Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War

Conclusion: Film Criticism in Cuba and the United States

Conclusion Film Criticism in Cuba and the United States The goal of this study has been to understand the politicized critical reception of Memories of Underdevelopment, Lucia, One Way or Another, and Portrait of Teresa in two national/cultural contexts (Cuba and the United States) and relate this reception to the performance of political identities. I have taken this approach because it allows me to tie together the cultural, epistemic, and institutional conditions of the production of criticism together with its actual textual traces: the review. The conditions for the production of criticism provide the staging cues to the social actor, the critic, to carry on her/his political role. I use the first half of the book to lay down these staging cues. These cues are found in the institutional contexts and in the discourses that explain the political role of the critic. These discourses, which circulate within cultural and political institutions, help explain why cultural work is political and how cultural work should be interpreted. Because of these discourses, criticism becomes a place for the performance of specific political identities. The performances are the actual reviews, writings, interpretations, and commentaries . I analyze these in the second half of the book. Together, staging cues and performances allows me to talk about criticism and its production as central to understanding specific citizenship practices in Cuba and the United States. In this book, political criticism is civics. In general, individuals engage in civic behavior in order to accomplish political tasks, but also to become proper political beings, proper citizens. Below, I bring together insights from the previous chapters to explain the relationship of criticism to proper citizenship in both national contexts. I begin reviewing institutional contexts, followed by commenting on how criticism becomes political. Finally, I argue for understanding criticism as a public performance of political selfhood. 180 C O N C L U S I O N Institutional Contexts The 1959 Cuban Revolution produced the conditions for the institutionalization of Cuba’s field of cultural production, including film and criticism. Perceived by the leadership as a necessary tool for securing the support of the population and for transforming the population into a revolutionary social force, culture and criticism became increasingly politicized, typically, in line with the government’s ideological requirements. The close relationship between the field of culture and the field of power had profound implications for the lives of cultural workers, for it meant, among other things, that their professions (as sets of actions, expectations, and discursive legitimizations) would be often, if not always, shaped by politics. Culture was politicized and cultural workers became political actors. This point was evident from the third issue of Cine Cubano, in 1960, which printed a short article written by the Cuban film director Julio García Espinosa entitled “Criticism and the Public” (12–13). In this article, Espinosa suggested that criticism had to play a strong and revolutionary role in the new Cuba. To do so, the critic ought to practice her/his craft in ways consistent with the needs of the revolution and with those of an increasingly aware and media-savvy public. The critic would have to forget the facile and formalist criticism that went hand in hand with North American movie fare. “Together, we will have to approach the more lively content and the most proper form. Criticism will profit the most by observing the progress of the artist in such direction” (13) (see also Kolker 1983, 279). In the following issue, the director of the Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), Alfredo Guevara, expanded on Espinosa’s ideas in an article titled “Culture and the Revolution” (“La Cultura y la Revolución”) (45–47). Criticism, Guevara contended, must be harnessed in the struggle against imperialism and cultural decolonization. Criticism “must be the product of philosophic and aesthetic positions, the product of an analytical method, the product of the knowledge of reality and of reality’s internal contradictions, reality’s tendencies and character” (46). In short, criticism would use aesthetics, methodology , and epistemology for the betterment of the revolution. In so quickly (only one year after the triumph of the revolution) recognizing the importance and necessity of cultural criticism for the constitution of the field of cultural production, Espinosa and Guevara placed criticism within a system of social relationships bound by the grid of power. Espinosa defined 181 criticism as a social practice enacted...