Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone. My name is Alexandria Miller, your host of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture. Back again to share not only my love of Caribbean history with you but some of the really exciting moments and things that I recently came across. And so one of the moments I recently learned about was the fact that in 1974, a Cuban organization, the Cuban Film Institute, a Cuban organization, the Cuban Film Institute Well, that's the English version, but you know, in Cuba it's known as the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, or otherwise known as the ICAIC, which we'll talk more about throughout our conversation today.

Speaker 1: 0:58

But they organized a pirated showing of popular American 70s movies the Godfather, part 1 and 2, and I just thought it was so funny. For a lot of reasons, of course. You know anybody who's a little bit familiar with Cuba at this time, especially the 70s. You know it's Cold War, us and Cuba embargo, and all of these things are happening. So it was really ironic for me to learn that. You know, there is this state-sanctioned showings of American films happening. It was also pirated which brings us to a whole nother set of you know thoughts and questions that we'll also get to in our conversation today. But yeah, for me it was like, okay, it's state-sanctioned, it's also pirated, which to me, brought me to you know how oftentimes we in the global South or other parts of the world have to get access to things which is not always the most direct route as well, as you know, of course, these connections between pirates in the Caribbean and all of these things, right. But, all that to be said, we'll unpack a lot of these ideas.

Speaker 1: 2:01

But it brought me to this thinking of the Caribbean film industries, and in a different perspective. So we've had a conversation about films in the Caribbean, but primarily from the, you know, anglophone Caribbean perspective, and so I really wanted us to unpack what it looks like in different parts of the region, so in a place like Cuba and in Puerto Rico, which are our concentrations for today. So, before I jump right in, joining me for this exploration of film industries in the Hispanic Caribbean is Dr Pedro Noel D'Orestes Rodriguez, the assistant professor in the film studies program at Michigan State University. And so, dr Rodriguez, thank you so much for joining us. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your connection to the Caribbean and what inspired this passion for film for you?

Speaker 2: 2:48

Yeah, well, first off, alexandria, thank you for having me here, New fan of your podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:54

So yeah, I am originally from Puerto Rico, born and raised there, but my family is of Cuban descent, so I always had an affinity toward both islands growing up and I actually was a relatively late arrival to Caribbean cinema and Latin American cinema broadly.

Speaker 2: 3:13

So what I'm saying is don't look up my master's thesis, because it's something else entirely. But yeah, I just sort of like really got into Cuban cinema, particularly when I was a master's student, to sort of like helping me understand Cuban politics. You know which, if you know anything about Cuban exile politics, then you know it's very one-sided. So growing up within that environment kind of gave me like a very narrow view of Cuban history, and cinema opened that up for me. And then I just thought, you know, during my PhD program, you know what, if you know, I could do through Puerto Rican cinema, through studying Puerto Rican film history, what Cuban cinema and Cuban film history had already done for me. Puerto Rican film history is a little bit more obscure, more scarce, more scattered. So it's sort of become my life's work, I guess, to sort of fill in those historical gaps.

Speaker 1: 4:05

A lot of us who have at least been on my show, have certainly come to this point, through our research, of really understanding ourselves and where we come from.

Speaker 1: 4:14

So tremendous to have you. You picked up a little bit on a point that I definitely want us to underscore as we really begin the conversation. It's that the Cuban film industry has existed for a lot longer than several of the other places that we'll discuss today or in the greater Caribbean in general, and, you know, in a lot of ways that's obviously due to US investment and US companies in Hollywood, which you know we might want to also discuss, discuss. But there is this particular moment in the latter 20th century where we see companies and organizations like ICAIC, which I mentioned earlier, another one, the Puerto Rican Division of Community Education, really coming up, as you know, instrumental in this political time frame, given the Cold War, given, you know, radical calls to independence that are happening not just in the Caribbean but throughout the world. And so could you sort of frame this moment for us, not just in the formation of these organizations but also how this stands against the longer history of film in both Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Speaker 2: 5:21

Yeah, well, as you already allude to Alexandria, these are what's the saying. Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird, both their modern history you know the last 130 years or so and their film history are like intertwined. That came to Cuba and came to Puerto Rico. A lot of people or historians thought that it was filmed in Puerto Rico scenes of the Spanish-American War, you know the Rough Riders, all of that but a lot of it was filmed in the US as sort of like war propaganda. So there's this idea that our national cinemas are already sort of, you know, there's blurred boundaries between them and I guess that's kind of what ties Cuban and Puerto Rican cinema together in the post-war period, right.

Speaker 2: 6:10

So what really unites a lot of these what I call minor or developing cinemas post-World War II is this idea of underdevelopment, right? So there are various ways to combat that. Going around the world around the time, puerto Rico had one direction, sort of like becoming a United States Commonwealth right, aligning themselves with US-styled democracy and capitalist sort of systems, whereas Cuba sort of languished under dictatorship for the better part of that mid-century period and of course had their own revolution, which instead instituted a socialist and communist government, a sort of state-controlled cultural organisms and art institutions such as the Ikaik. So what I'm really interested in in these two sort of comparative cases is how national cinemas, state-sponsored national cinemas, can be constructed, you know, to combat underdevelopmentalism from two different political frameworks. On the one hand, you have, like the liberal internationalism and liberal sort of humanism of the DeVetco films and the DeVetco program, which is, you know I'll talk about it more in detail but essentially what it was telling the Puerto Rican peasant class is to don't rely on the government to solve your own problems, right? Basically, what they wanted to do is to sort of shrink the Puerto Rican welfare state in line with the overall project of like depopulating the island slowly in order to sort of like prime it for American and foreign capital investment.

Speaker 2: 7:48

So the De Vecchio basically was teaching people in the countryside how to make water safe to drink right, how to combat alcoholism in your community, how to build your own bridges, your own schools, your own sort of like public infrastructure, so that you can essentially like become independent of the government in these areas.

Speaker 2: 8:08

Of course, you and I know that the government wasn't really interested in developing those areas, which is why this program sort of like you know, to continue with the bird metaphors killing two birds with one stone, I guess Whereas the Icaic, on the other hand, suffering from many of the symptoms of underdevelopment that Puerto Rico was suffering from in the 1950s, the Icaic had a totally different sort of approach. Even as the topics that both state-sponsored film entities sort of took on you know like how to make your own house, how to practice self-subsistence, farming, things like that, you know gender equality, how to participate in politics and electoral politics the Ikaik still had a much more nationalist and radical sort of bent to their educational cinema. And these are some of the differences that I kind of want to talk about today, that I kind of want to talk about today.

Speaker 1: 9:02

One of the interesting parts to me about this exploration, why I definitely wanted to have you on the show, is, while, of course, you know there are several ways that films become educational tools, they become markers of you know where we are at a time period and how we understand ourselves, all of the sort of more emotional understandings to film beyond just being like a source of entertainment.

Speaker 1: 9:28

Right, these two organizations really intentionally, were predicated on, as you're saying, right, teaching things like subsistence farming, like how to vote, how to participate in politics.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Right, these weren't industries film industries that just sparked out of, you know, a capitalist desire to like, make money and entertain people. Right, and of course, that's definitely a part of the times that they were launched in. So, for DeVetco in Puerto Rico, established in 1949, for Ike in Cuba, established in 1959. So, you know, 10 years apart and really just wanting for us to understand that, that is a critical part of you know the point of these organizations, and it's not to say that there weren't certainly like other film industries and things happening alongside what these two organizations have going on, but it's really tremendous for us to think about it not necessarily being in some ways a marker of nationalism, but also really about the individual as opposed to about the state framework, which I think is different from sometimes how we see films. Could you share a little bit more with us about you know how you saw these organizations really being champions of identity in Puerto Rico and in Cuba and reshaping these ideas of who these individuals are and the legacies of imperialism?

Speaker 2: 10:54

Yeah, that's a great question and actually a very complicated one in the case of Puerto Rico. So I'll start with them. So Puerto Rico didn't have an established sort of like film industry. Neither country had really like a national cinema prior to their respective reforms or revolutions, but Puerto Rico really had nothing. You know, the US was sort of embroiled in World War II Immediately afterwards. It's like there wasn't sort of fertile ground for film production in Puerto Rico.

Speaker 2: 11:23

What did happen is, with the liberalization of Puerto Rican politics or sort of ground for film production in Puerto Rico, what did happen is, with the liberalization of Puerto Rican politics or sort of. You know, puerto Ricans were finally allowed to elect a Puerto Rican born governor right, as opposed to having a US state appointed or US state born and elected governors prior to 1948. So these sort of like changes in Puerto Rican politics brought with them new sort of civic responsibilities for this newly constituted citizenry. The De Vetco sort of stood in to explain to the populace, really in a very paternalistic way, how they fit into this rapidly changing society and industry. So of course we had this huge shift from agricultural industry to more industrialization, to more urban life. We became much more of an import economy as well around this time. So that led to growing divides and wealth inequality. It resulted in mass migration of Puerto Ricans from the islands to urban centers along the East Coast in the US and elsewhere as well. So the DeVetco was kind of like a sort of like palliative, in a way, for the psychic shock of, you know, being Puerto Rican poor and working class in the 1940s and 50s. A lot of the films tapped into this sense of Puerto Rican identity and Puerto Rican nationalism to sort of create this sense of community. But a lot of Puerto Rican historians and just critics of Puerto Rican culture have taken this moment as a sort of like a missed opportunity.

Speaker 2: 12:59

Right, this was the decade in the 1950s, particularly in 1952, where Puerto Rico sort of crystallized its colonial relationship to the United States by voting in favor of the referendum that created the continued US occupation of Puerto Rico. As we became a free, associated state is the official designation, which we can talk about that for hours. But yeah, so as part of this arrangement there were concerns by many politicians but also many Puerto Ricans about what would this mean to our culture. You know the US had already instituted limitations on the expression of, you know, autochthonous Puerto Rican culture, be it language, be it music, be it flying their own flag, right? So this sort of arrangement with the US came with some caveats.

Speaker 2: 14:02

What the governor of Puerto Rico at the time, luis Muñoz Marín. What he did was that he created this vast arts and cultural apparatus of which the de Betco was a part, to sort of give Puerto Ricans a sense of identity, pride, through cultural nationalism instead of political sovereignty and self-determination, which is, it may seem like a very cut and dry way to put it, but it is essentially what ended up happening. And what's important is that Luis Muñoz Marín never thought that the Commonwealth was going to be a permanent sort of arrangement with the US. He always thought that it was going to be a path towards a form of independence in the future. But of course he passed away without ever seeing that and we're still stuck in the same sort of political stalemate with the US. So the DeVetco came from this very flawed sort of calculus of how can we implement a sort of universal understanding of Puerto Rican identity in place of Puerto Rican, you know, self-determination, sovereignty in place of an actual Puerto Rican state, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 15:16

So, on the other hand, almost 10 years to the day, the ICAIC, the Cuban Film Institute, was one of the first laws that the revolutionary Cuban government passed. I think the revolution triumphs in January 1959. In March, the law that created the GIC had already been created, and then what came afterwards was like a vast propaganda and education campaign, basically trying to involve the entirety of Cuba into the revolutionary changes right and reforms that were happening. So these early, mostly documentary works focused more on, like, explaining the land reform that was happening in Cuba, explaining, you know, sort of property rights in Cuba, even of people who had been completely disenfranchised during the prior regime. During the literacy campaign, cinema played an essential part of this vast educational initiative. So, really, the Gaique was initially a vehicle for the revolution and the reforms that came from that.

Speaker 2: 16:27

What is curious, though, is that a lot of the same sort of topics, techniques and styles that the DeVetco used to train their own, you know, working class Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, cuba seemed to tap into the same strategies, and this is something that you know if you talk to any film historian. In either Rico, cuba seemed to tap into the same strategies, and this is something that you know if you talk to any film historian in either island, they'll say like, oh yeah, of course there are. You know, the Icaic was based on the Devedco. But you know, it's kind of been like the holy grail for me to sort of like find evidence of this, and maybe it's a fool's errand, but I'll keep trying.

Speaker 2: 17:02

But just by watching the films you can see how similar they are the people, the audiences, the way that the films were made, by, you know, going out into the countryside, consulting their communities. Like, hey, what are your biggest issues right now? And the community would respond well, kids are getting bilharzia when they, you know, go to the river and play in the river. Or kids are getting bilharzia when they, you know, go to the river and play in the river. Or kids are getting sick when they go to the river. So they put out this campaign against, like you know, parasites and against, like, making sure not to go in like bodies of water if you have like an open wound, things like that. So they were responding to the same sort of social ills but through different sort of like means.

Speaker 2: 17:45

I guess the other thing that they really had in common that was kind of exceptional around the time, was the mobile cinema unit. So each institute had a mobile cinema unit, which sounds very fancy but it's literally just a van with a screen and a projector. They would take it out into the countryside, they would organize sort of afternoon-long programming, cultural programming for specific villages, they would have reading groups, they would have sort of vernacular theater and then they would end with a screening of their films and a sort of public forum to discuss what the films were about, to discuss the films in relation to the literature that they were circulating. So it was all this very sort of democratic way of, you know, of engaging with a state-sponsored project. So you know, a lot of people have dismissed both the DeVetco and the Geik as propaganda.

Speaker 2: 18:45

Propaganda doesn't necessarily need to have these negative connotations, right, propaganda can just be understood, as you know. A public service announcement, right, brush your damn teeth. Who's going to disagree with that? So if somebody comes to you and has told you for decades that you can't vote, right Because you're a union member, for example, and then the revolution triumphs, they come to your house, they knock on your door and it's like hey, welcome back to Cuban democracy. This is what you have to do to make your voice heard. That's the sort of like propaganda or public service announcement that anybody can get behind, and that's what the ICAIC was, and the DVEDCO, to a lesser extent, were trying to do.

Speaker 1: 19:28

So I'd imagine that, you know, based on that, there was at least in my mind to make sense that there was a pretty positive response to these organizations or feel free to correct me if that's not true.

Speaker 1: 19:40

As you're saying, right, if an organization is telling me how to clean water, how to take care of my kids, like that seems to be, you know, a lot more beneficial, especially in rural places of the islands, as opposed to you know who to vote for, or to an extent maybe, but you know it's not strictly political, is more so. What I'm trying to say, right, it's also about the social well-being of the communities, which I find really impressive. But I guess, to that point then, what were some of the strengths and weaknesses of both organizations? And another piece that I'd be really interested to hear about is, I'm sure, based off these organizations, there are filmmakers that are, you know, growing and developing their own craft, coming through them. So how do they play a factor in not only what is happening with the organizations but also how the organizations are influencing these? You know, more modern set of filmmakers coming out of Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Speaker 2: 20:34

Excellent question. I'll focus on the individual filmmakers first, because that's sort of an approach that's usually not used in the case of the DeVetco. In the case of the Ikaik, it's very well known, their filmmakers are very well known as individual artists. In the case of the DeVeco, that's not really the case. So in the Icaic, of course, there are the major figures, the first of which is Alfredo Guevara. Alfredo Guevara was the founder of the Icaic, but long before then he was one of Fidel Castro's best friends. He founded a sort of cine club and film library with two filmmakers who would eventually also become part of the founding group of the ICAIC. These are very well known Tomás Gutiérrez-Alea and Julio García Pinoza. You know, if you've seen Memories of Underdevelopment, then you've seen Gutiérrez-Alea film. So yeah, these three. But later, people like Sara Gomez, like you know, an Afro-Cuban woman filmmaker who was a pioneering presence in Cuban documentary but also Latin American documentary proper, who is just now getting her due as all her films are being restored I think it's York University, so keep an eye out on that. People like Humberto Solas, right, fernando Perez. So Cuba has this storied history of like auteurs, right Like film filmmakers who had their own signature styles. The DeVetco didn't quite have that.

Speaker 2: 22:03

The DeVetco was mostly founded by North American filmmakers or North American artists who became filmmakers when they went to Puerto Rico. Among the most famous ones are Jack and Irene Delano and Edwin and Louis Roskam. So you'll notice these are two couples. They were photographers, all of them who worked in the New Deal, so I think they worked for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and early 40s. They did some work in Puerto Rico in the early 40s, which is how they sort of fell in love with the island In the immediate post-war years where you know the US sort of started paying attention to Puerto Rico as a sort of strategic military point. But also, you know, they were kind of forced because of growing unrest in the island to pay attention to what they were doing down there. They sent Jack Delano and the Roskins to Puerto Rico to sort of start this film and graphics and literature program through the Parks and Recreation Department for some reason. And basically it was an early DeVetco. This is 1946 into 47. So a lot of films about sort of, you know, boiling your water before drinking it, washing your hands. There's a really important one about sort of blood drawing right and getting your blood drawn to be able to like find diseases or find you know how doctors are gonna use needles and things like that. And that was like the immediate precursor to the De Vetco.

Speaker 2: 23:41

Once the De Vetco was founded in 1949, luis Munoz Marin, the governor, makes it a point to hire local talent, right To sort of like treat the De Vetco as quote local talent, right To sort of like treat the DeVetco as quote a schoolhouse on the screen. And that was a schoolhouse not just for the audiences, right, the people in the villages who were watching the films, but also the filmmakers and the graphic artists and the screenwriters who were making the films. So among this early group you have Amin Caltirado. So among this early group you have Amin Caltirado, you have Luis Maisonet, you have Ángel F Rivera, michael Smetancourt, so a lot of Puerto Rican artists who were usually involved somewhere between the theater and the screen, right, sometimes as actors, other times they were directors. The DeVetco basically taught these artists to play different roles and through the 1950s they all sort of developed in their own direction, but of course their formations as artists were facilitated by the De Vetco itself.

Speaker 2: 24:46

It's important to note that the De Vetco wasn't just a film program, right. It had three production sections that were called cinema, graphics and literature, and in each one of these you have, like, huge names in the art scene of the Tevetco. Some of them were already huge in the 1940s and 50s, others became so through the Tevetco. So in the literature you can name people like René Marqués, pedro Juan Soto, emilio Díaz-Balcalce, so very well-known novelists of the time. In graphics you have Rafael Tufiño and Lorenzo Omar, which I hate this term, but if anybody in Puerto Rico uses the phrase old masters they're usually referring to people like Lorenzo Mar and Rafael Tufiña.

Speaker 2: 25:35

But the thing about having like these very seasoned artists in the Divetco is that they were able to train like a newer generation of Puerto Rican artists that sort of developed their own voice, their own style and, in terms of cinema, their own vision. And I'm not going to get too into the individual trajectories of each artist, because it's all very fascinating how they all individually wanted to construct the national cinema in Puerto Rico, in which the De Vetco would only be a small part. So they tried to use the De Vetco as a sort of jumping off point to make a national cinema, and they all had different proposals for it. Some of them wanted to work exclusively through the De Vetco right. They truly believed in the governor's agenda right of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth. Others tried to use the De Vetco to sort of further their own film careers by getting the De Vetco to pay for film schools, getting the DeVetco to pay to go to film seminars or film festivals in Europe and all that and they sort of built a vast network that way.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Others jumped into a nascent private film industry in Puerto Rico, and when I say private I mean mostly Hollywood B-movies and sort of like early exploitation cinema that was being filmed in the island. So a lot of films from the 1950s that say that they're set in the South Pacific are actually made in Puerto Rico. Things like that, that type of really bad film, softcore, pornography there was a lot of that in the 1960s being filmed in Puerto Rico. You know, as theaters started struggling getting people into the through the doors they started showing more skin in the 60s. So Puerto Rico became sort of like the playground for excuse my language, but the shittiest kinds of film that you can imagine. And DeVetco filmmakers sort of use these opportunities to polish their technique, to like further their own careers and in a lot of respects it was a sort of like failed project. A lot of them ended up working in television or going back to the theater, or they entered academia, became teachers, became professors, which is not a failure in their own right, but it definitely did not meet the standards that they had set themselves, which was to create a Puerto Rican national cinema.

Speaker 2: 27:59

And then the one artist that I do want to talk about that sort of unites these two islands is Oscar Torres. Oscar Torres was a Dominican filmmaker who joined the DeVetco in 1954, made three films for them between 54 and 58. And in 59, he mysteriously disappears from Puerto Rico and reappears in Cuba in 1960, making films for the Icaic. So there are a lot of gaps in his record, but he's a fascinating character. He grew up in a relatively well-placed family in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. All of them were avowed anti-Trujillo organizers and activists and they funded sort of like anti-Trujillo or anti-dictatorship organizations and all that. His cousin, moises de Soto, was a very well-known Dominican revolutionary right who famously conspired against Trujillo in the 1940s. Then Oscar Torres himself sort of got in trouble in the Dominican Republic for attending these meetings and sort of like agitating against Trujillo and sort of like agitating against Trujillo even as he was working as a film critic for Rafael Trujillo's newspaper El Caribe. So while he was publishing reviews of Italian neorealist films, he was sort of like calling for Trujillo's head, you know, moonlighting as a revolutionary. So in the 1950s he gets exiled from the Dominican Republic. You know, very common around those days. It was either like leave the island or mysteriously disappear.

Speaker 2: 29:38

He goes to Rome to study film at the Centro Experimental de Cinematografia, which is their film school in Italy and basically where Italian neorealism was being taught to the rest of the world. And once there he went to all sorts of film festivals, you know, in the Soviet Union but also the sort of satellite countries around there. So he went to Prague, he went to Poland, he went to Romania and sort of was exposed to this sort of radical and experimental cinema that he didn't know of beforehand. He was very Western in his sort of like tastes and that radicalized him even more. And over there in Rome he also meets Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Julio Garcia Pinosa, who themselves were fleeing a dictator in Cuba, you know, under the guise of like furthering their film education. So these three meet there. They all graduate in 1953.

Speaker 2: 30:39

In 54, oscar Torres goes to Puerto Rico, while the other two return to Cuba. His credentials right as a graduate of the Rome Film School to join the DeVetco and because he has all this training, he basically becomes the most seasoned filmmaker, or at least you know, caribbean-born filmmaker, in the DeVetco. So he could be director of photography, he could be director, he wrote screenplays right, he was an actor we already know. He was a film critic and journalist. So really, even though he was like an actor, we already know he was a film critic and journalist. So really, even though he was like one of the younger members, he was more experienced than a lot of them and he was Dominican, which is a story that's not really told about the DeVetco.

Speaker 2: 31:23

The DeVetco, this grand national project built on Dominican labor and Dominican expertise Very standard story in Puerto Rico actually. But yeah, oscar Torres made some films there. He quickly became disillusioned with the Puerto Rican Commonwealth and by 1958, he was sort of like done, you know, sort of propagandizing for American colonialism. He was done making sort of like milquetoast, liberal, liberal, educational cinema. And he fell off the map and went to Cuba in 1959, joined the ICAIC and he was actually made head of the didactic documentary department. So he made two films in Cuba, none of them really documentaries, they're more like docudramas, or one of them's a historical epic.

Speaker 2: 32:17

One of them is called Tierra Olvidada, forgotten Land, from 1960, which is about the Ciénaga de Zapata, the Zapata swamps in the southern middle part of the island, well known for, you know, abject poverty for how remote it is from the nearest sort of like cities. They didn't have like public infrastructure hospitals, schools, roads, trains, bridges and really one of the first projects of the revolution was to go into the swamp, drain parts of it and build infrastructure so that residents of the swamp would know that they were being integrated into this revolutionary project. In fact, one of the first films that the two Cuban students in Rome made when they went back to Cuba was precisely about the Zapata swamps, called El Merano. So clearly this was like a sore spot, you know, for Puerto Rican society, like how can we pretend to be this modern nation where we have these people living in the swamps with some of the lowest life expectancy in the world? So Oscar Torres tackled that in 1960s, as soon as he became part of the Icai, his second film, ralengo 18, which is Ralengo 18, is a sort of historical epic about a peasant uprising that happened outside Guantanamo in the 1930s. So around this time in 1961, the Cuban Revolution had already declared itself socialist right. So they were making more outwardly sort of radical and socialist cinema, and Oscar Torres was a part of these initial experiments in making a truly state socialist national cinema.

Speaker 2: 34:04

But isn't that crazy, like the fact that he was exiled from the Dominican Republic, trained in Italian neorealism in Rome, where he becomes a communist, then goes to Puerto Rico and, almost like betrays his own politics, making these films that are being used to entrench the Puerto Rican political status with the US, and then just falls off the map. And when he pops up he's a revolutionary in Cuba. So I just think like he is oh, a detail that I left behind. He's also a gay man, an openly gay man, which would have been an added obstacle in all of these locations for him. So he's truly like this pan-Caribbean figure sort of trying to position himself somewhere on the political spectrum, but he keeps running into sort of historical realities of these three islands that he's actively working to liberate right the Dominican Republic, puerto Rico and Cuba, and so I suspect that he leaves the Cuban Revolution because he was sort of in disagreement about how it was growing closer to the Soviet sphere of influence. He was kind of disappointed about how the ICAIC had begun consolidating film production in Cuba. So one of his best friends, néstor Almendros, who he met in Italy, had a film producing group in Cuba, lunes de Revolución, which got banned in 1961 when he was there and there's no way to know for sure, but sort of freewheeling personality like Oscar Torres. He wouldn't have been very happy seeing these early instances of censorship, and not just censorship but just government interventionism in cultural practice more than anything.

Speaker 2: 36:03

So he returns to Puerto Rico sometime in 1962 or 1963, a sort of defeated man.

Speaker 2: 36:11

By now he's able to return to the Dominican Republic because he's Rafael Trujillo.

Speaker 2: 36:16

The dictator had been assassinated. He's no longer running the same risks going back to the Dominican Republic, but he sort of aligns himself with the liberal reforms of Juan Bush, the Dominican president and presidential candidate later, and his politics become de-radicalized to an extent that actually he actually comes closer to the politics of 1950s, puerto Rico in the 1960s, and by then he's more of a struggling artist. He's taking bit jobs where he can and ultimately he passes away early in 1968, at the age of 35, if I'm not mistaken. So even though he is like this very hopeful transnational radical reformist figure, he's also a tragic figure in a way. But what is mostly known about him in Caribbean film history is this aspect of tragedy, and a lot of the work that I'm doing in trying to weave together his entire career and his political aspirations is to sort of resist looking at his life through the lens of tragedy and trying to see him as a fully realized filmmaker but also activist and radical. Sorry, alexandria, can you tell that? This is the thing I've been writing?

Speaker 1: 37:36

Yes, no worries. Oh God, I was like, oh, he loves this so much. That's what I've been over here thinking.

Speaker 2: 37:45

He's, he's the missing link between this two, these two cinemas. I guess is why I'm so into his story.

Speaker 1: 37:53

And it makes sense, I mean, as you painted out for us, right, he's clearly moving Of course we talk about migration all the time, moving throughout the region.

Speaker 1: 38:02

I'm sort of really captivated by how central he plays a figure in all of these places, right, right, and of course leadership and domination obviously take part, but you know, to see how he's moved through not just the Caribbean, but of course his time spent in Italy is remarkable and that's what I always love about history.

Speaker 1: 38:21

In a lot of these ways, you always find these niche points where, you know, we started out thinking we were talking about just film history, right, but we get this remarkable story of this man who, you know, sometimes goes overlooked when we, you know, gloss over things. And speaking of that, right, I started our conversation with this story of, you know, the Godfather screenings in Cuba and I just, you know, would really love to hear your take on piracy and how it played a factor. You've definitely walked us through films that these organizations created, but how do you think piracy played a factor in sort of understanding that? You know, of course people want to access films coming from other parts of the world, but what does this also say about, you know American cultural influence amidst the national sentiment. That's happening as well.

Speaker 2: 39:13

Yeah, that's a good question. It sort of ties into the question you asked earlier that I forgot to answer because I went on a long tangent about Oscar Torres. Educational cinema is kind of bogus, right, like that's not what spectators want to see, especially if they're already familiar with, you know, hollywood film, european art film, and even like the extremely popular Mexican and Brazilian films that showed in all these these islands at around that time. So really, you know, neither Cubans nor Puerto Ricans stopped watching Hollywood film or long form features from other countries. The revolution in Cuba initially tried to do that. Right, they tried to say that, yeah, hollywood is cultural imperialism, right, imperialism, right. They propped up this boogeyman of like. This is one of the sort of like psychological ways that US imperialism sort of is manifest in the global South.

Speaker 2: 40:23

That was early in the revolution, as a response to the embargo. Very quickly, though, the Cubans realized that they couldn't just depend on their own or their allies' film infrastructures, that the Cuban people also wanted to see what was going on in the rest of the world. Right, and part of the world is mostly aligned with capitalism, right and world liberalism, but also just the cinema that they were used to prior to the revolution. So they opened up their screens to Hollywood films relatively early and their reasoning was the embargo can be economic, right, but we're not going to allow it to become cultural. And that was the sort of position that the ICAIC took to showing films from the former first world in Cuba, because the embargo prevented Hollywood to negotiate directly with Cuba. What they did is that they usually went through a third nation In the 70s it was mostly Salvador Allende's Chile, right, because they had also been embargoed or not embargoed, but their trade with the US was sort of restricted after his election.

Speaker 2: 41:44

So if you look at the catalog of the Ikaik and you don't even have to look at the catalog, just look at the film posters that the Ikaik was making in the 1960s you'll notice a ton of American films. You'll notice a ton of British, french, italian films, right, but they seem to be sort of handpicked. They're not going to show everything, right, they're not going to show Alice in Wonderland or something like that, for no reason. They picked films, carefully curated, films that sort of aligned with the ideology and the project of the Cuban Revolution. So they had films that showed sort of like social unrest, that had sort of you know, historical materialist interpretations of recent events. So a lot of war films made in the US didn't make it into Cuba because for Cubans that was basically fantasy, right, it was like an alternate reality, this idea of the American soldier as a sort of hero, an individual, as opposed to like a death machine. Anyway, so in the 1970s this sort of infatuation with American cinema really becomes entrenched in, not just in Cuban culture but also in the culture of the Icaic. So the Icaic starts bringing in, even like films from the new Hollywood, so even Spielberg films, francis Ford Coppola films. So these films that don't immediately have this anti-capitalist sort of latent interpretation in them, they get brought in.

Speaker 2: 43:16

And, as you mentioned, one of the big ones was the Godfather, particularly the Godfather Part II. So it was brought in a little bit late. I think the first Godfather must have came out in 73, but it was brought to Cuba in 75. The Corleone family was sort of taken as a microcosm of American society, right when you had, like this collusion between organized crime, government and private capital, which, if you look at it that way then yeah, it's a perfect sort of like encapsulation of the American dream. And so they were both brought to Cuba through third country. It wasn't Chile anymore by the mid-70s, since Pinochet was in power, and they were screened to great fanfare. It's become very, it's very common.

Speaker 2: 44:08

If you ask like a Cuban person like what their favorite film is like, give them 10 tries and they'll mention the Godfather. And this is across the political spectrum, by the way, which is another thing that sort of captures my attention, like what are they seeing that I am not seeing? But yeah, so in 1977, I think, cuba even invites Francis Ford Coppola to come to Cuba to present his films and to talk about making the Godfather, which was, by the way, filmed in the Dominican Republic, like right next door to Cuba, and has scenes that are set during the Cuban Revolution. So there's this idea that this film, even though it's a Hollywood product, it's made by a leftist filmmaker in a way, which is Francis Ford Coppola, and even though it's taken the perspective of a mafia family right, very hard to sympathize with, it's sort of showing like the ills, the corruption and the sort of like decrepit state of American democracy. And I think the Godfather films being this popular in Cuba sort of opened the floodgates, so to speak.

Speaker 2: 45:21

So another huge film in Cuba was Jaws a few years later. So Steven Spielberg, it was called Bloody Shark in Spanish. I mean, I've only read the reviews. I don't really, I can't really say what you know the sort of political spin was. But Fidel Castro personally screened that film in his residence and there was somebody there who asked him like so what is it? What is it about this film that you know that's so important for the revolution? Right, you had like this big premiere. You had like film posters made for it. It was covered in the whole press, like what's Marxist about this film? And then Fidel Castro like looks at the reporter and says the shark.

Speaker 2: 46:12

That's hilarious, one of my favorite apocryphal stories of this time. So we can sit here and intellectualize, like cuban piracy of hollywood film in the 1970s. But I think if we want to take a simpler approach, we can just say file castro was a big fan of hollywood, he was a big fan of coppola, he was a big fan of spielberg and that's kind of why he found a way to pirate the films. Bring them in.

Speaker 1: 46:40

You've given us quite a few names of certain films, but do you have any others that you know, in my love of all things Caribbean popular culture that you feel like are really reflective of this? You know 50s, 60s, 70s period for Cuban and Puerto Rican films, just films to watch.

Speaker 2: 47:00

Yeah, I would say. In the case Puerto Rico, in 1959, a lot of De Vetco filmmakers worked on a film called Maruja by an Argentinian filmmaker called Oscar Orzaval Quintana who was based in Puerto Rico and made a lot of sort of romance melodramas, even though it's a film made by an Argentinian. You can sort of see the aspirations of DeBetco filmmakers of the type of national cinema that they wanted to make through this film. So if you just read like the synopsis, it's like a typical, you know Latin American melodrama from the 1950s based on like the Mexican Golden Age style. But if you actually watch the film, you'll notice that there are a ton of scenes with, like you know, puerto Rican trova and Puerto Rican danza and musical styles and genres that are like native to the island dances, you know, and other sort of like folk expressions of Puerto Rican cultures that bleed into the film itself. And then also just knowing that a lot of Puerto Rican cultures that bleed into the film itself, and then also just knowing that a lot of Puerto Rican filmmakers were part of the film, a part of the crew, it's sort of like a I always prop it up as you know what could have been or what the Puerto Ricans sort of wanted to make. Even if it's not necessarily like my cup of tea or my favorite type of film, even if it's not necessarily like my cup of tea or my favorite type of film, in the case of Cuba, I really recommend Oscar Torres' Ralengo 18,. So Ralengo 18 from 1962. So this is the film, the famous sort of uprising of the Ralengo in 1934. But you can sort of see this in 1961. It's when the Icai was trying to break out of its documentary box, so to speak. So Ralengo was a film that was made almost outside the influence of the Icaic.

Speaker 2: 49:01

Oscar Torres was on the other side of the island completely. He was working with his own film crew, he was head of his own department, so he didn't have any direct oversight and he ended up making a film that is so different from the other films, the other Cuban films that were being made around the time, especially long feature films, such as something like Histories of Revolution, which is more in a neorealist style, and the Adventures of Juan Quinquín, a comedy by Julio Garcia Pinosa. Well, scott Torres' film is, of course, a historical epic, but it's also like picking and choosing which neorealist techniques or which sort of like styles it borrows from and then construct, like this weird Frankenstein Italian, neorealist, soviet-style edited historical epic that, seen in the context of what Cuba was producing around that time, stands out as very idiosyncratic. It also helps to know the context. Oscar Torres left Cuba before he was able to finish this film, so as mysteriously as he entered Cuba, that's how he left it as well.

Speaker 2: 50:01

So it's also sort of an incomplete project. It's just a 60-minute film, so you don't know if it was meant to be that way or not. And there are things about it that are sort of like not super congruent with one another. But I guess you could say what interests me most about these Caribbean national cinemas are these sort of missed opportunities, like these models that didn't quite come to fruition but still constitute like original proposals right Maruja on the one hand, even though it's made by an Argentinian, and then Ralengo 18, by Oscar Torres, as a model for Cuban cinema, even though he was Dominican. This sort of like necessary transnationalism that I think is missing from Caribbean film criticism and Caribbean film history broadly.

Speaker 1: 50:51

Certainly, I'll be sure to link those for our listeners who you know really you know to link those for our listeners who you know really you know more, so want to dive into the work of DeVetco and Ikaik and really underscore. You know what this moment looked like within that 50s, 60s time period. I want to draw us to a close because I think you've woven for us such a beautiful history and genealogy of this time period and how certainly these two organizations not only transformed Puerto Rico and Cuba in the 50s and 60s, but how they inspired other filmmakers who then went forward to continue this work. Right, how do you really see them having inspired today's current generation of films coming out of both organizations, or both islands, rather, is what I meant to say you know, every academic has his niche.

Speaker 2: 51:49

Part of the reason that I am, you know, irretrievably stuck in the 50s and 60s is because this was such a momentous shift for both national cinemas, right, for better or worse. In the case of the DeVetco, it still remains our most cohesive attempt at establishing national cinema. Even if it was mostly, you know, shorts and sort of middle-length films, docudramasas and documentaries, it still constitutes like our closest attempt at, you know, having like this, thriving and comprehensive catalog of filmmaking. And in many ways some artists contemporary artists, for better or worse, try to emulate the DeVetco. There was even one very naive film student who went to the film archive in Puerto Rico and said I want to create another DeVetco and I'm like you know what, that's never going to happen and we wouldn't want it to happen.

Speaker 2: 52:51

It's very much a product of its time. In the case of Cuba, it's just because it's become such an institution right of Latin American film broadly that you know, I just have a great amount of respect for it, even as it sort of, like you know, had its pitfalls. It's made mistakes in its history, whether through censorship or just shelving certain artists in favor of others. It still exists, it's still making quality cinema. It's still supporting well less than before, but still supporting contemporary filmmakers, even as other sort of filmmaking bodies and entities and groups in Cuba have emerged to sort of complement it.

Speaker 2: 53:36

But even if somebody, even myself, who I'm highly critical of the Icaic and the ways that they serve as the sort of mouthpiece for a lot of flawed you know Cuban politics today they still sort of have an eye for talent, they still have a lot of the resources and the sort of just good taste to make or to keep the dream of a Cuban national cinema alive, so to speak. That was a bit too flattering of the geek, but I hope you understand. Yeah, I wish they supported more younger artists. That is one thing I will say. But other than that, it's like most of the well-known and successful feature films that are coming out of Cuba are still being supported by ICAIC in one way or another, even as they're being co-produced with, like France or the Netherlands, you know.

Speaker 1: 54:35

I do think it is not only beautiful to see certain organizations from the height of our certain revolutionary periods in the mid-20th century still survive so that's the case of the IKIC, which is even still continuing today, as you outlined for us, but also I love to hear that you know the current generation is still being supported in some ways, that you know the current generation is still being supported in some ways, and that, I think, is wonderful to me when we consider just how you know our nations and our islands have changed over the course of time. But you've certainly given us so much to learn from and sit with. I definitely like feel like I'm going to jump into spending my weekend watching a lot of these films, dr Rodriguez. So I thank you and appreciate you so much in sharing your love and expertise in this film history with us, as always. You know I will put up some of these links to you know where to possibly watch these films and you know some material etc. For our listeners who want to learn more.

Speaker 1: 55:34

And till next time, look for more, learn more and till next time, look for more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit strictlyfactspodcastcom for more information from each episode. Follow us at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.