The Cuban actor Vladimir Cruz remembers today, with marked clarity, the day in 1995 when, under the eaves of the Carlos Marx Theater in Havana, he and other actors jokingly told the Russian film director Nikita Mijalkov that they had snatched the Oscar award from the Cubans. Mijalkov hugged them while he laughed. He confessed to them that everyone in Cuba told him the same thing. The previous year, comedian David Letterman announced from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, at the 67th Academy Awards, that the award for Best Foreign Language Film went to sunburnedand not for the Belgian Farinellinot even for the Taiwanese Eat, drink, lovenot even for Macedonia before the rainnot even for the Cuban Strawberry and Chocolate.
Cruz believes that, without a doubt, the greatest prize was the one that the viewer from his country put in his hands: “That the Cuban people overwhelmingly thought that we deserved the Oscar was our true prize,” he tells EL PAÍS .
Just 30 years ago, in December 1993, Cruz gained space among the main faces of Cuban cinema as the protagonist, along with Jorge Perugorría, of Strawberry and Chocolate. The film, which premiered at the opening of the XIII International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, won the festival's Grand Coral award that year, won the Silver Bear at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar. Its directors, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, gave an indisputable artistic piece to Cuban and universal cinematography. The 108-minute film set in Havana in the seventies tells the story of a young heterosexual (Cruz, in the character of David), a political science student and communist, who meets another young homosexual (Perugorría, in the character of Diego ), reader of Lezama Lima, Martí or Cavafis, with whom he developed a friendship, one could say a love, that exploded in the minds of Cubans in the early nineties.
The great theme of Strawberry and Chocolate It is still a territory of debate: it addresses homosexuality, but the protagonists never even get to kiss each other, rather the man ends up leaving with a woman and the conflict is resolved in friendship, with the mythical hug of the final scene. “What would happen if the archetypes were more heteroflexible or pansexual as in the narrative of Reinaldo Arenas?” asks the filmmaker. queer Cuban Lázaro González. “Or seen another way, how to put the seal of queer, cuir, queer, pájara to a film in which homoerotic desire never materializes even like a stolen kiss; and, on the other hand, each sexual scene represents pleasure from the voyeurism from a heteronormative perspective.”
Another of the great themes of the film is tolerance: “I believe that everyone has the right to live their life however they want,” says David's character in the film. But when we talk about tolerance, we are not only talking about respect for sexual choice, but also for the opposite in every sense, which is embodied, in this case, in the figure of the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary. If there are two great antagonists in the film, more than the homosexual and the heterosexual, it is those. The first, which preserves posters with the most pop face of Marilyn Monroe, issues of the magazine time and who consumes whiskey, “the drink of the enemy,” who reads Vargas Llosa, Severo Sarduy and Goytisolo, demonized at that time in Cuba. The second, whose only saints are Che, the insignia of the July 26 movement and his young communist card. The counterrevolutionary is the homosexual, the dissident, who does not do CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) guards or volunteer work, and the revolutionary is his counterpart, “the new man” that Fidel Castro intended to build in Cuba. At times, the film throws darts of criticism at the heart of the system. At times, it seems like he condones it.
“The reception of a film will always depend on the viewer's horizon of expectations,” says Cuban film critic Juan Antonio García. “However, more than a political assignment, from what I have been able to investigate, I see Strawberry and Chocolate such as the need that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea had to bring his own ideas to the public sphere.”
In some of his dialogues, the character of Diego says: “In socialism there is no freedom, the bureaucrats control everything”, a criticism not insignificant in those years. At the same time, it depends on how you look at it, it is a film that, at times, could whitewash the face of the Government: “What I am going to show you is that we communists are not as savage as you paint us,” says the character. of David in another of his scenes. There are even phrases that you wouldn't know how to define if they are on the spectrum of criticism or absolution. “It is unfortunate but understandable that mistakes are made, like sending Pablito to UMAP,” says David in a certain scene. By this he refers to the Military Production Aid Units, a kind of forced labor camps where the Cuban Government sent religious, criminals and homosexuals, with the desire to reorient them politically, ideologically and sexually. There was, among others, the Cuban singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés.
Many are those who consider that Strawberry and Chocolate does not inaugurate a tradition of homosexual themes in Cuban cinema, when there were already works like Improper conductby Néstor Almendros, Tent Cityby Miñuca Villaverde, And female is my soulby Lizette Vila or Butterflies on the Scaffold, by Luis Felipe Bernaza and Margaret Gilpin. There are those who believe that Strawberry and Chocolate, which waited 14 years to be broadcast on a national television channel, had the backing of authorities and cultural guardians. The truth is that the island's public and critics welcomed like never before a fiction feature film that explicitly addressed the issue of homosexuality, a territory directly attacked by those responsible for the 1959 Revolution, guerrillas, bearded, virile, of young bodies covered in olive green, which condemned from the beginning any sexual manifestation that was not between men and women.
Three decades after the Castros came to power, a film was released where the words “gay” or “faggot” were repeated, in the same country that was the scene of the so-called Night of the Three Ps, when a police raid attempted to put an end to prostitutes, pimps and “birds” (homosexuals), including the writer Virgilio Piñera. The same country that expelled homosexuals from universities or workplaces. The same one where in the 70s the well-known Gray Quinquennium was established, and artists who moderately disagreed with the system were persecuted and homosexuals were particularly marginalized. In 1971, at the National Congress of Culture and Education, it was insisted that “recognized homosexuals” should not be tolerated despite their “artistic merit.” In the 1980 exodus, from the port of Mariel to the United States, in an attempt to “purify Cuban socialist society,” many homosexuals left, among them the writer Reinaldo Arenas. In an interview published in 2010 by the Mexican newspaper The Day, Fidel Castro was asked about the crusade unleashed against homosexuals, and he confessed to having been the main person responsible. “If anyone is responsible, it's me,” he said, and then added that he didn't have time to deal with the issue because he was immersed in political issues like the October Crisis. “We had so many terrible problems, life-and-death problems, you know, that we didn't pay enough attention.”
Strawberry and Chocolate It came a few years after a certain path towards the acceptance of homosexuality by the Government, which had allowed the opening of the National Center for Sexual Education (Cenesex) and the integration of homosexual men into the army. After 30 years, the authorities report a total of 745 same-sex marriages in Cuba until April, after having approved a Family Code in 2022 that recognizes equal marriage. Many thank the film for having paved the way towards a dialogue on homosexual issues in Cuba. But if the Cuban viewer of the 1990s experiences an approach of amazement, recognition or discovery toward the film, today's viewer does not. Today's spectator, who can marry whoever he wishes, approaches a document, a testimony, and a mirror.
There are many other stories in Strawberry and Chocolate that seem to have not changed for the viewer of yesterday and the viewer of today. For example, censorship. The film revolves around an exhibition that finally becomes censored in a country that 30 years later restricts many of the expressions and possibilities of art. An avant-garde film that talks about censorship when the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (Icaic) keeps some of the most notorious episodes of recent times on the island. Even so, García believes that Cuban cinema today, or the “audiovisual body of the nation,” as he likes to call it, “enjoys great health, especially because there is a group of young filmmakers who have managed to reconquer international spaces, and place their films in various circuits around the world. Paradoxically, the State fails to understand these new processes, and continues to use a cultural policy absolutely surpassed by History.”
In Strawberry and Chocolate We see a David and a Diego who suffer from the deterioration of Havana. “They are dropping it,” says one of the two at one point, and it seems like the monologue of any Cuban passing through the city right now. If the viewers of the early nineties lived through the fateful Special Period, today's viewers remain in a crisis that many consider has already surpassed any other.
The film talks about emigrating. “I've had problems with the system,” says Diego before announcing to David that he will finally leave Cuba, news that he keeps hidden almost until the end of the film, like almost everyone in the country, who keeps the secret of his departure until that can't be hidden anymore. Thirty years later, many of the viewers of Strawberry and Chocolate They are part of the great exodus that Cuba is experiencing, the largest in its history, which reaches the number of almost half a million emigrants in just two years.
It would be worth asking, three decades after Strawberry and ChocolateWhat kind of country is Cuba? Vladimir Cruz believes, without a doubt, that it is not a better country. “It is curious to see how time seems to have only eroded the physical structure of our city, but not the closed-mindedness and dogmatism of many officials and cultural institutions, more concerned with politics than with culture itself,” he says. “Given this situation, it is worth asking if a similar film could be filmed and exhibited in today's Cuba. To be honest, I'm afraid not,” he answers. “I have to say that, at least in that sense, we have a worse country.”
Strawberry and Chocolate begins with a scene at the popular Coppelia ice cream parlor in Havana. Diego arrives with a bouquet of sunflowers, a book and his hunter's gaze. He asks permission to sit down and tastes his ice cream. “I couldn't resist the temptation. I love strawberry,” he tells David. The Coppelia is also a worse place. The streets that Diego and David walk, or the bookstores they visit, are a worse place. The mythical Guarida, the main set of the film converted today into one of the most sophisticated restaurants in Havana, in the middle of one of the neighborhoods where the most building collapses have been reported in recent years, is not a better place either.
The question arises as to whether, after 30 years, Vladimir Cruz and Jorge Perugorría have been faithful to the spirit of Diego and David. Perugorría did not respond to a questionnaire from EL PAÍS. Cruz, for his part, believes that he has tried to be consistent with the film: “The only thing I can say is that in the last 30 years, from my work in Strawberry and Chocolate“All the main acts that I have carried out, both professional and personal, have been done taking into account that spirit and that responsibility.”
#Cuba #front #mirror #years #39Fresa #Chocolate39
