Blue Heart — You Can Fund It / Miguel Coyula

Commentary by Miguel Coyula starts at about 5 minutes into the video.

The following text is taken from Indiegogo, a crowdfunding site that is supporting Blue Heart. Miguel lives in and works from Cuba.

Here is the link to help fund Blue Heart.

THE FILMMAKER:

Miguel Coyula was born in Havana, Cuba in 1977. His work is focused on blending different genres and formats into new ways of storytelling by exploring digital technology. Always working outside the film industry made his first feature Red Cockroaches (2003), for less than $2,000. The film was described by Variety as “a triumph of technology in the hands of a visionary with know-how…” and went on to gather several awards in the international film festival circuit. In 2009 Coyula was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to develop his next film, Memories of Overdevelopment, a follow-up to the Cuban classic Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968). The film premiered on Sundance in 2010 and went on to gather 20 awards during its festival tour. The International Film Guide chose it as the best Cuban Film of the year.

DIRECTOR´S STATEMENT:

Blue Heart is a film about the individual’s inability to escape its environment, as well a discussion about the violent nature of a revolution and its consequences. It is also an exploration of the boundaries of human behavior in a dysfunctional family. This is a foray into a dark future from an uncertain present. continue reading

I have always been interested in science fiction films that serve as a possibility to explore the strangeness of an alternate reality with specific social and political repercussions that are rooted in real events. This allow for a deeper and more meaningful reflection on the world we live in.

However, political science fiction can incur in a didactic approach. One must never make a film about a subject matter that you love or hate, otherwise it becomes a propaganda film. One must only make the film if you are not convinced 100% in either direction.

Beyond stating ideas with intellectual coolness, the film concentrates on visceral storytelling where atmosphere, and feelings and are the most immediate focus.

The story uses several elements from transmedia storytelling, where the narrative flows in a variety of formats, which include fiction from a variety of genres, newscasts, animation, web-browsing, commercials, documentary. I intend to use the digital medium to full advantage by manipulating every single image. The goal is to work the smallest details, which on a low budget becomes difficult to manage on sets. An open mind to use the world that surrounds you and find a way to weave it into your narrative is a priceless advantage of independent filmmaking. For example the Occupy Wall Street was a real event; which was adapted to the narrative of the film by inserting actors in a documentary environment, plus heavy manipulation of the images and green screen to achieve the right mood.

THE STORY:

Dr. Nicholas Fredersen faces a difficult situation after his Human Genetic Engineering project at DNA21 comes to a full stop when the practice is declared illegal in the United States. However Octogenarian leader Fidel Castro, with the aid of Chinese money sets out to build a superior New Man that will transform the crumbling Cuban Socialist system into a model society. A few years later Cuba is ravaged by pollution and acid rains, becoming economically dependent on Chinese Investments of ever-growing oil drilling in the deep seas. Inheriting the worse of communism and capitalism, the country has become a corrupt dystopia on permanent crisis. The New Men turn out to be powerful but uncontrollable and dysfunctional in several ways. Outcasts of the system that created them, they set out to destroy the very fabric of society with devastating consequences. When the US government discovers that Dr. Nicholas Fredersen has been collaborating with the Cuban government in this enterprise. Tensions between the two countries begin to complicate.

This is the world Tomás lives in. He is a widowed, middle aged photo-journalist who lives with his teenage son David, an introverted teenager who escapes into the alternative reality of his drawings. One day, while taking pictures in ruins, Tomás finds Elena, an enigmatic young woman who casts a spell on him. He takes her home and this creates initial frictions with David, who later grows equally fascinated by her. A triangle develops as the tensions between the three characters escalate, in parallel to the national crisis. Gradually they both connect and explode as Elena might be linked with the terrorist group.

RISKS AND CHALLENGES:

We have most of the cast in place and ready to go. A science fiction film of this scale on such a budget is a thrill of a challenge and like any other great adventure, a must do for me. The focus is to complete principal photography within 3-4months of shooting. The rest will be all up to the post-production time. I sometimes take a long time to complete editing, but I have always completed every film project I have undertaken because of patience and obsessive tenacity: Two things to make up for the lack of a larger budget. Time is essential to create a solid film.

We Are a Community With Our Own Voice / Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba. For years Mariela Castro Espín Has tried to take credit for numerous  efforts on behalf of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) community in Cuba. Forgetting that this community has its Own Voice.

These uncertain efforts have won her international awards and recognition, before she has even achieved what is now her most ambitious project. Which is to declare to those who do not know the Cuban issue, that the project authored by Mariela had been initiated by her late mother Vilma Espin.

The constant appearance of Castro Espín before the national and international media are not showing, much less is giving voice to, the (LGBT) Cuban community. On the contrary, they are only providing an opportunity for the voice of the daughter of current Cuban President, Raul Castro Ruz, enthroned in an ill-fated Revolution that has only managed to put the community that she pretends to lead at a disadvantage. continue reading

Despite the uncertain official efforts, and the institutionalized homophobia on the island and preached for over fifty years by those who believe in the formation of the New Man, the reality that is felt today is different; the ability to feel the dissatisfaction of this community before the failed promises and to the constant violation of our rights.

Already more than five projects of Cuban civil society working in the LGBT area independently and those who do not join official institutions. Among those worth mentioning are the Cuban Observatory for LGBT Rights, the Cuban LGBT Platform, the Chui Tuix Community Integration Project, Rainbow Project, Open Doors Foundation, the Cuban League Against AIDS among others.

These new citizen initiatives organize other days in favor of the fight against homophobia; lead from different points of view projects focused on the education of their peers in their most basic rights and the defense of those rights; and in turn they are not supporters of the existing government speech so far.

Despite the constant negatives for the legalization of these initiatives by the Cuban Ministry of Justice, the work continues and its leaders haven’t accomplished any legalization in any Cuban institution. For which they are labeled as mercenaries or paid by the empire, which is easy to disprove with more than conclusive evidence.

Mariela Castro is not a recognized voice, much less the voice of our constantly growing community. They accept feeling manipulated by the official campaigns that do not intend to vindicate the LGBT rights.

New publications circulating in the Cuban streets, free of political contamination, which highlight the work for various projects in support of the urgent need to claim each of the usurped rights of the Cuban LGBT community. These initiatives of these publications flourish at the time when they are trying to show the world that in Cuba if there is a Community with its Own Voice and there is no need for intermediaries or spokespeople who are committed to the guilt of those who, in 1959, tied us to the lie and even now are trying to force us to force us to live with it.

By Ignacio Estrada

20 May 2013

Insufficient Qualifications / Regina Coyula

Presenter Aleanys Jáuregui

Cuban television is not characterized by the quality of its domestic programming so I review the movie schedule to see if anything interests me. The only ones I follow are the pirated ones: Grey’s Anatomy, Suits, and Dirty Sexy Money; this latter despite its late night schedule.

But sometimes, by chance, by pure chance, I stumble on programs produced by  Cuban TV, which produces little, bad and late, and luckily fills in with the canned. In a fatal chance I’ve seen some scenes of a horrible thing called Santa Maria of I Don’t-Know-What that shows on the soap opera hour; but the other day I endured with a stoicism worthy of a better cause a humor (?!) program made by women. They were competing, there was a really condescending jury, raising their cards with their ratings.

Bad taste, vulgarity, lack of grace, lack of originality; and an example of all of the above, the host of the program. In the Federation of Cuban Women and the Cuban Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC), institutions that concern themselves interchangeably with female integrity and raising cultural values, should not have seen More Women (with the “more” [plus] sign that I don’t find on the keyboard), this monstrosity of “more” for which I can not find enough adjectives on the keyboard.

20 May 2013

New 2013 Meteor Exercise / Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba: The May rains have already started throughout the country and the in June hurricane season begins, extending until November.

The Cuban authorities and Civil Defense have recently launched the 2013 Meteor Exercise, preparation intended to corroborate the availability of all the factors involved in times of natural disasters. It is clear that this organization is run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and which have a structure from the nation top to bottom.

Authorities of the Institute of Meteorology say the hurricane season for Cuba and the Caribbean this year be a big one. So they predict that the island will be hit by any of these phenomena. The solidarity of the national response is immediate with things like this, far different from the government indolence that abandons countless families of disaster victims like this.

They are only there to lend a gaze to the eastern provinces and especially to Santiago de Cuba so that we can see a false reality of a city totally recovered.

The Civil Defense and the authorities in power more than ensure the preservation of human life. They have the obligation to provide to Cuban population with secure decent housing. We recall that the situation of the state of the buildings on the island is one of the problems that constantly checkmates the Cuban family.

The drought is palpable on the island and the lack of rain is well-known, but it is necessary to take urgent measures to preserve not only human lives as I said earlier but to put all of our goods in safekeeping. And to take as one of the main measures not walking around in places that are underpinned by danger of collapse.

It is our duty in this season for the sake of the Cuban family to preserve our lives. Not to highlight the role of the authorities but to comply with the first right of every man. Always remembering that our nation needs people committed to build the immediate future for our children and our future families if they can enjoy safe homes that can be a garrison in these catastrophes.

By Ignacio Estrada

20 May 2013

The “Revoliquera” Experience (Reloaded) / Regina Coyula

Screen Shot 2013-05-17 at 3.53.53 PM

I put up this post this past Friday, but the WordPress goblins made it disappear. With my scarce connection time and my barely adequate technical knowledge, I wasted a copious amount of time looking for responses in a forum, and along the way, restoring this post. Management having failed, I’ll do this the old way: by repeating it.

The Revoliquera* Experience

If I ask a youth with occasional internet access which page referring to Cuba he visits, almost certainly he’ll respond with Facebook. It doesn’t matter that it’s not Cuban. The social network par excellence keeps him up to date with his artists and favorite athletes and let’s him meet up with his school friends, who today can be the same in Miami as in Madrid or Moscow.

But if I consult a young fan of technology or video games, or who is just growing out of his first childhood, the more sure is that he’ll answer that his favorite page is Revolico, the site of national sales & buying, born from the lack of a physical space inside Cuba to accommodate a classified ad.

It’s impossible to walk down the street and not see bills posted on phone poles announcing electronic musical concerts or house parties. On bus walls appear printed announcements of exchanges, nor does a car attract any attention with a cardboard box behind the windshield with hurried letters that read: “FOR SALE”. The yellow pages of the telephone book increasingly recognize the emerging private services sector, but even there the space is insufficient to insert a perishable or offensive ad. Here is where the online note triumphs.

No matter the real estate market, where the false image of an enormous (and overpriced) residential listing is for sale, poking around on revolico.com reveals that Cubans aren’t too interested in whether or not the government is going to build socialism; but meanwhile, each provides their own management style, and for some it doesn’t seem to be going badly. The productive forces of this country are in the starting blocks waiting for the starter’s gun to go off, and Revolico is becoming pre-competition training.

And if you don’t have access to the internet, that is no longer a problem. Inside a weekly or monthly 500 GB pack you can find an offline version of the popular site that now permits even the opening of links to photos; “It’s exactly the same as seeing it on the Internet,” a neighbor told me who copied her own version from me last week. As it is often forbidden to access Revolico from work and school, or the page won’t open and is redirected to the searcher, disturbed souls have posted alternative addresses and proxies that lead to the revoliquera (messy) experience.

Office services, translations, language classes, wedding dress rental, jobs, loans with interest, clowns, quotes … that amalgam makes up the pages of Revolico, a much better known site within Cuba than Generation Y, and more visited than CubaDebate.

Translator’s note: “Revoliquera” is an adjective roughly meaning “messy” created from the word “revolico” which in Cuban slang means “a mess”; it is the name of the Cuban site that is the equivalent of “Craigslist.”

Translated by: JT

13 May 2013

“Catch and Release”: El Sexto (Danilo Maldonado) Arrested on Saturday, Released on Sunday, His Work Confiscated / Lia Villares, Danilo Maldonado

Screen Shot 2013-05-20 at 1.52.26 PMSaturday [18 May 2013]

El Sexto is raided at his home this afternoon at 1:15 pm, according to Alexandra his wife and owner of the apartment, who learned of it through an email from her dad who lives downstairs and saw men and women in uniform and in plainclothes, accompanied by 2 neighbors from the CDR [Committee for the Defense of the Revolution], and a major from MININT [Ministry of the Interior], in all about 5 people, they showed him a search warrent and confiscated his laptop, spray paints and all the works they found and took him away in a patrol car. As of now with destination unknown.

Translator’s note: This post and the following ones (now with earlier time stamps) together form a report on El Sexto’s (“the Sixth” — Danilo Maldonado) arrest, the search of his home and the confiscation of his belongings.

18 May 2013

My Confiscated Works and the Scene of the Crime (Part 1) / El Sexto – Danilo Maldonado

El Sexto – Danilo Maldonado
– 8 mini cards in the name of Danilo Maldonado – 1 Canon camera – 1 Thinkpad laptop – 15 virgin discs – 76 yellow cards with the writing “I determine” 4 signed by El Sexto – 4 recorded discs – 2 recorded discs with photos and video. [Identifies Danilo as “unemployed”]
37 spray paints, multiple colors and brands – 4 templates to paint – A dossier of the Salbutomal (asthma medicine) project – 1 book of curriculum vitae – 3 DVDs – 3 canvases (of paintings)
1 Samsung cellphone – 14 cards with paintings and sketches – 15 canvases with paintings, 2 Voices Magazines, 4 photos with counterrevolutionary elements
[same as above]

20 May 2013

Post Arrest 3 / El Sexto – Danilo Maldonado Machado

Undesirable
Fear is a role. You play it how you want. [After el Sexto’s t-shirt with Laura Pollan was ripped off him by State Security, he had her face tattooed on his skin, followed by those of other recently deceased heroes of the freedom and democracy movement.]
Faces of the new Cuba. Benedict XVI was in Cuba this week. There, where change is beaten among the Castro reforms and the demands of the famous dissidents, there are also more anonymous people who from their commercial undertakings, their rap music, or their graffiti, modify the face of the island. This is a tour of this new Havana labyrinth.

20 May 2013

Cubans One and All: Today is May 20, Independence Day / Ignacio Estrada

Tomas Estrada Palma

With my little note I just want to remember those who wrote history bequeathing the Cuban nation a date that today unites Cubans inside and outside the island.

Independence Day is one of the many festivals they have tried to rip from the memory of our nation. Like they have also ripped from one of our capital’s main arteries the name of the person who was the first president of that fledgling republic, leaving only his shoes and an empty pedestal never occupied by any Cuban.

Palma's empty pedastel, only his shoes remain. Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Palma’s empty pedestal, only his shoes remain. Photo: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Don Tomas Estrada Palma is a man worth remembering like those who drew their machetes for a May 20 that was entered into history as a day of glory. I know this date has been erased by those who have tried to show a history not told by our ancestors. The nascent Republic of 1902 is still worthy of being celebrated and is one of the indelible marks of our identity.

Blessed be they day of May 20, the birth date of our Republic of Cuba, island nation that jealously guards the key to the Gulf.

Today we have a Republic, today we have a Nation, today we have independence but our nation weeps to see the Cuban family disintegrate and see it abandoned to the whims of a few in olive-green who have been able to put themselves above all the interests of a group, that only cares for the throne and the perpetuation of its name.

20 May 2013

Three Memories of Angel Santiesteban / Miguel Iturria Savon

Angel Santiesteban

On September 2, 2011 I published the “SOS for Angel Santiesteban” in Cubanet, when despite his having been awarded multiple prizes by the regime itself, the Cuban government’s own political police were harassing the writer. In late 2012 Angel was sentenced to five years imprisonment after a show trial in which his ex-wife was used as a spearhead against him. I will not refer to details of the case because they are still circulating in various writings and in Santiesteban’s blog, but I will offer my personal impressions of this word artist.

Before personally coming to know the author of “Dreams of a Summer Day,” “The Children Nobody Wanted,” “Blessed are Those Who Mourn,” and “South: Latitude 13,” I read his books and listened to several anecdotes that reflected his temperament and satirizes the political situation in Cuba. It’s hard to forget some of the characters of his stories about prison and Cuba’s intervention in the wars of Africa. Perhaps the masterful design of these alienated beings who gallop through the pages of his works are the real cause of humiliating trial that attempted to annul his rebellion and the voice of this audacious man without masks.

As my son was Angel Santiesteban’s lawyer, I had the privilege of welcoming him to my home in Havana and chatting with him over a glass of water — Angel does not drink rum or coffee. We talked about literature and his family experience. Only once, when asked by one of his characters, did he reveal the traumatic imprint of his brief stay in prison before the age of 20, after being arrested on the northern coast while saying goodbye to a relative who tried to leave the island on a raft.

I met Santiesteban several times at the house of the blogger Yoani Sánchez and at cultural gatherings organized at the residence of the physicist Antonio Rodiles, leader of the Estado de Sats program. I remember that Angel barely took part in those debates and almost always sat at the end of the hall, far from poses and prominence poses but friendly with anyone who approached him. In the end he left in his car with 4 or 5 people whom he drove to, or closer to, their homes.

The last time we met was in front of the police station at Infanta and Manglar,  next to the “Fame and Applause” building, where fifty opponents demanded the release of Antonio Rodiles, arrested after the funeral of Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, who died in suspicious accident. We chatted there while Wilfredo Vallin and Reinaldo Escobar tried to negotiate with the Head of the Station, also surrounded by a gang of criminals who awaited orders from State Security officials to kick and drag opponents.

The judicial farce against Ángel Santiesteban reminds me of the famous narrator Reinaldo Arenas and the poets Heberto Padilla — imprisoned in 1971 — and Raul Rivero, sentenced in 2003, victims of a dictatorship that punishes free expression and promotes quietism and the complicit silence of the intellectuals.

19 May 2013

Dualities / Fernando Damaso

Photo Peter Deel

In the Republican Cuba each province had a governor and each municipality a mayor, who governed, in the case of the province with a Council of municipal mayors, and in the municipalities with a city council with councilors. The municipality was the local society organized politically to an extent determined by the necessary relations of vicinity, on a basis of financial capacity to meet the expenses of the government. It had autonomy, with powers to meet the peculiar collective needs of local society. The province was composed of the municipalities within its territory. So it was established in the Constitution of 1940.

From the year 1959, instead of perfecting what already existed, these structures were modified and, in the case of the municipality, which is what interests me, the mayor was replaced by a triumvirate of three commissioners, something also provided in the aforementioned Constitution, but with the number of commissioners in correspondence with the number of inhabitants in each municipality, rather than a fixed number for all.

As the experiment failed, due to the multiplicity of leaders, it was changed to just one, though with limited executive and financial power, and with the measures to be applied having to be approved or ordered by the central government.

In practice, the old town hall of municipal government became a mere administration. Then they experimented with the same dismal results, with the so-called JUCEI (Coordination, Operations and Inspection Boards, which were the municipal and provincial governing bodies). With the emergence of the People’s Power they thought that the problem would be resolved, looking to the experiences gained within the Republic and later, but these lessons were discarded, maintaining the inefficiency, now increased with the increase in bureaucracy.

The truly great problem is that, sitting on top of the existing bodies of government, both national as well as provincial and municipal, is the Party. It is no coincidence that every time there is a meeting of any of them, either the National Assembly or the provincial or municipal ones, the Party Plenary is held first and it establishes the scope and limits of what will be discussed and approve by the assemblies.

In this scheme, in reality the Party has the power, and of course it the Party that governs and the government (the People’s Power), are simply administrators. Herein lies its inability to solve problems, national as well as provincial and municipal. It is a duality similar to the two existing currencies where one, though it do not do so consciously, conspires against each other, because they occupy and act in the same small space.

In the capital this is the big problem, aggravated by the presence of the central government and its agencies and institutions, who influence and pressure the administration, which becomes an executor of the tasks of others, leaving its own tasks uncompleted.

The result is on view for all: broken streets and sidewalks without maintenance,  abandoned landscaping, chaotic garbage collection, terrible services of all kinds, buildings deteriorating and collapsing daily, poor health and other evils that affect citizens.

As long as our provincial and municipal governments do not have real, strong and resourceful leaders, who perform their duties as such, all this will be insoluble.

18 May 2013