Santa y Andrés: A dossier

Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (2016) has enjoyed worldwide acclaim as an intimate, dramatic portrayal of the unlikely friendship that develops in rural Cuba between Andrés, a gay dissident writer, and Santa, the militant citizen who has been sent to surveil him. Declared to be extreme and/or inaccurate in its historical depictions, the film was censored in Cuba and was the subject of intense controversy and public polemics surrounding its release in 2016. Debates about the film’s subject matter and its censorship extend ongoing disagreement over the role of art within the Cuban Revolution, and the changing nature of the Cuban film industry itself. This dossier brings together new scholarship on Santa y Andrés and is linked to an online archive of some of the original essays that have been written about the film by Cuban critics and filmmakers since 2016. The aim of this project is to create a starting point for researchers who wish to investigate Santa y Andrés, evaluating the film both for its contentious initial reception, and in terms of its enduring contribution to the history of Cuban cinema.

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.