Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

260 reframing latin america
Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky. In 1958 they won the top prize at
Cannes with The Cranes are Flying. Soy Cuba was coscripted by the Russian
poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cuban novelist Enrique Piñeda Barnet.
The fi lm is typically both praised as an aesthetic and cinematographic
achievement and denounced as anti-American propaganda. The task of the
semiotician, however, is not to pass judgment on the fi lm but to examine
the discourse that speaks through the text, which is often disparate from
the intentions of the fi lmmakers. Soy Cuba is a particularly stark case
of this latter phenomenon. Despite the fi lm’s anticapitalist stance in legitimizing
socialism for Cuba and for the world, it was criticized by Castro as
counterrevolutionary and censured in Cuba and the Soviet Union. It was
rescued from cultural oblivion in the capitalist West—fi rst in 1992 by the
Telluride Film Festival for a tribute to Kalatozov, and later in 1995 by Francis
Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese who, with Milestone Films, restored
and re-released it with English subtitles (thereby, in a sense, entering it into
the capitalist canon).
All of this provides evidence that Soy Cuba inadvertently challenges
its own pro-socialist pretensions. Our contention is that because the fi lm
is deeply rooted in an appeal to Cuban essence, it runs the risk of opposing
socialism’s ideology of universalism. Moreover, we argue that its unwitting
engagement with patriarchal presuppositions is at odds with the revolution’s
professed commitment to gender equity. Finally, the fi lm’s intention to portray
the failure of religion in the characters’ lives inadvertently conveys
the sense that prerevolutionary Cubans were devout Catholics who were
subsequently denied the right to religious practice. This presents a dangerous
assertion, since Cuba was officially declared an atheistic state after the
revolution when religious practice purportedly became a nonissue for most
Cubans, rather than being severely restricted by the new government.
Filming of the movie began in 1962, just two weeks after the Cuban missile
crisis and three years after Fidel Castro came to power. It comprises four
principal stories that defi ne Batista’s Cuba through the hardships and injustices
suffered by the Cuban people at the hands of their dictator and the U.S.
capitalists who pull his strings for their own gain. Each story promotes the
seeds of resistance that will eventually become a popular revolution toppling
the dictatorial regime. A female narrator links the stories by reciting
Yevtushenko’s poetry in a mournful but fi rm voice-over and repeating the
title refrain, “Soy Cuba,” to signal the end of one defi ning episode and usher
in the next. From the young Havana couple whose future together is ruined
by poverty, repression, and imperialism to the sugar farmer who torches his
own house and cane fi elds in rebellion against the United Fruit Company