I Am Cuba

It is necessary to tear down one myth so that another can be built in its place. For example, with the aid of five thousand of Castro’s troops. Four stories from the time of the Cuban revolution, as seen by Soviet filmmakers. Soy Cuba. If some of the shots in Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying made my heart pound (yes, that also happens to viewers without critical distance), his trip to Cuba gave me a continuous tachycardia. Unbelievably long and complicated shots and emotional camerawork, which immediately responds to the emotional/physical state of the characters or just flies through the space (the conclusion of the third part was the most WTF shot of the pre-digital age in my opinion). Soy Cuba. The obvious propaganda contained in every sentence of the poetic commentary, in the behaviour of every simply typologised character, in every ostentatious hand gesture, revealing in its melodramatic nature that Kalatozov didn’t try very hard to adapt the principles of socialist realism to the Cuban mentality, is not offensive today. Just as it wasn’t offensive at the time of creation, when the film, made with virtually unlimited resources, went almost unnoticed by anyone for nearly two years. It was the Americans (Scorsese and Coppola, among others), ironically caricatured in the film, who brought this mammoth work back into the twilight of the cinema. Soy Cuba. The unsophisticated symbolism (a white dove), the ponderousness, hollowness and pathos of the accompanying commentary (also the work of a Russian, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko), the victory of form over content and the aggressive manipulation of facts, at some moments directly “rewriting” actual news footage, the somewhat ridiculous pointing out of manipulation perpetrated by others (false reports of Fidel’s death) – these are all deficiencies that prevent this technically brilliant spectacle from getting the highest rating. Even if there were more drawbacks, even a hundred times more, get this this film for its cinematography, ideally in a version without the intrusive Russian dubbing…and be amazed. Soy Cuba. Appendix: The documentary Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano will tell you more about the filming and subsequent rejection of Soy Cuba. You’ll just have to deal with its heavily nostalgic tone. 85% (05/11/2011)

With a bit of exaggeration (but not that much), the viewer may feel, after almost two and a half hours, that they have only seen four cuts - between four separate stories. The countless intuitive and at the same time imaginative rides, Kalatozov's detailed false ceilings, and various camera angles are certainly still diligently studied by students at the Moscow Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Similarly, the story progresses smoothly from the seemingly invisible humiliation of a poor country, through the identification of the source of its misery in capitalism maintained by an imperialist colossus up north, and through the first isolated, uncoordinated attempts doomed to failure, to the conscious, organized mass victory of the revolution in the final story. Originally, even I, despite being an old leftist, wanted to be strict and criticize the film's overly readable plot. But when I hear (as in so many Eastern European films) the cries such as those who say, "it's all ideology," "victory of form over content," or "manipulation/abuse," I change my mind. An objective assessment would probably be that which saw Batista as the smiling guy who didn't do anything that the US ambassador saw with his own eyes (find out, for example, what the golden phone was), in 1961, the US sent a humanitarian mission full of freedom fighters to Cuba (probably like those in Syria today), and so on. There remains one unrelated question to ponder: how is it possible that Cuba is constantly elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council by the General Assembly of the UN? Strange, when we know that the whole world despises it because of Castro's totalitarian regime... (04/19/2014)