- The Revolution Will Be ArchivedCuba’s Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano
The filmmaker Santiago Álvarez (1919–98) has long been synonymous with Cuban revolutionary cinema. Remarkably prolific, he made more than one hundred documentaries over four decades, including, most famously, the 1960s-era classics Now (1965), LBJ (1968), and Hasta la Victoria Siempre (Always Until Victory; 1967).1 Also, in a less well-known but equally significant aspect of his career, Álvarez served for thirty years as the director of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (Latin American newsreel), a newsreel produced from 1960 to 1990 by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) that was shown each week in Cuban theaters before the main feature. Throughout his work—features and news-reels alike—Álvarez remained faithful to, and largely helped to define, a Latin American revolutionary aesthetic: formally experimental, politically anti-imperialist, and [End Page 1] passionate about the dynamic relationship between cinema and its spectators. Along with this sensibility came a certain cultivated disdain for the idea of film as cultural artifact. For Álvarez, a revolutionary filmmaker worked in the present tense. “I do not believe in films for posterity,” he once said. “I make an urgent cinema.”2
Statements like this—and the committed aesthetic they represent—lend a certain irony to the news that the work Álvarez produced for Cuba’s newsreel division now sits on a prestigious list of documentary properties designated as “world heritage.” In 2009, the year of ICAIC’s fiftieth anniversary, the director-general of UNESCO declared that all original negatives of the Noticiero would be included on the organization’s Memory of the World Register, a move resting on the assumption that, in UNESCO’s words, the “first and most urgent need is to ensure the preservation, by the most appropriate means, of documentary heritage.”3
This recognition—and the fact that ICAIC worked for at least three years to obtain it—signals a shift in Cuban revolutionary thinking about film, history, and the politics of preservation. Indeed, during the course of the last decade, the institute has launched an international campaign aimed at saving its audiovisual archive, moving in the process from an emphasis on film as a dynamic tool of living history to one of film as artifact. Traditionally speaking, ICAIC had approached preservation with a necessary improvisation. Dealing creatively with the constraints of material reality has always been a mainstay of Cuban film practice and key to the practice of everyday life on the island. Best efforts at film preservation meant trying to keep things as stable as possible, while reacting to unpredictable and sometimes devastating environmental, economic, and geopolitical conditions. ICAIC devoted its time and resources to conservation, not restoration. With the UNESCO designation, ICAIC enters an institutional realm that requires strict professional standards and highly specialized skills. Rather than conserving a vibrant film library, ICAIC is for the first time attempting to produce a national cinematic heritage.
This essay examines the opportunities, unique challenges, and political stakes facing ICAIC as it attempts to preserve the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano. All in all, there exist 1,490 regular editions of ICAIC’s newsreel, each averaging about ten minutes in length. In addition, there are three special edition newsreels running double-length at twenty-two minutes each. Obviously, a complete restoration of the Noticieros would represent a boon to scholars on the island and off, allowing for more comprehensive study of Cuba’s complex film and political history. But the UNESCO designation, and its implications for national heritage building in Cuba, raises thorny practical and political questions as well. How will ICAIC prioritize the restoration of the individual newsreels? [End Page 2] Who will have access to them, and how complete will the access be? What are the consequences of aligning Cuba’s national film heritage so closely with ICAIC? After outlining the history of the Noticieros and arguing for the potential benefits of their preservation, this essay examines some of the material difficulties of film preservation in Cuba and the political and economic negotiations taking place as ICAIC seeks international funding to do its national cultural work.
Overview and Style
As is frequently noted in discussions...