Reviewed by: Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959 by Megan Feeney, and: Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema by Laura-Zoë Humphreys Rielle Navitski (bio) Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959 by Megan Feeney. University of Chicago Press. 2019. 320 pages. $105.00 hardcover; $35.00 paper; also available in e-book. Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema by Laura-Zoë Humphreys. Duke University Press. 2019. 304 pages. $104.95 hardcover; $27.95 paper; also available in e-book. In English-language film studies, perceptions of Cuban cinema are still shaped by an oft-romanticized period in the 1960s, when politically and formally radical works like the recently restored Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) emerged from the newly created Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and gained international renown. This vision of Cuban film persists despite growing scholarly interest in its transformation after the fall of the Soviet Union, the subject of recent book-length studies such as Enrique García's Cuban Cinema After the [End Page 208] Cold War, Nicholas Balaisis's Cuban Film Media, Late Socialism, and the Public Sphere, and Dunja Fehimović's National Identity in 21st Century Cuban Cinema.1 Two monographs join this recent crop of works examining Cuban film outside its most familiar parameters, with Megan Feeney's Hollywood in Havana addressing film culture on the island prior to 1959 and Laura-Zoë Humphreys's Fidel between the Lines largely focusing on Cuban cinema from the 1980s to the present. The iconic figure of Fidel Castro, rendered all but inseparable from the Revolution in the discourse of the authoritarian Cuban state, looms as a spectral presence in both books. Hollywood in Havana begins by evoking a famous 1959 photograph of Castro gazing upward at the Lincoln Memorial, a gesture that simultaneously pays homage to US principles of liberty and democracy and offers a rebuke of actual US policies that contradict these ideals. Both are implied by the image's citation of a moment from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which the idealistic protagonist, played by Jimmy Stewart, squares off against a corrupt political establishment.2 For Feeney, the photograph encapsulates how in the years prior to the Revolution, Hollywood cinema served as a means through which Cubans actively imagined political change, even as they resisted the United States' economic and cultural dominance on the island. Feeney writes, "Like Castro in the photo, Cuban film writers and moviegoers paid homage to US ideals and their heroes but also asserted themselves as agents of an adjudicating gaze rather than its passive objects."3 In Fidel between the Lines, Humphreys notes that satirical and critical references to Castro in film act as litmus tests for the shifting and uncertain limits of politically permissible cultural expression in Cuba, defined ambiguously in Castro's famous 1961 speech "Words to the Intellectuals" as "within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing."4 Humphreys argues that these perceived allusions to Castro—whether deliberately inserted by filmmakers or identified by audiences, who have developed a tendency toward "paranoid" modes of reading due to a climate of unpredictable repression—exemplify the dynamic, two-way process through which political allegory is constructed in contemporary Cuba, with creators and consumers playing equally significant roles. Humphreys observes that "[w]hile spectators argued about whether films harbored secret messages against the socialist state, veiled complicity with political leaders, or served as publicity stunts, filmmakers complained that these readings ignored the nuances of their depictions of Cuba and reduced their art to propaganda" and interrogates how "allegory and conflicts over textual interpretation shape [End Page 209] the public sphere."5 Whether focusing on production and audience reception, as in Humphreys's case, or on exhibition and film criticism, as in Feeney's, both books illuminate cinema's role in the collective construction of political imaginaries in Cuba. In her account of pre-revolutionary Cuban film culture, Feeney argues (repurposing language from a 1949 epigraph from Motion Picture Association of...