In Cuba, censorship of a documentary shakes the world of cinema

NEWS — The censorship of a documentary on the relationship between an Argentine star musician and Cuba has for several months provoked the anger of filmmakers on the island who are demanding to be able to exercise freely their art.

“Cuban cinema will be free or it will not be!” Cuban actor Luis Alberto Garcia said Tuesday to applause as he received an award at the Gibara International Film Festival in eastern Cuba.

The actor dedicated his award to the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers, made up of around 400 professionals, who recently protested the censorship of a documentary called “La Havana de Fito” which tells the story of the bond that Argentine rocker Fito Paez, a celebrity in Latin America, has had with the Cuban capital since the 1980s.

“It was the straw that broke the camel's back for a number of historical problems and censorships within the culture of the Cuban revolution,” director Juan Pin Vilar, 60, told AFP.

It all started in April when the Ministry of Culture banned the screening of three documentaries, including Juan Pin Vilar's, in a small independent cultural space in La Havana.

Faced with the filmmaker's protests, the documentary was finally broadcast on Cuban television, but incomplete and without the authorization of the author, the producer, or the singer.

According to the director, the authorities' reaction concerns a passage in the film where Fito Paez questions the official version of the death of revolutionary guerrilla Camilo Cienfuegos, who disappeared in 1959, and the death sentence in 2003 of three young people who had hijacked a boat to emigrate to the United States.

The broadcast of the film on television prompted some 600 artists to sign a declaration denouncing this type of “procedures (…) that have become systematic” in Cuban cinema. Among the signatories are singer Silvio Rodriguez, director Fernando Pérez and Jorge Perugorría, the lead actor in the iconic “Strawberry and Chocolate” (1993).

“Showing (the film) on television encourages piracy” and “ruins the life it could have in international festivals,” Miguel Coyula, a 46-year-old filmmaker who says he shoots his films clandestinely to avoid police harassment, told AFP.

He screened his film Corazon Azul (2021) at home for two years, which was shown at a few festivals abroad but ignored by Cuban theaters. “It's as if we had sold out Chaplin twice,” he says, referring to Havana's main movie theater.

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It was in this theater that an unprecedented meeting took place at the end of June between members of the Assembly of Filmmakers and government officials, including the representative of the ideological department of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC).

The debates became tense when Miguel Coyula began to film certain interventions, despite warnings from the president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), Ramon Samada.

“We are independent filmmakers, we are ready to be arrested, because our job is to film!” Miguel Coyula can be heard shouting in a video posted on YouTube.

A few days later, the director of the ICAIC was replaced and the authorities announced the creation of a working group to address the concerns of professionals.

The Assembly of Filmmakers, which learned of the creation of this group on television, responded by stating that it had not received answers to the “specific and systematic questions of censorship and exclusion” and requested a new meeting.

In an interview with the independent Cuban media outlet El Toque, Fito Paez joined the controversy: “I am a friend of the Cuban people (…) They do not represent the Cuban people,” he said, referring to the ministry officials.

For Maria Isabel Alonso, a specialist in Cuban literature and culture at St. Joseph's University in New York, the controversy is a “symptom of a larger, systemic problem: the right to freedom of artistic expression of creators, in conflict with a moralistic and ideological vision promoted by the authorities.”

In November 2020, some 300 artists organized an unprecedented demonstration to demand more freedom of expression. The dialogue with the ministry had been cut short.

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