A Cuban Zombie Nation

CHAPTER 2
A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters

in Havana
In 2012, Cuba’s very first zombie film shambled onto the international
screen. A co-production with Spain involving both ICAIC and TVE, as
well as the most prominent non-state production company on the island
(5ta Avenida), Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead, henceforth Juan)
(Alejandro Brugués 2011) has been widely interpreted as hailing a new
era of ‘indie’ production on the island (Hopewell and Mayorga 2010).
The film has toured extensively on the international festival circuit,
winning Best Ibero-American Production at the 2013 Goya (Spanish

Film Academy) Awards, and topping audience polls at both the 2011
Havana Film Festival and the 2012 Miami International Film Festival—a
range of accolades that demonstrates the film’s apparently transnational
and ‘trans-political’ appeal. At the same time, a proliferation of scholarly
works (see, for example, Grosman 2013; Cardentey Levin 2014; Eljaiek-
Rodríguez 2015; Maguire 2015; Subero 2016; Ballina 2017) indicates
the way in which the film has quickly been identified as representative
of a new, post-Special Period Cuba and its evolving film industry. In a
paradox that is typical of the overdetermined, undead figure of the zom-
bie, this sense that Juan somehow represents the island nation feeds off
and into the understanding that it also deviates from some kind of status
quo. Transcending divides and troubling binaries, the film proceeds by
both fulfilling and subverting expectations, inviting and resisting iden-
tification, and asserting and unsettling identity. The resulting complex
and contradictory interpretations reflect Juan’s status as a ‘cinematic
oddity’ (Walsh 2012)—a kind of monster in its own right. Added to its
© The Author(s) 2018 41

D. Fehimović, National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93103-6_2
42 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
giant scale and atypical production values is the fact that it is ‘a zom-
com shot on location in Havana’ (Walsh 2012) that is both supported by
and critical of official Cuban institutions. Like Frankenstein’s monster,
it is composed of different elements grafted together, particularly com-
edy and horror; like a zombie, it too embodies the reanimation of sev-
eral traditions: the Haitian Vodou ‘zombi’ and its presentation in cinema,
the modern zombie genre epitomised by the films of George Romero,
and finally the subgenre of more recent zombie comedies, perhaps best
exemplified by Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright 2004).
It is more surprising still that such an apparent oddity should be taken
to be representative of Cuba—as indicated by the media’s insistence on
this aspect of its provenance as well as by scholarly work that identifies
it as emblematic of twenty-first-century Cuban cinema—given that in a
statement published on the film’s slickly produced official website (‘Juan
de Los Muertos’, n.d.), the director Alejandro Brugués states his admira-
tion of Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead (1981) as one of the main motiva-
tions for making Juan. In doing so, he explicitly situates the film within
a transnational cinematic tradition, seemingly confirming claims that
Cuban film is entering a new, transnational phase (Stock 2009) in which
relationships with the nation, its identity, and its cinematic tradition are
complicated and reconfigured. Indeed, some elements of the foreign
press have even received Juan as a ‘cult hit’, categorising it according
to its genre and in explicit relation to Anglo-zombie films rather than to
any continental, Latin American tradition (Tierney 2014: 129). Despite
the evident success with which Juan harnesses the widely recognised
generic tropes of the zom-com, zombie film, and horror to capture cer-
tain international sectors’ interest, however, the film’s press coverage also
attests to the continuing centrality of the national within this apparently
transnational cultural moment. Brugués both feeds into and exploits this
expectation by claiming in interviews that his aim was to explore ‘cómo
somos los cubanos’ (the way we Cubans are),1 creating a ‘bien cubana’
(very Cuban)2 version of the familiar zombie scenario (Ruiz de Elvira
2011). Moreover, although he identifies Evil Dead as his primary inspi-
ration, Brugués does not dissociate his work entirely from Cuban film
1 Brugués was born in Argentina but states: ‘…I’m not Argentinian. My parents just
happened to be there [when I was born]’ (in Tillman 2008). Although often listed as
Argentinian, Brugués has repeatedly identified himself as Cuban.
2 All translations from Spanish are my own, except where a translated edition is available.
2 A CUBAN ZOMBIE NATION?: MONSTERS IN HAVANA 43
history, explaining that ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (Vampires in Havana,

henceforth Vampiros), Juan Padrón’s 1985 classic, was an important
national filmic referent in making Juan (Ruiz de Elvira 2011).
Whilst Juan charts the adventures of a group of survivors of a zombie
‘epidemic’ in present-day Cuba, Vampiros and its sequel Más vampiros
en La Habana (More Vampires in Havana, henceforth Más vampiros)
(Juan Padrón 2003) are cartoons that follow a Cuban musician–vampire
called Pepe in different historical periods—the Machado dictatorship
and the Second World War, respectively. If the first film was an exception
because it was Cuba’s first feature-length animation, then the second
broke with precedent by offering the first explicitly identified ‘sequel’ in
Cuban cinematic history. By establishing a link between his own work
and that of Padrón, Brugués links these apparent moments of exception,
drawing attention to the films’ similarities over and above their different
settings, styles, and contents. Though they may feature different kinds of
monsters, all three films utilise figures rarely associated with the nation
and so, true to dominant cultural discourses about the Caribbean and
Cuba (Jáuregui 2008), cannibalise ‘foreign’ cultural products to create
something idiosyncratic and new. Furthermore, by conjoining interna-
tionally familiar zombie, vampire, horror, and comic tropes with the idea
of a specific ‘Cubanness’, these films highlight and exploit the overlap
between genre and sequel—that is, they make meaning through ‘repeti-
tion-with-variation’ (Budra and Schellenberg 1998: 9), promising audi-
ences the joys of recognition as well as the thrill of the new. For Cuban
viewers, the films’ generic frameworks likely act as a source of novelty,
whilst in-jokes and knowing nods to Cuba’s history and cinematic tradi-
tion provide a point of identification. For international audiences, Cuba’s
foreign setting and unique geopolitical context are made comprehensi-
ble through the reassuringly repetitive tropes of genre. In either case, all
three films function as hybrid creatures, balancing local and international
expectations and negotiating the appeal of the familiar and the new in
order to call on, constitute, or revive specific interpretive communities.
If all three films are exceptional in certain ways, then we may well
ask why these specific monsters raise their ugly heads, and why they do
so at these specific points in time? After all, as Alejo Carpentier once
pointed out—albeit in reference to architecture—Cuba appeared to have
‘skipped’ the gothic phase in order to advance straight to its ‘natural’
baroque mode (Soler Serrano 1998). Brugués himself gives an indication
as to the reason for his unusual choice of genre when he claims to have
44 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
been inspired by the zombie-like behaviour he observed around him

(Izquierdo 2011), suggesting that this monstrous figure expresses some-
thing about ordinary Cubanness in the twenty-first century. Moreover,
the director’s decision to produce a new iteration of an established
genre, configuring familiar elements in new ways, draws viewers’ atten-
tion to particularity: what is different in this differential repetition? As
a sequel, Más vampiros similarly carries a unique representative force,
offering ‘a heightened image of the particular cultural moment which
it inhabits’ (Budra and Schellenberg 1998: 5) through its specific
configurations of repetition and variation. This constant mutation

should, perhaps, be unsurprising, given the evolution of vampires and
zombies in popular culture, but it is no less unsettling; monsters’ unholy
conjunction of recognisability and radical alterity provokes hysteria, call-
ing on protagonists and viewers to question the very notion of identity
as well as their own specific sense of self. If monsters ‘[exist] only to be
read’ (Cohen 1996: 4), maintaining their roots in the Latin ‘monere’
(‘to warn’), then Padrón’s vampires and Brugués’s zombies draw us
inexorably in: we are compelled to analyse these monsters as telling—
albeit humorous—symptoms of a compulsive dynamic, an underlying
condition.
Indeed, El Pais’ explicit interpretation of Juan as ‘una metáfora de
la reacción del país hacia la crisis’ (a metaphor of the country’s reaction
to crisis) (Ruiz de Elvira 2011) shows the monster to be ‘a social and
cultural metaphor, a creature that comments on the society that pro-
duced it by confronting audiences with fantastic narratives of excesses
and extremes’ (Bishop 2010: 31). The extreme situations of a zombie
epidemic in Juan and the international vampire conflicts staged in the
Vampiros films produce an excess of possible meanings. As emphatically
Cuban as these three films’ monsters, characters, and settings may be,
their gothic referents inevitably enrich the filmic texts with a messy mul-
tiplicity of seemingly contradictory significations. In fact, the centrality
of humour to all three films suggests they might best be understood
as manifestations not of the gothic, but of ‘lo tropigótico’. Coined by
Costa Rican author José Ricardo Chaves, this term describes the muta-
tion of the gothic that results not only from its transplantation to tropi-
cal climes, but also—and crucially—from the addition of irony, humour,
and critical distance (in de León 2013: 36). If irony works by creating
multiple layers of meaning and thrives by addressing different ‘discur-
sive communities’ (Hutcheon 1994), then it is hardly surprising that all
three films turn around a central instability, a monstrous multivalence

that both invites and resists interpretation. Rather than blocking analysis,
however, it will become clear that each instance of overdetermination in
fact performs a variation of a central theme, revealing what it simultane-
ously attempts to cover up: a deep-seated anxiety over Cubanness.
Like all other acts of ‘monstrous interpretation’, my reading of Padrón
and Brugués’s films will necessarily be ‘a work that must content itself
with fragments’ (Cohen 1996: 6). But by stitching together the films’
broken bodies and fragments of meaning, this chapter will start to reveal
an operation that undermines oppositions, establishing a logic of ‘both/
and’ rather than ‘either/or’. In this way, these films invite us to consider
how the unusual can also be representative, and how the exception can
also be the rule (Althusser 2005: 106)—in twenty-first-century Cuban
society, as well as in its recent films. As distorted versions of humanity
and rare gothic specimens in Cuban culture, these monstrous symptoms
shed light on a particular moment, but they simultaneously serve as
mutations of an underlying condition of Cubanness, understood not as
an essence or content but as a recurring dynamic.
There is a Spectre Haunting Cuba

The monster may die many times but it will always reappear (Cohen
1996: 4), either reanimated like a zombie or rejuvenated by fresh blood
in the same way as an undead vampire. The monsters chosen and rean-
imated by Padrón and Brugués arrive with rich, complex histories and
associations. Like the spectre, the monster is thus always a revenant of
some kind (Derrida 2006: 11), returning from the past to haunt the
present and cast a shadow over the future; it is conjured by specific
actors, manifesting itself in a way that expresses something that is not
quite right, ‘out of joint’ about the moment of its conjuration. Juan
Padrón’s original and unlikely Cuban cartoon heroes emerged in the
wake of the 1980 boatlift that saw over 100,000 Cubans leave from
Mariel harbour for the USA. Those who had left were often referred to
in the Cuban media as ‘escoria’ (scum) or ‘gusanos’ (maggots), evoking
a subhuman stratum of society that had been purged through the exo-
dus. This implicitly reinforced a sense of a now-purified nation of ‘true’
Cubans: those who, beyond their cubanidad or official Cuban citizen-
ship, also possessed cubanía as truly desired and felt national identity
(Ortiz 2014: 459). The 1984 return to the island of those immigrants
46 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
not deemed refugees by the USA may have troubled this distinction, but
it also constituted an unexpected bolstering of Cuba’s sense of national
sovereignty. The agreement involved compromise and discussion nec-
essarily based on the premise that Cuba was an independent, sovereign
country. Furthermore, by sending some ‘marielitos’ back, the USA
implicitly recognised that only a minority of Cuban immigrants quali-
fied as refugees, and that communism in itself did not represent a threat
(Domínguez 1986: 128). The vampiric protagonists of Padrón’s first
film, which was released in 1985, were thus conjured into a space and
time of complex national identity and unstable definitions of what consti-
tuted a ‘true’ Cuban.
The problematic discourse of the nation and national identity cre-
ated by Mariel and its aftermath also developed under the pall cast by
the death of Che Guevara, and in the midst of a gradual introduction
of Soviet-influenced, market-oriented policies that had begun in the
1970s and continued through the early 1980s.3 Although the Third
Party Congress—which was to effect thoroughgoing changes to the
country’s entire economic approach and administration and begin the
so-called campaign of ‘Rectificación de errores y tendencias negati-
vas’ (Rectification of errors and negative tendencies)—would not take
place until 1986, there would almost certainly already have been some
unease about the ideological compromises that the aforementioned turn
towards the material (rather than the ‘moral’) entailed. As Fidel was to
point out in 1986, the new budget had been promoting ‘improper social
consumption’ (Domínguez 1986: 122), threatening to turn Cubans into
insatiable, vampiric consumers. At the same time, the rise of tourism
on the island started to transform Cuba into a site of consumption, as
foreigners feasted on the best the country had to offer and converted
3 From the moment Cuba joined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)
in 1972, its economy became increasingly reliant on Soviet-subsidised and Soviet-designed

trade, development, and finance agreements. Following the USSR’s ‘economic model of
bureaucratic state capitalism’ (Reyes 2000), an ‘economic planning’ model was introduced,
so that managers were actively encouraged to make state enterprises profitable. In addition,
the 1970s saw the introduction of financial incentives to spur productivity, allowing some
workers to buy consumer goods such as refrigerators or air conditioners. The greater finan-
cial resources of certain sectors of the population, from workers who put in extra time to
distributors of agricultural produce earning considerable sums from private farmers’ mar-
kets, together with the increased availability of certain goods, had started to create a certain
culture of consumption.
Cubans into ‘embodied commodities’ through practices such as sex tour-

ism (Sheller 2003: 164). Moreover, through their own acts of consump-
tion, these vampiric foreigners threatened to infect the island, bringing
not only hard currency but also goods and capitalist aspirations.
Anxieties associated with tourism and consumption were even more
prominent by the time Padrón’s sequel was released in 2003, as the gov-
ernment had embarked on the massive promotion of tourism in order
to help the country survive in the economic wastelands of the Special
Period. Since then, ‘[c]onsuming Cuba has become a bonanza’ (Sheller
2003: 164), both inside and outside the island, and issues surrounding
the effects of foreign tourist presence and consumption acquired even
greater relevance to Juan in 2011. The decision to make Más vampiros in
the early 2000s can also be seen as a response, unconscious or otherwise,
to anxieties over national identity and sovereignty. Padrón’s creation of a
sequel to Vampiros doubtless involved a desire to capitalise on the popu-
larity of the original cartoon, and the seeming simplicity of such a motive
is indicated by the straightforward nature of the sequel’s title: the direc-
tor was simply offering his audience more of what they loved. However,
as the recycling of the original title indicates, the revival of a past cine-
matic success also constitutes a conjuration—evoking a time before the
difficulties of the Special Period, the specific spectral uncertainties that
haunted Cuba in the 1980s, as well as those that have always haunted
the nation. Padrón’s project suggested that Cuban cinema did not die
during the intervening barren years of the late nineties; rather, like the
vampire, it had merely lain dormant due to the practical and financial
constraints of the time. In 2003, as the country seemed to be edging
its way uncertainly out of the Special Period, Más vampiros represented
both a tentative new beginning and also the reanimation of old anxieties
by a fresh injection of blood—and capital.
If the events and policies of the 1980s led contemporary commenta-
tors to conclude that ‘There is a specter haunting Cuba […:] the specter
of capitalism’ (Domínguez 1986: 122), then this is equally, if not more
relevant during the 2000s. The only sequel in the history of post-Revo-
lutionary Cuban feature film to date, Más vampiros is inevitably linked
to what Carolyn Jess-Cooke has called ‘the profit principle’ (2009).
Playing on the title of Freud’s seminal ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’,
Jess-Cooke sees instances of a very different ‘compulsion to repeat’
([1920] 1991: 289) in the contemporary predominance of cinematic
remakes, film franchises and new forms of interactivity, in which purely
48 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
commercial interests come to occupy the place of the ‘drives’. Although

she argues for the need to go beyond this profit principle in analyses of
such phenomena, it is undeniable that Más vampiros, co-produced with
foreign companies such as TVE and Canal+, reveals how much had
changed in both the film industry and country as a whole since 1985, its
logic of ‘more’ bespeaking a new moment in Cuba’s relationship to pro-
duction and consumption.
With ICAIC no longer able to fund all of the island’s production
since the Special Period, filmmakers found themselves increasingly
obliged to rely on international partners. The subsequent need to take
the profit principle, market interests, and external demands into account
is evident in both Padrón’s sequel and Brugués’ breakthrough success
abroad. Though the collapse of the Soviet Bloc further isolated the
island nation politically, it paradoxically also forced Cuba to re-establish
itself within the global network of cultural consumption. This specific
change in film production methods can therefore be seen as symptomatic
of the broader pattern of Cuban interaction with global market forces
and the increasing importance of the latter to its survival. Whilst such an
interaction may have always existed, the financial hardship of the Special
Period and its aftermath has rendered foreign input in and consumption
of Cuba’s cultural products significantly more visible. Padrón’s sequel
may attempt a straightforward reanimation of a 1980s hit, but in resur-
recting Pepe and the other vampires, he also resurrects the uncomforta-
ble spectres that haunted post-Mariel Cuba and the first film, including
the spectre of capitalism. The Vampiros films thus demonstrate how, with
so many previous lives and incarnations, once a monster is summoned
or evoked, it cannot be entirely controlled. Rather than corresponding
specifically to its conjurers’ conscious desires, the spectre manifests itself
multiply in contradictory and often unintended ways (Derrida 2006).
Taking shape through multiple processes that produce a surfeit or super-
abundance of meanings, the spectre of capitalism speaks to the excess,
expenditure and waste that inevitably accompany and trouble normative
models of the productive nation and its identity (Bataille [1933] 1985).
This spectre of capital is not only visible in the Vampiros films’ pro-
duction, but is also present in the narrative. In the first film, we learn
that Pepe’s uncle (the brilliantly named Werner Amadeus von Dracula) is
motivated to move to Cuba by the supply of ‘grandes cantidades de ron
y piña colada’ (large quantities of rum and pineapple juice) available on
the island. The voice-over that delivers this information is accompanied
by the image of a boat crossing the world map, producing laughter

through the jarring juxtaposition of a serious scientific experiment with
the drunken leisure associated with the items required—a contrast rein-
forced visually by the formal, standardised appearance of the map and
the distinctly cartoonish boat that moves across it. However, this expla-
nation also identifies the vampiric scientist with the tourists who would
also have been arriving around this time, attracted by related visions of a
tipsy, tropical holiday. Despite the fact that von Dracula goes on to insist
on Vampisol’s free distribution, the product of his experiments remains
irremediably linked to such commercial, tourist fare, as is indicated by
the sequence in which he prepares his nephew’s monthly dose in a cock-
tail shaker. After all, it is this formula that allows and encourages vam-
pires who had previously limited themselves to specially constructed,
local, underground beaches to visit Cuba, acting as a magnet for tourism
and thus inserting the island into transnational flows of capital.
This parallel between tourists and vampires is highlighted in a scene
in which two Cubans comment on mafia boss Johnny Terrori and his
henchmen who, having just taken Vampisol, can now stand in the sun-
light for the first time (Fig. 2.1). One cubano, propped nonchalantly
against a bar in the shade, quips that ‘los turistas aquí siempre están
Fig. 2.1 Johnny Terrori and his vampire henchmen stand in the sunlight for
the first time (Vampiros, Juan Padrón 1985)
50 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
achicharrándose en la acera de los bobos’ (the tourists here are always

frying themselves on the silly side of the street), assuming that these
Americans are just another group of sunseekers. However, as we watch
a European group of vampires feast on drunken tourists in the iconic
Plaza de la Catedral, viewers start to understand that these vampires
represent more than foreign visitors or evil Yankees. Rather, they stand
for something higher up the scale—something that feeds off touristic
consumption: the capitalist system or capital itself. In this sequence,
the floral-shirted tourists consume Havana’s sights and signature cock-
tails, only to be consumed themselves—by vampires. Tourism in Cuba is
thus clearly presented as a link to a vampiric system of global capital, and
the fact that none of these vampires is identified as Cuban reflects the
attempt to free locals of such negative, blood-sucking associations.
As such, the film begins by figuring Cubans as victims—not vam-
pires—in this chain of consumption; outraged at his companions’ unwill-
ingness to share their tourist dinner, an apparently ‘English’ vampire in
distinctive, colonial/safari garb encounters a hypersexualised Afro-Cuban
woman who propositions him (Fig. 2.2), prompting him to reconsider
his previous refusal to consume locals (‘muchos son negros’—many of
them are black—he had intoned with disdain).
Fig. 2.2 An Afro-Cuban woman propositions an ‘English’ vampire in colonial

garb (Vampiros, Juan Padrón 1985)
This neocolonial encounter of course evokes—in comic mode—

the consumption of Cuban bodies through sex tourism and the cor-
rupting threat of capitalist vampiric ‘infection’ brought by tourists.
Disrupting the stereotype of the Caribbean native as cannibal, the scene
hints humorously at the fact that it has always been the coloniser who
has sucked the locals’ blood and not vice versa. Although it attempts to
maintain a distinction between consumer and consumed, nothing is so
clear-cut, not least from a contemporary perspective; the woman’s exag-
geratedly provocative appearance and clear intent to seduce the ‘English
vampire’ invite unfavourable comparisons between the exploitation asso-
ciated with the ‘glamour’ of the 1940s and 1950s Havana and the more
recent reappearance of practices such as prostitution since the Special
Period. As Camilo Díaz Pino has argued, Vampiros successfully uses
nostalgic stereotypes associated with pre-Revolutionary Havana—such
as jazz music and the Latin lover—to negotiate a ‘re-representation of
the self as desired other’, finally reasserting ‘a dissenting, self-defined
cultural identity’ (2015: 234, 238). However, whilst such negotia-
tions with hegemonic discourse can function as ‘sites of entrepreneur-
ial labour, social ascension and symbolic empowerment for those who
are able to derive some agency from them’ (Díaz Pino 2015: 238), they
also blur the line between consumer and consumed, aggressor and vic-
tim. Although Vampiros maintains its delightful levity by leaving out the
gory aftermath of the English vampire’s encounter with the afrocubana,
it shows us just enough to suggest that the agency that might be derived
from entrepreneurial forms of self-exoticisation (such as those associated
with the contemporary practice of jineterismo)4 comes at the cost of
complicity with one’s own consumption.
But this blurring of lines between consumer and consumed is not
limited to a humorous side scene. Given the ambivalent national and
even human identity of Pepe, these uncomfortable connotations refuse
to be contained and instead contaminate the film through its central
4 Literally derived from ‘jinete’ (jockey), this local term’s colourful associations imply
agency and control on the part of a Cuban who ‘rides’ a foreigner/tourist for all they can
whilst charming and seducing them. Most often used to refer to services of a sexual or at
least romantic nature, jineterismo can also simply take the form of companionship or con-
versation. With no direct translation, it is sometimes rendered ‘hustling’ and can be used
to describe the offering of goods, recommendations, or unofficial guide services to passing
tourists, but always framed by affective discourses of family, friendship, or romance—genu-
ine or otherwise.
52 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
character. He might perform a stereotypical Cubanness in his manner

and speech as well as his profession as a musician, but Pepe is nonethe-
less a vampire—of German origin, no less. As such, he is both foreign
and Cuban. Whilst Díaz Pino interprets this as indicative of a view of
Cuba as ‘transformative to those who inhabit and embrace it’, there is
an unsettling uncertainty inherent in the claim that Pepe is ‘the consum-
mate Cuban’, but only ‘because of his cultural upbringing’ (2015: 240,
243). Reminiscent of the gap or insecurity at the heart of cubanía, this
Cubanness is learned, performed, and ultimately unstable. At the same
time, Pepe is also somehow simultaneously vampire and human and so
remains haunted by the spectral and capitalistic associations of his fellow
(non-Cuban) vampires. This duality manifests itself in his two primary
activities: music and social struggle, producing an ‘intratextual recon-
ciliation of Cuba’s own dual constructs of national identity as both a
site of the bohemian and of social revolution’ (Díaz Pino 2015: 240).
However, the glamour, consumption, and excess of pre-Revolutionary
Cuba cannot easily be reconciled with an ideological commitment to
Revolutionary values, creating a paradox that expresses itself particularly
clearly in Más vampiros. Haunted by the spectre of capitalism, the sequel
sees Pepe ascends the ranks, becoming not only a performer in but also
owner of a nightclub that recalls the decadence of Club Tropicana. This
development draws attention to the kinds of compromises and returns to
market policy that the Cuban State has had to make in order to survive
the aftermath of the Special Period, highlighting the overdetermination
of our hero: a German-Cuban, human–vampire, capitalist–revolutionary
who hardly squares unproblematically with socialist ideals of the ‘hombre
nuevo’ (new man).
The connection between vampires and capital is far from new, find-
ing one of its best-known expressions in Franco Moretti’s essay on
Frankenstein and Dracula (1982). For Moretti, Bram Stoker’s Count
Dracula represents not aristocracy but capital, in its unwavering impetus
for unlimited expansion. Given the popularity of ‘catchy’ Cuban music
around the world, the fact that Pepe’s identity is so bound up with his
profession as musician further associates him with this idea of expansion
through consumption. Infectious Cuban rhythms and melodies consume
the world, spreading a contagious culture that allows others to consume
Cubanness, hinting at strong parallels between the blood-sucking vam-
pire and the spectre of capitalism. At the same time, the ambivalent sta-
tus that results from such a dynamic of simultaneous power and passivity
finds its correlate in the zombie, which is both consumer and consumed.
The zombie’s lack of consciousness foregrounds its sole purpose as a
consumer of others that creates an ever-growing horde of ‘living dead’
and thereby mimics a consumer consumed by the insatiable desire for
consumption.
The zombies of Juan thus evoke the culmination of fears of
‘improper’ consumption expressed in 1986—fears that have become
particularly relevant in recent years, with the reintroduction of certain
market policies, the rise of tourism, and the associated re-emergence of
inequality. On the other hand, the zombie also represents a threat to
human agency and identity, and in this sense resembles the master of
Haitian Vodou, whose creation of zombis for use as free labour marked
him—rather than his slaves—as ‘a soulless greedy consumer with no
regard for the humanity of those whom he or she exploits’ (Graves
2010: 11). In reproducing the zombie figure as both consumer and con-
sumed, the film situates itself within the transnational tradition initiated
by George Romero, whose Dawn of the Dead (1978) staged a critique
of capitalism in which humans hiding in a shopping mall are besieged
by zombies, who then start to shop because that is all they remember
from their past lives. At the same time, given that it is defined in great
part by its grotesque physicality, the zombie evokes the ‘paradoxical
incorporation, the becoming-body’ that makes the spectre into ‘a certain
phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit’ (Derrida 2006: 23); literally
embodying both sides of the capitalist exchange, then, the zombie lum-
bers through Juan as a spectre of capital.
This spectral presence is not confined to the diegesis; Juan’s reception,
promotion, and distribution demonstrate the link between form and con-
tent in the zombie genre (Boluk and Lenz 2011: 3): like an unstoppa-
ble zombie plague, the genre’s contagious spread troubles borders and
boundaries and suggests Cuba’s immersion in transnational flows of cap-
ital and culture that unsettle and reshape its sense of self. Since it rejects
boundaries and enclosures, the monster functions as ‘an invitation to
explore new spirals, new and interconnected methods of perceiving the
world’ (Cohen 1996: 7). These spirals and interconnections not only recall
the ceaseless spiralling outwards of the Caribbean and its people (Benítez-
Rojo 1996), but also the unlimited expansion of capital. Given the cult
popularity of zombie films and their proven ability to generate consid-
erable box office income, the very decision to work in this genre evokes
the spectre of capital that has haunted Cuban cinema since the Special
54 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Period. Moreover, through its relatively big budget and international dis-
tribution, Juan places itself ostentatiously within an emerging category of
international co-productions. Its aforementioned flashy website details the
production’s various foreign partners, as well as proudly dedicating sec-
tions to its numerous international accolades and press coverage. Given
this prominence of the international, Juan can be understood in the con-
text of the recent rise of genre filmmaking in Latin America, which par-
allels an increase in international co-productions and distribution circuits.
As Luisela Alvaray points out, genres function as ‘the Esperanto of film
language’ (2014: 80), helping audiences to access and understand new
films, regardless of their origin. Given the way in which it allows producers
and distributors to package and market a film for foreign audiences, it is
tempting to understand the use of genre in Latin American cinema as a
commercial concession to specific international partners and the market in
general. From this perspective, Juan’s conception and production within
the terms of a would-be ‘foreign’ set of conventions highlight the way in
which even a film produced within a socialist setting appears ‘haunted’
through and through by the spectre of transnational capitalism.
However, this turn to genre must be nuanced and understood dif-
ferently within a context that lacks a significant tradition in horror film,
whose dominant aesthetic is auteurist (García 2008), or whose main
mode of production is still state-subsidised and centralised. As Alvaray
has shown, rather than constituting a surrender to the mainstream or a
kind of ‘selling out’, the use of genre in Latin American cinema has the
potential to empower local forms of expression, allowing filmmakers, in
their adaptation and combination of transnational or foreign tropes to
local contexts, to ‘reclaim hybridity in film-making as a way to inscribe
agency into a transnational industrial product’ (2014: 6). Indeed, her
suggestion that generic tropes can function as ‘shortcuts to tell localized
stories’ (Alvaray 2014: 76) resonates strongly with Juan. As the film’s
director himself points out, the conjuration of the transnational spectre
of the zombie at this particular time is a deliberate attempt to express
the national context of the film’s production. As well as suggesting that
Cubans have turned into zombies, Brugués explains his decision to use
this monster with reference to a desire to show how the nation typically
responds to crisis (Dobbs 2012). More specifically, he does so by humor-
ously delineating Cubans’ three strategies in the face of difficulty: to try
and carry on as normal, to profit from the situation and, failing all else,
to leave the island on a boat. The first reaction is evident in protagonist
Juan and sidekick Lázaro’s initial agreement never to speak of their first
zombie encounter at sea. The second response is demonstrated by Juan’s

creation of the zombie-killing business that gives the film its name, as
well as at moments that trouble the distinction between zombies, tourist
consumers, and Cuban human consumers (such as the memorable scene
in which Lázaro’s son, Vladi California, tries to steal a zombie tourist’s
camera and sunglasses). Apart from the emigration that marks the film’s
ending, the final response is also evident in a memorable shot that shows
the horizon beyond the Malecón filled with Cubans fleeing on impro-
vised rafts. As the director’s statement suggests and the film itself con-
firms, then, the local story—that of Cubans struggling to defend their
identity—is in fact pervasively haunted by the foreign or transnational—
the spectre of capital, embodied here by the zombie.
Despite the link between the spectre of capital and the infectious spread
of the zombie genre, the zombie is an inherently ambivalent figure, char-
acterised by overdetermination and acquiring new associations with every
new manifestation: ‘if they derive from folk memory and age old fears
of death and enslavement, they add to them modern anxieties about the
effects of consumerism, over-population and dependency upon machines
with the consequent loss of humanity, community and self-determination
this involves’ (Richardson 2010: 28). The zombie thus embodies multiple,
contradictory meanings, evoking both ‘a vision of capitalism’s fulfilment
in the form of a stasis of perpetual desire, as well as a model of proletarian
revolution, depicting the emergence of a new classless society’ (Boluk and
Lenz 2011: 7). As the visual representation of ultimate socialist equality as
homogeneity, the zombie therefore also comes to represent the spectre of
Marx. Similarly, Padrón’s vampires become ambivalent and overdetermined
as they acquire different meanings through contrasting characters. Whilst
the European and American vampires are most clearly associated with the
spectre of capital, Pepe’s anti-totalitarian struggles, his uncle’s international-
ist, socialist desire to distribute Vampisol around the world for free, and the
community of vampires invoked by ‘Radio vampiro internacional’, all recall
the spectre of Marx and of Marxism—an unacknowledged but nevertheless
pervasive presence throughout both Vampiros films. The way in which all
three films call on these apparently opposing spectres, building their narra-
tives around different models of consumption and production, suggests the
centrality of contradiction and conflict to any understanding of Cubanness.
If Žižek argues that the ever-present potential for breakdown within capi-
talism is precisely what keeps it going (Kay 2003: 131), the films’ endings
imply that, in the constant struggle between socialism and capitalism, Cuba
paradoxically survives thanks to, rather than in spite of, this dynamic.
56 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
The Haunted Present and Zombie Time

Through their spectral associations, the undead function as embodiments
of the past that take form in and haunt the present. Just as the proper
name ‘Marx’ is haunted by many spectres—not only the uncomforta-
ble historical failures of Marxist ideas in their totalitarian institutionali-
sation and often violent imposition, but also the spectres of new forms
of alienated labour and painful forms of inequality (Derrida 2006)—the
undead of these three films bring into play a range of specific interpreta-
tions of international and national history which are both based in and
exceed the moment of their production or conjuration. For example,
the ambivalent presence of tourism and capitalism on the island in the
Vampiros films ostensibly refers to the 1930s and 1940s, but by resur-
recting these spectres, the director also relates them to the more recent
moments of their production. The historical setting of both films recalls
Mary Shelley’s decision to fix the narrative of Frankenstein (1818) in the
past in a way that ‘attenuates every fear, because the intervening time
enables one not to remain a prisoner of events’ (Moretti 1982: 84). The
distancing of the films’ narratives from the present moment can be seen
as an attempt to allay the anxieties aroused by the troubled national iden-
tities they depict. Furthermore, Padrón’s choice to set the stories during
two periods of dictatorship fulfils a patriotic, didactic function, reaffirm-
ing recognisable elements of Cubanness. In Más vampiros, Pepe and his
friends’ resistance against the fascists and Batista incorporates the period
into a Cuban narrative of nationalist, anti-totalitarian lucha—already
hinted at in the first film with Pepe’s anti-Machado schemes—that has
its roots far back in the colonial past and its most recent reincarnations
in official discourse since the Special Period. This patriotic use of history
is hardly surprising given the fact that this director’s most famous crea-
tion is Elpidio Valdés, the iconic cartoon hero of the Cuban anti-colo-
nial struggle. Moreover, the interplay between the Batista regime and the
narrative of the Second World War in Más vampiros places Cuba within
an international context, linking it to world events as well as giving this
small island nation a significant role and defined identity within one of
the most recognisable periods of world history.
Far from containing objective representations of the past, all three
films create what are effectively après-coup narratives, providing a version
of history which ‘does not seek to repeat the past, but to release its sig-
nificance for the present’ (Kay 2003: 19). Más vampiros uses history to
demonstrate ‘la visión del mundo desde la perspectiva cubana’ (a vision

of the world from the Cuban perspective) (Yoshua 2011) and think
through the definition of Cuban identity against various kinds of other.
For example, the Russian general’s description of Cuba as being under
the control of ‘el imperialismo yanqui’ (Yankee imperialism) echoes more
recent Revolutionary discourse, which has long revolved around anti-US
imperialist rhetoric. This example demonstrates how comfortably the
films’ depictions of periods of crisis fit into an official Revolutionary
timeline which retrospectively resignifies Cuba’s history with reference to
a teleological tale of struggle for justice, independence, and sovereignty.
This logic, whereby the past is reconfigured in terms of the present,
is also inherent in the sequel, whose ‘latent registers of “afterwards-
ness”’ allow it to ‘[tap] into a particular cultural urgency to memorial-
ize, interact with and perhaps alter the past’. Not only does the sequel
allow for the selective editing and fixing of the past in the image of the
present, but it also relies on ‘the memorialisation of a source text’ (Jess-
Cooke 2009: 9). Más vampiros thus enacts a double memorialisation: of
the righteous past of the Cuban nation, on one hand, and of the more
recent national favourite, Vampiros, on the other. As José Quiroga has
shown, the uncertainties of the Special Period resulted in a turn towards
the memorialisation of the recent Revolutionary past in order to shore
up a sense of national identity. If this memorialisation provided Cuban
authors, musicians, and painters with ‘a kind of cultural hard currency’
to sell abroad (Quiroga 2005: 5), then the resurrection of Cuban h istory
in Vampiros, and the memorialisation of both history and its past cre-
ative reimagining in its sequel, can be seen to generate their own kind
of cultural hard currency, gathering together and reinforcing a national
interpretive community through common referents. At the same time,
the films also evidence a kind of ‘entrepreneurial hierarchical bargaining’
(Díaz Pino 2015: 239) that makes creative use of stereotypes to call on a
foreign audience united around exoticised visions of Cuba and nostalgic
notions of its history.
In Juan, meanwhile, sequences such as the opening slow zoom in
from an overhead shot of the protagonist’s inert body on a makeshift
raft (Fig. 2.3) explicitly recall traumatic national events such as Mariel,
linking past and present to suggest recurring patterns in the country’s
history. In contrast to the Vampiros films, which disavow the problematic
present through a focus on the past, Juan makes a point of high-
lighting its historical vicinity to multiple moments of crisis, most
58 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Fig. 2.3 The opening shot evokes the national trauma of the Mariel exodus
(Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011)
notably the Special Period and associated cultural expressions such as

the ‘literatura del sobreviviente’ (survivor literature) of the n ovísimos
(Reyes 2012). It does so in order to convey the idea that, in the
Caribbean, crisis, apocalypse, and dystopia are ‘idea[s] ante la[s] cual[es]
ya se está habituado’ (ideas to which people are already accustomed),
whether because of susceptibility to natural disasters such as hurricanes
(Bustamante Escalona 2013: 57), ‘current medical and economic pre-
dicaments in the region’ (Armengot 2012: 9), or Cuba’s specific geo-
political situation and history. Similarly, when the protagonist proudly
lists all that he has survived at the end of the film, including Mariel,5
Angola6 and the Special Period, he includes the present moment of the
zombie epidemic—‘la cosa esta que vino después’ (this thing that came
5 In the context of a sharp economic downturn, and following the attempt by thousands
of Cubans to seek asylum in Havana’s Peruvian embassy, Fidel Castro declared the port
of Mariel open to any Cuban wishing to leave the country. Between April and October of
1980, over 100,000 Cubans left the island via Mariel.
6 Between 1975 and 1991, Cuba sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilian
workers to support the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) in their

struggle against rival movements backed by South Africa and the USA.
afterwards)—recalling the way in which ‘the subject revisits and reworks

its past in response to its successive experiences’ (Kay 2003: 18). Juan’s
choice of examples from Cuba’s recent history jumps from one moment
of crisis to another, suggesting that the nation’s identity is characterised
by ‘zombie time’ (Harpold 2011). Defined by ‘the unmeasured interrup-
tion of history’s seriality’, zombie time ‘no longer marches but lurches
on from one state of exception to another’ (Boluk and Lenz 2011: 12,
13). In zombie narratives such as Juan, time becomes deferred, recalling
the anti-Messianic mode, or rather the Messianic expectation of ‘the very
return to anti-Messianic capitalist normality’ which, for Žižek, character-
ises Cuban reality (2002: 8).
The film’s unresolved ending constitutes a continuation of this appar-
ent suspension or deferral, but rather than undermining the system—as
Žižek seems to imply when he discusses the widespread availability of
English-language instruction on the island—this zombie time is shown
to be the mainstay and support of the nation’s continued survival. This
is suggested by several telling visual reminders of Cuba’s cinematic tra-
dition throughout the film, such as the scene in which Juan uses a tele-
scope to survey the city below (Fig. 2.4).
Fig. 2.4 Juan uses a telescope to survey the city, recalling Sergio in Memorias
del subdesarrollo (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011)
60 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Framed to make clear reference to the iconic scene from Memorias del
subdesarrollo (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea 1968) (Stock 2012: 61), this visual
echo not only contributes to the film’s monstrous hybridity through a
cannibalistic consumption of filmic sources, but also highlights the con-
tinuities and contrasts between Sergio and Juan’s situations. Whilst both
are surrounded by tension and crisis, the latter character has survived
so many apparent apocalypses that he is no longer disconcerted by the
chaos around him. As Juan’s self-labelling as a ‘sobreviviente’ (survi-
vor) suggests, Cuba defines itself through ‘lucha’ (struggle) and crisis; it
is a context in which the picaresque protagonist feels at home and even
thrives—as he repeats at key points in the film: ‘a mí nada más que tú me
das un filo, y yo me las arreglo’ (just give me half a chance, and I’ll man-
age). Whilst the apparent stasis or zombie time of the film refers to the
recurrence of crisis in the Revolution’s history, it can also be interpreted
as a version of the deadlock inherent to all political life (Kay 2003: 130).
In the case of Cuba, this ‘resistant kernel’ of conflict is not only related
to politics; just as the Ortizian ajiaco does not present transculturation as
a finished product but an unresolvable recipe that is ‘constantly cooking’
(2014: 452), Cubanness itself is founded on a zombie time of constant
crisis and unresolved contradiction in which a particular kind of creativity
and resourcefulness thrives. In other words, it is not only the reference to
classic Cuban films that provides a sense of reassuring familiarity, but also,
and perhaps primarily, the chaotic context of crisis in which Juan finds
himself—a zombie time of suspension or daily ‘experience of postpone-
ment’ (Venegas 2010: 24) that characterises life in twenty-first-century
Cuba.
By depicting a literalised zombie time in Juan, Brugués also presents
a distorted version of the image of Cuba so common to tourist propa-
ganda as ‘caught in a retro time warp of the late 1950s and 1960s’, sus-
pended ‘outside real space and time’ (Fernández 2005: xiii). As Emily
Maguire notes, the film makes use of the ‘fantastic’ element of the zom-
bie to show the existence in Cuba of ‘inmiscible times’—‘discrete tem-
poralities incapable of attaining homogeneity with or full incorporation
into a uniform chronological present’ (Lim 2009: 12). Such ‘temporal
mistranslation’ has been used in colonial discourse to designate certain
cultures as primitive, and indeed, the traces of such a procedure can be
detected in media and touristic fetishisations of Cuba’s ‘out of joint’
temporality. In Juan, however, such gaps or chasms are identified within,
so that the zombification of characters such as Mario, leader of the local
Comité de Defensa de la Revolución (Committee for the Defence of

the Revolution, CDR) ‘makes visible the ideological and temporal rifts
in Cuban society’ (Maguire 2015: 180). From the critical perspective
of viewers such as Antonio Cardentey Levin, these rifts are not simply a
reflection of the violent dislocation of Revolutionary theory from every-
day practice since the Special Period, but in fact represent a deepen-
ing of the existing systematic fracture of Cuban identity created by the
Revolutionary moment itself (2014).
Whilst such a perspective risks reinforcing the fetishistic relegation of
post-Revolutionary Cuba to a separate sociopolitical time zone (either
idyllic or unenlightened, depending on one’s political persuasions), it is
undermined by the very use of the zombie figure to comment on the
island’s ‘zombie time’. The director’s decision to use zombies may be
seen as an index of Cuba’s insertion into a transnational cultural pres-
ent, thus negating the notion that the island inhabits a distinct temporal
ity. Indeed, by utilising the cannibalistic, Romero- and Raimi-inspired
zombie, Brugués divests the trope of its traditional denotative value as a
figure for Caribbean peoples’ inability to embrace modernity (Paravisini-
Gebert 1997: 37). Instead, the combination of local referents with trans-
national generic codes allows both director and audience to demonstrate
the skill of code-switching, a key cosmopolitan competency that denotes
an individual’s ability to recognise, enact, and change between a series of
cultural repertoires (Hannerz 1990). Furthermore, through the genre’s
familiarity and popularity, the film also facilitates the transnational con-
sumption of this particular artefact of Cuban culture, inserting it into
global flows of cultural goods. Nevertheless, although Brugués shows
that ‘despite its political distinctiveness, Cuba is not outside the context
of transnational culture’ (Fernández 2005: xiv), this is far from unprob-
lematic. After all, in their many manifestations, zombies have consistently
served to express fears relating to the ‘loss of freedom and autonomy’
(Bishop 2010: 13). If ‘the monster expresses the anxiety that the future
will be monstrous’ (Moretti 1982: 68), and the zombie is associated with
contemporary fears regarding migration and the permeability of borders
(Stratton 2011), then these zombies can be seen to embody anxieties
about how Cuba will negotiate and maintain its national identity and
sovereignty in an increasingly globalised, transnational context.
Just as the zombie is overdetermined in evoking the spectres of both
capital and Marx, it is also ambivalent as a marker of transnational cul-
ture. Its Haitian roots recall how this figure of the undead represents
62 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
‘the personification of slavery as a persistent presence within historical

memory’ (Richardson 2010: 124), whether on an individual or national
level. If the zombie is a pure memory that returns and refuses to go
away (Boluk and Lenz 2011: 10), it represents consistency and roots as
well as new transnational flows. Despite being ‘the only canonical movie
monster to originate in the New World’ (Bishop 2010: 31), however,
the fact remains that Juan represents a ‘re-caribeñización’ (re-Carib-
beanisation) (Eljaiek-Rodríguez 2015: 96) of the zombie trope rather
than a continuation of an original, ‘purely’ local tradition. The multiple
transformations of the zombie, from its origins in the Caribbean to its
popularisation in North American horror film, thus make it a marker of
the messy inseparability of the national from the transnational. Its con-
tagious spread recasts in macabre form the Caribbean tendency to spi-
ral forever outwards, just as the opening sequence—in which Juan and
Lázaro encounter their first zombie at sea—reconfigures, in rather more
gruesome terms, Benítez-Rojo’s idea of the Peoples of the Sea, impelled
‘toward the search for fluvial or marine routes’ (1996: 25). Seen as part
of a longer history of power struggles and a broader pattern of interna-
tional interaction, Juan turns zombie time into a figure of differential
repetition that is not so much an index of stasis and stagnation, as the
very motor or drive of Cuban history itself.
Troubling and Reasserting Locality: Space and Humour

The contradictory way in which the overdetermined zombie both trou-
bles and reasserts the Cuban identity through its transnational and local
associations is echoed in the film’s use of space. Throughout Juan, pan-
oramic shots of Havana and its skyline serve as periodic reminders of the
film’s specific setting. Moreover, these shots serve to turn the city itself
into a protagonist, functioning as marks of love for and commitment to
the capital (Armengot 2012: 4). As Brugués declares in his official state-
ment, ‘quiero fotografiar una Habana preciosa, la Habana que yo amo.
Una Habana por la cual uno arriesgaría su vida y por la cual vale la pena
luchar’ (‘Juan de Los Muertos’, n.d.). Scholars such as Maguire (2015)
and Bianka Ballina (2017) have noted how the film’s cityscapes work as
in-jokes about the apocalypse-like degradation of Cuba’s urban environ-
ments, interpellating a local interpretive community brought together as
much by exasperation as by affection for their home. However, several
sequences also subvert this sense of familiarity with an affectively charged
local space of personal and collective belonging, particularly as they

transfigure Havana’s iconic landmarks.
Over the course of the film, a series of highly symbolic spaces comes
into contact with the contagious force of the zombie epidemic, and as
soon as they do, their ordinary associations are transformed; sites such as
the Capitolio would normally represent a synecdoche of Havana as well
as metonymically signifying the nation itself through the force of their
historic visual iterations. These locations tend to be associated with the
exercise of different kinds of power—visually clear symbols of authority
that serve to control, by making legible, the incomprehensible whole of
the city (Cohen 2000: 321) and, by extension, the nation. The sequence
in which a helicopter spirals out of control into the dome of the
Capitolio (Fig. 2.5) thus suggests the way in which the zombie epidemic
destabilises the order of the city and with it, its identity, as embodied by
icons such as this building. Furthermore, by creating such a strong visual
reminder of 9/11 and so establishing an unexpected parallel between
Cuba and its imperialist ‘opposite’—the USA—this sequence shows how
such apocalyptic or catastrophic events not only cause physical destruc-
tion but also unsettle the common spatial and visual markers around
which national identity is organised.
Fig. 2.5 A helicopter spirals into the Capitolio, destabilising the symbolic order
of the city (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011)
64 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Like the traumatic events of 9/11, the zombie narrative creates chaos,
reconfiguring hierarchies and social orders (Bishop 2010: 23). At the
same time, ‘the destruction of hegemonic and ideological spatial cod-
ifications’ enacted by the zombie epidemic also creates ‘an in-between
space, an “other”-space’ (May 2010: 286). The zombies’ relentless
advance ‘deterritorialize[s] the imaginary landscape into a smooth, des-
ocialized and lifeless landscape’ (Coonfield 2013: 9), forcing the iconic,
familiar spaces of the city and the nation to include an ‘other’ or blank
space of difference within itself. A clear example of this deterritoriali-
sation can be found in the film’s depictions of the Malecón—the city’s
seafront promenade—which is either eerily empty or overpopulated by
zombie hordes. Faced with this smooth, blank space of destruction, the
human survivors ‘seek to reterritorialize civil society wherever and in
whatever attenuated form they can’ (Coonfield 2013: 9). When they are
forced to venture out of the safe space of their solar (apartment block
rooftop), which functions as bar, army barracks, and office all at once,
Juan and his band of survivors must use the raw materials of the apoc-
alyptic city space to their advantage; creating a ramp of zombie corpses
to launch their amphibious tank-car out to sea, for example, they show
how blank space can, and indeed needs to be, creatively reinterpreted for
survival.
Rather than straightforwardly destroying identity, the blank, deterri-
torialised space created by the zombies shows how ‘difference and oth-
erness play counter-hegemonic roles in the constitution of cities and
bodies’ (May 2010: 186), suggesting the latent instability that allows all
cities to be violently reconfigured or creatively rewritten by those who
live in them. Both city and nation are like loosely woven fabrics, neces-
sarily entwining difference into their very texture, leaving gaps in which
new threads can be incorporated and from which old ones may be unrav-
elled. Rather than representing an anti-Messianic waiting-for-the-end, as
Žižek claims in his analysis of time in Cuba (2002), the zombie epidemic
here functions as an extreme demonstration of this potential for renewal
and renovation as ‘the soft spaces of the city are writ clean, reduced to
blank space and made potentially new’ (May 2010: 290). As Fernanda
Bustamante Escalona has shown in her analysis of Juan alongside texts
by Dominican writers Rita Indiana Hernández and Frank Báez, the
zombie trope can provide testimony to ‘una de(re)generación, la cual,
materializada en los cuerpos y en el espacio, apela a una reconstrucción
de las narrativas e imaginarios locales’ (a de/regeneration that, when
materialised in bodies and space, calls for a reconstruction of local nar-

ratives and imaginaries) (2013: 62). The ambivalence of this renewal—
which is potentially both destructive and creative—is demonstrated by
the scene in which, reclining on the roof, Lázaro comments to Juan that
the view would be better if two large buildings (one of which appears
to be the iconic FOCSA tower) were not in the way. Seconds later, with
no explanation, the structures collapse, revealing a resplendent sunset
behind them.
Whilst this sequence constitutes a clear visual reference to the
destruction of the Twin Towers and offers a parallel between physical
destruction and the ‘derrumbe moral’ (moral collapse) (Grosman
2013) of Revolutionary ideals, it also reconfigures chaos as wish fulfil-
ment, since the immediacy of the buildings’ demolition after the charac-
ter’s comment creates the sense of a causal link. The way in which space
seems to respond to individuals’ desires rather than to a ‘normal’, every-
day logic shows how, in the crises and chaos epitomised by the zombie
epidemic, but also inherent to extreme events such as 9/11, the city
space is internalised and rendered illegible. These apocalyptic situations
expose the true nature of the public domain, which is ‘always, inher-
ently, a phantom sphere’ in which we are faced with unknowability, the
other, and uncertainty in the self (Donald 2002: 52). Gradually replac-
ing the iconic city with a deterritorialised, smooth space whose illegibility
exposes the radical contingency and unpredictability of the public sphere,
the film heightens the anxieties normally caused by the unknowability
of the other in shared space. In so doing, it defamiliarises and destabi-
lises the local and gestures towards fears surrounding Cuba’s sovereignty,
identity, and stability in the context of the island’s recent reinsertion into
transnational flows of people, information, and goods.
If the zombie narrative reduces the city to a blank canvas or surface,
then humour in Juan is often based on the reduction of people to their
bodies—their physical surfaces. Laughter itself involves ‘moments of
radical corporeal exposure’, calling us back to the physical reality of our
bodies and, through the partial object of the voice with which we laugh,
showing that ‘the human is this break, this hiatus, this gap between the
physical and the psychical’ (Critchley 2002: 8, 28). In exposing this
gap, laughter defines the human against the zombie, which, with no
consciousness, represents the reduction of humanity to a purely physi-
cal plane. This creates a creature simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
Like the automaton, the zombie moves stiffly, mechanically, and with
66 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
a repetitive, blind insistence, recalling Bergson’s theory that it is ‘the

momentary transformation of a person into a thing’ (in Critchley 2002:
55) that makes us laugh. Given the automaton’s uncanniness, it is no
wonder that what we laugh at and find uncanny often coincide (Critchley
2002: 58), and zombies are humorous for the same reasons they are
frightening (Badley 2008: 35). These machine-like monsters are defined
largely by their lack of consciousness, which renders them unsettlingly
resistant to our attempts at comprehension. We may laugh at what we
don’t understand (Žižek 2001: 68), but we are also frightened by it.
Humour is caused by the disjunction between expectation and actu-
ality and presents ‘the world with its causal chains broken, its social
practices turned inside out, and common sense rationality left in tatters’
(Critchley 2002: 1)—a world we find difficult to fathom. Nevertheless,
the chaotic reality of the zombie epidemic is repeatedly described as
similar to ‘ordinary’ life in Cuba, particularly during the Special Period,
which suggests the way in which expecting the unexpected and exist-
ing in a permanent state of incomprehensible exception have become
defining features of Cubanness. Furthermore, the similarities between
the living and the undead indicate how the familiar and unfamiliar, the
clear and the incomprehensible all simultaneously constitute and under-
mine Cuban identity. As Simon Critchley has argued, laughing at our
surroundings, our social rites, and authority may expose their arbitrar-
iness and contingency (2002: 10), undermining the symbolic order of
the society we inhabit, but it also continually recreates a shared cultural
order and identity. Thus, the film’s ironic redeployment of Revolutionary
rhetoric around resilience, ingenuity, and survival to a zombie apocalypse
may critique discourses of constant crisis and sacrifice, but by mimick-
ing Cubans’ frequently ironic redeployment of such speech in everyday
life (Pertierra 2011), Juan also demonstrates and reinforces a shared
national identity thoroughly ‘entangled with the revolutionary experi-
ence’ (Ballina 2017: 202).
Evidently, then, just as the zombie may represent both Caribbean ori-
gins and transnational transformation, in Juan, its comical nature inter-
pellates different interpretive communities, whether formed around
genre or nation. The industry term that applies to the film—‘zom-
com’—highlights its hybridity as part of an irreverent and transnational
genre particularly well-suited to a culture that has long figured itself in
terms of cannibalisation and transculturation. Humour works as a form
of ‘cultural insider knowledge’, marking belonging to a cultural system
and connecting us to a specific place. Because jokes have an ‘intersubjec-

tive appeal’ (Critchley 2002: 67, 80), they presuppose and create a com-
munity of people who will understand them. As Brugués has confirmed,
the film’s reliance on humour necessarily means that it will address and
include different audiences in very different ways:
In the case of Juan, what was really important was humor rather than con-
flicts — a kind of humor that could work here in Cuba but also elsewhere.
In fact, there are inside jokes in zombie movies that the Cuban public
doesn’t get, but that audiences elsewhere do. And there are jokes that are
more for Cubans than for other viewers. (in Maristany Castro 2012)
The director’s choice of language in this interview—he goes on to

describe the film as ‘an original and appealing product’ and discuss its
success in various markets—suggests that the deliberate use of a gen-
re-specific comic mode to create and interpellate different interpretive
communities has been key to ensuring the film’s international commer-
cial success.
That the film’s zom-com and horror-based in-jokes go over the heads
of the Cuban public is echoed disapprovingly by Cuban film critic Joel
del Río (2013), but Juan also contains numerous references that ensure
the interpellation of a markedly local audience, thereby underscoring
Brugués’ reterritorialisation of the space of the film in the reaffirmation of
a common Cuban identity. As commentators like Armengot have noted,
much of the film’s humour relies on vulgarity and negative stereotypes
about sex, race, and gender (2012: 5), and this is equally evident in the
Vampiros films. Both Padrón’s problematically hypersexualised and racial-
ised drawings and the stereotypes conveyed by Brugués’ La China and
El Primo interpellate a Cuban interpretive community, which—like all
other such collectives—is not only unified by warmth and acceptance but
also by shared prejudices. In this sense, it is significant that, as Cardentey
Levin argues, ‘en Juan de los Muertos el gay es dilucidado como parte de
la degeneración social y no tanto una ganancia en términos de apertura
mental’ (in Juan the gay figure is presented as part of a social degenera-
tion rather than as a mark of open-mindedness) (2014).
In fact, both Padrón and Brugués place a heteronormative masculin-
ity at the centre of their films by humorously highlighting their protago-
nists’ machismo. Pepe’s trumpet acts as a phallic symbol, leaving women
aquiver and magically removing their clothing with its sexual power.
68 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Meanwhile, despite his dysfunctionality in many other respects, Juan’s

‘sexploits’ make clear that he lives up to the alpha male expectations of
a classic cinematic hero. As Gustavo Subero has argued, the ‘bromance’
between Juan and his sidekick, Lázaro, places a queering force at the
heart of the narrative that the film constantly tries to remedy through
the hypersexualisation of female characters and the caricaturisation of
different models of masculinity. The centrality of the film’s ‘crypto-gay
couple’ (Subero 2016: 176) thus leads to the anxious, repeated reasser-
tion of a decidedly straight, male Cubanness, producing much of the
film’s humour. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the primary
function of the pseudo-romantic rooftop scene in which Lázaro—who
believes he is dying from a zombie bite—asks to give Juan a blow job
is to reaffirm an interpretive community organised around heteronor-
mative notions of gender and sexuality (Ballina 2017: 207). Whilst the
insidiousness of this threat of otherness is manifest in La China and El
Primo’s inclusion in Juan’s crew (it is no coincidence that they are the
first to become zombified), the importance of its elimination is made
grotesquely clear by the killing of the unsettlingly resilient, zombified
La China; a low-angle mid-shot allows us to see both his friends’ dis-
concerted, yet approving reactions and Juan’s disgusted expression
as he energetically crushes the character’s skull with an oar, spitting
periodically.
However, the films’ comic reaffirmation of common Cubanness is
arguably most evident in the characters’ use of the particularly idio-
syncratic national humour known as choteo. Famously defined by Jorge
Mañach as ‘un prurito de independencia que se exterioriza en una burla
de toda forma no imperativa de autoridad’ (an impulse towards inde-
pendence that manifests itself in the mockery of any non-coercive form
of authority) ([1928] 2010: 210), choteo is deployed defiantly by the
characters in an act of refusal to be intimidated by the chaotic, frighten-
ing situation they face. As ‘una afirmación del yo’ (an affirmation of the
self) (Mañach 2010: 210), choteo also constitutes a reassertion of iden-
tity in a context that is undergoing a disturbing process of defamiliarisa-
tion. This impulse to assert the idiosyncratic is perfectly expressed in the
film’s closing credits sequence. By setting the characters’ battle against
the zombies to the Sex Pistols’ cover of the classic song, ‘My Way’,
the film finishes by reaffirming a stubborn, even contrary Cuban ‘way’
(Eljaiek-Rodríguez 2015: 93). Yet the paradox is that such a ‘Cuban
way’ should be expressed in such a hybrid manner: not only is the song
Fig. 2.6 Juan’s ending evokes an international comic book aesthetic (Juan,

Alejandro Brugués 2011)
in English, but this particular version, with its punk-rock style, presents
a jarring discord against the iconic, jazzy rendition performed by Frank
Sinatra. Furthermore, this is accompanied by a zombie-fighting sequence
depicted through a hybridisation of live action and animation, recalling
an international comic book aesthetic (Fig. 2.6). This particular hybrid
of local and foreign adapts transnational forms in a ‘Cuban way’, stand-
ing synecdochically in relation to the film as a whole, which imports both
the zom-com genre and the Romero-style zombie whilst also localising
them through the pervasive use of choteo.
In the Vampiros films as much as in Juan, idiosyncratic Cuban
humour is used to hybridise foreign or transnational elements, turning
them into ‘unstable contact zones of a wide variety of national, regional
and transnational determinants’ (Alvaray 2014: 69). As various for-
eign forces invade the nation, threatening to dilute or disturb its iden-
tity, Pepe and his friends make use of choteo in order to undermine the
authority of their enemies and reassert the Cubanness of their space.
Similarly, both films create humour through the unexpected com
bination of local and foreign, parochial and global, and, in so doing,
demonstrate how hybridity can function within these contact zones
of national, regional, and transnational determinants as ‘a strategy to
70 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
inscribe local agency in transactions of differential economic and cultural

power’ (Alvaray 2014: 69). This dynamic is of particular relevance to
Más vampiros; as an international co-production, the sequel is a site of
heightened contestation over identity, influence, and agency. As it begins,
we watch the sunrise over an iconic Havana skyline dominated by the
Capitolio, whilst the credits acknowledge the film’s foreign partners:
Ibermedia and Canal+. The romantic, picturesque scene is ruptured by
the nasal, heavily accented habanero tones of a newsvendor, who shouts
‘¡Submarinos Nazi en Cojímar!’ (Nazi Submarines in Cojímar!). This
acknowledgement of foreign input and interests within a very local visual
scene reterritorialises the film at a point at which its Cubanness is most
insidiously threatened. At the same time, the newsvendor’s cries sum-
marise the film’s diegetic development, which advances through a com-
ical combination of world history and local place that makes a claim for
Cuba’s importance and agency on the world stage.
Vampiros and Más vampiros: The Symbolic Order and its

Transgression
Pepe’s role as one of the key exponents of the Vampiros films’ humour
highlights his ambivalent status within the cultural and symbolic order
of the nation. On the one hand, by practising choteo, he signals his
Cubanness through his sense of humour and associated characteristics
of independence and rejection of authority. This Cubanness is clearly
declared in the montage of stills used at the beginning of Vampiros to
prove that the young Pepe ‘creció bajo el sol tropical’ (grew up beneath
the tropical sun), associating him with further markers of national iden-
tity such as baseball and music. On the other hand, as the biographical
explanation also makes clear, he is a vampire and technically just as for-
eign as his uncle. In the same way that Stoker’s Dracula is associated with
the ‘feudal, oriental, tyrannical’ and ‘cannot be the product of that very
society he wants to defend’ (Moretti 1982: 76), Padrón’s vampire fits
uncomfortably into the mould of representative Cuban hero. Although
the other and the foreign are partially nationalised through Pepe, recall-
ing key concepts of Cubanness relating to the assimilation of difference
through transculturation, this process is never complete. Just as the aji-
aco is not a perfect blend, there is always a remnant—what Žižek might
refer to as a kernel of the Real—that cannot be incorporated or under-
stood. This is made clear in both films, as Pepe is seen to be able to
resurrect his vampiric identity when needed. His ambivalent overdeter-

mination as vampire thus shows the way in which cultural identities are
endangered by difference, and yet his role as protagonist places this very
problematic at the centre of the director’s depiction of Cuba.
That vampiric difference is associated with threat is made clear through
the negative associations brought by Johnny Terrori, the European vam-
pires and Hitler, who wants to enlist vampires to strengthen his fascist
army. By literally bringing vampires out into the light with his potion,
Vampisol, Pepe’s uncle shows a desire to neutralise threat, incorporating
these creatures of the night into the lawful order and the realm of the
knowable. If night-time can be seen to stand for the ultimate unknowabil-
ity and unrepresentability of the Real and therefore a constitutive part of
its traumatic monstrosity, Pepe’s uncle attempts to fight that monstrosity
by trying to turn the vampires into diurnal, virtual creatures. As two-
dimensional creations, the genre of these animation films reflects the fact
that they present a virtual reality—that is, ‘reality itself divested of its sub-
stance, the resisting hard kernel of the Real’ (Žižek and Critchley 2007:
38)—attenuating with their humorous caricatures the fear that might be
aroused by the monsters presented. Similarly, Vampisol makes the vampire
outwardly resemble a human, turning them from an ultimate, unknow-
able ‘Other’ into an ‘other’—a specular image or projection of the ego,
in which the human subject can recognise itself. This is demonstrated in
negative form through the sequence in which Pepe assumes his vampiric
identity for the first time. In accordance with age-old vampiric folklore,
he is unable to see his reflection in the mirror (Fig. 2.7). The unrecog-
nisability of the vampire as a paradoxical figure of the Real is highlighted
humorously by the fact that only the character’s shirt and hat are visible
in the mirror. His inability to see himself frightens Pepe so much that he
reverts to human form, to ‘a reflection or projection of the ego’ (Evans
1996: 135).
Vampisol and Vampiyaba’s formulas, which feature several very typ-
ically Cuban elements—piña colada, sun and guava—enact a domes-
tification of the difference represented by the vampire. As the original
user of Vampisol, Pepe becomes associated with a Cubanness that is
demonstrated in his behaviour, accent, and mannerisms as well as his
anti-Machado activism, and identified as a representative of the human,
national symbolic order. This is particularly true of Más vampiros, in
which Pepe’s family recalls the importance of the Walton family in
Frankenstein, which allowed for the ‘symbolic reunification’ (Moretti
72 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Fig. 2.7 Pepe cannot see his vampiric reflection in the mirror (Vampiros, Juan
Padrón 2003)
1982: 72) of society.7 Pepe’s key role in the maintenance of this nuclear
family unit and therefore of the symbolic order through which it is
defined is demonstrated in the wake of a scene in which a vampirised
Pepito is almost forced to drink his mother’s blood as Booman and Little
Smiley look on, exclaiming ‘¡No sabes cómo vas a gozar el viejo ritual!’
(You have no idea how much you’re going to enjoy the old ritual!). This
vampiric transposition of the incest taboo is intercepted, as Pepe rein-
forces the law of the father and the symbolic order. If ‘one of the institu-
tions most threatened by the monsters is the family’ (Moretti 1982: 78),
then Pepe acts as its champion, reasserting through it the wider symbolic
order of the nation.
However, as is demonstrated by Pepe’s fear that a second child may
turn out to be a vampire, the film’s protagonist is far from a straight-
forward defender and representative of the human, symbolic order.
7 Although the metonymic link between family and nation is often broken down in
Communist thought, particularly given Marx and Engels’ discussion of the issue in The
Holy Family (1844), once again Cuba establishes itself as a somewhat different case. This
is indicated by the national importance of the custody battle over Elián González in 2000
and the Código de la Familia, to name just two examples.
Although he dismisses talk of vampires at the beginning of Más vampi-

ros, he also shows awareness of his own ambivalent identity. His desire
to forget his vampiric self whilst embracing humanness recalls the role
of the desire for coherent completeness in Cuban identity. As Pérez
Firmat points out, for Ortiz the most complete form of Cubanness is to
be found ‘in a kind of longing: to desire cubanía is already to possess it’.
Like the author himself, the Cuban is ‘haunted by a yearning for whole-
ness’ (Pérez Firmat 1997: 2, 7) as a very part of his identity. Rather than
simply embodying the name of the father and the symbolic order, Pepe
also shows how the national subject is always yearning and incomplete,
incorporating an element of non-identity or difference.
In this sense, it is significant that his uncle moderates Pepe’s dosage
of Vampisol to ensure that he is never fully transformed into a human,
but always maintains his hidden vampire potential. The uncle himself
never takes the potion, preferring instead to remain in his dark, damp
quarters and reminisce, as he does at the beginning of Vampiros, about
his castle in Düsseldorf. Furthermore, whilst the Chicago and European
mafia groups and Nazis may represent the vampire’s desire for ‘continu-
ous growth’ and ‘unlimited expansion’ (Moretti 1982: 73) through their
capitalist enterprise or plan for world domination, Pepe and his uncle
are hardly free of this association. By working to allow vampires unlim-
ited access to the daylight world of humans, they show a similar vampiric
desire for expansion. Through their promotion of Vampisol, both char-
acters put into a play a particularly Cuban logic of fetishism (Pancrazio
2004: 12), visualising difference as an extension of the self and then
appropriating it into insular space. But the logical consequence of this is
never the total neutralisation of difference, but the revelation of its insid-
iousness; Vampiros ends with a narrator who tells us to watch out, as the
person next to us on the beach may just be a vampire (Fig. 2.8). Thanks
to Vampisol, difference—figured as capital and capitalism most visibly
through depictions of tourists and the respective foreign ‘invaders’ that
come to the island—is incorporated into the nation itself.
The persistent presence of difference is shown through Pepe’s son,
Pepín, who is so irresistibly drawn towards vampirism that he desperately
wants to become a vampire. After discovering the truth about his father
and seeing how upset the mention of vampirism makes him, Pepín apolo-
gises for his obsession, justifying it by adding that ‘era algo más fuerte que
yo’ (it was stronger than me). His fascination suggests how the Other func-
tions as ‘the site of an unfathomable desire’ (Žižek and Critchley 2007: 42)
74 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Fig. 2.8 Watch out! The person sunbathing next to you might turn out to be a
vampire (Vampiros, Juan Padrón 1985)
that draws us inexorably towards it. Vampirism, as a manifestation of such

Otherness, can be seen as ‘an excellent example of the identity of desire
and fear’ (Moretti 1982: 79). If it is true that every repressed feeling turns
into anxiety, then Pepe’s fear of having vampire children and his anxiety
about his vampiric status result from the repression of his desire to assume
part of his identity. The act of repression transfigures emotion, creating a
kind of monster that ‘expresses the unconscious content and at the same
time hides it’ (Moretti 1982: 15). The monstrous figure of the vampire
thus comes to embody repressed difference, and Pepe can be seen to rep-
resent identity as affirmed by the symbolic order—identity that necessarily
involves the repression or disavowal of difference as such to create a coher-
ent whole. However, Más vampiros also demonstrates the way in which the
repressed returns in the very act of repression (Žižek and Critchley 2007:
19); it is precisely when Pepe decides to destroy his uncle’s laboratory and
remains to protect his son from the lure of vampirism that he finds out
that Pepín has already discovered them. Not only does the protagonist see
that his son wants to be a vampire, but he is forced to admit his own vam-
piric nature. Moreover, Pepe chooses to augment this difference by tak-
ing Vampiyaba and thereby becoming even more vampiric than before. In
itself, his son’s invention is far from a better, stronger formula of Vampisol;
rather, its ability to give vampires superpowers and turn non-vampires
into vampiric ‘bichos’ (creatures) suggests the inevitability of the return of

difference.
To help invent an antidote to Vampiyaba and thereby neutralise the
threat to humans in general and Cuba in particular, Pepe is obliged to res-
urrect the very difference—in the form of his uncle—that he was about
to destroy. Combined with his decision to take Vampiyaba in order to
develop exaggerated vampiric traits, this act marks him out as a representa-
tive not only of the symbolic order, but also of its transgression. Thanks to
Pepe, Werner Amadeus von Dracula, who had previously manifested him-
self as an animated pen (whose scribbled instructions and equations could
be seen to represent only the injunctive ‘content’ of the spectre), assumes
full ghostly but bodily form, recalling the ‘paradoxical incorporation, the
becoming-body’ of the spectre as opposed to the spirit that testifies to its
power (Derrida 2006: 5). As if to confirm both this corporeality and the
particularly paternal injunctive authority of the spectre, the ghost uncle
checks under his robe before triumphantly proclaiming, ‘¡He regresado…
enterito!’ (I’ve come back… in one piece!). The uncle thus comes to
embody the spectre of difference that haunts any claim to coherent iden-
tity. This haunting is not necessarily negative, as the sequence of events
that follows demonstrates the way in which order is maintained by its peri-
odic transgression and coherent identity, by difference. Not only does the
vampiric ghost uncle help to save the day, but Pepe’s Vampiyaba-induced
ultra-monstrous state contributes to the successful resolution of the battle.
Though it may prove troublesome, monstrosity or difference clearly serves
to support the symbolic order that creates unified meaning. That the Cuba
depicted in Padrón’s cartoons needs Pepe and his uncle in order to avert
the schemes of Johnny Terrori, the European group, the Nazis, and the
nation’s own dictators suggest the way in which the nation relies on the
presence of difference. Not only does Cubanness somehow survive thanks
to its monstrous, transgressive elements, but given Pepe’s ‘cubanisation’,
national identity itself involves an element of unresolved difference, a ker-
nel of the Real that cannot be assimilated.
Juan de los Muertos: The Real versus the Symbolic

Order
Pepe’s complex signification in the Vampiros films is echoed in the over-
determination of the zombies in Juan. Whereas generic conventions
tend towards depicting zombie invasions, in which the monsters come
76 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
from the outside, Brugués presents us with an insular space that becomes
infected from within. This set-up indicates the way in which zombie films
respond ‘more to a fear of what is the same, (our own bodies, our neigh-
bours, the government) than to any threat from without’ (Richardson
2010: 136). Indeed, the opening of the film makes it particularly difficult
to identify whether this threat comes from inside or outside the island.
The first zombie we see appears dressed in an orange jumpsuit distinctly
reminiscent of the uniforms of Guantánamo prisoners. The monster’s
ambivalence is thus tied to the ambivalent and troubled status of this
region of Cuba; part of the island yet held apart and controlled by the
USA, Guantánamo can be seen as an ever-present symbol of the threat of
the foreign, an internalised piece of the outside that troubles the coher-
ence of the national whole.
As Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez points out, given the way in which the
film ‘se nutre, retoma y transforma formas estadounidenses de repre-
sentar a los zombis’ (feeds off, takes up, and transforms American ways
of representing zombies) this first monster’s provenance is hardly surpris-
ing (2015: 97). Moreover, the silence and stillness, camera angles, and
extra-diegetic music that accompany the climactic moment recall Stephen
Spielberg’s classic Jaws (1975) (Cardentey Levin 2014), reinforcing the
zombie’s association with US cultural influences, which, despite embar-
gos and technical obstacles, have always seeped into the island. In this
sense, the fact that this first zombie appears floating in the sea is equally
significant. An ambivalent, liminal space that is not quite national or
foreign, the sea functions as a symbol of both connection and isolation
and is subject to currents that defy the simplicity or unidirectionality
common to many understandings of cultural flows. If this origin of the
zombie epidemic evinces ‘the dangers of invasive alterity associated with
uncontrolled spaces in a globalised world’ (Robert Saunders in Eljaiek-
Rodríguez 2015: 98), then perhaps it is more appropriate to read this
sequence in the light of the messy multiplicity and multidirectionality
of transnational flows that increasingly characterise twenty-first-century
Cuba, blurring the boundaries between national and foreign, unsettling
notions of self and other.
That zombies reflect a distorted version of the self or a familiarised
form of the other is further suggested by the difficulty of distinguish-
ing between them and the survivors. This is highlighted by the frequent
jokes about how little people have changed once they become zom-
bies, a humorous denial that evokes the Cuban pattern of incorporating
difference through disavowal (Pancrazio 2004). In this sense, the zombie

can be said to represent the ‘little other’, not truly different but cou-
pled with the ego—a specular image with which the subject can iden-
tify. However, zombies complicate our ideas of otherness (May 2010:
289) and identity because, whilst they may resemble us from afar, up
close they prove unsettlingly difficult to explain or comprehend. This is
demonstrated at the very beginning of the outbreak, where the protago-
nists are summoned by Juan’s elderly neighbour, whose husband has just
died. When he suddenly reanimates, the group struggle to understand
what is happening, humorously running through a series of supersti-
tions in an attempt to stop the zombie (Fig. 2.9). Having tried methods
relating to vampires and evil spirits, Juan’s group only establish what the
zombie is not, showing the way in which the monster ‘is always described
by negation’ (Moretti 1982: 70). Even later, the only thing that Juan can
state for certain is that the zombies are not ‘disidentes’ (dissidents), as
official news outlets repeatedly claim.
The elderly neighbour’s belief that her husband has simply revived
and the friends’ uncertainty as to the monster’s nature show the prob-
lematic identity of the zombie. This sequence thus functions as a com-
ically literal demonstration of ‘the monstrosity of the neighbour’, which
Fig. 2.9 Juan and his friends run through a series of superstitions in their
attempt to kill the monstrous neighbour (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011)
78 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
consists of an ‘alien traumatic kernel’ that resists interpretation and ‘hys-

tericizes’ the subject, causing them to question both its and their own
identities. Lacan’s use of the term Thing (das Ding) in relation to this
incomprehensible kernel is significant, as it carries ‘all the connotations
of horror fiction’ (Žižek and Critchley 2007: 43); in Juan, the neigh-
bours literally become such monstrous Things. Neither dead nor alive
but undead, the zombies occupy a space between the human and not
human—a ‘third domain’ that undermines both categories and the dis-
tinction between them. The ambivalence and overdetermination of the
zombies present ‘a terrifying excess which, although it negates what
we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human’ (Žižek and
Critchley 2007: 47), recalling the way in which the Real can manifest
itself both as absence and worrying excess (Kay 2003: 8). By making
the neighbour into a zombie, the director inserts an element of radi-
cal alterity into a familiar, specular image, investing it with a ‘resisting
hard kernel of the Real’ (Žižek and Critchley 2007: 38). The zombies
retain recognisable elements of the people they used to be, as suggested
by Juan’s slogan—‘matamos a sus seres queridos’ (we kill your loved
ones)—but they also make literal the monstrous element of unknowa-
bility of the neighbour. This results in their acquisition of qualities of the
Other, as they become radically different and ultimately incomprehensi-
ble to the human survivors.
As an externalisation of the monstrous unknowability of the neigh-
bour, then, the zombie becomes associated with the Lacanian Real. If
this is defined ‘not [as] an external thing that resists being caught in the
symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself’
(Žižek and Critchley 2007: 72), then these walking metaphors can never
directly represent the Real. Instead, they may be better understood
with reference to Lacan’s lamella, inhabiting the intersection between
the Imaginary and the Real and representing ‘the primordial abyss that
swallows everything, dissolving all identities’ (Žižek and Critchley 2007:
64) (Fig. 2.10). Since the zombie is ‘simply the hulk, the rude stuff of
generic humanity, the bare canvas’ (Dendle 2001: 12), it evokes the
Real as experienced through ‘the realm of biology and the body in its
brute physicality’ (Evans 1996: 163). Like the formless lamella, the
zombie horde is a homogenous ‘bulk’ without consciousness, convey-
ing the anxiety of the loss of differentiated identity. As well as fulfilling
some of the more gruesome generic conventions of the zombie horror
film, the repeated visual focus on the deteriorated bodies of the zombies
Fig. 2.10 The Lacanian lamella represents a primordial abyss that swallows all
identities (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011)
and their violent extermination, often accompanied by particularly grisly

sound effects, draws the viewer’s attention back to the threats of dis-
memberment, death, and the dissolution of the subject associated with
the Lacanian lamella.
With the outbreak of the zombie epidemic, a fissure in the symbolic
order is created and the country enters a new state of exception. As man-
ifestations of the unbearable Real, the zombies figure forth this fissure,
threatening the virtual reality of Cuban society. For Žižek and Critchley,
this consists of a reality divested of the incomprehensible, the unassim-
ilable ultimate non-identity of the Real (2007: 38), so that we can see
Cuba’s contemporary virtual reality to consist of its claim to coherent
nationhood and identity, in which supposed difference may be cele-
brated but true Otherness is excluded. As the zombies reappear, so too
does ‘the monstrous Thing behind the veil of appearances’ (Žižek and
Critchley 2007: 72)—the void behind identity. However, the idea that
this gap in the symbolic order, this state of exception or crisis is a consti-
tutive part of Cubanness itself is indicated by the fact that the apocalyptic
space of the zombie epidemic is not too different from the many crises
that have shaped Cuban identity. It is compared to the Special Period,
and Juan incorporates the epidemic into his list of other Cuban ‘special
80 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
periods’ that he has survived. This suggests that Cuba’s continuous state
of crisis constantly forces it to confront unsettling manifestations of the
Real, recalling Lacan’s description of the Real as stuck to the sole of our
shoe or glued to our heel (Evans 1996: 163).
If the zombie is associated with emptiness, non-identity, and void,
then the survivors of the epidemic are often depicted as conventional
and unthinking (Kealey 2012: 35), recalling the unsettling similar-
ities between monster and human. Ample evidence of this is provided
to comic effect by Juan’s friend Lázaro and his slow, stoner son Vladi
California, whose activities as a jinetero and attempts to steal zom-
bie-tourists’ expensive goods moreover mark him as dangerously moti-
vated by consumption. Characters in zombie films are ‘bland, ordinary
(Heimlich) citizens’ (Bishop 2006: 202), tending to conform to or rep-
resent certain types, and significantly, Brugués’ protagonists ‘represent
the common man (not the “New Man”) who struggles to find direc-
tion and purpose’ (Armengot 2012: 10). Whilst the group represents
different, caricatured aspects of post-Special Period Cuban society, the
monster’s main antagonist acquires an even greater significance as ‘rep-
resentative of the species, of the whole of society’ (Moretti 1982: 68).
Brugués assigns the eponymous protagonist this role of representative
of the species, and it is telling that Juan is no card-carrying party mem-
ber, no dedicated revolutionary, but rather a slacker who floats ‘weight-
less’ through twenty-first-century Cuba (Casamayor Cisneros 2012).
Recalling the overdetermination of the zombie, Juan functions as both
representative and exception, anti-hero and hero at the same time.
Through his resistance, Juan is forced to turn the characteristics of
Cubanness we have seen him express in his daily life—ingenuity, resist-
ance, and resilience—to a new purpose that transcends his everyday strug-
gle to get by. His attitude towards the zombies and efforts to fight them
thus unwittingly reassert recognisable models of Cubanness, so that the
monster indirectly ‘serves to reconstruct a universality, a social cohesion’
(Moretti 1982: 68). The fact that such cohesion also—and perhaps inev-
itably—constitutes a social exclusion for some is conveyed in an ingen-
ious scene in which Juan dances salsa with the zombified La China. His
attempts to defend himself from infection may provide a particularly
funny demonstration of the assertion of identity as a defence against the
consuming void of the Real, but it is telling that this Real is here asso-
ciated with the queer aggression of La China (Ballina 2017: 207), who
threatens to destabilise Juan’s heteronormative Cubanness through the
assertion of her non-productive sexuality. If the heroic everyman who

fights the monsters becomes associated with the preservation of the sym-
bolic order, then the symbolic order at stake here is not some socialist
utopia, but rather a Cubanness defined both by particular prejudices
and patriarchal structures and also by an ironically depoliticised set of
Revolutionary ideals—resilience, ingenuity, creativity, and independence.
In his struggle against the zombies, Juan becomes ‘the most unlikely
of heroes, in that to a great extent he has given up on heroism itself’
(Maguire 2015: 181). Nonetheless, the extremity of the situation forces
Juan to adopt cubanía—‘a cubanidad that is full, felt, conscious, and
desired’ (Ortiz 2014: 460)—expressed most clearly in his decision to
remain on the island.8 Not only does Juan ensure a bright future for the
nation by finally giving his blessing to the union between Camila and
Vladi California, ‘conferring the promise of a reconstituted, post-national
and diasporic Cuba onto younger generations’ (Ballina 2017: 209), but
he also rescues a young child, whose presence shores up a heteronorma
tive investment in the future (Edelman 2004). Moreover, if we are to
interpret the animated credit sequence as part of the narrative, we can see
that Juan’s dedication has inspired hope and commitment in his friends,
who now join him in his fight. Juan’s assertions of Cubanness are thus
not only key to his own and his friends’ survival, but also, this sequence
implies, to the continued survival of the nation itself.
We are never shown the decisive defeat of the zombies, and the fact
that the fighting continues throughout the credits implies the struggle
will be ongoing. We sense that this new crisis or state of exception will
continue and become incorporated into the national narrative, suggest-
ing that Cubanness in fact relies on the constant conflictive interplay
between the Real and the symbolic order. As such, Juan’s self-sacrifice
thus maintains a distinctly un-Messianic tone, since his decision to stay
seems to be informed by the conviction that ‘la derrota no es la muerte
sino la renuncia al combate con el monstruoso enemigo’ (defeat does
not lie in death but in giving up the fight against the monstrous enemy)
(de León 2013: 44). Undermining the divides between the norm and
its suspension, between the representative and the exception, Cubanness
can be more accurately described as this unresolved struggle or tension
8 This act of nationalist loyalty recalls Žižek’s discussion of how nationalist over-identifi-
cation functioned as the transgression of socialist law that also served to hold the commu-
nity together in the former Yugoslavia (1992: 48).
82 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
rather than a stable essence. That the zombies are not exterminated
suggests the stubborn presence of indomesticable difference within the
national self, suggesting a reconfigured—if not broken (Cardentey Levin
2014)—dialectic defined by incomplete process, rather than synthesis
(Žižek 1989: 209). Rather than exterminating the undead, which would
result in the eradication of difference, and ultimately produce a totalitar-
ianism of sameness, Cubans have learnt to live with the undead as man-
ifestations of the Real that trouble coherent identity. In this sense, the
film can be seen as part of a broader category of ‘postmodern horror’, in
which the lack of closure and certainty expresses the most troubling of
contemporary threats: ontological uncertainty (Budra 1998).
However, whereas the prime examples of this postmodern type
of horror focus on very human monsters such as the serial killer, who
escapes capture and fades into anonymity, leaving the viewer terrified
of every shadow or phone call, this film uses conspicuously gruesome
monsters and, moreover, deploys them in an explicitly comic mode. The
excessive and extreme figure of the zombie functions as an Imaginary
representation of the unrepresentable Real of threatening ontologi-
cal uncertainty; by giving this threat a gruesomely embodied form and
comic manner, the film creates a screen of fantasy that protects viewers
from facing the full force of this traumatic presence. If apocalyptic nar-
ratives such as this one provide temporary, cathartic enjoyment, then
it is more accurate to say that they maintain order by providing peri-
odic opportunities for release rather than subverting or undermining
it (Bakhtin 1981). Thus, though Brugués’ film may admit the unset-
tling presence of difference, non-identity, and void within the nation,
it also attempts to neutralise, screen, and repress it, recalling the way in
which the monster works to both express and hide unconscious content
(Moretti 1982: 85).
Conclusion: Enjoy your Mystification!

This pattern of simultaneously hiding and expressing unconscious con-
tent is visible throughout all three films. Distorting reality, they perform
‘a work of “mystification”’ (Moretti 1982: 83) that displaces anxieties
over identity onto fantastical narratives of excess. In this way, such texts,
whether filmic or otherwise, ‘[dissimulate] the radical contingency and
flimsiness of the symbolic order; [they] embod[y], naturaliz[e] and fi[x]
fantasy in a way that can only block analytical progress’ (Kay 2003: 69).
However, as Moretti notes, the key to gothic narrative is that we take its
metaphors not as such but as literal beings, accepting the films as part of
zombie or vampire genres with which we are already familiar. This means
that the intellectual construction or metaphor of the zombie or vampire,
together with the ideology it expresses, becomes ‘a “material force”, an
independent entity that escapes the rational control of its user’ (Moretti
1982: 83). In this way, whether it is their intention or not, ‘cultural arti-
facts make visible, in anamorphosis, the relation of our symbolic and
imaginary reality to the real’ (Kay 2003: 72), and these overdetermined
films expose, through the Imaginary, the unsettling presence of kernels
of the Real lurking just behind or at the fringes of the symbolic order of
national identity.
Whilst the insidious presence of vampires in Havana and the trans-
formative effects of the zombie apocalypse on national space may func-
tion to ‘show how very strange (and “other” to itself) Cuban society has
become’ (Maguire 2015: 177), Padrón and Brugués continually imply
that this otherness—figured as state of exception, suspension, or crisis—
has always lurked within: a kernel of the Real stuck to Cubans’ collec-
tive heel. These films thus recall the structure of gothic literature, which
Moretti describes as dialectical because ‘the opposites, instead of sepa-
rating and entering into conflict, exist in function of one another, rein-
force one other [sic]’ (1982: 85). Just as Juan as representative hero and
the zombies as unsettling non-identity exist in function of one another,
Pepe becomes defender of the symbolic order precisely because of who
he is—an outsider to that order: a vampire. These contradictions are
never resolved, suggesting the way in which Cuban identity can best be
figured in reference to Žižek’s reinterpretation of the Hegelian dialectic
(1989: 209). Rather than resulting in synthesis and sameness, such a dia-
lectic involves the internalisation of difference, creating an identity that
must necessarily ‘at the same time, [include] an element of non-identity’
(Kay 2003: 26).
Following a logic of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’, the d epictions
of Cubanness in Juan, Vampiros, and Más vampiros also include
elements of non-identity—anxious remnants that reveal the presence
of difference within the nation. Monsters such as zombies and vam-
pires are metaphors because they combine different sources of fear, but
they also exist to transform these fears, changing their form and mean-
ing to allow ‘the social consciousness [to] admit its own fears without
laying itself open to stigma’ (Moretti 1982: 83). This transformation is
84 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
crucial, since the full admission of these anxieties of non-identity and dif-
ference would constitute the integration of the kernel of the unbearable
Real into the symbolic order of both film and nation. This is impossi-
ble because it would result in ‘the aphanisis (the self-obliteration) of the
subject: the subject loses his/her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates’
(Žižek and Critchley 2007: 55). Although they ultimately maintain their
internal consistency as miniature versions of the wider symbolic order of
the nation, the films suggest that Cubanness is inherently troubled by
difference, each transmitting a specific sinthome that triggers the specta-
tor’s enjoyment. As ‘a signifying formulation beyond analysis, a kernel of
enjoyment immune to the efficacy of the symbolic’ (Evans 1996: 191),
this sinthome suggests the presence of ‘the thrill of the real’ (Kay 2003:
4) as the kernel of difference within national identity, whilst also evoking
what makes the films so enjoyable: their ultimate resistance to analysis
and full comprehension.
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A Cuban Zombie Nation

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CHAPTER 2

A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters

© The Author(s) 2018 41

history, explaining that ¡Vampiros en La Habana! (Vampires in Havana,

been inspired by the zombie-like behaviour he observed around him

three films turn around a central instability, a monstrous multivalence

There is a Spectre Haunting Cuba

in 1972, its economy became increasingly reliant on Soviet-subsidised and Soviet-designed

Cubans into ‘embodied commodities’ through practices such as sex tour-

commercial interests come to occupy the place of the ‘drives’. Although

by the image of a boat crossing the world map, producing laughter

achicharrándose en la acera de los bobos’ (the tourists here are always

Fig. 2.2 An Afro-Cuban woman propositions an ‘English’ vampire in colonial

This neocolonial encounter of course evokes—in comic mode—

character. He might perform a stereotypical Cubanness in his manner

zombie encounter at sea. The second response is demonstrated by Juan’s

The Haunted Present and Zombie Time

demonstrate ‘la visión del mundo desde la perspectiva cubana’ (a vision

notably the Special Period and associated cultural expressions such as

workers to support the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) in their

afterwards)—recalling the way in which ‘the subject revisits and reworks

Comité de Defensa de la Revolución (Committee for the Defence of

‘the personification of slavery as a persistent presence within historical

Troubling and Reasserting Locality: Space and Humour

local space of personal and collective belonging, particularly as they

materialised in bodies and space, calls for a reconstruction of local nar-

a repetitive, blind insistence, recalling Bergson’s theory that it is ‘the

and connecting us to a specific place. Because jokes have an ‘intersubjec-

The director’s choice of language in this interview—he goes on to

Meanwhile, despite his dysfunctionality in many other respects, Juan’s

Fig. 2.6 Juan’s ending evokes an international comic book aesthetic (Juan,

inscribe local agency in transactions of differential economic and ­cultural

Vampiros and Más vampiros: The Symbolic Order and its

resurrect his vampiric identity when needed. His ambivalent overdeter-

Although he dismisses talk of vampires at the beginning of Más vampi-

that draws us inexorably towards it. Vampirism, as a manifestation of such

into vampiric ‘bichos’ (creatures) suggests the inevitability of the return of

Juan de los Muertos: The Real versus the Symbolic

difference through disavowal (Pancrazio 2004). In this sense, the zombie

consists of an ‘alien traumatic kernel’ that resists interpretation and ‘hys-

and their violent extermination, often accompanied by particularly grisly

assertion of her non-productive sexuality. If the heroic everyman who

Conclusion: Enjoy your Mystification!

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CHAPTER 2

Fig. 2.2 An Afro-Cuban woman propositions an ‘English’ vampire in colonial

The Haunted Present and Zombie Time

Troubling and Reasserting Locality: Space and Humour

Fig. 2.6 Juan’s ending evokes an international comic book aesthetic (Juan,

inscribe local agency in transactions of differential economic and cultural

Vampiros and Más vampiros: The Symbolic Order and its

Juan de los Muertos: The Real versus the Symbolic