Revolutionary ruralities: Spaces of surveillance and exclusion in Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Andrés (2016)

The abundance of rural and provincial settings as spaces belonging to or determined by revolutionary time are recurrent elements in Cuban cinema prior to 1989. Many documentaries and films from the late 1960–80s focused on ‘scaping’revolutionary accomplishments and struggles in the construction of a socialist society. At that time, the depiction of provincial and rural towns of Cuba were aligned with and echoed the Revolution’s political and social agenda of collective work, struggle and revolutionary virtue. This article explores rural space, surveillance and exclusions through Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (2016). The film portrays the punishment and surveillance of a blacklisted homosexual writer in a small town in the eastern part of the island during 1983. This article, first, examines how Santa y Andrés questions the premise that Cuba’s rural and provincial space is a homogeneous revolutionary one, and, second, proposes that the film’s choice of location refashions the rural-provincial space in Cuban cinema as a space of dissidence, exclusionary practices and pervasive surveillance.