Who Is Cuba? Dispersed Protagonism and Heteroglossoa in <em>Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba</em>

Abstract

Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, CU, 1964) was a collaborative SovietCuban production. It was funded by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC), founded at the very outset of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s largest film production company, established in 1923, six years aft er the Bolshevik Revolution. It flopped both commercially and critically upon its release in 1964 and was largely unknown until the 1990s, when it came to the attention of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who subsequently promoted it. An interview with Scorsese is included in the latest DVD release of the film, and his insights will be referred to in this article. Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano/Soy Cuba, Siberian Mammoth (Vicenz Ferraz, BR, 2005), an informative documentary on the making of Soy Cuba and its later reemergence, is another important source for any study of the film because it contains interviews with many of the cast and crew of the production, which Ferraz refers to as “a unique film experience.” Th e documentary also gives the distinct impression that authorship of the film was dispersed among various members of the crew. Although it was directed by Georgian Mikhail Kalatozov, whose most notable other films include the early propagandistic documentaries Sol Svanetii/ Salt for Svanetia (SU, 1930) and Lursmani cheqmashi/Nail in the Boot (SU, 1934), as well as the later fiction features Neotpravlennoye pismo/Letter Unsent (USSR, 1959) and Letyat zhuravli/Th e Cranes Are Flying (USSR, 1957), the laconic screenplay was written by both the celebrated Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cuban scriptwriter Enrique Pineda Barnet. Russian cameraman Sergei Urusevsky, with whom Kalatozov had previously worked on Cranes, was in charge