chaos theory and recent Cuban cultural production.

Attuning itself to Chaos, then, Screening the Repeating Island analyses a selection of films that demonstrate the diversification of subject matters, genres, and approaches in early twenty-first-century Cuban cinema. This tour of recent production introduces the reader to a shifting cultural ground through four key figures—the monster, the child, the historic icon, and the recluse. These diegetic figures also combine to offer an account of the island’s changing industrial landscape, in which the historic national film institute coexists with small, new, ‘independent’ companies and international co-producers, creating productions that range from state-led, ‘traditional’ films to no-budget, ‘submerged’ cinema, and hybrid ‘indie’-state and international co-productions. At the same time, both the corpus and the perspective from which it is examined emphasise a dynamic of differential repetition, shedding light on the evolution of Cuba’s well-established but complex imbrication of culture, national identity, and politics. Tracing the reappearance, reconfiguration, and recycling of national identity in recent fiction feature films, Screening the Repeating Island reveals the spectre of the national that continues to haunt Cuban cinema, albeit in new ways. Moreover, it shows how the creative manifestations of this spectre screen—both hiding and revealing—a persistent anxiety around national identity even as that identity is itself transformed by connections to the outside world.

Spiralling Outwards: Cubanía, Diaspora, Transnation

Although he was applying a groundbreaking paradigm to a new field, Benítez-Rojo’s postmodern image of the Caribbean as repeating island was foreshadowed by one of Cuba’s most influential thinkers: Fernando Ortiz. In ‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad’ (The human factors of Cubanness), a lecture delivered in 1939 and first published the following year, the anthropologist and sociologist took geography as the point of departure for his discussion of the definitions of Cubanness. However, the simple statement with which he began—‘Cuba is an island’—was soon troubled by the suggestion that ‘Cuba is an archipelago, in other words, a set of many islands, hundreds of them’. On closer inspection, the singular, bounded, and definitive started to multiply, complicating attempts at knowledge or classification. Moving onwards and outwards, Ortiz noted that this archipelago was, moreover, ‘an expression with an international meaning that has not always been accepted as coterminous with its geographic meaning’ (2014: 457). He was alluding, of course, to the long tradition of exile and emigration that has shaped Cuba’s history—the same tradition that contributed to Benítez-Rojo’s view of the Caribbean population as ‘Peoples of the Sea’, impelled ‘toward travel, toward exploration, toward the search for fluvial or marine routes’ (1996: 25). This disjunction between the borders of the island and state on the one hand and the spread of the Cuban population on the other led Ortiz to his central insight: the distinction between ‘cubanidad’—an official Cubanness defined by citizenship—and ‘cubanía’—the neologism invented to name that ineffable ‘consciousness of being Cuban and the will to want to be it’ (2014: 460). For Ortiz, it was this emotional, spiritual component that differentiated ‘true’ Cubans from those alienated or ashamed citizens whose Cubanness ‘lacks fullness’ or is ‘castrated’ (2014: 459).

This very particular national castration anxiety, which threatens to separate the ‘true’ Cuban from the mere Cuban citizen, has an ironic and paradoxical effect; the suggestion that a substantive national identity requires a longing and desire to be and feel Cuban places an unbridgeable gap or inescapable lack at the very heart of Cuban identity. The spread of conceptualisations of the nation as narration (Bhabha 1990) or as imagined community (Anderson 1991) has drawn attention to the absent origin or constitutive lack at the core of all forms of national belonging. However, as the titles of significant studies such as Cuba, the Elusive Nation, suggest, in Cuba a range of sociopolitical, historical, and geographical factors—including the colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial forces to which the island has been subject—have contributed to a national narration particularly ‘characterised by unsatisfied longing, elusive desire’ (Fernández and Cámara Betancourt 2000: 3). This elusiveness has not diminished the impact of the concept of cubanía, which, as a key term within political discourse, has been repeatedly resignified over time.¹ In the current frame of a Revolution preoccupied with issues of sovereignty and cultural autonomy, it often becomes either the ultimate patriotic compliment—such as in the laudatory suggestion that all of the roles played by recently deceased actress Alina Rodríguez ‘rezuman cubanía’ (ooze cubanía)² (del Río 2015)—or a particularly barbed insult—as when then-culture minister Abel Prieto suggested that pro-annexation exiles ‘se nutren de una cubanidad castrada’ (feed off a castrated Cubanness) (1994).

Cubanía, however, is not reserved for those residing within the island, and this has been one of its main advantages from the globalised, postmodern perspectives of recent critics, theorists, and cultural commentators. In the conception of prominent Cuban exile scholar, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, for example, cubanía resides in the individual’s subjective experience and is therefore ‘post-political’. Since it can be used to describe ‘a nationality without a nation’ (1997: 8), the term can be taken up by those who, for whatever reason, do not identify with the nation state and its politics—a stance, we might note, that is itself far from apolitical. As a ‘homeland one cannot leave or lose’ (1997: 11), then, cubanía is a powerful source of identification and recognition for what is increasingly referred to as Cuba’s diaspora. This understanding of Cubanness that does not require the conjuncture of citizenship and sentiment has informed attempts since the 1990s to bridge the political, cultural, affective, and geographic chasms between the island and its emigrant communities. Taking advantage of the end of the Cold War to create an imagined community whose only criterion for inclusion was cubanía, the collection of poems, prose, and essays, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (Behar 1995) perfectly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Screening the Repeating Island
• 2. A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters in Havana
• 3. Not Child’s Play: Tactics, Strategies, and Heterotopias
• 4. Time ‘Out of Joint’: Icons, Images, and Archives
• 5. Of Moles and Giraffes: Recluses, Drifters, and Disconnection
• 6. Conclusion: Shipwrecks and Seasickness
• Back Matter