Jump Cut. A Review of Contemporary Media
Author: Miguel Coyula. Translator: Cristina Venegas
The war with Ukraine had not yet begun.[1][open endnotes in new window] During the press conference at the Moscow International Film Festival, program director Kiril Razgolov described my film Blue Heart (Corazón Azul, 2021) as “the most transgressive and irreverent” of the event.[2] Two reviews were published after the film’s screening. Olga Artemyeva emphasized the influence of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein,[3] and Marina Kopylova that of Andrei Tarkovsky.[4] Was it possible to have two antagonistic styles combined in the same work?
Blue Heart takes place in a uchronia where Fidel Castro tries to build the new man through genetic engineering. These individuals are born with uncontrollable mutations and are united by performing acts of terrorism to destroy not only the system that created them, but seemingly any kind of pre-established structure.
Tarkovsky and Eisenstein represent almost opposite universes, many might say incompatible. Both share a care for the image, but with different objectives. A reductionist impression could define them in this way: one is a poet, the other a brilliant scientist in the service of an ideology. Tarkovsky opts for sensoriality; Eisenstein for rationality. Both are virtuosos with different poetics. In Tarkovsky’s timeless spirituality the individual prevails over the masses. There is nothing definitive. His mysticism is born of human irresolution itself.
While Eisenstein’s symbolic rationality always aimed for a concrete goal, his montage of attractions was ultimately the precursor of an important strategy in agitprop: cinema as an element to transform reality. This was common practice in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, and though he had creative clashes with the cultural authorities, this essence is part of most of his finished work. Although in Alexander Nevsky (1938), he shifts the leading role of the masses to a heroic individual, Nevsky’s essential narrative, stripped of formal scaffolding, responds to that of the most impersonal Hollywood epic. It is not until the second part of Ivan the Terrible (1958), that Eisenstein begins to delve into contradictions never before explored in his cinema. Here Ivan is no longer presented as the untainted hero, but as a glorified tyrant full of contradictions. The tragic interruption of the trilogy by the Stalinist authorities may have played a part in bringing about his premature death shortly before his half-century birthday. We will never know how Eisenstein would have evolved in his twilight. continue reading
Tarkovsky did not live much longer. “The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long,” says Tyrell in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). Tarkovsky was not interested in Eisenstein’s cinema, he considered that the imposition of a planned montage as an emotional-symbolic shock to produce a psycho-ideological effect, had little to do with poetry. He relied on an experience dictated by the senses where man and his relationship with nature prevailed.
In Eisenstein’s defense, it must be recognized that while his contributions to cinematic language could have been used to generate greater contradiction in the content, they laid the groundwork for others to do so. It is difficult to encompass the extent of his mark on cinema.
I mention these two great masters that I admire, to arrive at how I assimilate their work. When it comes to a cinema with strong political content, many critics demand balance or neutrality in the treatment of conflicting sides. My approach is to look in the darkest areas to show what is not mentioned, even if it means deliberately going against all flags. The mistake would be to assume this strategy from the political, when it should always begin with human contradictions. The political will inevitably emerge.
Inspiration begins with an intuitive impulse, rationalization arrives later. I have always thought that the most effective way to deal with the political is to look at it from the future. Imagine that half a century has passed, and then you are able to strip away any attempt at sacralization.
Let’s say that one could inject Godardian strategies into an Antonioni film. Apparently, they share very distant poetics. Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is notable for hybridizing European authorial voices of the 1960s: French new wave, English free cinema, Antonioni’s bourgeois alienation, Godardian breaking of the fourth wall, even the by then outmoded Italian neorealism makes some intervention. Everything works because each element represents worlds that are alien to the protagonist, as representative effects of different realities. The multiple voices also serve as a dynamic window into the complexity of the world surrounding an essentially passive character.
Cuban documentary filmmaker Santiago Álvarez’s montage in Now (1965) responds to Eisensteinian strategies, although its author might have arrived at them regardless, without direct influence. Distances aside, Álvarez had something in common with Eisenstein: both had a communist background, wanted to transform reality and had the relative support of their respective institutions. Nicolás Guillén Landrián took Santiago Álvarez’s agitprop and reversed its meaning. His irreverence–in analogical times–cost him the ability to film in Cuba.[5] Normally, irreverence is understood in the face of governmental, religious or institutional power. But what if we were to launch irreverence equally against all sectors involved in a conflict, be it political, religious or human? This would generate greater complexity, which could result in barely tolerable discomfort. When it comes to political cinema, it is well known that audiences generally come to a film to reinforce a pre-existing view on the subject.
How are intuition and science combined? There is no ideal form of filmmaking, and in any case, it should not start from a predetermined model. I feel that narrative unpredictability can be enhanced by changing editing techniques within the same work.
In my film Memories of Overdevelopment (2010) and even more so in Blue Heart, I worked with an eclectic polyphony that leans towards the baroque, both in the composition of image and sound, as well as in a montage based on changes in format, genres, styles and perspectives.
I have always considered it dangerous to rely solely on an ability to build atmospheres in order to create the illusion of a stable narrative for the viewer through an audiovisual seduction. This can end up being a conservative device when it numbs the viewer’s senses and conspires against a vision of the cinema as an uncomfortable art, both in content and in narrative form. I think that’s why my first film, Red Cockroaches (2003), ended up being much more conventional despite the incest story.
It is not for nothing that it is the only one of my films that has had commercial distribution. When faced with a lack of creative control, I declined to make a Hollywood horror film for Ghost House Pictures and producer Robert Tapert could not understand my lack of interest. He asked if I had other offers. That was the only time the industry came around. At the time, I was preparing Memories of Overdevelopment, a film with a more fragmented structure. I decided that narrative subjectivity must be sabotaged when you barely settle into a rhythm or style. We live in an age of multitasking, media bombardment, post-truth and fragmentation. Here past and present take turns with the impossibility of creating a truly new future. Far from smoothing over these rough edges, the film’s language must reflect the dynamics and contradictions in a cognitive spiral where symbols and subsequent rationality can also emerge and be processed by the viewer.
Different narrative voices have always been a concern of mine. More than two decades ago, I wrote my first novel titled Red Sea, Blue Evil. Almost the entire narrative is constructed from my friend’s experiences and extrapolated to a science fiction universe with fabricated situations, while keeping intact their psychologies and speaking style. I wrote it under the precept that each sentence was equivalent to a cinematographic shot. I also translate this practice to an audiovisual language by never repeating a frame in the editing. This is based on the fact that my first short film was made on a VHS camera. I had to film in chronological order because I didn’t have a computer to edit. This artistic discipline was a strategy born from an obstacle. After each cut, I looked for more expressive framing that would enhance the sensorial nature of each sequence. Each moment of life is unrepeatable and each image concatenated in a film must also possess that unique quality.
I feel that I have made an aesthetic cocktail from the anime of my childhood and the classic film sequences that film critic Enrique Colina deconstructed in his Cuban television show 24xSegundo. During my adolescence, I discovered the cinematheque with Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard and the photo-animation of Santiago Álvarez, while simultaneously reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus, Ray Bradbury and the Strugatsky brothers. I also discovered the expressionist visual artist, Antonia Eiriz.
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| Rafael Alcides inside a painting by Antonia Eiriz in Nadie / Nobody (Miguel Coyula, 2017) | David’s (Carlos Gronlier) painting watches over him in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021) |
How can anyone of these strands reach a rhizomatic coherence to integrate the apparent chaos? If you are going to achieve any originality today, it is from cooking up a gigantic hybridity out of your own blood in order to have an unfiltered dialogue with your subconscious. Only in this way can a voice of your own be born to liberate the content of your genetic storm. Even when you maintain the power of association, sometimes it is necessary to suppress rationality until the later stages of the creative process.
In Memories of Overdevelopment, which is also based on the novel of the same name by Edmundo Desnoes, subjectivity is positioned from the perspective of a protagonist who is a writer and photographer who makes collages and records his voice. The film that we watch could be seen as a construction of the protagonist. But in Blue Heart, I wanted to go further. The multiplicity of characters and points of view, television channels with diverse editorial policies, constant ellipses, point to a rhizomatic polyphony, a territory of shifting sands where it will be more difficult for the viewer to predict how the narrative evolves, and from which perspective. Gone is the unifying effect of the voice-over of the sole protagonist in Memories of Overdevelopment. The fragments of the nation today are also the result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Special Period was also the beginning of my adolescence. I feel that somehow, I am still trying to collect the fragments of the chaos in order to recombine them.[6]
Making films outside of institutions has led me to shoot guerrilla style and without permits. In this scenario it is necessary to remain alert for any documentary event which could be imbricated in the fictional narrative. This instrumentalization of reality was part of Memories of Overdevelopment and Blue Heart. In the latter, I used the Occupy Wall Street protests as background, inserting actors in strictly documentary shots. Then using digital effects, I transformed some of the elements of the environment.
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| Occupy Wall Street original footage. | Footage after digital surgery in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021) |
I also edited speeches by political figures to construct new sentences using their own words, thus turning them into actors within the plot. In one sequence, the mutants storm a television studio and their leader delivers a controversial live speech. After shooting this scene, I showed it to natural actors and asked them to react to it in their own words in order to get a variety of genuine voices. I drew anime on paper to emulate the analog Japanese aesthetic, created commercials and newsreels.
The fictional story itself gradually permeated the real world, but I always maintained a distance from the strictest manifestations of realism.
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| Havana skyline before digital surgery. | Havana skyline in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021 |
It took me 10 years to shoot Blue Heart in Cuba. There were some extra-artistic events of that period that were important to me before I started working on the new film. In January 2017, I finished the documentary Nadie / Nobody (2017), which coincided with the death of Fidel Castro. I like to describe Nadie as a duel between Cuban poet Rafael Alcides and the politician Fidel Castro over of a woman: the Cuban revolution.
The film is built around Alcides’ honesty and the torrent of his thoughts, emotions and contradictions, where humor, lyricism, anger and sadness take turns. The aesthetic of the film itself moves through these registers. Aware of the impossibility of screening the film in a state-owned Cuban movie theater, we tried to show it in a private gallery. We were met with a police raid. In the history of Cuban cinema there are countless episodes of censorship taking place within institutions, but this time it occurred in a private house. We denounced the attack. Colleagues turned away and the critics remained silent. Except for a handful of timid exceptions, the institutionalized island intelligentsia buried the event. Curiously, the Miami Film Festival also did not want to program the film. When Nadie was finally shown in that city as part of the exhibition “The Forbidden Fruit,” I understood that the political honesty of its protagonist, Rafael Alcides, who still considered himself a socialist, did not allow any side to assume the film as their respective banner.
I was criticized by the most reactionary sectors of the left and right. This has been a typical response to my work that has political content. So, the only way to materialize these works has been outside of Cuba or through foreign institutions.
Alcides was an orphan born in the extreme poverty of Barrancas, Cuba. In the film, he did not want to promote his books out of fear of self-praise. He believed in building a better world, and his honesty led him to fall into disgrace. He turned to the monastic construction of his pages on a typewriter with homemade ink, renouncing compromise and/or opportunism. He never knocked on publisher’s doors, inside or outside the island. Utopia had taken hold of him. Nor was he one of those writers who blurred his own history with demagogies. He had nightmares because he also knew how to have big dreams. His open-hearted contradictions made him a being of peculiar transparency. The poet remained in Cuba until his death.
A filmmaker friend once told me: “I want to continue making independent films, but I don’t want to spend ten years making a film. I also want to be able to go to a restaurant, to a bar, to have money to travel.” In Cuba, we can only choose one of the two variants. He decided to emigrate. It is true that living in Cuba limits your freedom of movement. Not having a credit card narrows your travel possibilities to those made possible by scholarships, film festivals or academic events. My camera and computer models are obsolete under any industrial parameters. But cinematic language is not determined by the number of pixels. For me, technological obsolescence is breakage beyond any possible repair. We are on the earth for a very short time. I chose to exist with austerity, in order to create freely.[7]
Years later, when the political-cultural situation of the country worsened, I understood the phenomenon better. At that time, I met a visual artist who felt uncomfortable showing his work in state-run spaces. He was considering emigrating. Without understanding his point of view, I told him that I did not discriminate between spaces, that the work speaks for itself. He explained with exemplary sincerity: “But my work is not as political as yours. How can I justify myself morally while using state institutions and still call myself independent?”
In 2019, the Cuban Institute of Art and Film Industry (ICAIC) implemented Decree Law 373 for cinema, which intended to bring together independent filmmakers who were operating in a legal limbo.[8] The document contained pragmatic advantages for producing, but it also straitjacketed filmmakers by framing the content of each work within “the objectives of the Revolution that makes it possible…” Even so, almost all filmmakers signed on to obtain their independent audiovisual creator’s card, granted by a state industry with a long list of censored films.[9]
The definition of independent cinema in Cuba has been controversial. Most of the works that define themselves as independent are approved by the ICAIC and are made possible by international funding that is inscribed in a predetermined socio-political aesthetic that circulates in mainstream independent markets. As with much mainstream-independent films, they do not cross the thresholds of discomfort. Here I am referring to the limits imposed by both the Cuban government and the profile of the relevant international institutions that decide what Latin American art cinema should be.
The cultural situation after Fidel Castro’s death became more complex as more artists were censored. Activism increased on the island, heightened by the pandemic. An eclectic group of people led by the artivist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara of the San Isidro Movement, went on a hunger strike during a collective confinement in the neighborhood and demanded, among other things, freedom for Cuba. The official news source of the regime disqualified the veracity of the hunger strike. But, does anyone pay attention to vertical newscasts anymore? The state security raided the house and evicted everyone, leading to the largest spontaneous protest of artists in front of the Ministry of Culture on November 27, 2020, which created the 27N movement. Finally, on November 29, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara announced the deposition of the strike from prison, which he said he had started on November 18.
On July 11, 2021, popular protests erupted throughout the island as a response to the lack of food and medicine. They also demanded freedom and used the title of the song “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life) as their anthem. President Miguel Díaz-Canel told the authorities that “The order for combat has been given.” A wave of repression was unleashed that included mass imprisonments with arbitrary sentences. What was previously practiced against a small sector of the opposition, became a general practice.
The subsequent exodus was massive. Many important artists left the island. Others returned to the institutional fold and lowered their voices. At the same time, artists and intellectuals began to be censored not for the political radicalism of their work, but for taking an active role and demanding changes from the standpoint of civil society. The playwright Yunior García Aguilera also emerged along this line with his platform Archipiélago. Garcia Aguilera’s theatrical work, had circulated within institutional channels. His activism combined with his eloquent discourse garnered the sympathy of many intellectuals across generations, achieving a remarkable synergy. On November 15, 2021, he called for a “peaceful march for change.” But on that date, his followers would be disconcerted when they discovered that their leader was no longer on the island. Garcia Aguilera had negotiated his departure quietly under pressure from Cuban state security.
In September 2022, Ediciones Deslinde published my novel The Vertical Island in Madrid.[10] At the book’s launch, the presenter, artist Lester Álvarez Meno declared that the novel was “beyond saving.”[11] He recriminated me morally for debasing figures of the Cuban opposition, which appeared in the novel as secondary characters, sometimes in cameos. Curiously, the rest of the book showcases its protagonists in more grotesque behavior and situations, and they too were inspired by real people. What was happening here? That none of these other characters were media celebrities with a foothold in the opposition’s political arena? Maybe Álvarez, a member of the 27N movement, expected a mea culpa from me.
With The Vertical Island, I envisioned a narrative that was more focused on the psychology of its main characters. When I finished it, I thought to myself…well…it’s okay, it’s readable. I was happy with the idea that, just as with my film Red Cockroaches, any lover of dystopian anime could understand it without any knowledge of Cuba. But I did not feel that it would generate much political controversy, since despite its multiple narrative voices, its anecdotal essence was a twisted love triangle. My interest in including the secondary characters referenced by the book presenter was essentially based on the fact that I found their contradictions dramaturgically attractive and added stylistic variety to the social dynamics of the environment through satire. But the presentation-recrimination at the book event was revealing: I discovered that I had injected inflammable political content into 4 of the book’s 158 pages. I had arrived at the conflict intuitively: from the gestation of the characters. Not only that, I had entered uncharted territory. My last three films had deconstructed the myth of Fidel Castro, instrumentalizing him as a character, because I felt that there was a critical silence about his figure in the island’s cinema.
Álvarez, the presenter, published a text pointing out the problematic sentences about the opposition celebrity figures referenced in the novel, among which was also the artivist Tania Bruguera. But the text gave prominence to Lumoa, a character inspired by the mutation of Charles Manson and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (LMOA). The novel has several narrative voices. In his description of Lumoa, the narrator in question, was accused by Álvarez of being sexist and classist. Interestingly, Álvarez thought this a more serious offence than the incest, violence and murder committed by the protagonists in the rest of a novel where the narrator himself is also “the very expression of uncertainty and failure.”[12] Then, Álvarez makes reference to an excerpt about machismo: “he always kept a brood of women around him,”[13] which rang even more strange since LMOA himself has publicly confessed: “Yes, I care about having money, dressing in my own style, traveling, having women… the good life.”[14] Álvarez also failed to mention that when the book’s protagonist visits Lumoa, he discovers that, in reality, his “brood of women” keeps him doped up in a bed, and one of them informs him: “There is no single leader here. We are a collective.” (La Isla Vertical)
Álvarez’s criticism of the depiction of Lumoa’s humble origins was equally debatable, because it is unrelated to the professional life of LMOA himself, who has never denied his origins, and has since won numerous awards, including the $50,000 prize awarded by Prince Klaus. Then again, in the novel, Lumoa is a mafioso who controls food supply, in a world where the protagonists live a perennial famine. What was the real problem then? Towards the end of the text, the presenter tried to persuade me: “Coyula should not try so hard to destroy a country and people already in ruins, and should devote himself to erasing the traces of his references and frustrations.”[15]
During the presentation he hinted that I sympathized with the Cuban government by saying “It’s OK if you are a communist and love Fidel Castro, surely in Miami you will be eaten alive.”
I felt embarrassed for him, but I confess that his reverse ideology left me with a growing curiosity. Why had Álvarez agreed to present a novel that he so detested? Why was there such an insistence on an edifying and positivist art in the style of socialist realism or of the most conservative Hollywood productions? Was there something beyond mere moralism, or political correctness? I have never been interested in journalistic writing because it kills the possibility of creation. But now it seems a pertinent resource to analyze my sources of inspiration, since there also seems to be a critical silence on the subject.
Days after the book’s presentation in Madrid, page 80 of La Isla Vertical was circulated on WhatsApp among some members of the 27N movement. A sentence was circled in red where a character, referring to Lumoa, confesses to have “taken food and water to the future martyr during his hunger and thirst strike.” Had reality cracked inside the fiction?
During the collective confinement in San Isidro, the non-governmental mainstream media had already written the epic of LMOA, his 10-day hunger strike,[16] and the eviction that gave rise to the protest, spurring the 27N movement.[17] The resistance had thus already created a mythic figure, who also happened to be imprisoned.
Was there a pact to hide a “minor fissure” for the sake of a greater cause? Two narratives circulated: a public and a private one. Obviously, I was inspired by the later. In this one, some of his followers alluded to LMOA’s vulnerability to power as an excuse to lie. In a private conversation, one woman tried to justify him: “If the Cuban dictatorship has lied for 60 years, why doesn’t he have the right to lie too, and thus give them some of their own medicine?”
Cuban dissidents have died from hunger strikes. Others have come close. Sometime after the events in San Isidro, opposition scientist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, held a live broadcast on Facebook to dismantle the LMOA strike as “a farce to create a theatrical atmosphere.”[18] He was bombarded by negative comments and ignored by the so-called independent press.
The post-truth that Fidel Castro practiced for analogical decades, and which Donald Trump had popularized in the U.S. political arena, seemed to circulate in the veins of many in the Cuban opposition. This was symptomatic of an era where words transmute their meaning in the face of facades erected and demolished indiscriminately, sometimes with a gentle blow, in order to achieve circumstantial objectives.
All cultures have idiosyncrasies that are to some extent immovable. Today Vladimir Putin continues the expansion started by Ivan the Terrible. We in Cuba are partially descended from a tradition-betrayal-idiomatic, a quixotic saga destined to failure, which Edmundo Desnoes in Memories of Overdevelopment says is the nature of all of us who speak Spanish. In short, we inhabit a continent of endemic corruption.
But I want to move the calendar back a bit. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, had stood out as the most prolific artivist in the country until his last imprisonment on July 11, 2021. In 2018, he announced that he had had a “vision” where Fidel Castro appeared to him in a dream to tell him that in his final days, he had written a testament and had chosen him to make it public because he was “an ordinary Cuban, with a sense of the historical moment.”[19] This work premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris and consisted of the recording of a comedian imitating Fidel Castro’s voice while reading his fictional mea culpa. Almost all of LMOA’s subsequent performance work responds to a compulsive immediacy, with strategies that can fluctuate from draping himself in the Cuban flag while sitting on a toilet, to wearing the American flag as a cape, or covering himself with his own excrement in front of the capitol in Havana. He is part of a trend of performance art, where notions of quality, inscribed in traditional criticism, are irrelevant. His greatest coherence is to put the dictatorship in check while demanding freedom for Cuba. The independent press constructs him as a popular hero, young, black, of humble origin, charismatic, a self-taught man guided by his intuition and courage. This type of press coverage occasionally confers a certain mystical aura on him.
Under this precept, LMOA is produced as a bearer of virtues that are mostly innate, but such a definition ignores that LMOA was equally produced by the harshness of the post-Soviet urban landscape. We could see it as a gigantic mural of economic, ethical and moral contradictions like the grotesque humans illustrated in Antonia Eiriz’s painting. In other words, the LMOA phenomenon in the idealized independent press, becomes a spontaneous sprout of the current island nature, an earthquake miraculously germinated in infertile soil, to consolidate the imminent liberation of the island. It was a success story that sold the possibility–promised and frustrated by the Cuban revolution itself–to finally give power to the people, awaken them from their lethargy and ignite them like a volcano.
Curiously, the populism intrinsic to this construction is also aligned with the utopian dimension of capitalist neoliberalism. LMOA grew up in a state capitalism that had a socialist facade. He has no creed other than his own person:
I always wanted to be a superstar, I like recognition, fame. I’ve always said that. I don’t hide it. If you go to Cerro, where I was born, and show them the Mona Lisa, everyone will recognize her… But if you show them Da Vinci’s self-portrait, no one can tell you who it is. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want them to associate my work with me, to know who I am. A famous guy! But back then I wasn’t. What was I? Well, I was black, with no academic training, the kind of guy who put himself forward for an event and was almost never accepted. I was ‘de pinga’ and ‘a pinga’ I did so that they would know me.[20]
His actions in public spaces and outside academic or institutional ties, place his body in uncontrollable, unpredictable ways, establishing himself as an element of chaos against the regime, inspiring a good many artists of his generation in need of a voice and a space in the totalitarian society, and also in need of a shield to withstand the bigger blows. The official media defames him and the independent press sanctifies him. During this narrative bipolarity, LMOA’s performances gradually moved into a hardcore activism that was no longer under the blanket of art. His race to destroy the regime seemed to reach an unstoppable rising climax, incited by Cubans inside and outside the island, until Icarus was burned by a midnight sun. His sentence: 5 years in prison.
Simultaneously, young artists, academically trained writers and LMOA followers were breaking ties with Cuban institutions. Some emigrated, others engaged in activism until state security–using their most recent strategy–pressured them to negotiate their own exile. For much of this group, the boundaries between left and right are archaic or deliberately blurred. Some align themselves with a social-democratic discourse, yet their actions are neoliberal. Today, they carry out actions from a distance for the sake of LMOA’s liberation. Exhibits are curated in his name, poems dedicated, documentaries made and banners bearing his likeness are raised in demonstrations outside of Cuba. But the echoes on the island are virtual. The regime has assumed them as collateral damage that has no immediate impact on the physical reality of the country. For this group, LMOA seems to represent indistinctly symbolic capital, and sometimes, capital itself. The aestheticization of courage instrumentalizes his figure and freezes the instant before departure in order to postpone their individual impact in exile. In many cases, the drama of such dislocation also responds to a hedonistic longing whose generational imprint is represented by the authors of the song “Patria y Vida.”[21] This is also the consequence of a regime that has tried to hide its economic failure and the material welfare of its elite, under the iron-clad preaching of self-sacrifice. The freedom of the masses is no longer an idea. Contemporary life has turned it into an abstraction.
I am not too much of a follower of José Martí, but I cannot help quoting him now: “Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who uses a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if because of them he exposes his life.”[22] Cuban leaders have created a sad tradition with these words, and Fidel Castro was their maximum exponent. LMOA now dwells in the shadow of his prison. To date, he has not been able to negotiate his exile. Alongside him await hundreds of other political prisoners without the same media protection. The light at the end of the tunnel has not changed in size. Many of the most valuable artists are no longer on the island.
What then is the function of art in Cuba? Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in the 1960s saw cinema as an instrument of change to develop critical thinking in the population in order to build a better society. Like Eisenstein, he had (including the ups and downs) the support of the official industry. Alea achieved a masterpiece with Memories of Underdevelopment. But in this gregarious tableau there was little room for individual poetics, where the excessive illumination of an inner world could be labeled as ideological diversionism and the commitment to an artistic discipline, as exaltation of the spirit, was often interpreted as egoism, or simply as being disconnected from reality.
The artivist Tania Bruguera has likewise referred to the need for a useful art, able to transform the current Cuban reality. Bruguera now confronts the once luminous Cuban revolution of 1959, turned into authoritarianism with chronic metastasis. In 2016, Bruguera created INSTAR in Havana: an institute that promised to align and provide space to multiple artistic disciplines, alternatives to the governmental discourse. For a while, the space attracted many young creators and thinkers. But the growing activism of its members caused the regime to collimate the space to the point that face-to-face activity was made impossible, nullifying its objective of disseminating critical art. On the face of it, INSTAR could itself be seen as a work of performance. Perhaps its ephemeral physical nature, in the face of the regime’s repression, was part of its strategic budget to denounce it. Today INSTAR continues virtually from abroad, but the country’s primitive, costly and controlled level of connectivity makes it difficult for the Cuban islander to interact with the space.
I confess that my reaction to activism is controversial. I respect the tenacity of some activists, because I recognize my own tenacity to create. But as a creative engine, I do not find it a vehicle for inspiration. I have done activism on a few occasions. In January 2020, the artist Javier Caso was summoned to an interrogation after taking photographs during a shoot for Blue Heart, the audio of which he recorded with a hidden cell phone. On top that audio, I edited a visualization in photo-animation to ironize the exchange he had with two police agents. I posted it on YouTube and it went viral, far surpassing the views of all the videos on my channel.[23] An acquaintance told me “Now, that is political art.” I think it is activism, maybe even artivism, but I don’t think it is Art. Even if the form was novel, when seen from a broader perspective, its dramaturgical essence adheres to a scheme: rebel artist versus two cartoonish cops.
Good versus evil in a revealing document of the workings of state security. It is terrible and funny. But as a work of art, it is not polysemic. Its gestation arises as a denunciation and this unique objective made it an aestheticization of a political tool. With some exceptions, the essence of this type of expression is generally contextual and therefore ephemeral. Political art is, at a semantic level, a term that could be problematic, since an art about politics is not necessarily a political art, if we understand the latter as a tool designed strictly to denounce power, or to navigate it. If art has some utility, bravo. But preconceiving its usefulness beforehand has little to do with a state of grace; that which true inspiration achieves, the terrible purity that can emerge from a subconscious that erupts in multiple directions. I feed on dreams; and if I ever had a dream or nightmare that was political in essence, I cannot remember it. The ones that stay with me are connected to the darkest zones of human nature.
In this mode of expression there are no pragmatic goals or answers. To claim them would be a betrayal of the creative act. Let us take this very text. I started this essay trying to talk about art and I have ended up dirtying it with politics. I could divide it in two, but I would lose the essence of this organic sabotage. I remember Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in his mea culpa: “Can one be a poet in Cuba?”
I turn off the monotony of social networks. The virtualities of the postmodern world do not inspire me. On desolate streets, people wander terrified by the new penal code. The science of the future has failed on the island. Some claim that poetry has been buried. Others continue to wait for a new messiah. But I am not into ideologies, parties, religions, political corrections, movements, sects, guilds, herds, or crowds. I could say that one of my creative gratifications is to burn the ships down over and over again. Only I have never needed other people’s ships. The material world is not a priority for me. I know that such an attitude can complicate life, but it facilitates creation. And that is my raison d’être. I am attracted to protagonists who are misfits for a number of reasons that include destabilizing narrative perspective. A good number of audience members expect a film to reinforce their political convictions and are rarely interested in a debate with themselves.
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| An American flag burning in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021) | A burning Jesus in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021). |
The brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, a scientist and poet respectively, wrote science fiction books together in the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky would adapt their novel Alien Picnic in his film Stalker (1979), a culmination of science being devoured by cinematic poetry. Would something like that be possible in Cuba? Perhaps not. But the mistake is to try to mold beauty strictly under foreign cultural patterns. We are a young, fragmented culture, a fetus that has not germinated satisfactorily. The poet Rafael Alcides said that behind true beauty there is always drama. Finding beauty in Cuba can be a traumatic experience for someone who does not know how to appreciate the terribleness of the discovery.
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| Sergio (Ron Blair) in Memories of Overdevelopment (Miguel Coyula, 2010). | Gorki Aguila and Lynn Cruz in Where is freedom? (Miguel Coyula, 2022) |
Is this masochism? Migration is not an option for me. I have already “lived in the monster and know its entrails…,” although I insist that my vision of the human being is too dark to be aligned with José Martí. (Obras Completas). I return to another hell, but it is my hell. I felt that my multidisciplinary independence would allow me to make films that otherwise would never materialize here. For a while I assumed that I had to continue creating in Cuba like a fanatical monk on a romantic mission to contribute to the national culture from the margins. Today, I am tempted to say that I no longer care about national culture, nor about the country. I recently finished a music video with the Cuban rock band Porno para Ricardo covering Pappo’s Blues’ “¿Adónde esta la libertad?”[24]
In it, I blow up the island in a nuclear explosion. An unnecessary underlining, since the war of time is palpable and the worst destruction is that of the soul. Why am I still here? There are a few artists left, but I trust that others will emerge. That helps me to continue as a witness. This is not 19th century nationalism. I took the plunge to film 9/11 in New York. Now I wish to go to Ukraine, even if I end up documenting my own annihilation.
Where does this death drive originate? It is not from José Marti. There is no other reason than the pursuit of art as a collage of contradictions. Independent art should be uncomfortable. This friction is essential as my creative engine.
My life has never been important. Partial brain blackout: I return and try to observe my city divorced from any historical political context. Sensory memory survives. I inhabit the apartment where I was born, with the same view of the ocean from the window. The buildings no longer matter. I rescue the scarce smells of the green, I swallow particles of saltpeter. The nature of this land will last until the sun explodes. I still believe in an art free of utilitarian expectations: Annihilation in order to be reborn. I start filming again on the Vertical Island.
Poster of Chronicles of the Absurd (Miguel Coyula, 2024)
Epilogue: June 5th 2025 began a strike of Havana University Students soaring into a magnitude of dissent never seen since the previous regime of Fulgencio Batista, more than six decades ago. It is a lifetime, but as poet Rafael Alcides once said in Nadie (2017): “We are but an instant in history. Logically this government will end.”
