The Spanish Republic also had the support of Cubans who wanted to fight fascism after the coup d’état of 1936. This is how the Canarian filmmaker Miguel G. Morales portrays it in his documentary listen to the shadowwhich in the words of its director is “a song to the memory of the so-called defeated who never were, those who sacrificed and laid down their bodies for the sake of a better world.” He emphasizes that it is also “a film that vindicates what was not included in the official story of the International Brigades, where thousands of anonymous people from Cuba were not included. It seems that they have also been overcome by memory. The “forgetfulness” in official history underpins the ideology of power,” he maintains.
The 30-minute film shows 80% unpublished images that are the result of Miguel G. Morales’ research work for three years. It recalls that Cuba was the last colony of the Spanish empire and, despite this, and “clandestinely, thousands of Cubans arrived to the Iberian Peninsula to defend the Second Republic against the threat of fascism and Franco’s coup d’état. ”. However, it is not intended to be a historiographic film, but rather a kind of essay.
He explains that this story came to him after coming across La Pasionaria’s speech in Cuba, where he talks about the Cuban men and women who were in the war defending the Republic. “I started to pull the thread and raised it with Atilio Caballero” (renowned Cuban playwright and writer who was the screenwriter of this documentary). “I am interested in stories that have never been intended to be told, that do not fit into normative narratives, that one”beauty of the dislocated“as Alejandra Pizarnik said. From an image or a simple oral record you can activate a story to tell, in this case it was La Pasionaria’s speech in Havana in 1963,” he points out.
The filmmaker explains that if there are two key characteristics that describe the film, it is, on the one hand, the normalization of women within all the spectrums of what the coup d’état and the civil war were and how the Spanish Republic was defended. He emphasizes that he was interested in reflecting the leaders who were there at that time, both in anarchism, communism or socialism, but above all normalizing it in the story. And, on the other hand, he points out that the film is also characterized by non-violence, that is, its premise was “not to use or select any images of dead people, war, trenches, bombs.” “In the film you don’t see any of this, you barely see weapons, you see some weapons because someone has them, but we tried to create a story that did not advocate violence,” he emphasizes.
Miguel G. Morales regrets that the story of the Cuban brigade members has gone unnoticed in history and highlights that Cuba, which is a tiny island compared to the United States, contributed more brigade members in relation to its population. “It has been confirmed that Cuba contributed about 1,400 and the US 3,000. However, thousands of stories have been told about the American brigade members but not about the Cubans and with the particularity that on top of that Cuba was a Spanish colony where Spain had devastated a Cuban population, it had treated them like slaves,” he explains.
Miguel G Morales highlights that the Cuban intellectuals who were at the II Congress of Antifascist Writers in Valencia were Juan Marinelo, Nicolás Guillén, Felix Pita and Alejo Carpentier. In Spain, the painter Wilfredo Lam and the musician Julio Cueva were also caught by the coup d’état. He also mentions the surrealist writer Juan Brea or the well-known journalist Pablo de la Torriente Brau, who died on the front and to whom Miguel Hernández dedicated his “Second Elegy.”
Among the motivations that led Cubans to fight for Spain there is one that stands out above all in the film: “We were going to fight for humanity,” says one of the testimonies collected. For Miguel G Morales, “it is a story of struggle for humanity or for the possibility of another future, which was what was happening in Spain,” a country that at that time, it is said in the film, “was like a lighthouse in the darkness of fascism.
“They were people who sacrificed their lives for the fight for a common ideal but who were not attached to a specific ideology. Of the Cuban men and women, there were people not affiliated with any party, others with the socialist, communist, anarchist party…,” he explains.
The importance of unpublished images
“I am a worker of images and archives. In my work I always try to treat the files with commitment, with an intention to serve something to society. “The very fact of researching archives and bringing dormant images back to life makes us resist and that entails a responsibility,” explains the director, who adds that he feels more like a catalyst than an author trying to leave his mark. “A catalyst for the meaning of those images. Navigating those meanings to expose them, to ask questions and share, which at the end of the day is what culture is about,” he clarifies.
Miguel G Morales emphasizes that before his work there was a film from the eighties, called Spain in the heartby Belkis Vega, who told this story about the Cubans and who gave in so that in listen to the shadow these testimonies could be integrated. “He was the only person who had touched on this topic and his work had been made invisible. For this reason, we pay him this tribute, so that he can be included in this film,” he points out.
The associate producer of this film is Emilio Silva Barrera, journalist and president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), and through him, the Canarian filmmaker says that he has been able to access the New York University archive “and That is where I actually find almost 60% of the material is taken from the archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” he says. It was by analyzing shot by shot and contrasting it with archives from Havana that he was able to weave and decipher these images. This is how he finds a microfilm about the departure of the Cubans to Spain in which there are files of those people and that allows him to string together a lot of stories of people who left, who were in the concentration camps in France and who later arrived to Cuba years later, or people who were left along the way and died.
The relevance of the story of this work
Miguel G. Morales points out that listen to the shadow It is a film that today, in the current context, takes on a meaning with which we can identify. “Right now all over the world, all over the planet, fascism, which is another type of fascism, is taking over everything and that is why it is important for me to work on these types of stories,” he says. “For me, it is resistance to try to tell stories that we have not been told,” he insists.
“I am interested in these types of projects, with a commitment that films can serve something beyond authorial creation, and in this case it is to shed light on a hidden story. There is a very nice sequence that I really like, which is when they talk about the other Spain, which is that other Spain that in some way was lost but that was not lost in the minds of the people who went to fight and who put their life at the service of that idea,” he adds.
A team between Havana and the Canary Islands
listen to the shadow It is an independent work with a documentary narrative of rehearsal with work teams in Havana and the Canary Islands and that has had the production direction of Encarna P. Yanes. The original soundtrack is by the musician Fajardo, who makes his debut with this composition and who had already collaborated with Miguel G. Morales on the creations Huacal or Matul. Likewise, the narrating voice is from the Cuban actress and playwright Mariela Brito and the sound post-production is carried out by the team formed by Sara Sánchez and Fabián Yanes.
The director explains that his connection with Cuba began following in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, born in Havana. In addition, he studied at the International Film and TV School of San Antonio de los Baños. His first documentary short film The old man and the lake was filmed in the Sierra del Escambray and its fiction short film Ekaterina It also premiered in the Official Section of the Havana Festival in 2021 and was filmed in Juraguá and Cienfuegos. All the works that Morales has developed on the island are produced with the collaboration of the Cuban writer Atilio Caballero, whom he met during his stay at EICTV.
listen to the shadow It is an independent project that has been carried out with the help of the Government of the Canary Islands and the Cabildo of Tenerife. It has also included the special collaboration of the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the ALBA Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive and New York University. It also has the collaboration of the IISH of Amsterdam, the Institute of History of Cuba, the Cuban Cinematheque, the ICAIC, the Toulouse film library, Archeology of Images, the PCE Archive and the Spanish Film Library.
The world premiere of this documentary took place at the 45th Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, on December 12. Part of the technical team from Cuba and Spain was present at the premiere.
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