I Am Cuba

The film, I Am Cuba (1964), consists of four vignettes that depict what Cuba was in its pre-revolutionary day beyond the wealthy gloss of the American-owned casinos. Sugarcane is sweet, but it is also of tears.  Furthermore, the film explains the revolutionary ground-swell in the individual lives of Cubans whom the American tourists didn’t see from their luxurious perches near the beaches. The film proffers a glimpse of the extreme poverty and oppression so raw that it could (and did) foment a revolutionary change of regime through amassed violence against the police-state. The abstract message ripe for political theory is that once regime-change is on the front burner at the macro, or societal level, strong interpersonally-directed emotions that stem from particular cases of injustice will have had a lot of time to build up. Indeed, the latter is the trigger for the former. Abstract political principles on governance and macroeconomic policy on the distribution and redistribution of wealth, and even principles of distributive justice are not divorced from the interpersonal level, especially as between citizens and individual police or military employees of the state. Indeed, those philosophical abstractions gain traction in a revolutionary context through the sweat and tears of individual people.

In the first short story, the exploitation of a Cuban prostitute is evinced not only in the act itself, but also, and more so, in the fact that the businessman takes the woman’s cherished crucifix for a few dollars without her consent as she is watching. The man’s disorientation as he leaves her hut to discover in daylight the squalid living conditions of the Black, poor Cubans suggests that exploitation of labor is likely endemic and hidden from the view of Cuba as the land of nice, Americanized hotels.

In the story of the sugarcane farmer, the utter precariousness of economic position is most salient. The line that there are so many tears in sugar cane even as it is so sweet reflects the arduous labor that goes into cutting the stalks. That the landowner could refuse to pay the farmer who is harvesting a crop because the landowner has presumably just made a lot of money selling the land to United Fruit company demonstrates just how unfair economic laws can be. The sheer unfairness translates into radical, emotion-laden reactions, such as the farmer immediately ceasing his work and instead burning the crop so the land owner won’t profit from the farmer’s work. The depth of the unfairness, more abstractly, is capable of triggering radical (rather than “reform”) economic and political actions, including armed revolution. That the farmer dies of smoke inhalation gives the viewer an understanding that it is possible that both interpersonal and structural or systemic power and economic dynamics may be so unbalanced, and thus unfair, that a person on the losing end may choose to end one’s life rather than go on in such a condition. Abject humiliation alone can give prompt oppressed people to risk everything to “just say no” or hit back. The attacks from Hamas against Israel on October 8, 2023 can be understood, for instance, as a people pushed against a proverbial wall with nowhere to go to the point that they were willing to take rash steps to upend the status quo. This is not to say that violence is excusable; only that it is explainable.

The indiscriminate arial bombing of another farmer’s mountainous dwelling is unfair to him and his family, especially since one of the bombs kills one of his sons. The sheer unfairness, I submit, completely changes his political position from that of non-involvement with the revolutionary army near his hut to joining up to fight. He is not fighting to improve his economic lot; he dismissed such a motive when he talks with a soldier before the bombing. He is also not fighting to avenge the loss of his son, for the tone he adopts in telling his wife that he has to go has more of a sense of duty than anger to it.

The next story naturally transitions the viewer to the macro, political level of what is based on the economic struggles and hardship of individuals such as the people living near the prostitute, the sugar-cane farmer, and the subsistence-living mountain farmer. Out of the dire economic conditions of such people, who are also part of Cuba, emanates the political conflict between a regime and a revolutionary army. By this time, as the man sings, “It’s taken you too long; I can’t forgive.” The revolutionaries will not turn back; the ferment has gone past compromise and reconciliation. The injustices have been too harsh and have been allowed to go on too long for any signs of contrition to be credible. Slaves, once having made the determination to be stars, cannot put the new wine into the old bottles. The revolutionaries are firing at the past; not to kill. But is this really so when economic injustice is so harsh that strong emotions flash quite naturally in human beings?

Enrico on the left is furious at the policeman on the right for having murdered Enrico's friend and compatriot handcuffed in police custody. The intense emotions naturally triggered by witnessing an aggressor abuse his authority are the root cause of regime change by armed rebellion. 

Enrico, a young revolutionary from university, is clearly furious at the policeman who murders a friend who is already handcuffed and in custody. The agent of the state cannot tolerate even a prisoner making political statements in public. Enrico had resisted pulling the trigger on the chief of police because the man was with his wife and kids at the time; unlike the police, Enrico has a conscience and is flexible. Although Enrico understands that the struggle is against the system, which in turn can be viewed as the past, his rage is  against a particular agent, the policeman, of the unjust and violent regime that protects the exploitation by the rich of the poor. When the policeman who shot Enrico’s compatriot shots Enrico himself, he continues on as a walking wounded not because “to die for your homeland is to live,” but, rather, out of sheer rage against the unrepentant bully-policeman. It is personal. The source of a revolution is personal.  Abstract revolutionary slogans are too abstract to motivate a person in exacting retribution, or vengeance. Enrico is finally raw rage as he walks towards the armed policeman with only a block of concrete held up in the air. Enrico's pent-up anger has finally surpassed his conscience. The audience is surely rooting for him and against the policeman. Even viewers such as myself who oppose Socialism and Communism are rooting for him, for empathy naturally sides with the victims and their allies rather than with the bullies and predators. 

In summary, I Am Cuba is not just propaganda for Socialism and Communism. All that on a human level goes on before an armed revolutionary army is formed is visualized in four short stories. So much emotional pain built up over such a long time is packed into a radical political movement that seeks to completely up-end the status quo that once such a movement has begun on the macro level, the partisan movement is very difficult to reverse. The lesson for government officials is perhaps that there is time to stave off such movements because they do not pop up overnight. Moreover, preventing agents of the state or wealthy land- or company-owners from abusing their authority and holding those who do accountable is very much in the interest of a regime, lest it eventually fall all of a sudden by armed unrest. The lesson for revolutionaries is that the shift from the particular economic/power injustices that are interpersonal to a revolutionary party or army includes adopting a broader, more abstract perspective beyond the killing to fighting against the past as represented in the ongoing status quo.

Human nature is of course an indelible part of political and economic paradigm shifts via revolutionary movements, and the abstract political platforms are rooted in interpersonal emotions from particular cases of injustice. Revolutionary politics, including abstract slogans in the film’s dialogue, such as slaves and stars, firing at the past, struggle against the system, and To die for your homeland is to live, function along with an extant revolutionary army as landing pads for individuals who, had they not been the victims of particular agents of the state or the wealthy, would have resisted joining any army and not felt the slogans, being content instead to live life as it comes in poverty.