Juventud Rebelde
July 24, 2005
Positive, exclamatory and very convincing
By: Joel del Río

A CubaNews translation by Ana Portela.
Edited by Walter Lippmann
http://www.jrebelde.cu/2005/julio-septiembre/jul-24/afirmativa.html  
Film and movie halls in the country are showing Viva Cuba, a film that is already becoming a great success this summer and is becoming, in July 2005. a milestone in recent Cuban film history.

One of the most controversial endings in Cuban films was Nada (2001), the first film by Juan Carlos Cremata taking us by surprise as always and who now gives us Viva Cuba. This is the first Cuban film played by children and includes, also, the most eloquent and suggestive ending this critic has seen in a long time. The ending is a beautiful and tragic metaphor with the pair of young protagonists, defenseless, confused about the impossibility of a new flight, precisely at the point where the island ends and there is no more space to escape to from intolerance and lack of harmony. They are at the point where the lighthouse warns that the crocodile sinks its nozzle into the reverberating waters of the Caribbean.

But before reaching this allegorical ending, the spectator will have seen a very native and tragic-comic road show, a rhapsody woven with threads of gentle naturalism, a story vividly narrated – successfully achieved in the editing by Angélica Salvador – with few dead points and the roles sharply defined – a Montesqiue-Capulet classicism. Yes, because there is something of this story in the Cuban script taking us back to the Venetian environment of those two families Shakespeare confronted until the youngest of each family break the constant chain of hatred with a strange link of flaming love. Cremata and his co-script writer (Manuel Rodríguez) perhaps were not influenced by Shakespeare and preferred to deliver a beautiful fable of Jorgito and Malú chock-full of humor, beautiful landscapes and sharp criticism in the subtexts. They also preferred a stretched tone, graceful, agile, not somber or pessimistic.

The reader should not get the impression that Viva Cuba is a thoughtless effervescence or that the sublime simplicity becomes, silly, clichéd, or with a pre-determined optimism. This is not what I wanted to say. I must explain, because it is difficult to describe a work that sidesteps with great skill all forms of vulgarity. It is hard to avoid rhetoric in the style of “a song of love and hope” or “a tender poem about friendship at an early age” (which it also is). The writer has to tell these to sustain a tone which moves, without violence, between the picaresque and the lyrical, that is also the case with the images and soundtrack of the film. Cremata and his team have given us moments of acute farce, lyrical scenes, and fantasies, children who move the stars or who grow dry stalks by only wishing it.

For a better understanding of the intentions, twists, suggestiveness of the film, it is worthwhile referring to recent declarations made by Cremata to El Caimán Barbudo: “Cuban idiosyncrasies are part of my life project. And Cuba is a very different country. What I am interested in is transmitting the singularities of this unique country. I am a staunch defender of differences, of tolerance. I believe that a revolutionary is the one who re-evolves, who gets up every morning to change what has been achieved. Because I believe that re-evolution is not an inertia that generates satisfaction for having achieved something, but a joy felt with the re-creation, the re-making, re-invention, re-discovery of a different way, much better, new, once again. I believe in the will and vocation of re-doing the world I live in. That is why I seek to confront new situations, alive, unheard of, and unique. In Viva Cuba we use a lot of patriotic symbols: the flag, the Pioneers, the hymns, Che, the mambo, danzon, the bumblebee, the guajiro, the centipede. I lived outside of Cuba for eight years, in different countries. and all that time I felt the strong need to express myself as a Cuban. This experience served to make me aware that what I wanted was to make films here. And this marked me. Perhaps that is why my films, up to now, are about being here or there, of leaving or staying, or returning or departing”.

Honestly, I had never seen in Cuban films, children who talked with such grace and freshness; I almost never saw the Island photographed with such affection and colorful dynamism (thanks to Alejandro Pérez). Also with the imaginative framing and angles and very rarely saw a national production where religious solemnity is pictured, without hang-ups, smiles or heavy jokes. The film deals with that intangible essence that is called spirit perhaps with more lightness or smiles than what tends to be accepted by the apprehensive.

Viva Cuba is an exclamation of joy and anxiety, a sensitive confirmation that wishes can be made to falling stars and are granted although we know, for sure, that the balls of fire going through the firmament are indifferent to our desires. Or is a true gesture of good will enough to bring us closer and even move the distant and stranger spaces? The film by Cremata allows us these and many more questions. Can it be that we are missing something great, essential? Otherwise there is no explanation why our little ones decide to escape from our reach.

Viva Cuba is a novel and surprising gift, a film whose impact is a poignant shudder at an emotional level and intuition. I can imagine shortsighted, narrators and academicians mentioning excesses to the incredulity the story calls for, of the elemental and dependability of certain situations and personages, or the poor structure at the core of the wish to join subject with object in the plot, of how the photography is too pastoral and panoramic when they move through Cuba. Perhaps they are right in many of these points but it would be aberrant to “read” the actions of these tropical Hansel and Gretel without considering how warm and true ALL the interpretations are (although the prize goes to Malú Tarrau and Jorgito Miló closely followed by Larisa Vega y Luisa María Jiménez), of how moving in its strict simplicity about these children who no one listens to or asks their opinion. This powerful and entertaining film shouts to us about intolerance and despotism, of the need for love and understanding while whispering quietly ideas about death, relief, the loss of innocence and the manifest need to listen more and shout less.