The Special Period — the early-to-mid 1990s, after the collapse of Soviet support and before the partial economic stabilization of the late nineties — is the hardest decade in recent Cuban memory and the decade Cuban cinema spent fifteen years trying to render properly. Most of the attempts failed. Three of them succeeded in ways that I want to write about. One famous attempt failed in a particular way that I think is worth being more honest about than the criticism usually is.
I should say upfront that I was a small child during the Special Period proper. My family had left for Miami before the worst years, and the years I have my own direct memories of are the late nineties and after, when the texture of daily life was still substantially shaped by what had happened earlier in the decade but when the acute crisis had passed. What I know about the worst years I know from my grandmother, from my aunt who stayed, from the friends I made later who had been teenagers during the apagones and who remembered everything. The films I am about to discuss are filtered through their memories as much as through my own.
What the period actually was
The Special Period began, formally, in 1990, when the disappearance of Soviet subsidy began to be felt in the Cuban economy. The years 1992 through 1994 were the worst. Food shortages were severe. Electricity was intermittent. The fuel for transport was rationed in ways that effectively shut down much of the public transport network. The currency held value unevenly. The black market expanded into territory that the formal economy had previously covered. People lost weight. Some people left, in the rafter crisis of 1994. Many people stayed and built lives around the constraints in ways that the rest of the world has had a hard time understanding.
The texture of the period was specific. It was not generalized poverty in the way that international coverage often frames it. It was a particular kind of resourceful desperation, with humor woven through it, and with a strange ongoing normalcy that coexisted with the genuine crisis. People still threw birthday parties. People still fell in love. People still went to the beach. The films that got the period right had to render both the crisis and the normalcy without flattening either, and most films flattened one or the other.
The first film that got it: Fresa y chocolate
Fresa y chocolate is the 1993 film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío that everyone outside Cuba already knows the title of. The film is principally about the friendship between a young communist student and an older gay intellectual, and the political reading of the film — about the place of homosexuality in Cuban society, about ideological orthodoxy and its costs — is the reading the international audience picked up on.
What is less commonly noticed is how exactly the film renders the daily texture of the Special Period in its background details. The empty refrigerator. The improvisation around what to eat for dinner. The way the apartment is decorated with the accumulated objects of a life that pre-dated the crisis and that the crisis has not erased. The way the friendship develops over food that the older character has somehow assembled despite the impossibility of assembling it. The Special Period is not the subject of the film, but the Special Period is the air the film breathes, and the rendering of that air is one of the things the film does most carefully.
I watched Fresa y chocolate again last year, in Miami, with my mother. She had not seen it in fifteen years. She cried through most of it, and what she said afterward — and what I have not been able to stop thinking about — was that the film had gotten the apartments right. The way the apartments looked. The objects that were in them. The way the dust settled. The way the light came in. That was what she remembered, and that was what she had not realized she remembered until she saw it on screen.
The second film: Madagascar
Madagascar is the 1994 short film by Fernando Pérez that almost no one outside Cuba has seen and that I would call one of the most important Cuban films of the decade. The film is about a mother and daughter and the daughter's growing alienation, with the daughter increasingly retreating into a private fantasy of escape to a place called Madagascar that is not really Madagascar but is just somewhere else.
The film is barely fifty minutes long. It is shot in a stripped-down style that I think of as essentially documentary. The Special Period is rendered in the texture of the city — the empty streets, the buildings in particular states of disrepair, the rooftops that the daughter climbs to as her private escape — and in the relationship between the mother and daughter, which is the relationship of two people who love each other and who are also slowly losing each other to a set of pressures that neither of them has the language for.
The film is sad in a way that is not the standard cinematic sadness. The sadness is the sadness of small daily losses accumulating into something that has changed the shape of a relationship without any single event having caused the change. The Special Period in this film is not crisis-as-event. The Special Period is a slow attrition that has reshaped what is possible between people, and the film captures that attrition more honestly than almost any other Cuban film I can think of.
The third film: Suite Habana
Suite Habana is the 2003 documentary by Fernando Pérez — same director as Madagascar — that follows several Havana residents through a single day and night. The film is post-Special-Period strictly speaking, but the residue of the period is everywhere in it, and the film is doing something that I think only became possible after enough time had passed.
The film is essentially wordless. There is no narration. There is very little dialogue. The film shows people doing things — making breakfast, going to work, fixing shoes, performing in a drag show at night — and the camera trusts the audience to assemble the meaning from the accumulated detail. The Special Period appears in the film as the explanation for the texture of the lives shown. The improvisations, the dignified work that the work itself was not paying for, the lives lived on the edges of the formal economy, the small private worlds that people had built and were maintaining — all of that is the Special Period's legacy, and the film documents that legacy with a care that I do not think any other Cuban film has matched.
I watch Suite Habana once a year, usually in late summer, usually with the air conditioner on, usually with a glass of rum. The film does something to me every time. It is the film I would show to someone who wanted to understand what living in Havana actually felt like in the years I lived there.
The one that didn't
The film I think did not get it — and the film that has the highest international profile of any Cuban film about the Special Period — is one I will name because the criticism I want to make is specific and I think the film can stand the disagreement. The film is Guantanamera, the 1995 Alea and Tabío comedy. The film is a road movie about a funeral procession crossing the island, and the film uses the absurdities of the period as the engine of its comedy.
I want to be careful. The film is not a bad film. There are moments in it that work. There are performances in it that I admire. The film won prizes and the international audience loved it and there is nothing wrong with making a comedy out of difficult material. The Cuban comedic tradition has always done that and the doing has always been one of the things that has gotten people through.
What the film does not do, and what I think is fair to ask of it because of how widely it has been taken as representative, is render the period with the care that the period deserved. The comedy flattens the texture. The road-movie structure imposes a narrative shape on a situation whose actual shape was not narrative but ambient. The film makes the period legible to an international audience in ways that simplify what the experience was, and the simplification is the kind of simplification that comes back to bias how the period is remembered.
I do not think Alea and Tabío owed anyone a sober treatment of the period. They had already made Fresa y chocolate. They were allowed to make a comedy. What I think is fair to say is that the comedy ended up doing more international representational work than it was probably designed to do, and that the work the comedy did not do — the work of careful documentation, of rendering the daily texture without flattening it — was the work that Madagascar and Suite Habana did better.
Why the films matter now
The Special Period is more than thirty years in the past at this point. The people who lived through it as adults are now mostly in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. My grandmother, who lived through it, is gone. My mother, who left before the worst, has the period largely from family stories. The generation that experienced the period in its acute phase is aging into a period of life where the memory of those years is becoming the dominant memory of their early adulthood.
The films are the cultural record. The good ones — Fresa y chocolate, Madagascar, Suite Habana — are going to do a lot of the work of telling future generations what those years actually felt like. The less-careful ones are also going to do work, and the work they do will be less accurate. It matters which films we keep watching. It matters which films we recommend. It matters which films get preserved and shown to people who were not there.
I am writing this in Miami in May. I have copies of all three of the films I have praised, on a hard drive that my cousin gave me last year. I have not watched Suite Habana yet this year. I will, probably in September, when the heat in Miami has settled into the kind of heat that asks you to stay inside with the air conditioner on. I will pour the rum. I will sit on the couch. I will watch the film. I will think about the years I lived through after the worst years and about the years my grandmother lived through during them, and I will be grateful to the filmmakers who took the time to get the texture right.
