Word: cuban
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once in power, Armas returned the land, killed those new peasant owners who resisted, declared every union in the country illegal, and formed new ones with the help of AFL/CIO's ORIT (Interamerican Regional Lab-or Organization) and Batista's Cuban Confederation of Labor. ( Presna Libre, July 19, 1954, p. 3, cited in CRV, "Peasant and Worker Organization in Guatemala," p. 5) He promised entering foreign firms a ten-year tax holiday, and signed away oil exploitation rights for over half the land in the country. The oil law was presented to his new congress to ratify written in English...
...LOCKWOOD, the photojournalist who did interview books with Fidel Castro and Eldridge Cleaver, will run a benefit show at the Harvard Square Theatre this Sunday at 12:30 p.m. Proceeds go to a worthy cause, the Cuban Study Center, which will help support such beloved leftist writers as Lockwood, Jason Epstein, Sal Landau, and Jose Yglesias. The film is Tomas G. Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, the first post-Revolutionary Cuban dramatic feature to be shown in this country...
...those who want to see Cuba today, Memories does contain pictures and sounds recorded in 1966-67. If you have a need for crude "documentary" evidence, I can assure you that you will see and hear Cuban faces and voices. But if you want some kind of understanding -of Cuba, of post-revolutionary societies, of women and men within them, or even of capitalism and yourself-this film won't help...
...film does not try to develop ideas about its subject. It lacks any stylistic will to lay things open, to cut apart fictional characters or real societies so we can see better what they are made of. The Cuban Revolution, for example, is presented as the hero's "revenge on the stupid Cuban bourgoisie-everything I don't want to be." It has no direct presence in his life; he is always buffered from it by this sense or that feeling. Even when the Cuban legal system intervenes in his life, and puts him on trial for rape. Alea presents...
Formally, too, Memories does lip service to progressive film-making; and there too it cops out. It includes phony pieces of self-criticism: a pseudo-reflexive section wherein Elena, wanting to become an actress, has the hero take her to ICAIC, the Cuban film institute, where he just happens to know a director who has found some pieces of old Hollywood films cut out by Battista's censors, and who wants to incorporate them into a new film he's making-he doesn't know quite how, his film will be a "collage" of social bits and pieces; and thus...