Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gender

Abstract

In Cuban director Tomis Gutidrrez Alea's film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), there is a brief scene in which a panel of male, erudite, and middle-class-looking Latin American writers are discussing the role of the intellectual in Latin American society, only to be interrupted by an anonymous member of the audience (North American playwright Jack Gelber). Why, he demands, if they are so revolutionary, do they not allow for a more active engagement the part of the audience? Immediately preceding this intervention, Edmundo Desnoes, author of the novel which the film is based, has expounded the tendency of North Americans to view all Latin Americans as blacks while an Afro-Cuban waiter, positioned to the left of Desnoes in the same frame, silently pours glasses of water for the panel's lightskinned participants. This scene anticipates, in a metaphoric nutshell, a dilemma recently facing postrevolutionary Cuban cinema: have issues of difference along lines of gender, race, and sexual preference (in addition to class) been adequately addressed within the established institutional channels, or is there a pressing need to create more autonomous spaces within which diverse subjectivities and identities can be represented on their own terms?1 In light of the focus of this issue of Frontiers, I will be addressing the specific directions taken by women's representation in postrevolutionary film, in the hope that this will contribute to a cross-cultural dialogue. In any social and artistic context, the struggle toward cinematic self-representation for individuals and collectivities the margins involves an interrogation of hegemonic styles and themes, as well as of