Abraham Lincoln University Cuban Revolution Paper Please write in simple English, vocabulary, and grammar. Instructions: 1. Please watch the Film “compan

Abraham Lincoln University Cuban Revolution Paper Please write in simple English, vocabulary, and grammar.

Instructions:

1. Please watch the Film “companeras and companeros” by adolfas mekas and barbara stone, and Please read the article by dr lillian guerra below in the uploaded files.

2. Search the film “companeras and companeros” online and please confirm the movie with me first before you write the essay.

3. Please add at least 2 footnotes or bibliography

4. THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: View “Compañeros y Compañeras” and read Dr. Lilian Guerra’s article on David Stone and “Companeros y Companeras” (both on blackboard) and reflect on issue in the article and film. Bring in specific cites for the film and reading.

5. Please write at least 3 pages and in MLA format.

6. Thankyou have a nice day! Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
The Reel and Hyper-Real Revolution:
Self-Representation and the Political Performance of Everyday Life
“No other medium influences the spectator’s consciousness as deeply [as
film]. … Naturally, it is the most dangerous for all of those who might
violate the trust of the people [que no andan muy claros en sus cuentas
con el pueblo]. Film is the ideological weapon of the highest calibre.
Anyone who ever cared about public opinion knows this.”
—ICAIC director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, June 1959i
At the start of the Revolution’s second decade, Cubans faced not only the collapse
of what was supposed to have been the people’s greatest triumph and imperialism’s
greatest scourge—the subversion of underdevelopment by a record sugar harvest—but
they also faced humiliating evidence of how far the state had gone to buoy support in the
most implausible dimension of Fidel’s vision so far. Despite official comparisons of the
Zafra del 70 with the victories of 1959, the impossible had not proven possible this time;
carefully crafted images of a united people did not produce an inevitable victory.
Nonetheless, neither failure itself nor the alienation that citizens subsequently manifested
necessarily precluded the development of new forms of political consciousness.
Exploring the self-representation of consciousness through public performances
of loyalty and revolutionary identity, this chapter suggests that the most militant and loyal
revolutionaries claimed an unprecedented degree of authorship in the discursive
construction and daily political management of the Revolution that effectively displaced
the voice, image and centrality of Fidel. Based on archival and finished documentary
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
films, we examine how the most devout revolutionaries cultivated counter-narratives of
struggle that engaged the Revolution on official terms but also strove for greater
independence from the state.
Performed for the camera by citizens and reified by documentary filmmakers,
these counter-narratives of sacrifice and personal protagonism reveal how the Revolution
had, by the end of its first decade, produced bifurcated political realities. Awareness of
this bifurcation and how to respond to it in ways that claimed power over the state and
transferred moral authority to individual citizens formed the crux of this new
revolutionary consciousness. Like conjoined twins, the image of a future society
marching ever forward toward economic prosperity and equality sank deep roots in the
entrails of the revolutionary present, determining how citizens gauged the rhythm, pace
and progress of the nation. By positing themselves rather than Fidel as the principal
authors and heroic champions of the Revolution’s future and present, loyal citizens deftly
navigated the boundaries of these mutually dependent yet distinct national realities. What
were these realities and how were they constituted?
On the one hand, the state media and mass organizations’ deliberate imagemaking and control over the form and content of discursive and visual portrayals of the
Revolution had produced a “hyper-reality” of utopia based on total unity. Following Jean
Baudrillard, this chapter suggests that hyper-real spaces exist in any given society in
order to convince their members that the rest of society, external to these spaces, is not
only authentic but that its values should not be contested.ii As Umberto Eco has argued,
imperial societies like the United States designed hyper-realities like Disney World as a
place of “total passivity” that “not only produces illusion, but—in confessing it—
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
stimulates the desire for it.”iii Standing in awe of capitalism’s power to surpass the real
through simulation, visitors embrace the limits of their freedom in patterns of regulated
consumption and willingly “enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and
afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.”iv
In the late 1960s, the Cuban government assigned a parallel role to the many
hyper-real spaces it created. Regardless of where one stood, whether in a cane field, a
classroom, a rally, or a government work center, citizens willingly and unwillingly
subjected themselves—their actions, their attitudes and even their sexual encounters— to
self- and group scrutiny. In these spaces, citizens evaluated each other and themselves
according to an ideal version of reality and levels of altruism that no human society had
previously reached. They also stood in awe of Communism’s power to subvert all that
had come before it historically, embracing and justifying the boundaries it placed on their
choices through predictable discursive practices that celebrated and promoted the
apprehension of collective consciousness. As in any hyper-reality, lived reality could
never fulfill the standards of the future which Cubans collectively imagined that they
were building; thus, its inferiority—that is, observable problems, shortcomings or failures
of policy—became naturalized conditions for which neither the collective nor
Communist system was ever fully responsible; only the past or the individual was to
blame.
According to the messages saturating the media as well as the political panorama
of billboards, posters and murals that decorated the walls of virtually all public buildings
in Cuba by the late 1960s, the future could always be better and brighter depending on
one’s behavior and attitudes in the present. From 1968 to 1970, the state’s campaign to
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
promote awareness of these mutually dependent, equally fragile halves of existence—
what is and what could be—subjected Cubans to the full weight of the Revolution’s
failure or triumph as never before. This constant focus on the future as a lens for
interpreting and assessing daily reality put the present and future at odds with one another
by placing citizens in two places at once: in the desired realm of the hyper-real and the
degraded condition of the real. Paradoxically, the future utopia could only survive and
flourish if citizens engaged in regular displays of aspiration toward it as well as a day-today discourse that denied the existence of any obstacle that might impede its eventual
triumph. Thus, not only did “authentic” representations of the Revolution require the
denial of all local conflict but they also required a denial of the need to deny conflict as
foundational to the building of a truly classless society. Few sources capture the paradox
of this performative process of denying conflict and simultaneously scrutinizing and
repressing the conflict being denied than archival footage and documentary films shot in
Cuba, especially those of 1968-1969. Just as state officials cast their policies as the result
of spontaneity and public agitation rather than top-down planning and decision-making,
documentary filmmakers employed or supported by ICAIC in these years were supposed
to rely on related tactics to ratify the credibility of revolutionary arguments presented
filmically. Like the Cuban state, they needed to create the illusion of spontaneity.
In the late 1960s, the Revolution’s golden age of documentary film-making,
Cuban leaders saw film, like the photographic images of the early 1960s, as a central
medium for not only defending the present-day but “offensively” defining the future on
its own, hyper-real terms.v The genre of documentary film seemed a particularly reliable
witness to the authenticity of belief and unconditional support for Fidel’s vision because
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
of its unique nature. Since its inception decades earlier, documentary film derived its
power from the ability to present the “world shown” as more true-to-life than the
viewer’s individual experience because the terms of the filmed world’s knowability are
“organized by the film [itself], not by reality”. vi As “indexical traces of past reality”,
individual testimonies, actions and filmed perspectives of events become evidence of
authenticity. Credible documentary requires their synthesis and conversion into a
construction that surpasses memory and completes experience.vii
As argued earlier, ICAIC’s origins in the PSP ensured that collective screenings
of films, whether at mainstream movie houses or at La Cabaña’s cultural workshops for
the Ejército Rebelde, were self-scrutinizing experiences. Seen in this light, cine-debates
ranked among the Revolution’s first hyper-real experiences of 1959. Subsequently,
ICAIC’s monopoly on the production and distribution of films was supposed to ensure
that the films which Cubans watched were appropriately didactic, in both content and
form. Following its legal charter, ICAIC assigned documentary films a central role in
“orienting” (or homogenizing) citizens’ interpretations of the changing world around
them according to the same discursive and ideological principles. This meant that
ICAIC’s founders, especially Alfredo Guevara and Julio García Espinoza, expected
documentary to represent hyper-real images of citizens consciously and visibly engaged
in revolutionary struggle: because no part of lived reality should exist independent of or
isolated from the Revolution, no part of filmic reality could betray this principle. To do
otherwise risked subverting real-life citizens’ belief in the values of that struggle and
their universal acceptance among “good” Cubans. The “real reality” of the Revolution
depended for its success on persuasive forms of media and ritualized spaces that
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
generated belief in the inevitability of that success: the filmic euphoria of the hyper-real
reel thus reinforced the viability of the real.
The first victim of this policy was the documentary P.M., made in a free cinema
style and shown on television without ICAIC approval in May of 1961: having caught
citizens in the act of dancing, drinking and generally expressing a popularly based
euphoria that apparently owed nothing to the Revolution, P.M. documented “pachanga
sin revolución” and, as we learned in an earlier chapters, such representations of Cuban
society were not allowed. The fact that P.M’s mostly black subjects subsequently
claimed to be fidelistas and milicianos did not rescue the film or its makers from disgrace
because their declarations were made off-camera and after-the-fact: the reel, in other
words, trumped the real and betrayed the hyper-real.
In the re-radicalized context of the late 1960s, ICAIC arguably took the
principles it applied to P.M. several steps further. Not only did interest in producing
solidly didactic documentaries increase, but ICAIC efforts to control the interpretive
gaze of documentary filmmakers intensified. Thus, top leaders provided unprecedented
access to documentary filmmakers both foreign and domestic, apparently believing that
the camera’s lens would substitute and fix the Revolution’s own discursive frame for
both a local and international audience. Citizens who “starred” in documentary films on
the Revolution’s state-engineered “epic battle for development” also knowingly starred in
the drama of the Revolution writ large. Wanting to recast the people of Cuba as central
characters in this drama, radical filmmakers from the United States like Saul Landau and
David Stone, a member of the guerrilla group known as the Weather Underground, made
documentaries that focused on the testimonies of people caught up in massive labor
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
projects between 1968 and 1970. At the same time, national filmmakers at ICAIC,
Santiago Alvarez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián, offered filmic interpretations of citizens’
experience and relationship to the state. Charged with capturing and exhibiting the
masses’ euphoric unity at its apogee, ICAIC assigned these filmmakers the task of
buttressing the state’s frame for interpreting revolutionary reality by reproducing it
through images and testimonials of citizens on screen.
However, the effort to record hyper-realistic images of mass mobilization and
popular expressions of euphoria fell far short of the goal, revealing the depth of
dissonance (and possible dissidence) that rituals of collective self-sacrifice were not only
supposed to transform but also conceal. The denial of problems and conflict was as
apparent in the filmic results as the problems and conflict themselves.
Central to apprehending this paradox in the finished documentaries of Landau,
Alvarez and Guillén Landrián are forty-six unedited archival films shot in four of Cuba’s
six provinces from June to October 1969 by Weatherman David Stone and a team of
ICAIC collaborators.viii Importantly, the subjects and sites that Stone filmed were not
only selected entirely by ICAIC and organs of the Cuban state but virtually all the
individuals who appeared before the camera were drawn from the most militant ranks of
Cuban society. Thus, the scenes filmed were meant to fulfill three duties: first, reflect a
“correct” political consciousness among citizens; second, convince viewers (through the
absence of all but the most integrated Cubans) that the attitudes expressed were typical of
all Cubans; and third, ensure that all the footage would represent a uniformly positive
portrayal of revolutionary Cuba before the world. However, these films are not simply
unique illustrations of “staged” political performances. Their archival, unedited nature
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
shows citizens actively managing the discursive bond between the hyper-real Cuba they
were supposed to portray and the real Cuba that they were living. Slip-ups in the
predictable dialogue, on- and off-camera voices heard correcting the behavior or
prompting the discourse of subjects in the frame, unexpected and uncontrolled
expressions, actors overstating, mis-speaking or otherwise reproducing official discourse
in inappropriate ways —all these elements form part of a counter-narrative of selfrepresentation that strained the grand narrative that ICAIC and David Stone were
committed to re-telling.
Drawing on the archive of David Stone initially allows us to see how the finished
films of Alvarez, Landau, Guillén Landrián and even Stone himself ironically resisted
both their makers’ intentions and those of the Cuban state that sponsored them to focus
on the spaces that citizens wedged in between. While Landau made a film entitled and
centered on “Fidel”, Guillén Landrián created multiple documentaries examining the
Revolution’s social base, especially the communities or individuals whom the state
claimed to have rescued from political isolation and the emotional desert of the Self.
Both filmmakers intended to explore how citizens’ consciousness and daily lives
interwove themselves with the Revolution’s symbols, the public persona of Fidel, state
policies and structures. Still, the very different effect that Landau and Guillén Landrián
achieve lies in the difference of their gaze: Alvarez and Stone sought to document the
truth of the Revolution in the expressions, bodies and/or words of their subjects; Landau
and Guillén Landrián explored the expression, bodies and/or words of their subjects to
discover if truth of the Revolution existed at all.
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
Examining the dissonance within and among their representations of the
Revolution helps reveal three otherwise elusive elements of the Cuban experience: what
it was like to build the hyper-reality of Fidel’s future utopia by simultaneously denying
and eradicating the elements that contradicted its growth; how Cubans who identified
themselves as revolutionaries discursively connected the twin realities of the Revolution,
future and present, hyper-real and real, often by recourse to an objectified, vanquished
past; and finally, what it meant to root authorship and control over the Revolution in
oneself, independent of the figure and vision of Fidel.
“La Revolución somos nosotros”: Fighting Everyday Armageddon
in the Archival Films of David C. Stone
Sitting on the floor of a thatched hut in the batey, or inner patio, of a sugar
plantation in Las Tunas, Oriente in September 1969, four Communist cuadros, all of
them officers of Las FAR who led the Turcios Lima brigade of 36 millionaire cane
cutters, explained to the joint Cuban and US film crew how the Revolution had become
the center of their identity. Despite the interview’s improvised setting and the sincerity of
the witness that these men bore to the power of the Revolution before the camera, there
was nothing spontaneous about the discussion. As Communist militants, the speakers
would have already told their stories of hardship, political awakening and revolutionary
conciencia, both orally and in written form, on multiple occasions, beginning from the
time of their evaluation for the UJC. Not only did these cuadros’ testimonies of
integración follow the same structure but they concluded the same way: each identified a
“born again” moment when they fully realized the Revolution’s power and the
unconditionality that its fulfillment required; each qualified the extent of his contributions
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of Power: Revolution and Redemption in
Cuba, 1959-1972
to the Revolution as insufficient even as he proudly described them in detail. Yet, their
most interesting quality is not their authenticity or inauthenticity but their bald illustration
of how seriously revolutionaries took the connection between discourse and change.
Discursive self abnegation within the grand narrative of the Revolution helped to build it;
absenting the self even while talking about the self provided real-time evidence that the
hyper-real utopia of the future was becoming more real every day. In this sense, these
men’s story-telling was as much a show meant for others as a sign of progress aimed at
themselves.
Of the four cuadros’ testimonies, two show this connection most
dramatically.
The oldest of four cuadros, thirty-four-year-old Felix Pacheco was the only one
with a substantial war record. Having served in a small 26th of July guerrilla unit
organized in his home region of Realengo 18, an area of Guantanamo made legendary by
multiple peasant rebellions since 1930s, Pachecho testified that he had been “fighting for
this Revolution” since April of 1957. Like his fellow cuadros of rural background,
Pacheco’s slow, halting style of story-telling and overly detailed references prompted
film makers to cut his story short in several takes. Nonetheless, an unperturbed Pacheco
continued his monologue from cut to cut, even as the camera picked up only parts of it,
gazing at other members of the group and rarely looking directly at the camera.
“[A]lthough what I did was not so much,” he said firmly, “it was also not so little, given
my participation in revolutionary activities such as burning cane, sabotaging forklifts at
sugar mills (quemar grúa), breaking phone lines (romper teléfono), the communication
lines for the island, as well as combat…such as the battle at Central Hermita…”.
Pachecho then ended his story by contradicting all he had just said until then. “….Yet,
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Prof. Lillian Guerra
Visions of …
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