Memory in Contemporary Cuban Film and Digital Media, livre ebook

How Cuba’s contemporary mediascape is challenging official histories, recovering memories, and redefining identities

This volume shows how Cuban filmmakers, journalists, and activists use film and other digital media to create competing notions of memory and history that challenge official narratives about Cuban society. In the wake of the economic and ideological crises of Cuba’s Special Period, suppressed political differences and personal experiences have resurfaced in the contemporary mediascape, which has become a principal political arena for Cubans both inside and outside the island.

In this volume, contributors examine topics including how filmmakers use audio to subvert official histories, media representations of sanatoriums and other settings at the margins of the Revolution, and a COVID-era digital archive that preserves personal memories outside government oversight. By tracing the interplay of film, digital technologies, and the internet, contributors reveal how alternative archives and online platforms resist state-sanctioned stories, circulate new materials, and broaden ideas of citizenship, time, and identity. Together, these essays offer fresh perspectives on the complexities of Cuba’s late-socialist context.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Dunja Fehimović, Reynaldo Lastre, Nils Longueira Borrego, and Isdanny Morales Sosa

1. Sensing the Past

1. Thwarted Communication and Destinies: “Russia” in a Twenty-First-Century Cuban Cinematographic Repository

Jacqueline Loss

2. Bodily Archives: The Cinema of Alejandro Alonso as Reenacted Memories

Celia Rodríguez Tejuca

3. A Crisis of Listening: The Sonic Afterlives of the Cuban Revolution in Eliecer Jiménez Almeida’s Isla

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

2. Entangled Temporalities

4. Interventions in the Revolutionary Past: Working with Memory in the Documentaries Entre perro y lobo and Los puros

Ángel Pérez

5. The Archive on Fire: Past and Present in Sueños al pairo and El caso Padilla

Isdanny Morales Sosa

6. Specters, Hauntology, and Avatars in Independent Cuban Cinema

Reynaldo Lastre

3. Dystopia and Citizenship

7. Persona and the Invention of Politics in Contemporary Cuban Cinema

Nils Longueira Borrego

8. The Long Slog of Totalitarianism: Contemporary Cuban Cinema as Dystopian Regime

Dean Luis Reyes

9. Confined Spaces and the Margins of Cuban Revolutionary Society in Pavel Giroud’s El acompañante

Lauren Peña

10. Interrupting Cuban Cinema’s Archontic Power of Consignation: Carlos Lechuga and Marco A. Castillo’s Generación and José Luis Aparicio Ferrera’s Tundra as Anarchaeological and Anarchivist Narratives

Walfrido Dorta

4. Beyond and against the Archive

11. Cine cubano en cuarentena: Archives, Databases, and Variants of Cuban Cinema

Dunja Fehimović

12. Cuban Queer/Trans and Black Lives Online: Archives, Anarchaeologies, and Activisms

Darien Sánchez Nicolás and Zaira Zarza

13. “Film Me; I Am Also Filming You”: Livestreams, Fake News, and Cuba’s (Still) Paranoid Public Sphere

Laura-Zoë Humphreys

List of Contributors

Index