The audience was mostly Cuban and foreign university students.
14ymedio/EFE, Havana, 7 December 2024 — For one night, Havana stopped being a city of old people and beggars to show off its youth. The reason: the screening, this Friday, of the first two episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the miniseries recently produced by Netflix based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez. To watch, dozens of young Cubans and foreigners came to the Yara cinema.
Amidst the sea of people, Sofia Morales, a medical student from Valle del Cauca, Colombia, waits as she weaves through the crowd and anxiously asks how she can get a ticket to see the screening. The young woman has arrived too early. The first showing, at 8:00 p.m., is intended for movie-goers with invitations to the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, which runs from Thursday through December 15. A much later showing, at 10:00 p.m., has been reserved for the general public.
Morales, who has been in Cuba for two years now, is willing to do anything to watch on the screen one of the books that left the greatest impression on her. “Either I dare to let my imagination run wild with everything I read in the book or I dare to watch the series and have it change my view of everything García Márquez wrote,” she says.
Like her, most of the audience are university students, whether Latin American, African or from other continents; or from the Island, like Adiel and her friends, who test the atmosphere to try to get in. “We found out later that it was by invitation, but we are just curious,” she says.
Minutes later, Morales, against all odds, finds a seat in the first showing with her Palestinian-American boyfriend, with whom she wants to share García Márquez’s work because “it expresses everything that Colombia is: the classes, the people, but in a different way.”
The lights go out in the room and there is total silence. It is at that moment that a phrase resounds, causing more than one person to stop solemnly and applaud, while others simply shed tears: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Outside, in the theater’s entrance, many people wait until the 10:00 screening begins, and the crowd contrasts with the empty lobby of a few hours earlier, when people were gathered in lines at the cashiers at 23rd and N. Two puny palm trees wrapped in garlands try to give a Christmas atmosphere to the Yara, which, along with the rest of the venues designated for the Festival’s activities, is an oasis of light in a country besieged by blackouts.
The premiere of the One Hundred Years of Solitude series was the main event of the second day of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana. Netflix, whose products reach Cubans mainly through pirated films, plans to premiere this miniseries worldwide on December 9 in Bogotá.
García Márquez (1927-2014) was a figure closely linked to Cuba and its cinema for years. Among other things, he presided over the New Latin American Cinema Foundation, an organization based in Havana. His friendship with Fidel Castro, of whom he was a staunch supporter, put him at the center of dozens of controversies.
The writer played an important diplomatic role in the service of the regime and was a key figure in the exchange of prisoners and people of interest to Castroism. Despite this, finding his books in recent editions is an impossible task in the country where, for decades, he had a protocol mansion assigned to his family.
The main movie theaters in the Cuban capital will screen the 110 films – 89 fewer than last year – in competition for ten days from 42 countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Spain and the Island itself. The Havana Festival was founded on 3 December 1979, conceived in imitation of the festivals of Viña del Mar (1967 and 1969), Mérida (1968 and 1977) and Caracas (1974).
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