Cuban Independent Documentary and Nonofficial Journalism: The Two Faces of Janus

For decades in Cuba, the official journalistic agenda has neglected or completely obliterated complex areas of the nation's socioeconomic and cultural fabric. These areas are being appropriated by a new generation of audiovisual creators and producers. They are interested in discovering and analyzing the complexities and problems of their immediate contemporaneity, with full autonomy from the official establishment. To this end, and thanks to the democratization of technological media, they have developed different and diverse discourses, fostering a true "para-journalistic" current or noninstitutional journalism, aimed at filling the conceptual aporia of the Cuban people. In this process, the documentary film genre has come to replace reporting, investigative reporting, and testimony when exploring, exposing, and deconstructing numerous alternative topics like sexuality, youth, religion, history, emigration, architectural ruin, the peasantry, the economic, and identity crisis, among others. The pessimistic, skeptical, iconoclastic, controversial, and dystopian tone of such documentary is nothing but the counterpart of the optimistic and excessively triumphalist idea of Cuba as constructed by the official media.

This article is an analytic cartography, from a sociocultural perspective, of this phenomenon over the last twenty years. Using discourse analysis, it will counteract the dominant criticism of these films as defective because essentially journalistic. Besides, two decades of filming already requires more than a casuistic approach, which is the general tendency among Cuban film critics with this recent work.