The Sugar Curtain (review)

The film The Sugar Curtain, directed by Camila Guzmán, is a sensitive, complex portrayal of the Cuban Revolution that captures the broad arc of the revolution’s history from the 1960s to the present. It conveys the exhilaration the revolution once sparked among its supporters, the sense of participating in an ambitious collective project to forge a new nation and a “new man.” It was a dream that collapsed abruptly and painfully with the fall of the Soviet Union and the onset of the Special Period, when many Cubans turned inward, falling back on family and friends for their daily survival.

Yet the film also tells a lesser-known story, recounting this history through the eyes of the generation that came of age during the revolution’s “golden years” of the late 1970s and 1980s. Many studies of the revolution focus either on the generation that witnessed and contributed to the revolutionary triumph, or on the youth of today, never fully integrated in the revolutionary project. Yet the story of the in-between generation that the filmmaker herself belongs to has particular poignancy. Raised with the ideals of the revolution, and often still loyal to those ideals, many members of her generation eventually left the island to realize themselves personally and professionally, in the very terms that they had internalized from their educations within the revolution. This point is driven home when one interviewee offers a long litany of names and places: he is listing all his former classmates who now live abroad.

The film also touches briefly upon the virtually unstudied history of the flood of political refugees from the Southern Cone, for whom Cuba provided an important safe haven in the 1970s. The film’s director is the daughter of the famed Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán, who fled with his family after the 1973 coup that toppled Salvador Allende, when Camila was only two years old. In one of the most moving moments of the film, the director’s mother describes her gratitude for the stability Cuba offered after the trauma of Allende’s overthrow. While not the primary subject of the documentary, we get a fascinating glimpse here of the intertwined histories of the Latin American left during the Cold War.

The documentary eventually offers a deep critique of the revolution from within, and from the left. Guzmán builds up to her criticism slowly, letting it unfold from her own personal reflections and interviews with her former schoolmates. They remember their childhoods as an idyllic time, a paradise lost, when Cuba was characterized by social equality, economic security, and a sense of political engagement. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, she and others hoped for a Cuban perestroika, a more tolerant socialism. Instead, the country plunged into an economic inferno, and she and most of her friends chose to emigrate. Now, as Guzmán notes, “the country of my childhood has disappeared,” replaced by resignation, uncertainty, and nostalgia for those early revolutionary dreams.