Abstract
This chapter examines creative cinematic responses to the pervasive presence of the past in contemporary Cuba. It focuses on Fernando Perez’s unusual period piece or ‘biopic’, Jose Marti: El ojo del canario (2010), which attempts to humanise the iconic independence fighter by presenting him as a child, and Jorge Perugorria’s Se vende (2012), which adopts a more ironic, postmodern perspective on the personal and national pasts. Calling on Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida’s and ideas about photography, spectres, traces, melancholy, and mourning, this chapter argues that these films deliver affective injunctions, playing with the image’s fetishistic power that stands in for that which it simultaneously recreates as absent or dead. Informed by Svetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgias (2001), it shows how these very different films effectively recycle history in order to facilitate survival, combining new with old in a differential repetition that attests to the vitality of Cuban culture.
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