Who Is Cuba?: Dispersed Protagonism and Heteroglossia in Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba

Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, CU, 1964) was a collaborative Soviet-Cuban production. It was funded by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), founded at the very outset of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s largest film production company, established in 1923, six years after the Bolshevik Revolution. It flopped both commercially and critically upon its release in 1964 and was largely unknown until the 1990s, when it came to the attention of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who subsequently promoted it. An interview with Scorsese is included in the latest DVD release of the film, and his insights will be referred to in this article. Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano/Soy Cuba, Siberian Mammoth (Vicenz Ferraz, BR, 2005), an informative documentary on the making of Soy Cuba and its later reemergence, is another important source for any study of the film because it contains interviews with many of the cast and crew of the production, which Ferraz refers to as “a unique film experience.” The documentary also gives the distinct impression that authorship of the film was dispersed among various members of the crew. Although it was directed by Georgian Mikhail Kalatozov, whose most notable other films include the early propagandistic documentaries Sol Svanetii/ Salt for Svanetia (SU, 1930) and Lursmani cheqmashi/Nail in the Boot (SU, 1934), as well as the later fiction features Neotpravlennoye pismo/Letter Unsent (USSR, 1959) and Letyat zhuravli/The Cranes Are Flying (USSR, 1957), the laconic screenplay was written by both the celebrated Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cuban scriptwriter Enrique Pineda Barnet. Russian cameraman Sergei Urusevsky, with whom Kalatozov had previously worked on Cranes, was in charge of the photography. The Cuban composer Carlos Fariñas created its musical score. Bela Fridman, Urusevsky’s wife and the film’s production manager, had a significant influence on the set and casting. In the discussion on production design at the end of this article, I will briefly touch on the dispersed authorship thesis but my principal contention is that the film itself exhibits a similarly dispersed protagonism, to the point where useful questions arise regarding its commentary about the roles of land, people, and film itself in catalysing political debate. For this purpose, I mobilize Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory of heteroglossia to support the argument that the dispersed protagonism of Soy Cuba is a heteroglot response to the “unifying language” of Hollywood cinema, expressed partly in Hollywood’s own forms of protagonism.

Before discussing protagonism in the film, I would like to make some preparatory observations regarding uses of the word in a wider social and cultural context. Although the two terms are not intrinsically related, fictional protagonism can include reference to social protagonism. The latter term is more obviously a modern concept, acquiring resonance in the last twenty years or so following redemocratization processes in several Latin American countries. It is suggestive of direct state-citizen relations. For example, in Brazil, the concept of social protagonism emerged after terms such as participation and citizenship failed to fully capture the challenges of the postdictatorship era. According to Victoria Jupp-Kina, the term social protagonism suggested a reversal of top-down social control by emphasizing the agency of the individual in the pursuit of social justice, moving away from the “assistentialist perception of ‘giving voice,’” instead “incorporating the individual as a protagonist or an active agent within her or his own life and community” [emphasis mine].¹ Although this use of the term is helpful for broadly describing political changes in individual-state relations, it does not necessarily involve consideration of active agency in cultural practices, whether at an institutional, collective, or individual level. Such changes in cultural practices occurred in early revolutionary Cuba, long before the redemocratization processes in Latin America that led to the increased use of terms such as social protagonism. Those changes in Cuba are usefully discussed by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG) in their 1993 founding statement.² Here, John Beverley et al. describe the...