Driving a Dead Body through the Nation: Death and Allegory in the Film "Guantanamera"

Abstract

Humor is a serious affair. (Jacques Prevert) You laugh at your own risk. (Luis E. Aguilar) The first shot in the film presents a plane landing on the island of Cuba. As the aircraft approaches, and the initial extreme long shot transforms into a medium long shot, the camera pans from right to left in a foretelling of what the film's journey is about: a journey physically and metaphorically from east to west. The one and a half minute shot, with its nondiegetic sound of the rhythmic, popular song Guantanamera playing in the background, concludes with a close up of the airplane displaying the word Cubana--the name of the only national airline--and an image of the nation's flag. From the beginning, the aesthetic decisions of cinematography and mise-en-scene establish the national boundaries and symbols that the film portrays, parodies and embraces all at the same time. Guantanamera, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio in 1994, functions asa national allegory--a counterhegemonic project within the Revolution and inside the space of the island. By parodying the experience of Revolutionary Cuba within a postrevolutionary era, reveals how, in fact, two intersecting societal modes currently exist side by side within the island. Furthermore, by utilizing an allegorical structure and in particular a specifically Cuban form of allegory called choteo, the film enables a rethinking of the transformative possibilities within the status quo. In the end, portrays the potential for a more integral and overlapping society where the individual and the collective, the personal and the public, do exclude each other, but supplement each other, contrary to what two ideologies--communism (extreme collectivity) and capitalism (extreme individualism)--stand for. The Revolution and Beyond The Marxist ideology of class struggle and nationalism has deliberately concealed individual, ethnic, or gendered subjective consciousness in the name of the unifying salvation of the Revolution. Identifying such subjectivities with bourgeois, antisocialist ideologies, the mainstream of the Revolutionary apparatus has suppressed any attempt at resistance among marginalized groups (for example, homosexuals, women, and Afrocubans, among others). The official slogan toward the problems of marginal groups in revolutionary Cuba has been not to limit the scope of the [national] as Carlos Franqui points out when commenting about Fidel Castro's positioning of issues of racism (qtd. in Moore, 7). Gender or ethnic identity struggles are subordinated to national struggle, and in this subordination, difference within Cuba is rhetorically covered up. So, for example, despite the effort to accommodate women's agendas by creating the Federation of Women in 1960 (controlled by the Communist Party), the Revolution has passed over key feminist aspirations. communism integrated women into society, but did so merely by increasing the number of women in the work force to meet the growing economic demand in the development of the island. On the one hand, the Federation enlisted more than 80% of the female population in the country and worked to incorporate women into the labor force. The Federation also tried to seriously formulate an agenda for women to be part, and in support, of the Revolution (Randall 25). On the other hand, the feminist movement in Cuba still has developed a feminist-conscious discourse that is able to deal with issues of inequality and sexism, due to the fact that the most important ground for the group has been the Marxist idea that egalitarian economic relations would erase differences and discrimination, thereby surpassing the patriarchal system embedded in the cultural heritage. While there have been productions such as Retrato de Teresa (directed by Pastor Vega, 1979) which intend to question the role of women and men, and the double standard that exists for them both, there have also been productions that reinforce the stereotypical machismo. …