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Cuba’s Outdated Film Festival Carries On

There were no great crowds of long lines outside the movie theaters and it didn’t feel like December because of the high temperatures and strong sun. These are the days of the New Latin American Film Festival, but the whole context is very different from 35 years ago when it was founded. The loss of importance of this cultural event is obvious, as is people’s reduced expectations round the Coral awards for the best films.

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There were no great crowds of long lines outside the movie theaters and it didn’t feel like December because of the high temperatures and strong sun. These are the days of the New Latin American Film Festival, but the whole context is very different from 35 years ago when it was founded. The loss of importance of this cultural event is obvious, as is people’s reduced expectations round the Coral awards for the best films. But.. what has changed more? The Festival or us?

The competition faced in Cuba for any movie is much greater now. Despite our material and technical limitations, our society has seen its access to films, documentaries and TV programs other than those broadcast by the official media skyrocket. Movie theaters have ceded space before home projections or private salons with flat screens and plastic chairs.

Despite recent prohibitions on the film circuit operated by the self-employed, the phenomenon of “non-institutional programming” is unstoppable. So the Festival of New Latin American Cinema is not a film oasis in the wasteland of Soviet films we experienced in the 80s. Now it must compete with more commercial and dynamic offerings that address a broad spectrum of tastes.

In the illegal market “combos” or “packages” proliferate, selections of series, reality shows and audience participation films. There are also abundant scientific and historic documentaries and big screen releases. We Cubans are true “Pirates of the Caribbean” when it comes time to copy and distribute recently released movies from other countries. One week after the film Avatar took New York by storm, the savvy marketers in our own backyard were offering a lesser quality — but similar impact — copy on local networks.

“The Festival” (period… as we call it), had a clear ideological focus from the beginning to promote creations filled with social criticism, a reflection of regional problems or the historic memory of the dictatorships that plagued Latin America. Hence, its current problems in competing for an audience that increasingly wants lighter entertainment — humorous or simply frivolous. From a mass phenomenon, the Festival has become an elite event that tries to compensate for the excess of Hollywood movies, today available everywhere.

Another element that marks the decline of this film event is the death of its creator and inspiration. Along with all that might have been controversial in the life of Alfredo Guevara, the Festival director, his drive and his personal relations shaped this film festival each December. Like every creature made in the image and likeness of man, the Festival received a very hard blow with the death of its principal author. However, in Cuba we’re already used to the survival of the most inert phenomena, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise in this case that there is another ad infinitum extension, another living-dead.

For the filmmakers as well, the Havana event has declined in importance. It has become more of a get-together, mojitos in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional, or simply a walk though this theme park of the past that we have become. But to get a Coral award feels more like a remembrance than a present honor. Other places, other festivals, have gained in prestige and media reach in recent decades, to the detriment of an event that hasn’t known how to keep up with the times.

Its political filter remains an impediment to the rejuvenation of the Festival. Although criticism has gained a space in its offerings, and its directors are not part of the institutional framework, it remains far from being a space without censorship. Another point on which it can’t compete — not even close — is with the underground movie networks, packed with controversial materials. But 35 years on, the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema continues.

However, it is worth asking whether this is evidence of its good health or the stubbornness of its organizers. Unable to compete with the illegal — and international — networks of film distribution, rocked by the passing of its creator, and given its apparent loss of popularity, this event needs to be renewed. Otherwise, it could end up like that moment of the year when we dust off our nostalgia, going to theaters with broken seats and noisy projectors, to evoke that time when we could only see good movies in December. Two weeks for longing and remembrance.

Yoani’s English Language blog is here, and her posts also appear in TranslatingCuba.com here, along with those of over 100 independent voices writing from the Island. You can help translate Cuban bloggers at HemosOido.com here.

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Cuba’s Outdated Film Festival Carries On

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L’organisation internationale contre la torture lance une “intervention d’urgence” pour José Daniel Ferrer

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José Daniel Ferrer

MIAMI, États-Unis.- L’Observatoire pour la protection des défenseurs des droits humains (OPDDH), a lancé ce vendredi une campagne d'”Interventions urgentes” en faveur du prisonnier politique et de conscience cubain José Daniel Ferrer García, leader de l’Union patriotique de Cuba (UNPACU), selon une note de Radio Televisión Martí.

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Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?

New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio) Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries. They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes

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New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio)

Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries.

They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes. Some nights they would connect through routers and play strategy video games that made them feel powerful and free. Whoever wants to know them should know that they’ve had “emerging teachers” since elementary school and were taught grammar, math and ideology via television screens. However, they ended up being the least ideological of the Cubans who today inhabit this Island, the most cosmopolitan and with the greatest vision of the future.

On arriving at junior high school they played at throwing around around the obligatory snack of bread while their parents furtively passed their lunches through the school gate. They have a special physical ability, an adaptation that has allowed them to survive the environment; they don’t hear what doesn’t interest them, they close their ears to the harangues of morning assemblies and politicians. They seem lazier than other generations and in reality they are, but in their case this apathy acts like an evolutionary advantage. They’re better than us and will live in a country that has nothing to do with what we were promised.

A few months ago, these same young people, starred in the best known case of school fraud uncovered publicly. Some of those hoping to earn a place in higher education bought the answers to an admissions test. They were used to paying for approval, because they had to turn to private tutors to teach them what they should have learned in the classroom. Many of those who recently enrolled in the university had private teachers starting in elementary school. They are the children of a new emerging class that has used its resources so that their children can reach a desk at the right hand — or the left — of the alma mater.

These young people dressed in uniforms in their earlier grades, but they struggled to differentiate themselves through the length of a shirt, a fringe of bleached hair, or through pants sagging below their hips. They are the children of those who barely had a change of underwear in the nineties, so their parents tried to make sure they didn’t “go through the same thing,” and turned to the black market for their clothes and shoes. They mock the false austerity and, not wanting to look like militants, they love bright shiny colors and name brand outfits.

Yesterday, with the start of the school year, they received a lecture about the attempts of “imperialism to undermine the revolution through its youth.” It was like a faint drizzle running over an impervious surface. The government is right to be worried; these young people who have entered the university will never become good soldiers or fanatics. The clay from which they are made cannot be molded.

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Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?

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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman

Woman drinking (14ymedio) 14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness

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Woman drinking (14ymedio)

Woman drinking (14ymedio)

14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness. Instead of the urgent demands they should mention, all I hear is this appreciation directed to a power as manly as it is deaf.

It’s not about “helping” to wash a plate or watch the kids, nor tiny illusory gender quotas that hide so much discrimination like a slap. The problem is that economic and political power remains mainly in masculine hands. What percentage of car owners are women? How many acres of land are owned or leased by women. How many Cuban ambassadors on missions abroad wear skirts? Can anyone recite the number of men who request paternity leave to take care of their newborns? How many young men are stopped by the police each day to warn them they can’t walk with a tourist? Who mostly attends the parent meetings at the schools?

Please, don’t try to “put us to sleep” with figures in the style of, “65 percent of our cadres and 50 percent of our grassroots leaders are women.” The only thing this statistic means is that more responsibility falls on our shoulders, which means neither a high decision-making level nor greater rights. At least such a triumphalist phrase clarifies that there are “grassroots leaders,” because we know that decisions at the highest level are made by men who grew up under the precepts that we women are beautiful ornaments to have at hand… always and as long as we keep our mouths shut.

I feel sorry for the docile and timid feminist movement that exists in my country. Ashamed for those ladies with their ridiculous necklaces and abundant makeup who appear in the official media to tell us that “the Cuban woman has been the greatest ally of the Revolution.” Words spoken at the same moment when a company director is sexually harassing his secretary, when a beaten woman can’t get a restraining order against her abusive husband, when a policeman tells the victim of a sexual assault, “Well, with that skirt you’re wearing…” and the government recruits shock troops for an act of repudiation against the Ladies in White.

Women are the sector of the population that has the most reason to shout their displeasure. Because half a century after the founding of the caricature of an organization that is the Federation of Cuban Women, we are neither more free, nor more powerful, nor even more independent.

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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman

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