Spotlight on Cuba: Sara Gómez 1

Programme

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  Isla del tesoro

  For three centuries, Isla de Pinos, Cuba’s “pine nut” or “treasure” island, was the domain of pirates, adventurers and buccaneers, and the inspiration for countless myths and legends. In his early years, the Cuban intellectual and liberationist José Marti lived in house arrest on the island.
  
  Following independence in 1898, new pirates came ashore: American entrepreneurs arrived to colonize it for plantations. Still later, the Cuban government built a huge prison for exiles, criminals and political dissidents.
  
  A rapid succession of scenes showing these events serves as an introduction to the Fidel Castro era, when the panoptic prison was dismantled and the island became a base for training young people to participate in Cuba’s revolution. This “youth island” is also the subject of Gómez’s documentaries On the Other Island and Una isla para Miguel.
  
  Isla del tesoro was digitally restored by Vulnerable Media Lab as part of the Sara Gómez Project.

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  Una isla para Miguel

  After the Cuban Revolution, the new government sent young people to Isla de Pinos for re-education. In this the second part of Sara Gómez’s trilogy on Isla de Pinos (now Isla de la Juventud), she follows the adolescent Miguel, who comes from a large, destitute single-parent family in Havana. Miguel is on the island to become an upright young man and a valued comrade in the new Communist state of Cuba.
  
  The ultra-disciplined group program helps Miguel avoid the gang life that draws in so many marginalized boys of color. Gómez films this forthright young man at the camp, and invites the camp leaders and Miquel’s comrades to have their say. In line with the ‘imperfect cinema’ tradition, the director tracks the progress of the revolution and in a dignified manner, presents people who would otherwise be neither seen nor heard. In the background we hear the Afro-Cuban jazz sounds of the legendary pianist and composer Chucho Valdés.
  
  Una isla para Miguel is being screened in a restored 4K version (restoration by Vulnerable Media Lab) of the last surviving 16mm print, from the archives of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC).

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  Sobre horas extras y trabajo voluntario

  A critical short film in black and white about the Cuban policy of unpaid overtime and “voluntary work” as part of plans for economic growth. At the 13th congress of the CTC, the Cuban state trade union movement, in 1973, workers from the textile industry question the value and necessity of this extra work.
  
  Male and female speakers are playfully edited together with a voice-over and captions, and revolutionary rhetoric is interrupted by critical notes about “the vice of unnecessary overtime,” sometimes to comic effect – as when praise for the virtue of voluntary work is followed by the word PERO... (BUT...) filling the screen. A worker calmly describes how she was sent to the same field three times as a volunteer to move the same stones – each time to a different place.
  
  This not only creates an ironic frame for propaganda footage of communist leaders Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh rolling up their sleeves among the workers, but also brings to mind the comparable pressure to put in unpaid overtime in today’s capitalist world.
  
  Sobre horas extras y trabajo voluntario was digitally restored by Vulnerable Media Lab as part of the Sara Gómez Project.

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  Mi aporte

  Mi aporte opens with what looks and feels like propaganda as an upbeat reporter interviews female factory workers – the shining examples in the dawning of a new, revolutionary Cuba. The Party has decreed that all women must get to work as part of the fight against imperialism.
  
  This uncritical opening is just a ruse, however, because Mi aporte (“my contribution”) actually offers a nuanced picture of this policy’s effects. We see men complaining that their female co-workers can’t physically manage the work, and that their “paternalism” compels them to take it over from them. And women explain that they soon had to stop working when it became clear that the childcare promised by higher-ups would never materialize.
  
  Made at the time as a topical discussion piece, the film now offers an intriguing portrait of a young revolution in progress. While Gómez and her co-creators, whose names appear in the egalitarian credits, clearly believe in the ideals of the revolution, they still dare to question aspects of its implementation. However, this didn’t please the film’s commissioner, the Federation of Cuban Women – the film ended up being censored.
  
  Mi aporte was digitally restored by Vulnerable Media Lab as part of the Sara Gómez Project.