Thoughts on I Am Cuba

I Am Cuba

Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba, is a powerfully crafted narrative. The opening shot is a bird’s eye view of the ocean and pans towards the island while capturing the lush palm trees. The vast ocean is captured smashing up against the rocks on the shores. The camera stops on a white statue and the voice over commences giving rise to Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Island, and the camera continuously goes through the city and up a sky rise where it stops and shifts to a close up of musicians atop a roof, capturing their performance, guitarist jumping up, a saxophonist dancing, and another guitarist jumps up. The camera pans over to a man holding a camera filming a group of women playing cards giving rise to self reflexivity, and panning over to an attractive woman disrobing while exposing her two piece bikini as she turns, goes into the pool, and begins to swim. The camera tracks the woman from when she was sitting on the lounge chair near the pool to when she gets up, disrobes, and steps into the pool to swim. The camera also goes into the water and captures the tourists swimming in the water as if to take the audience in for a swim.

The film cuts to a club sequence where there is a medium close up of a man performing a song while the camera captures his performance in a Dutch angle which foreshadows chaos or the psychological instability of the unbalanced characters as it tracks him through the club. The performers are wearing suits with a white mask attached to the backs of their coats with a sad expression on the masks. During the club sequence, the three Americans are depicted as chauvinists, savages, lusting animals that disrespect Cuba and her people.

The American wearing the sunglasses has a distorted view of the Cuban people as he draws exaggerated caricatures of the women that sit next to them. The bearded American is looking for a piece of Cuba that he can identify with.  The lighting and the use of shadows gives rise to contrast as well as increases the dramatic effect of the setting; especially, with the African totems dressing the set of the club sequence. The club sequence intercuts with a sequence in the street with the fruit vendor and Maria. The fruit vendor is depicted as a happy optimist that fronts his fruit cart for the revolution as he hides and passes notes to the rebellion. The vendor sings in the streets about the fruits he is selling while telling his companion Maria his dreams of marrying her, and how happy he will make her. The scene ends and cuts back to the club where Maria is wearing a black outfit adorned with a crucifix around her neck. Maria is asked to sit with the Americans, and the man wearing sunglasses draws a caricature of her face while assuring his friend the bearded American that she holds that identifiable piece that he was missing; the crucifix.

In the club Maria is known as Betty, she gets tossed around by the Americans from one to the other while the spectators laugh and cry out with their euphoric mind set, and Betty hears the beat, the beat of the drum, and she begins dancing around the African totem in a native dance, but is force to stop when the tossing around commences again. The bearded American wants to see her world, to understand her culture; he wants to see where and how she lives, so he takes a cab and escorts her home. Betty lives in a shack outside of town in a poor village. The camera is positioned in a Dutch angle as the background gives rise to German Expressionism by way of the design of the set. There is a large crucifix hanging from the head post of the metal frame while the frame looked very unbalanced. Maria takes the covers off of the bed and unfastens her crucifix, throwing it to a nearby chair. The man insists on buying her crucifix, but she looks at him in dismay. Maria sleeps with the bearded American, and in the morning he counts the money is going to pay her, when the fruit vendor opens the door abruptly, and sees the American with the money and Maria lying in bed with white sheets covering her naked body. The American exits, and the vendor looks at her in disgust.

Maria is, in a sense, a representation of Cuba while the Americans are a metaphor to the people and politicians that rape or whore Cuba for their own benefits. This is all depicted in the club sequence leading to Maria’s house and village. The Americans are staying in the posh hotel buildings of Cuba, and not in the poor village. The children are starving and begging for money while the women observe the displaced American man acting frantically as the children and people approach him.

For example, during the club sequence the American wearing the sunglasses states: “there is nothing decent about Cuba.” When he was making comments about the women and the performers, but when the Cuban performers were wearing ceremonial tribal costumes the same man states: “Now we are going to see something.” The man’s sunglasses are an allusion to the distorted view Americans have on Cuba. The man never takes them off throughout the sequence.

In the sequence with Pedro the sugar cane farmer, the narrative was very clear and linear with a montage of the exposition between Pedro buying a house, getting married, starting a family, and managing his crops. Pedro prays to Cuba to give him a healthy field of sugar cane, so that he can take care of his family, and the land provides for them, but Mr. Acosta informs Pedro that he sold the land to the United Fruit Company and that they no longer have a home, nor land to work. Pedro sends his children to the city while he burns his cash crop and home. There are a total of four sequences. Another sequence describes the suppression of students and dissenters at Havana University, and the final sequence shows how government bombing of mountain fields induced farmers to join with the rebels in the Sierra Maestro mountains. The final scene is a triumphal march into Havana to proclaim the revolution.

The film has a lot of Social Realism elements embedded within the film. There is a sequence were the Cubans rally together on top of steps and protest the government’s injustices  towards its people, like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin, the steps of Odessa. The film itself tries to play off a documentary feel as if to depict the heroism of Fidel Castro’s revolution to claim Cuba in the name of the people, but the outcome was not so noble. Kalatozov’s uses four stories and interweaves them from beginning to end to add to the embedded Social Realist theme of uniting the Cuban people to ‘stand up for what is right’ (socialism) throughout the film.

Finally, I feel that the camera work by A. Calzatti and B. Brozhovsky, gave the spectators a glimpse into the lives of the Cuban worker (Fruit Vendor), the prostitute (Maria), the farmer (Pedro), the student (Enrique), the revolutionary (Mariano). Each of the stories were strong enough to stand on their own, but keeping the connection, one can see the effectiveness of the continuity editing, the avant garde camera angles and panning, the montage, and the strong story-telling that made this film a powerful narrative.

Yes, the film has huge propaganda qualities to show the heroism and risks that Fidel Casto took to overtake Cuba with socialist ideologies, but the film at times did not feel as blatant as the other Russian films such as Circus or Ballad of a Soldier, and the film captures a longing for freedom amongst the people of Cuba. The film stands alone, and can be studied for its technical genius and structure. The film was produced in the 1964, but the techniques that were utilized were very advanced. The film was ahead of its time and so was Kalatozov. I will leave you with this stunning quote from the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, sums up the film’s provocative nature:

"Don't avert your eyes. Look! I am Cuba. For you, I am the casino, the bar, hotels and brothels. But the hands of these children and old people are also me"

-- Yevgeni Yevtushenko