From Utopia to Dystopia: The Demise of the Revolutionary Dream in Futuristic Cuban Cinema

The armed insurrection that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959 was one of the most influential events of the 20th century. Like the Russian and Mexican revolutions before it, the Cuban revolution set out to bring social justice and prosperity to a country that had suffered the evils of corrupt regimes. A small country thus became the center of world debates about equality, culture, and class struggle, attracting the attention of political leaders not only from Latin America but also from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Its intent to forge a model society has often been described in utopian terms. Writers, artists, and filmmakers turned to utopia as a metaphor to trace the evolution of the arts in the island from the enthusiasm and optimism of the first moments to the dystopian hopelessness and despair of the last decades. Indeed, the Cuban revolution, like so many other social revolutions of the 20th century, became the victim of a whole series of internal and external forces that ended up turning the promised dream into a nightmare tainted by autocratic leadership, repression, and political and economic isolation. Although Cuban literature has extensively addressed these issues since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is only recently that we can find similar trends in a cinematic output that portrays Cuba as a utopia gone sour. This article examines recent films such as Alejandro Brugués’ Juan de los Muertos (2011), Tomás Piard’s Los desastres de la Guerra (2012), Eduardo del Llano’s Omega 3 (2014), Rafael Ramírez’s Diario de la niebla (2016), Yimit Ramírez’s Gloria eterna (2017), Alejandro Alonso’s El Proyecto (2017), and Miguel Coyula’s Corazón Azul (2021). These films use futuristic imageries to offer a poignant (and often apocalyptic) depiction of the harsh paradoxes of contemporary life in Cuba while reflecting upon the downfall of utopia.

Matthew Pettway. Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido and Afro-Latino Religion.

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Introduction

In May of 1892, the Cuban exile Nestor Ponce de León (1837–99) delivered a lecture titled “Los primeros poetas de Cuba” (1892, 385) (The First Cuban Poets) at a meeting of the Sociedad de Literatura Hispano-Americana in New York City. Despite the name of the society and the ostensible focus of Ponce de León’s talk, this meeting was not simply a gathering of friends and visiting authors from Latin America who found themselves in the vicinity of New York and who happened to love Cuban literature and the wider culture of belle lettres in the Americas. Ponce de León was surrounded by fellow exiles planning revolution. In the audience sat one of the founders and a former president of the Sociedad, José Martí (1853–95), who had stepped down from leading the New York literary society in order to organize the Partido Revolucionario Cubano. As was so often the case among nineteenth-century Latina/o intellectuals (and their Latin American counterparts), literary and political practices were mutually informing and hard to separate into neat categories of their own....

The Aleatoric Aspect of Literary Tourism: an Example from Havana

The expression literary tourism is an established term which rarely raises controversies. It fits well into a positivist way of thinking about tourism reality. An analysis of Cuban literature, as well as field study conducted in Havana, however have pointed to the need to reconstruct the definitions of literary tourism that are currently in use as there are many contexts and current definitions are insufficient. The article presents an aleatoric approach based on the phenomenon of chance while exploring the literary space of Havana.