Cuba - Lonely Planet [36]
Cuba’s first notable postrevolutionary movie, the Cuban-Soviet made Soy Cuba (I am Cuba; 1964) dramatized the events leading up to the 1959 Revolution in four interconnecting stories and was once described by an American film critic as ‘a unique, insane, exhilarating spectacle.’
Serving his apprenticeship in the 1960s, Cuba’s most celebrated director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea cut his teeth directing art-house movies such as La Muerte de un Burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat; 1966), a satire on excessive socialist bureaucratization; and Memorias de Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment; 1968), the story of a Cuban intellectual too idealistic for Miami, yet too decadent for the austere life of Havana. Teaming up with fellow director Juan Carlos Tabío in 1993, Gutiérrez went on to make Cuba’s all-time movie classic, the Oscar-nominated Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) – the tale of Diego, a skeptical homosexual who falls in love with a heterosexual communist militant. It remains Cuba’s cinematic pinnacle.
Havana’s growing influence in the film culture of the American hemisphere is highlighted each year in the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano held every December in Havana. Described alternatively as the ultimate word in Latin American cinema or Cannes without the ass-kissing, this annual get-together of critics, sages and filmmakers has been fundamental in showcasing recent Cuban classics to the world, such as Viva Cuba (2005), a study of class and ideology as seen through the eyes of two children, and El Benny (2006), a biopic of mambo king Benny Moré.
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The 1964 Cuban-Soviet film Soy Cuba (I am Cuba) has recently been resurrected as an erst-while movie classic by a clutch of contemporary directors such as Martin Scorcese for its highly innovative tracking shots and poetic plot.
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To say that Cubans are cinema buffs would be a massive understatement: the crush of a crowd shattered the glass doors of a movie theater during the 2001 film festival in Havana and an adoring mob nearly rioted trying to get into Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report premier in 2002. If you’re headed for a flick, queue early.
Cuban TV has three national channels, no commercials and an obligatory nightly dose of political speeches (infinitely more boring since Fidel stepped down). Elsewhere, educational programming dominates, with Universidad Para Todos (University for All) offering full university-level courses in everything from astronomy to film editing. The news is a predictable litany of good things Cuba has done (eg big tobacco harvest, sending doctors to Africa) and bad things the US is up to (eg mucking around in the Middle East, big corporations buying influence). Mesa Redonda (Round Table) is a nightly ‘debate’ program where several people sharing the same opinion sit around discussing a topic of national or global importance. Telenovelas (soap operas) are a national obsession, and the latest favorite La Cara Oculta de la Luna (The Dark Side of the Moon) has been known to bring the country to a virtual standstill.
Architecture
In terms of style, Cuba is a smorgasbord of different architectural genres with influences ranging from Spanish Moorish to French neoclassical to decorative colonial baroque. Emerging relatively unscathed from the turmoil of three revolutionary wars, well-preserved cities such as Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba and Habana Vieja have survived into the 21st century with the bulk of their original colonial features remarkably intact. The preservation has been aided further by the nomination of Trinidad, Cienfuegos and Habana Vieja as Unesco World Heritage Sites.
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Memorias de Sub-desarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, was the first Cuban movie to be shown in the US after the Revolution (in 1968). It chronicles the travails of Sergio, a bourgeois writer undergoing feelings of ambivalence and alienation about Cuba’s new revolutionary order.
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Some of Cuba’s oldest and most engaging architectural