National Identity in 21St Century Cuban Cinema Screening The Repeating Island 1St Ed Edition Dunja Fehimovic Full Chapter

National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban
Cinema: Screening the Repeating

Island 1st ed. Edition Dunja Fehimovi■
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National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema
“Combining a broad ranging theoretical framework with close readings of

selected films, this is a fresh and original study of twenty-first century inde-
pendent filmmaking in Cuba as the expression of an anxious quest for cubanía
(Cubanness) in the face of the country’s reinsertion into global circuits of capital,
information and culture.”
—Michael Chanan, Professor of Film & Video, University of Roehampton, UK
“More than a half-century after revolutionary films astounded international audi-

ences, Cuba’s filmmakers remain both vocal and visionary. This compelling study
positions lesser-known directors alongside maestros, and juxtaposes works made
inside as well as outside the national film institute (ICAIC). In doing so, it prof-
fers an insightful panorama of the vibrant 21st-century island production that
emerges despite (or perhaps because of) seismic shifts in notions of national iden-
tity, transnational cultural practices, and Cuba’s place in the world.”
—Ann Marie Stock, author of On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during
Times of Transition
Dunja Fehimović
National Identity
in 21st-Century
Cuban Cinema
Screening the Repeating Island
Dunja Fehimović
School of Modern Languages
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-93102-9 ISBN 978-3-319-93103-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93103-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945190
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For my parents, Etela and Mirza.
Acknowledgements
I would not have been able to write this book without the encouragement,
guidance, and patience of Rory O’Bryen, or the support of colleagues
and friends at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of
Cambridge, particularly Julie Coimbra, Geoffrey Maguire, Rachel Randall,
Joey Whitfield, Natasha Tanna, and Paul Merchant. I would also like to
thank Par Kumaraswami and Geoffrey Kantaris for their careful reading
and advice. This research would have been impossible without the sup-
port of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), or the Simón
Bolívar, Santander, and Trinity Hall College travel funds. Equally, the ideas
I have presented here would not have developed in nearly the same way
without the generosity of Ann Marie Stock, Michael Chanan, Ana López,
and Guy Baron, or the wisdom of my ‘unofficial mentor’, Rob Stone. To
my Cuban interlocutors, all my gratitude for your creative work, your
insight, your time, and your friendship: Teurbe (Osvaldo Teurbe Tolón),
Luciano Castillo, Kiki Álvarez, Alfredo Ureta, Joel del Río, Dean Luis
Reyes, Juan Antonio García Borrero, Gustavo Arcos, Taty (Mayra Álvarez
Díaz), Juan Carlos Cremata, Enrique Colina, Zaira Zarza, Marcia, Frank,
and Anabel López. Finally, my thanks go to James for his unwavering faith
and support.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Zombie Nation:
Monstrous Identities in Three Cuban Films’ in The Cinema of Cuba:
Contemporary Film and the Legacy of Revolution, Ann Marie Stock, Guy
Baron, and Antonio Álvarez Pitaluga, eds. London; New York: IB Tauris,
2017. It appears here with the permission of the editors and publisher.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
An earlier version of a section of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Not Child’s

Play: Tactics and Strategies in Viva Cuba and Habanastation’, Bulletin of
Latin American Research 34 (4): 503–516 (October 2015), and is reap-
pearing here by permission of John Wiley & Sons.
Contents
1 Introduction: Screening the Repeating Island 1

Spiralling Outwards: Cubanía, Diaspora, Transnation 4
The Problem of Framing: Inventing Borders, Setting Boundaries 8
Cuba as Cork: Drifting through the Special Period 11
Film since the Revolution: The Story of a National Cinema 18
Continuity and Change: Street Filmmakers and ‘Submerged
Cinema’ 20
Film as Screen: From Freud to Lacan and Back to Benítez-Rojo 26
Works Cited 34
2 A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters in Havana 41

There is a Spectre Haunting Cuba 45
The Haunted Present and Zombie Time 56
Troubling and Reasserting Locality: Space and Humour 62
Vampiros and Más vampiros: The Symbolic Order and its
Transgression 70
Juan de los Muertos: The Real versus the Symbolic Order 75
Conclusion: Enjoy your Mystification! 82
Works Cited 84
3 Not Child’s Play: Tactics, Strategies, and Heterotopias 89

Elegguá in Aberystwyth: Clearing the Way 93
Tactics and Strategies: Power and Position 98
ix
x Contents
Film as ‘Contracandela’: Fighting Fire with Fire 107

Not Child’s Play: The Symbolic, Moral, and Affective
Significance of the Child 109
Heterotopias: The City and the Country(Side) 123
Conclusion: Tactical Practice and ‘Hot’ Nationalism 137
Works Cited 139
4 Time ‘Out of Joint’: Icons, Images, and Archives 145

Traces and Spectres: A National Hauntology 152
Melancholy and Mourning 160
National Nostalgias 168
El ojo del canario: Meeting Martí’s Gaze 172
Se vende: Auras, Archives, and Relics 180
Conclusion: Creative Constellations 188
Works Cited 190
5 Of Moles and Giraffes: Recluses, Drifters, and

Disconnection 195
Moles, Moulds, and Uncanny Enclosures 198
‘Dentro/Contra’, ‘Debajo/Fuera’: Tunnelling Out of Sight 210
‘Throwntogetherness’, Claustrophobia, and Control 216
Community, Communication, and Insilio 227
Conclusion: Between a Dark Den and the Deep Blue Sea 240
Works Cited 243
6 Conclusion: Shipwrecks and Seasickness 247

Fast and Furious?: From Obama to Trump 255
Cuban Cinema ‘en la intemperie’ 262
Works Cited 266
Index 271
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Johnny Terrori and his vampire henchmen stand in the
sunlight for the first time (Vampiros, Juan Padrón 1985) 49
Fig. 2.2 An Afro-Cuban woman propositions an ‘English’
vampire in colonial garb (Vampiros, Juan Padrón 1985) 50
Fig. 2.3 The opening shot evokes the national trauma of the Mariel
exodus (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011) 58
Fig. 2.4 Juan uses a telescope to survey the city, recalling Sergio in
Memorias del subdesarrollo (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011) 59
Fig. 2.5 A helicopter spirals into the Capitolio, destabilising the
symbolic order of the city (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011) 63
Fig. 2.6 Juan’s ending evokes an international comic book aesthetic
(Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011) 69
Fig. 2.7 Pepe cannot see his vampiric reflection in the mirror
(Vampiros, Juan Padrón 2003) 72
Fig. 2.8 Watch out! The person sunbathing next to you might
turn out to be a vampire (Vampiros, Juan Padrón 1985) 74
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) 77
Fig. 2.10 The Lacanian lamella represents a primordial abyss that
swallows all identities (Juan, Alejandro Brugués 2011) 79
Fig. 3.1 The viewer’s point of view appears to align with that of the
child, but this perspective is ultimately foreclosed
(Viva Cuba, Juan Carlos Cremata 2005) 120
Fig. 3.2 Malú and Jorgito make stars shoot through the sky using
their imagination (Viva Cuba, Juan Carlos Cremata 2005) 121
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 3.3 Mayito and Carlos walk through La Tinta, where washing
lines visualise community connections (Habanastation, Ian
Padrón 2011) 127
Fig. 3.4 The waves threaten to swallow Malú and Jorgito at the
Punta de Maisí (Viva Cuba, Juan Carlos Cremata 2005) 137
Fig. 4.1 The deliberate framing of the characters creates an absurd
and surreal take on the family photo (Se vende, Jorge
Perugorría 2012) 155
Fig. 4.2 Recurring compositions frame living characters with
static or dead figures (Se vende, Jorge Perugorría 2012) 157
Fig. 4.3 The skeleton figurine draws our attention to the disruption
of promissory plenitude by death (Se vende, Jorge
Fig. 4.4 The theatre director’s positioning of the skull
recalls the trope of the memento mori (Se vende, Jorge
Fig. 4.5 The young Martí is punished at school (El ojo, Fernando
Pérez 2010) 167
Fig. 4.6 The film repeatedly foreshadows Martí’s eventual
imprisonment (El ojo, Fernando Pérez 2010) 167
Fig. 4.7 An escaped slave peers out at a young Martí through the
mangrove (El ojo, Fernando Pérez 2010) 174
Fig. 4.8 Martí meets the slave’s gaze, establishing a silent complicity
(El ojo, Fernando Pérez 2010) 175
Fig. 5.1 The opening shot forces viewers to experience the world
through Daniel’s eyes (La guarida del topo, Alfredo Ureta
2011) 198
Fig. 5.2 Daniel’s figurines are the only exception to his detachment
from domestic space (La guarida del topo, Alfredo Ureta
2011) 203
Fig. 5.3 A close-up of a knife slicing blood-red tomatoes tempts
viewers to read the film in the key of the horror or thriller
genres (La guarida del topo, Alfredo Ureta 2011) 204
Fig. 5.4 A low-angle shot shows Daniel’s face as he peers into the
hole that has unexpectedly appeared in his floor
(La guarida del topo, Alfredo Ureta 2011) 208
Fig. 5.5 Daniel cannot escape and is forced to gaze at the
model from his bedroom poster (La guarida del topo,
Alfredo Ureta 2011) 209
Fig. 5.6 This composition foresehadows Manuel’s immaturity
and dependence on Lía (Jirafas, Kiki Álvarez 2013) 220
List of Figures xiii
Fig. 5.7 The high-angle shot of Lía sexually serving tourists implies
a panoptic presence that oversees her sordid subjection
(Jirafas, Kiki Álvarez 2013) 237
Fig. 5.8 The use of bokeh defamiliarises outside space (Jirafas, Kiki
Álvarez 2013) 238
Fig. 5.9 Lía’s arrival at work is shot through an aquarium, lending
the locale an insalubrious glow (Jirafas, Kiki Álvarez 2013) 239
Fig. 5.10 Having exhausted physical solace, the characters will stand
alone when facing their fates (Jirafas, Kiki Álvarez 2013) 241
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Screening the Repeating

Island
A horde of zombies shuffles along the Malecón in the blinding m idday

sun; two children travel through Cuba’s luscious landscapes and iconic
sites, only to face uncertainty amid the violently crashing waves; a
young José Martí kneels in a schoolyard in the pouring rain, his arms
outstretched in cruciform shape; a hermetic, middle-aged man peers
into a black hole in his apartment floor, clucking to retrieve his lost pet
chicken; three young people sit naked against a wall, dejectedly sharing a
cigarette as they await eviction. These are just some of the most striking
images seared into the viewer’s mind by recent films from Cuba—films
which take us from surreally altered iconic Havana sites and wondrously
reimagined countryside to morbidly comic family tombs and dark, dank
dens inhabited by anomic, anonymous characters. As Cuban filmmak-
ers and critics have repeatedly told me over the last few years, no uni-
fying trend, no coherent generation has emerged over the last decade
and a half of production. Rather, the recent multiplication of points of
view, subject matters, genres, and modes of production is reconfiguring
a previously institutionalised, national cinematic landscape described in
accounts of film and the Revolution. The result of these changes has
been the emergence of an ‘aquatic’, ‘sinuous’ system more attuned to
Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s distinctive vision of the cultures and histories
of the Caribbean ([1989] 1996). In other words, when seen in relief
against a broader picture of Caribbean culture, a certain order emerges
from the Chaotic panorama of contemporary Cuban cinema, so that it
© The Author(s) 2018 1

D. Fehimović, National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93103-6_1
2 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
starts to appear as a ‘discontinuous conjunction’ of ‘uncertain voyages of

signification’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 2).
Adopting and adapting the then-new paradigm of Chaos theory,
Benítez-Rojo’s revision of the region departed from a critique of the fact
that the characteristics of fragmentation, instability, isolation, uprooted-
ness, heterogeneity, syncretism, contingency, and impermanence usu-
ally ascribed to the Caribbean are also seen as the main obstacles to any
global study of its societies. Rather than attempting to circumvent or
explain away these characteristics, the author turned them into the cen-
tral object of investigation by focusing on ‘processes, dynamics, and
rhythms’ rather than results, objects, and definitive conclusions. Finding
in the complexity of the Caribbean patterns of nonlinearity, differential
repetition, and connections between different scales, Benítez-Rojo con-
cluded that: ‘within the (dis)order that swarms around what we already
know of as Nature, it is possible to observe dynamic states or regularities
that repeat themselves globally’ (1996: 2). On first glance, it may seem
that the resulting analyses of Caribbean social, economic, and cultural
systems such as the plantation or the carnival are at best only tangen-
tially related to a study of twenty-first-century Cuban cinema. However,
faced with the shifting political, social, and economic landscapes of
the island—even before the recent convulsions associated with US
Presidents Obama and Trump—Benítez-Rojo’s approach demonstrates
how, ‘for the reader who is attuned to Chaos, there will be an opening
upon unexpected corridors allowing passage from one point to another
in the labyrinth’ (1996: 3).
By identifying ‘the repeating island’ as the guiding metaphor of this
account of Cuban cinema from 2000 to 2014, I make a claim for the
utility of a practice of viewing and reading that, like Benítez-Rojo’s
seminal text, ‘aspires to be repetitive rather than definitive’ (1996: xi).
Considering the author’s native Cuba to have shaped his understand-
ing of the Caribbean as a region characterised by a dynamic of differ-
ential repetition, we begin by zooming in on one fractal in an endlessly
expanding pattern, finding in the largest island of the Caribbean the
attributes that are visible in the whole. From this new perspective, the
apparent disorder, inconsistency, or overdetermination of recent Cuban
film is ‘neither wholly disorganised nor absolutely unpredictable’ (1996:
313), but rather subject to certain repetitive and self-referential patterns.
Specifically, by tracing the contours of this repeating island, we start to
notice how, time and again, Cuban cinema of the twenty-first century
1 INTRODUCTION: SCREENING THE REPEATING ISLAND 3
attempts to screen—simultaneously displaying and concealing—an anx-

iety over national identity. This enduring dynamic exposes a ‘repetitive
and rhythmic insufficiency which, finally, is the most visible determinism
to be drawn in the Caribbean’ (1996: 28).
This foundational, constitutive lack, void, or insufficiency is a common
thread, twisting and changing but nevertheless continuously running
through the variety of recent cinematic production from the island. In
discussing national identity in twenty-first-century Cuban film, therefore,
Screening the Repeating Island refers not to some imagined or hyposta-
tised essence of Cubanness, but rather to a consistent anxiety regarding
the origins, nature, completeness, and future of national identity. Such an
anxiety may not be unique to Cuba. Its expression, however, is: acquir-
ing particular forms and new manifestations at specific historical and soci-
opolitical junctures, the shape of this repeating island shifts but, at the
same time, remains the same, reinforcing the differential repetition that
bridges the apparent chasm between Chaos theory and recent Cuban
cultural production.
Attuning itself to Chaos, then, Screening the Repeating Island anal-
yses a selection of films that demonstrate the diversification of subject
matters, genres, and approaches in early twenty-first-century Cuban cin-
ema. This tour of recent production introduces the reader to a shifting
cultural ground through four key figures—the monster, the child, the
historic icon, and the recluse. These diegetic figures also combine to
offer an account of the island’s changing industrial landscape, in which
the historic national film institute coexists with small, new, ‘independ-
ent’ companies and international co-producers, creating productions
that range from state-led, ‘traditional’ films to no-budget, ‘submerged’
cinema, and hybrid ‘indie’-state and international co-productions. At
the same time, both the corpus and the perspective from which it is
examined emphasise a dynamic of differential repetition, shedding light
on the evolution of Cuba’s well-established but complex imbrication of
culture, national identity, and politics. Tracing the reappearance, recon-
figuration, and recycling of national identity in recent fiction feature
films, Screening the Repeating Island reveals the spectre of the national
that continues to haunt Cuban cinema, albeit in new ways. Moreover,
it shows how the creative manifestations of this spectre screen—both
hiding and revealing—a persistent anxiety around national identity
even as that identity is itself transformed by connections to the outside
world.
4 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Spiralling Outwards: Cubanía, Diaspora, Transnation

Although he was applying a groundbreaking paradigm to a new field,
Benítez-Rojo’s postmodern image of the Caribbean as repeating island
was foreshadowed by one of Cuba’s most influential thinkers: Fernando
Ortiz. In ‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad’ (The human factors
of Cubanness), a lecture delivered in 1939 and first published the fol-
lowing year, the anthropologist and sociologist took geography as the
point of departure for his discussion of the definitions of Cubanness.
However, the simple statement with which he began—‘Cuba is an
island’—was soon troubled by the suggestion that ‘Cuba is an archi-
pelago, in other words, a set of many islands, hundreds of them’. On
closer inspection, the singular, bounded, and definitive started to mul-
tiply, complicating attempts at knowledge or classification. Moving
onwards and outwards, Ortiz noted that this archipelago was, moreover,
‘an expression with an international meaning that has not always been
accepted as coterminous with its geographic meaning’ (2014: 457). He
was alluding, of course, to the long tradition of exile and emigration
that has shaped Cuba’s history—the same tradition that contributed to
Benítez-Rojo’s view of the Caribbean population as ‘Peoples of the Sea’,
impelled ‘toward travel, toward exploration, toward the search for flu-
vial or marine routes’ (1996: 25). This disjunction between the borders
of the island and state on the one hand and the spread of the Cuban
population on the other led Ortiz to his central insight: the distinction
between ‘cubanidad’—an official Cubanness defined by citizenship—and
‘cubanía’—the neologism invented to name that ineffable ‘consciousness
of being Cuban and the will to want to be it’ (2014: 460). For Ortiz,
it was this emotional, spiritual component that differentiated ‘true’
Cubans from those alienated or ashamed citizens whose Cubanness
‘lacks fullness’ or is ‘castrated’ (2014: 459).
This very particular national castration anxiety, which threatens to
separate the ‘true’ Cuban from the mere Cuban citizen, has an ironic
and paradoxical effect; the suggestion that a substantive national identity
requires a longing and desire to be and feel Cuban places an unbridge-
able gap or inescapable lack at the very heart of Cuban identity. The
spread of conceptualisations of the nation as narration (Bhabha 1990)
or as imagined community (Anderson 1991) has drawn attention to
the absent origin or constitutive lack at the core of all forms of national
belonging. However, as the titles of significant studies such as Cuba, the
Elusive Nation, suggest, in Cuba a range of sociopolitical, historical, and

geographical factors—including the colonial, postcolonial, and neocolo-
nial forces to which the island has been subject—have contributed to a
national narration particularly ‘characterised by unsatisfied longing, elu-
sive desire’ (Fernández and Cámara Betancourt 2000: 3). This elusive-
ness has not diminished the impact of the concept of cubanía, which,
as a key term within political discourse, has been repeatedly resignified
over time.1 In the current frame of a Revolution preoccupied with issues
of sovereignty and cultural autonomy, it often becomes either the ulti-
mate patriotic compliment—such as in the laudatory suggestion that
all of the roles played by recently deceased actress Alina Rodríguez
‘rezuman cubanía’ (ooze cubanía)2 (del Río 2015)—or a particularly

barbed insult—as when then-culture minister Abel Prieto suggested that
pro-annexation exiles ‘se nutren de una cubanidad castrada’ (feed off a
castrated Cubanness) (1994).
Cubanía, however, is not reserved for those residing within the island,
and this has been one of its main advantages from the globalised, post-
modern perspectives of recent critics, theorists, and cultural commen-
tators. In the conception of prominent Cuban exile scholar, Gustavo
Pérez Firmat, for example, cubanía resides in the individual’s sub-
jective experience and is therefore ‘post-political’. Since it can be used
to describe ‘a nationality without a nation’ (1997: 8), the term can be
taken up by those who, for whatever reason, do not identify with the
nation state and its politics—a stance, we might note, that is itself far
from apolitical. As a ‘homeland one cannot leave or lose’ (1997: 11),
then, cubanía is a powerful source of identification and recognition for
what is increasingly referred to as Cuba’s diaspora. This understanding
1 Of course, this idea of cubanía as a very particular national sentiment has a long histor-
ical trajectory, deftly mapped out by Antoni Kapcia in Cuba: Island of Dreams (2000). As
Kapcia points out, cubanía, defined succinctly as ‘the political belief in cubanidad’ (2000:
22), is a multivocal tradition that has evolved from a competing discourse set against the
weakening ideology of Spanish colonialism to a dominant ‘cubanía rebelde’ (rebellious
cubanía) with the Revolution of 1959. The notion that cubanía not only allows for but
also often emerges from a disjunction between physical location and psychological state is
present throughout Cuba’s history, from key individuals such as priest and independence
leader Félix Varela and Cuba’s national ‘Apostle’, José Martí and important groups, such as
the US-based separatist organisations who mobilised for Cuba’s independence through the
Partido Revolucionario Cubano in 1892.
2 All translations from Spanish are my own, except where a translated edition is available.
6 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
of Cubanness that does not require the conjuncture of citizenship and

sentiment has informed attempts since the 1990s to bridge the politi-
cal, cultural, affective, and geographic chasms between the island and its
emigrant communities. Taking advantage of the end of the Cold War to
create an imagined community whose only criterion for inclusion was
cubanía, the collection of poems, prose, and essays, Bridges to Cuba/
Puentes a Cuba (Behar 1995) perfectly expressed the impetus for con-
nection behind this development. Since then, works such as Cuba: Idea
of a Nation Displaced (O’Reilly Herrera 2007) may have posited the
existence of a ‘transnation’ that provided a feeling of belonging for all
Cubans, but they also registered lack and longing—the sense that Cuba
and Cubanness were always elsewhere, or, as Benítez-Rojo writes of the
Caribbean, forever ‘beyond the horizon’ (1996: xi). Whilst those on
the outside yearned for the real or imaginary island, absence and yearn-
ing have made an indelible mark within Cuba too. If ‘successive waves
of emigration over the last four decades have created the trauma of
a divided community’ (Chanan 2004: 22), then it is unsurprising that
cinema also bears the traces of migration and diaspora—a gap, loss, or
absence that makes Cuban film different from and incomplete in itself,
disrupting identity (Rubio 2007).
Many changes have occurred since those initial contacts between
island and diaspora following the fall of the Soviet Bloc: the Cuban gov-
ernment has encouraged foreign tourism and relaxed travel controls for
nationals, emigration from Cuba has diversified and multiplied,3 and
Cuban culture has reached global audiences, increasing contact between
the island and the rest of the world. Offering one example of recent
responses to such changes, Ruth Behar reflects, in The Portable Island:
Cubans at Home in the World (Behar and Suárez 2008), on what she
calls a ‘post-bridge’ moment. Departing from the idea that now, ‘to be
Cuban is a global condition’ (2008: 7), she asks what it is that makes
Cubans Cuban in such a context: is it ‘by default’ or ‘because we actively
seek to craft a Cuban identity that can still make sense in an age when
the soul is global?’ (2008: 8). Her allusion to a quest to craft Cubanness
3 Studies such as ‘Exilio, insilio y diáspora’ (Ingenschay 2010) or ‘Between
Cosmopolitanism and the National Slot’ (Berg 2009) differentiate between waves of emi-
gration from Cuba (starting with exile, based on political opposition, and diversifying to
include predominantly economic-based emigration). There are also significant demographic
differences between the various waves, not least on a racial basis.
echoes the anxiety so eloquently expressed by Eduardo González, who

describes the experience of being ‘touched by the nation-bound or after-
birth condition of being Cuban at home and abroad: being incurably
Cuban; coming after Cuba; running after Her; after Her and from Her;
in signs, syllables, icons, figures’ (2006: 2). This sense of the inescapa-
bility of the Cuban condition, combined with the notion of Cubanness
as endless quest or perpetually unfulfilled romance, suggests a common
experience of lack that drives creative endeavour, producing ‘signs, syl-
lables, icons, figures’ that will screen—conceal and display—an anxious
search for national identity.
The increasingly globalised context of intensified emigration, tourism,
travel, communication, and cultural contact in which Cuba and Cubans
find themselves has multiplied and fragmented concepts of Cubanness,
creating specific anxieties regarding the nation and national identity that
drive new cultural expressions. Within these different circumstances,
however, it is possible to see the evolution of another dynamic identified
by Benítez-Rojo: the insufficiency and Chaos that mark the Caribbean
not only make its texts inherently ‘fugitive’ but also constantly impel
its people towards connection and travel (1996: 25). Just as the ‘origi-
nal’, central repeating island remains an impossible horizon of enquiry,
the search for a Cuban national identity is doomed from the begin-
ning, leading always onto other connections and questions, spiralling
out from the island to its former colonial and more recent neocolonial
networks, its contemporary diaspora and beyond. Within this longer
view, then, the dilemmas of national, transnational, and diasporic iden-
tity faced by Cubans in the twenty-first century become differential rep-
etitions—reformulations of perennial problematics of identity, borders,
and belonging. The frustration caused by the attempts to trace prolifer-
ating connections endlessly backwards to an elusive origin was familiar
to Benítez-Rojo: ‘as soon as we succeed in establishing and identifying
as separate any of the signifiers that make up the supersyncretic mani-
festation that we’re studying, there comes a moment of erratic displace-
ment of its signifiers towards other spatio-temporal points’ (1996: 12).
If such a pattern is indeed unavoidable, then one question inevitably
follows: given the inherent connectedness of the Caribbean, and the
current, fast-multiplying connections between Cuba and the rest of the
world, how and why limit any study of Cuban culture or Cubanness to
the island?
8 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
The Problem of Framing: Inventing Borders, Setting

Boundaries
The problem of framing a national culture—and particularly one whose
national boundedness is increasingly coming undone—is a serious one,
and indeed, the problem of framing this book is that of framing Cuba
itself. Having been placed within a series of geographical, political, eco-
nomic, and academic categories—Caribbean, Latin American, Hispanic,
Socialist, Third World, amongst others—according to various geopo-
litical projects and ideological tendencies at various times, Cuba has
remained resolutely slippery (Hernández-Reguant 2005: 278). Each
time, it has eluded our grasp due to different, historically specific con-
ditions of interconnection and interrelation with the world. From the
island’s belated independence from Spain to the immediate curtailment
of sovereignty through the Platt Amendment; the formative impact of
US modernity on Cuban culture (Pérez 1999); the concerns regard-
ing Soviet influence on the Revolution, particularly during the 1970s;
and the most recent back-and-forth between Cuba and the USA since
December 2014, Cuba’s is a complex history of struggles for self-defi-
nition, each one generating its own anxieties regarding sovereignty, cul-
tural autonomy, the nation’s identity and its future. Though it would
thus seem that Cuba and Cubanness always remain ‘beyond the hori-
zon’, it would nevertheless be remiss to suggest that the horizon is not
there. The very difficulty of imposing limits, establishing boundaries,
and defining the nation has been at the heart of a well-documented,
long-standing desire for national self-determination and definition.
Despite identifying the national as its key object of concern, Screening
the Repeating Island is grounded by a keen awareness of the fact that
‘the national is international and transnational’ (Fernández and Cámara
Betancourt 2000: 8), and has always been so. In Cuba’s case, this inex-
tricability has given rise to attempts to read the specificity of the nation
as emerging thanks to, rather than despite, an initial interaction with an
‘outside’, thereby acknowledging the relational nature of all identity.4
For example, Pérez Firmat has argued that the development of Cuban
4 Perhaps most famous of these is Ortiz’s notion of ‘transculturation’, which aimed to
describe how the violent encounter between cultures changed and affected all those
involved, creating something new. It thus complicated existing concepts of ‘acculturation’
and ‘deculturation’, whereby ‘weaker’ cultures were eliminated and replaced by ‘stronger’
cultures in the contact created by conquest. Ortiz departs from this insight to develop
culture through ‘the importation, and even the smuggling, of foreign

goods’ means that it is defined by a ‘translation sensibility’ (1989: 1).
Not only does this emphasis on the absence of indigenous elements
make impossible the identification of an internal origin, but it also lends
Cuban culture ‘a provisional, makeshift character’ (1989: 2). This seem-
ingly negative reading identifies a central lack or insufficiency within
Cuban culture, sending it on an impossible quest for origins and com-
pleteness. However, it also counters historic and enduring arguments—
expressed, for example, in the early twentieth century by prominent
Cuban scholar Jorge Mañach—regarding the corrupting effects of the
island’s excessive contact with the foreign. In opposition to such anxi-
eties, Pérez Firmat’s analysis turns ‘the derivativeness of New World
culture’ into ‘a privileged hermeneutic position’ (1989: 11). From this
perspective, Cuba’s distance from the Old World allows it to engage in
‘intralingual translation’ safe from the threat of collapse into the original.
This process of translation therefore involves a counterpoint between the
‘original’ there and the ‘native’ here, as meanings are constantly adopted
and creatively adapted, giving Cuban culture its inherent dynamism.
Foreshadowing Benítez-Rojo’s reading of the ‘repetitive and rhythmic
insufficiency’ of the Caribbean that drives the dynamic of differential
repetition (1996: 28), Pérez Firmat also makes clear the fact that any
assertion of cultural autonomy ‘can usefully be imagined as a process of
isolation, of aislamiento’ (1989: 3). It is only by emphasising the myth
of the island’s geographical and cultural separateness that the endless
proliferation of connections can be interrupted in order to allow for the
assertion of borders, origins, and definitions.
This tension between the island as discrete, autonomous whole and
as archipelago that constantly spirals outwards, making connections,
means that it ‘can and must be read in more than one way’ (Bongie
1998: 18). As Chris Bongie explains, the figure of the island has a
dual nature: on the one hand, it represents ‘the absolutely particular,
a space complete unto itself and thus an ideal metaphor for a tradi-
tionally conceived, unified and unitary identity’. On the other, it is ‘a
fragment, a part of some greater whole from which it is in exile and
his model of the ‘ajiaco’, a distinctly Cuban melting pot that described the unique and
dynamic make-up of a society produced through transculturation (1963: 98).
10 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
to which it must be related – in an act of (never completed) comple-

tion that is always also, as it were, an ex-isle, a loss of the particular’
(1998: 18). This element of always incomplete striving recalls Benítez-
Rojo’s idea of the foundational lack from which the Caribbean derives
its status as ‘meta-archipelago’, connecting diverse places ‘in another
way’ (1996: 2). For Bongie, this dynamism relates to the multiple,
mixed nature of Caribbean culture, which has been described variously
using ideas of hybridity, transculturation, and mestizaje or métissage.
However, in the inevitable and often politically necessary attempt to
define Caribbeanness in terms of these same ideas, the infinite trans-
formation inherent in such models is necessarily betrayed (1998: 11).
Thus, for example, Pérez Firmat’s affirmation of the ‘translation sen-
sibility’ at the heart of the ‘Cuban condition’ unavoidably defines by
delimiting and limiting Cubanness. In this sense, even a description of
the Caribbean in general or of Cuba in particular as Chaotic, defined
by insufficiency and endless differential repetition, reduces the referent
to some degree.
If connecting outwards entails an inevitable ‘ex-isle, a loss of the
particular’ (Bongie 1998: 18), then my decision to zoom in on film
production within the island is born out of a desire to attend to the
particular. Whilst recognising both the tendency of Caribbean texts to
‘take flight’, establishing connections between disparate people, times,
and places, and the vibrant tradition of examining Cuba as a diasporic
‘transnation’, this account grounds itself in a specific space and time:
Cuba, 2000–2014. In so doing, it accepts—for reasons of both practi
cal and theoretical nature—a certain reduction in the referents of both
Cubanness and cinema. From a practical point of view, this d ecision
establishes boundaries for what must needs be a limited project.
From a theoretical perspective, it is based on a desire to detect dif-
ference as much as repetition. The practices of viewing and reading
adopted here are therefore premised on the idea that any manifesta-
tion or mutation of the dynamic of the repeating island will be deter-
mined by singular, localised, historically and geographically specific
circumstances. It is by sketching these circumstances that I will begin
to find both spatial and temporal frames for this study, in the hope
that they will allow the particular—what is different within this differ-
ential repetition—to emerge.
Cuba as Cork: Drifting through the Special Period

Screening the Repeating Island is framed temporally against the coun-
try’s most recent struggle for self-definition: the ‘Período especial en
tiempos de paz’ (Special Period in Times of Peace). This euphemisti-
cally named state of exception was declared by Fidel Castro in 1990 in
response to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the tightening of the US
embargo, which combined to plunge Cuba’s economy into its deepest
crisis to date. Derived from a hypothetical ‘Special Period in Wartime’
developed in the event of a US invasion, it prepared the island for a
‘siege-type situation’ of extreme scarcity (Hernández-Reguant 2009:
4). The conditions faced by Cubans were indeed siege-like, with the most
basic necessities—from sanitary products to food—disappearing seem-
ingly overnight. A lack of petrol decimated transport, power cuts became
an everyday reality, and working hours were drastically reduced. The
State was forced to retreat from many areas of everyday life, focusing its
energies instead on the (continued but much reduced) provision of food
and the acquisition of hard currency through tourism and biotechnology.
A black market flourished and many informal practices proliferated under
the more tolerant eye of a state in ‘survival mode’. In 1994, the state-
party apparatus decriminalised the use of the US dollar and soon after
legalised some forms of private employment, privatisation, and remit-
tances. The tourism programme introduced in 1991 quickly developed
into a leading industry that, together with the foreign investment act
passed in 1995, restructured the country’s relation to the rest of the
world, declaring it ‘open for business’. The dark underside of this ‘open-
ing’ reached its peak of visibility during the Maleconazo—a series of pub-
lic protests in Havana—and the subsequent balsero crisis of 1994, during
which over 32,000 Cubans set sail for Florida on improvised rafts (balsas)
(Casamayor-Cisneros 2012: 45).
Needless to say, these multiple crises also had disastrous consequences
for cultural production, as many artists, writers, and filmmakers left the
country, whilst the lack of essentials such as paper, ink, film, and equip-
ment slashed practical possibilities for those who remained. However,
just as the conditions for its production were deteriorating, the state
was increasingly calling on the concept of a common culture to unite
its citizens. The stark contradictions between the promises and ideals
of the socialist state on the one hand and the reality experienced by its
citizens on the other led to a widespread loss of faith in many of the
12 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
epic metanarratives that had ordered and given meaning to everyday

life since 1959.5 This was reflected in a noticeable shift in official dis-
course ‘from a revolutionary nationalism based on political community
to a national ideology of belonging based on local culture and history’
(Hernández-Reguant 2009: 15). The change is evident in the contrast
between two of Fidel Castro’s most famous proclamations; in 1961,
the leader had addressed artists and intellectuals to declare: ‘dentro de
la Revolución todo; contra la Revolución, nada’ (within the Revolution,
everything; against the Revolution, nothing), but in 1993 he announced
that ‘lo primero que hay que salvar es la cultura’ (the first thing we must
save is culture), a phrase that struck such a chord that it was adopted
as the title of the Fifth Congress of the Unión de escritores y artistas
cubanos (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, UNEAC) (Salván 2015:
139). Although the former statement has often been misquoted and
misconstrued, varying in its interpretation and enforcement at different
points in the Revolution (Kumaraswami 2009), it clearly established the
primacy of the Revolution’s right to exist above all else, framing culture
within the Revolution. In 1993, however, the suggestion that saving or
promoting culture might save the Revolution framed the political within
the cultural, making the former dependent on the latter and enacting a
dramatic shift from a heroic to a besieged idea of the nation.
Notwithstanding the universal injunction to patriotism and national-
ism (Quiroga 2005: 23), this combination of a prioritisation of culture
with a retreat of state control made the 1990s ‘un período de confusión
para unos y de libertad para otros’ (a period of confusion for some and
freedom for others) (Ichikawa Morín 2001: 134). As scholars such as
Sujatha Fernandes (2006) have argued, these years saw the partial emer-
gence of a public sphere in which other voices started to express identi-
fications and issues traditionally overlooked by the Revolution, such as
religion, race, or generation. Popular culture became a space for critique
and alternative expression as the erosion of distinction between official
5 It is for this reason that Catherine Davies identified the crisis of the Special Period as
a postmodern moment for Cuba (2000). However, she nuances this reading by pointing
out that the triumph of 1959 also marked a break, albeit one in which the dominant met-
anarrative of capitalism was replaced by another: socialism. As we will see over the course
of this study, whether or not Cuban culture can be analysed in terms of postmodernity is a
complex question, since the socialist utopian metanarrative has been somewhat replaced by
a related but more pragmatic grand récit of national identity, struggle, and survival.
and unofficial allowed what had previously been considered ‘inferior’,

commercial forms to flourish. A perceived ‘flood of foreign cultural
influences’ revived fears regarding cultural imperialism and the loss of
national identity (Hernández-Reguant 2009: 14), but at the same time
artists and culture workers found themselves increasingly reliant on and
oriented towards publishers, universities, and cultural institutes abroad
(Birkenmaier 2011: 8). This created a kind of ‘double-consciousness’,
according to which artists were inclined to see their surroundings from
a new distance that would allow them to cater to foreign ideas and
expectations. In this way, debates surrounding Cuban national identity
and culture developed with a renewed ‘consciousness of connectedness’
(Hernández-Reguant 2009: 12, 16), and anxieties regarding national
identity were torn, once again, between the island and the archipelago,
boundedness and connection, coherence and fragmentation.
The Special Period thus provoked a particularly acute anxiety regarding
the nation’s identity and future. As Fernando Martínez Heredia eloquently
noted, the constant invocation of the nation and its identity during these
years was invariably accompanied by their association with the word ‘risk’:
‘the risk of losing the society of social justice to which national identity has
been linked for decades, the risk of losing socialism. And the risk of losing
sovereignty as a people, as a nation-state’ (1998: 141). However, at the
same time as it destabilised the bases of national life, the crisis also ‘cre-
ated a strong cohort-type consciousness’ as Cubans acquired an ‘anach-
ronistic self-awareness – as socialist survivors in a sea of global capitalism’
(Hernández-Reguant 2009: 2). Shared hardship and a renewed sense of
exceptionalism forged a precarious cohesion that coalesced around and
resignified existing Revolutionary concepts of struggle (luchar), resilience
(resolver), and inventiveness (inventar). Just as musical improvisation is
inherently tied to presence and the present (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 19), this
improvisational way of life mired Cubans in an extended present, caught
between a seemingly distant past and a frighteningly uncertain future. In
his meditations on the ‘out of joint’ temporality inaugurated by the Special
Period, José Quiroga (2005) echoes notions of Latin America’s differ-
ential, vernacular modernity proposed by theorists such as Néstor García
Canclini (1995) by conveying the confusing coexistence of progression
and regression in 1990s Cuban society. The experience and consequences
of this paradoxical temporality have shaped the specificity of twen-
ty-first-century life and culture on the island, so that the temporal frame of
the present study also substantiates a geographical one.
14 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
The feeling of being adrift in an extended state of exception also

gave new meaning to existing understandings of the island. For exam-
ple, a popular saying compares Cuba to a cork, pointing out that despite
its instability, it remains indestructible. However, for Mañach, writing
almost fifty years before the Special Period, this metaphor also suggested
that Cubans were ‘fofos y leves, flotando a la deriva por las aguas de la
historia’ (weak and light, adrift on the currents of history) (Pittaluga
and Mañach 1953: xii). His perception of Cubans as ‘un pueblo […]
sin orientación y, por tanto, sin programa histórico’ (a people without
a sense of direction, and therefore, without a historical plan) (1953:
xii) acquired particular poignancy in the 1990s, as ‘global tides washed
over the island’ (Stock 2009: 4). However, the continued relevance of
the cork metaphor also draws attention to the recurrence of aquatic,
oceanic metaphors in relation to the Caribbean. This may support the
use of Chaos theory to analyse Cuba—particularly as it drifts out of the
Período especial—but, as Mañach’s interpretation shows, it also gestures
towards the other side of any celebratory emphasis on waves, c irculation,
movement, and fluidity: the lived experience of desperately treading water
or listlessly drifting. As such, it highlights the particular way in which
modernity—along with its more troublesome relatives, p ostmodernity
and globalisation—is experienced in this specific time and place, perpet-
uating and reconfiguring persistent dynamics of insufficiency and anxiety
around Cuban national identity.
Film in the Special Period

Following one of two criteria for the interpretation of the evolution of
culture within the Revolution (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012: 22),
accounts of Cuban film tend to adopt a stagist view that focuses on a
succession of apparently significant events or crisis moments. Though
such an approach has obvious limitations, it is possible to speak of two
cinematic events as emblematic of the dynamics faced by culture in
general and film in particular during the Período especial. As we will
see, these same dynamics have significantly shaped the phase that we
might provisionally call the ‘post-Special Period’, on which Screening
the Repeating Island focuses. The first of these cinematic events is the
reception and suppression of Daniel Díaz Torres’ Alicia en el pueblo
de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown, 1991), which followed its pro
tagonist to a surreal, fictional town dominated by the Sanatorium for
Active Therapy and Neurobiology (SATAN) and its director (who

for many was dangerously reminiscent of Fidel Castro), in a satire of
the Revolution’s bureaucracy, stagnation, and hypocrisy. As Michael
Chanan has pointed out, much of the controversy around the film may
have been attributable to timing; written in 1988 in a context in which
it may have seemed like a farcical social comedy in the vein of hits
such as Juan Carlos Tabío’s Se permuta (For Trade, 1983) or ¡Plaff!
O demasiado miedo a la vida (Plaff!, or Too Much Fear of Life, 1988),
by the time the film was released, the whole world had changed and
‘Cuba was isolated as never before’ (2004: 459). At the same time,
the crisis was compounded by the recent announcement of proposals
to merge the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos
(National Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, ICAIC)
with the Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (National Institute
of Radio and Television, ICRT) and the Estudios Cinematográficos
de Televisión de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Film and
Television Studios of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, ECTVFAR),
threatening the creative independence of an institution that had always
maintained a high degree of autonomy. Consequently, the suppres-
sion of the film was perceived not just as a specific case of censorship
but also as a threat ‘against the right to free artistic expression’
(Chanan 2004: 457).
The ‘caso Alicia’ (Alicia case), as it became known (Díaz 2006: 209),
added yet another point of contention to the debate regarding the rela-
tionship between culture and politics that had started at the very begin-
ning of the Revolution (Redruello Campos 2007: 83).6 Despite the
aforementioned prioritisation of national culture, framing Cuba’s very
survival in its terms, the government’s actions attested to the continued
politicisation of culture, particularly in a context of national economic,
social, and ideological crisis. Whilst filmmakers showed a continued com-
mitment to free, individual, creative expression, their response to stalling
negotiations—to gather together a group of eighteen key filmmakers and
write directly to Fidel Castro—also required each of them to put individ-
ualism to one side, adopting a common stance to a shared problem (film-
maker Rebeca Chávez in Redruello Campos 2007: 93). This dynamic
6 The debate itself was arguably initiated by a film: Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando
Jiménez Leal’s short documentary, P.M. (1961) caused a controversy that culminated in
Fidel Castro’s ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’ (Words to the Intellectuals) (1961).
16 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
was echoed in the State’s actions, since the eventual solution to the insti-
tutional crisis relied on the reinstatement as director of ICAIC’s founder,
Alfredo Guevara—a close friend of Fidel who was seen as a guarantor of
the institute’s trustworthiness. The crisis and its resolution thus reveal
a tension between the individual and collective—between fragmentation
and criticism on the one hand and coherence and commitment on the
other. Though this has been inherent in the role of artists and intellectu-
als throughout the Revolution, it underwent a differential repetition at
this time. As opportunities in official spheres shrunk, amateur film move-
ments proliferated, digital technology became more readily available,
and the state legislated a move from collective to individual intellectual
property for artists, a new degree of diversity and individualism entered
cultural production. At the same time, however, filmmakers still felt the
need to respond to collective realities (as was evident in the ‘caso Alicia’)
and were still called upon to create and reflect a national, politically com-
mitted culture.
The second of the significant cinematic events that shaped the cul-
tural landscape of the Special Period is the success of Fresa y chocolate
(Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
and Juan Carlos Tabío. Notable for being the first Cuban film to feature
a gay protagonist, it tells the story of the growing friendship between
an intellectual, ‘bourgeois’ homosexual named Diego and a young
Communist and aspiring writer called David. The film’s huge domestic
success—it played for eight months in Havana—attested to the way in
which it allowed Cubans to discuss out loud issues that they had not pre-
viously dared to address (Chanan 2004: 472). Making use of melodrama
and identification in a ‘Hollywood-esque’ style that is a far cry from the
Brechtian elements of early Revolutionary films (Davies 1996: 183),
Fresa y chocolate also epitomised the concern, in film plots of this period,
with ‘el reconocimiento del otro’ (the recognition of the other) (Díaz
2006: 209). The fact that it is widely credited with opening up debate
regarding the tolerance of difference within Cuban society suggests the
continuing ‘role that Cuban cinema plays as a surrogate public sphere’
(Chanan 2004: 472). Nevertheless, the film also framed and delimited
this openness to identitarian categories that had previously been erased,
overlooked, or discriminated against by the Revolution within an ultimate
prioritisation of national culture and identity. The cubanía felt by both
characters is what finally unites them, allowing David—and, by exten-
sion, Revolutionary society—to ‘recognize the natural justice of Diego’s
inclusive and eclectic vision of Cuban culture and nationhood’ (Chanan

2004: 470). In this way, the film worked to reiterate the primacy of a
culturally defined belonging established by the State amidst the multi-
ple challenges of the Special Period, whilst simultaneously demonstrat-
ing how the emphasis on culture rather than ideology gave a new (albeit
limited) flexibility and inclusiveness to the understanding of national
identity.7
Whilst the success of Alicia at the Berlin Film Festival led to a revival
of the classic Revolutionary argument that ‘hablar de nuestras contra-
dicciones es darles armas al enemigo’ (to talk about our contradictions
is to offer weapons to the enemy) (Díaz 2006: 212), the international
critical acclaim and financial success of Fresa y chocolate arguably bol-
stered the film’s calls for tolerance, inaugurating a ‘new spirit of open-
ness’ (Young 2007: 32) that redefined the boundaries of acceptable
criticism in Cuban culture. The film’s reception signalled a changing
relationship with the ‘outside’, as international audiences and markets
acquired ever more importance. The lack of state funding led to a new
commercial orientation in filmmaking; as the number of international
co-productions increased, more and more films were made about Cuba
from an outside perspective (Venegas 2010: 137), and ICAIC increas-
ingly relied on offering services to foreign filmmakers for hard cur-
rency. Migration, competition, and reduced work opportunities chipped
away at the sense of community amongst filmmakers, so that ‘what had
been a very collaborative and dialogic environment for film production
became atomised and individualistic’ (López 2007: 184). At the same
time, film production was diversifying; as a new generation of aficio-
nados and amateur filmmakers from the filmmaking workshops of the
Asociación de Hermanos Saíz (the Saíz Brothers Association of Young
Artists and Creators, AHS) and the national network of ‘cine-clubes de
creación’ (creative film-clubs) came of age (García Borrero 2001), new
and newly-prominent organisations such as ECTVFAR, the Ludwig
Foundation of Cuba, and Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión
(International Film and Television School, EICTV) (Stock 2009)
entered the scene.
7 For critics such as Paul Julian Smith (1996), Catherine Davies (1996) and Enrico Mario
Santí (1998), the seamless reconciliation and rose-tinted optimism of the film failed to
show or acknowledge real—sexual, political—difference and therefore did little to really
challenge the political and cultural status quo.
18 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Film since the Revolution: The Story of a National

Cinema
This combination of hardship and opportunity, contraction towards the
self and expansion beyond national borders (Venegas 2010: 137), has
reconfigured the cinematic landscape, creating ‘a more porous Cuban cin-
ema’ not only in terms of the interaction between Cubans and interna-
tional partners, as Ana López has argued (2007: 194), but also in terms of
the interaction and coexistence of different spheres of artistic production,
each with varying degrees of ‘official’, ‘professional’, and ‘institutional’ sta-
tus. Such a situation stands in contrast to the functioning of Cuban cin-
ema throughout its immediate history. With the foundation of ICAIC
and Casa de las Américas (an ambitious cultural institution and publishing
house) just months after the triumph of the Revolution, the new govern-
ment showed how much it valued culture. By creating a Cuban film insti-
tute, it actively promoted the production of a national cinema of quality
that would replace a previous reliance on Mexican and Hollywood films
and a limited number of foreign-influenced local productions. However, in
providing space and funds, the State also subjected filmmaking to a certain
centralising, formalising, and regulating impulse that defined and there-
fore delimited what cinema could and should be. Significantly, in the insti-
tute’s founding law, cinema was described not only as ‘el más poderoso
y sugestivo medio de expresión artística’ (the most powerful and sugges-
tive medium of artistic expression) but also as ‘el más directo y extendido
vehículo de educación y popularización de las ideas’ (the most direct and
extensive vehicle for education and the popularisation of ideas) ([1959]
1988: 15). Thus, although the institute imposed no aesthetic or generic
requirements on filmmakers, it did operate under an understanding that
film was to form an integral part of the Revolutionary project.
The paradoxical combination of economic ‘independence’ (thanks
to state subsidy) with relative political autonomy (the institute was never
subsumed into a ministry or other state organ) meant that, until the
1980s, Cuban filmmakers were ‘the spoiled children of Latin American
cinema’ (filmmaker Gerardo Chijona in Venegas 2010: 38). Such a situ-
ation fostered a ‘cultural mode of production’ (Elsaesser 1989: 41–43)
distinct from the industrial mode typified by Hollywood studio cinema.
Without the constraints of the market, filmmakers found a degree of free-
dom to experiment with different ideas and styles (Venegas 2010: 133).
The possibilities offered by such a subsidised environment, together with
the constraining requirements of social, national, political commitment,

marked this period as the seedbed of a Cuban national cinema. In terms
of Stephen Crofts’ influential schema (1993), it was not only a cinema
that functioned within a wholly state-controlled and subsidised industry,
but also one that differed from and critiqued Hollywood, without trying
to imitate it. Furthermore, if national cinema is often a means of cultural
and economic resistance—a way of asserting national autonomy in the face
of international domination (Higson 1989: 37) and the various nefarious
effects of globalisation—then this title is doubly appropriate. Indeed, from
its beginnings in 1959, Cuban cinema was unequivocally aligned with the
Revolution’s inextricable twin projects: achieving national sovereignty and
combatting political, economic, and cultural imperialism.
Unsurprisingly, then, filmmakers in this context were charged with
both representing and intervening in social reality, and this is evident
in many works from this early period. Films such as Memorias del sub
desarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
1968), De cierta manera (In a Certain Way) (Sara Gómez 1974) or Retrato
de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa) (Pastor Vega 1978) explored the evolution
of the Revolutionary process, whilst others such as Lucía (Humberto
Solás 1968), La última cena (The Last Supper) (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
1976) or Clandestinos (Clandestines) (Fernando Pérez 1987) focused
on Cuba’s past and—sometimes directly, at others more implicitly—its
relation to the present. The institute also directed much of its energy

towards the production of documentary films, which were intended
not only to disseminate the ideals of the Revolution and educate the
public in areas such as agriculture and health, but also to cast a criti-
cal eye on contemporary Cuban society. This analytical engagement
with reality was formalised in one of the most significant theoretical
texts on cinema produced in Latin America—Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s
‘La dialéctica del espectador’ (The Viewer’s Dialectic, [1982] 1994).
Reflecting on Memorias and film in general, the director proposed that film
should establish a series of dialectics—between identification and aliena-
tion, fiction and documentary, individual and society—in order to leave the
viewer ‘estimulado y armado para la acción práctica’ (stimulated and armed
for practical action) (1994: 62). By emphasising the role of cinema in the
transformation of individual and society, ‘La diálectica del espectador’ gave
expression to the way in which ICAIC’s policies and productions established
‘the screen as a site of encounter with social reality’ (Chanan 2004: 14),
rather than an opportunity for entertainment-as-escapism.
20 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Given their very specific focus on Cuba’s history, culture, society,

and contemporary transformation, films were instrumental in building a
sense of national identity. As author and screenwriter Senel Paz remem-
bers, ‘durante esos años yo iba al cine no a ver películas, sino a hacerme
cubano’ (during those years, I went to the cinema not to see films, but
to become Cuban) (in Stock 2008: 143). Indeed, it is possible to see the
development of cinema in parallel with the Revolution’s hugely success-
ful literacy campaign; in 1961, the government formed and sent ‘brigades’
of young people out to rural areas with the aims of eroding the divide
between black and white, urban and rural Cuba, weakening the hold of
the Church, and laying the foundations for the development of a social-
ist state (Kumaraswami and Kapcia 2012: 19). If, in Benedict Anderson’s
famous terms, the spread of print capitalism was instrumental in creating
a national ‘imagined community’ (1991), then the Revolution’s literacy
programme can be seen as a differential repetition of this process; not only
did it disseminate the same, ideologically appropriate material to be read
by Cubans everywhere, it also created a new level of real, physical con-
tact between different sectors of the nation. Cinema played a similar role,
supplementing and arguably even usurping literacy as a means of subjec-
tivation as the ambitious cine móvil (Mobile Cinema) scheme spread film
to the remotest corners of the island. This was an important gesture of
commitment to the development of rural Cuba, ensuring that citizens
everywhere were aware of and felt involved in the rapid transformation of
society. Moreover, as Octavio Cortázar’s classic documentary Por primera
vez (For the First Time, 1967) showed, cinema created an awareness of
the audience as an audience—a newly-defined collective (Chanan 2004:
29); functioning as a mirror in which Cubans of all kinds might recognise
themselves, cinema helped to forge a national imagined community.
Continuity and Change: Street Filmmakers

and ‘Submerged Cinema’
However, the story of Cuban cinema is not all cohesion and harmony;
histories of national cinemas are also ‘histories of crisis and conflict, of
resistance and negotiation’ (Higson 1989: 37), and as the ‘caso Alicia’
suggests, its tradition of critical engagement with reality has certainly
filled the history of Cuban cinema with its share of crises and nego
tiations. The cultural historian Antoni Kapcia has shown how the
Revolution has historically functioned through a dynamic that first allows
certain kinds of criticism only to reincorporate them into the mainstream

as ‘intra-systemic dissent’ (2000: 246). The potential for such a dynamic
is evident in the ambiguity and flexibility of Fidel’s false binary of ‘den-
tro/contra’ (inside/against), and it has been played out in specific con-
flicts and negotiations between filmmakers and the State. One of the most
relevant of such examples to the present study is the ‘Muestra de Nuevos
Realizadores’ or ‘Muestra Joven’ (Showcase of New Filmmakers), which
has been instrumental in the careers of several of the filmmakers exam-
ined in the chapters that follow. Established in 2000 within the ICAIC,
this annual event recognised and promoted new filmmakers who were
emerging thanks to the cine-clubes, workshops, and other training cen-
tres that gathered force through the 1980s and 1990s. It also motivated
many young people to become involved in audio-visual production for
the first time. This initiative constituted an ‘official sanction by the state
of cultural renewal and expansion in the face of tough economic realities’
(Venegas 2010: 148), but also revived the impulses to centralise, regu-
late, and formalise that have long characterised the Revolution’s relation-
ship with culture, incorporating potential sources of dissent into the state
system. At the same time, the ‘Muestras’ gave rise to a new openness by
‘focusing on the margins’ (Stock 2009: 239)—recognising alternative
visions of the national and highlighting the work of cultural figures pre-
viously overlooked by the Revolution, such as the experimental filmmaker
and painter ‘Nicolasito’ Guillén Landrián, who left Cuba in 1989.
By organising the Muestras, ICAIC has contributed to its own decen-
tring, making it more necessary than ever to speak of a ‘Cuban cinema’
instead of a cinema of the Cuban Revolution (Sánchez 2010: 325), albeit
one in which Cubanness is more elusive than ever. The establishment of
these events, together with changes in Cuba’s relationship to its diaspora
and the wider world more generally, combined to complicate the defi-
nition of Cuban cinema and the perception of its history.8 At the same
time as spaces of production and reception were diversifying, Cuban
8 Where previous efforts to embrace the margins, epitomised by Fresa y chocolate, had
sought to sublimate difference and conflict through fictional, emotional resolution, these
later institutional efforts were more open in acknowledging the controversies and conflicts
of Cuba’s cinematic and cultural history. This has contributed to the deconstruction of a
single, teleological account of Cuban Revolutionary culture and encouraged the acknowl-
edgement of different strands, as with Juan Antonio García Borrero’s concept of ‘cine sum-
ergido’ (submerged cinema) (2001).
22 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
film critic Juan Antonio García Borrero initiated his efforts, which con-
tinue to this day, to advocate for the recognition of what he denomi-
nated ‘cine cubano de ficción sumergido’ (submerged Cuban fiction
film) (2001). Drawing on José Lezama Lima’s concept of ‘lo cubano
sumergido’ (submerged Cubanness), García Borrero has sought to make
visible ‘el cine hecho al margen’ (cinema made on the fringes) of ICAIC,
from the Cuba Sono Film project of the 1930s to the more recent cin-
ema of the Cuban diaspora and the amateur productions of the AHS
or ECTVFAR. Over the years, García Borrero’s calls for a more inclu-
sive vision have begun to deconstruct the moralising, panoptical, tele-
ological tendencies of cinematic historiography on the island (2004).
Together with the influence of critics abroad, such as Ana López, who
started to write about the ‘other’ Cuban cinema (of the diaspora) in the
late 1980s (1988), the Taller de crítica cinematográfica (Workshop on
Film Criticism) established by García Borrero in Camagüey in 1992 has
contributed to ‘a shift in outlook, in which Cuban cinema is increasingly
seen within a global perspective that places Latin American films along-
side the latest from Hollywood, China, Iran or England without privileg-
ing any of them’ (Chanan 2004: 486).
As this idea of the submerged and the shadowy—reinforced by
García Borrero’s Rehenes de la sombra: ensayos sobre el cine cubano que
no se ve (Prisoners of the Shadows: Essays on the Cuban Cinema that
Goes Unseen, 2002)—suggests, in the new century critical atten-
tion has turned to the grey areas that were proliferating with an unu-
sual degree of visibility in the wake of the Special Period. The approach
to wide-ranging reforms embodied in Raúl Castro’s ‘Lineamientos’
(Guidelines) and summed up by his motto ‘sin prisas, pero sin pausas’
(without haste, but without pause) (2013) reconfigured rather than
eliminated the contradictions created during the 1990s, so that entre-
preneurialism and individualism came to coexist with centralisation and
state control. Whilst economic reforms—most notably the legalisation of
small private businesses, or cuentapropismo—affect everyday life for most
Cubans, they have not yet transformed the film industry. A combination
of continuity and change is thus the order of the day as new generations
of ‘street filmmakers’ find themselves between the international market
and a weakened but still present state. This term, coined by Ann Marie
Stock in reference to post-Special Period Cuba (2009), uses spatial sym-
bolism to evoke the pragmatic, spontaneous, and improvised nature of
much of the new generation’s filmmaking practice. Working with low
or non-existent budgets and new technologies to create innovative and

experimental films, these cineastes collaborate with and move between
different figures in the national and international film fields, ‘resolviendo
and inventando’ (Stock 2009: 15) as they go. As we will see in the
chapters ahead, this pragmatic flexibility has shaped representations of
Cubanness, allowing diverse ideas of cubanía to emerge. ‘Cuban identity,
once crafted by the revolutionary collective, became more of a “copro-
duction”’ (2009: 6) not only because of the collaboration of actors
within and outside the state apparatus, as Stock notes, but also because
of the increased importance and visibility of international co-producers
and markets.
Often lacking formal training, and instead learning by doing, mak-
ing connections, and improvising, street filmmakers are far from being
an entirely new phenomenon. Rather, this generation recalls the situa-
tion of the first filmmakers of the Revolution, who learnt their trade by
producing newsreels and documentaries, with the pressure of a rapidly
changing society and the desire to record and contribute to that reality
taking them out onto the streets. Indeed, Stock claims that ‘like previous
generations of Cuban cineastes, [street filmmakers] are wielding cameras
to construct their nation’ (2009: 29).9 However, early Revolutionary
Cuban filmmakers were part of a collective, nationally-sanctioned project,
and their counterparts in the twenty-first century thus face rather differ-
ent circumstances to the likes of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto
Solás in the early 1960s. Over the past fifty-five years, national life and
culture have been thoroughly institutionalised, inevitably changing the
implications of an improvised, even partially independent mode of pro-
duction. Working in this way is no longer the norm but either an actively
assumed form of marginality or a testament to (and implied criticism of)
the limitations of the state apparatus. Most importantly, it is no longer
associated with a collaborative endeavour within the greater project of
the Revolution but might rather be seen as a worrying expression of
individualism and entrepreneurialism. Although the State is seeking to
9 At the same time, the label also evokes the practice, aesthetics, and ideologies of Italian
neo-realists, who stepped out of the studio into the street, turning the camera onto ‘ordi-
nary’ people in order to reflect critically on poverty and injustice. Although they do at
times ‘turn their cameras towards the margins to recover the disenfranchised’ (Stock 2009:
16), the designation ‘street filmmakers’ seems rather to describe their modus operandi than
to signal an engagement with this legacy.
24 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
accommodate and accommodate itself with these phenomena, the spread

of new economic logics to the sphere of cultural praxis has been slow,
and independent film production is not yet legal. Instead, the production
companies established by some of the directors whose work is examined
here must rely on Resolution Number 72 of 2003, which recognises the
professional activity of the film producer, in order that their companies
might function as ‘grupos de creación’ (production or creation groups).
Many of the films discussed in Screening the Repeating Island occupy
ambivalent positions within Cuba’s cultural field and legal framework,
and might therefore be described as products of ‘street filmmaking’.
Being on or of the street may imply marginality or exclusion, but it also
connotes a connectivity, mobility, and flexibility that have been demon-
strated in the actions of a group of filmmakers who first came together
in May 2013.10 The so-called Grupo de trabajo (Working group) was
created in order to call for and participate in the reform of the Cuban
film industry, following the precedent set by filmmakers’ unified response
to the ‘caso Alicia’. Held in the Fresa y chocolate Cultural Centre, oppo-
site ICAIC, the group’s first meeting and resultant ‘Acta de nacimiento’
(Founding document) highlight a vision characterised by both continuity
and change. Whilst these filmmakers remain committed to the historic
vision of the ICAIC, they also demand a ‘ley de cine’ (Cinema Law) that
recognises independent film production and establishes the conditions
necessary for its success in terms of funding and distribution. Moving
between official spaces and the metaphorical ‘street’, these filmmakers
and their work have variously been labelled as ‘new’, ‘alternative’, or
‘independent’. Received enthusiastically abroad, the indie label ‘confiere
prestigio de extraoficial y contracorriente’ (confers a prestige associated
with the unofficial and counter-current), especially when it is associ-
ated with Cuba, but it also covers over the continuities between ‘inde-
pendent’ projects and official entities such as ICAIC (del Río 2014).
Moreover, as filmmakers and critics both within and beyond Cuba point
out, the possibility of an ‘independent film’ is seriously compromised
by the expectations and demands of the market, so that ‘A medida que
el Estado se repliega, otros poderes se asoman, con nuevas exigencias’
10 At the first meeting, the filmmakers elected a smaller ‘Grupo de trabajo’ (working
group), which has been led by newer filmmakers such as Kiki Álvarez as well as well-known,
ICAIC-based auteurs such as Fernando Pérez, both of whose work will be examined here.
(as the State retreats, other forces appear, with new demands) (Duno-
Gottberg and Horswell 2013: 9–10).
The loaded nature of the terms used to describe recent productions
from the island—cine sumergido, street filmmaking, independent, or
alternative film—recalls Rafael Rojas’s reflection on the difficulty and sig-
nificance of labels in contemporary Cuba; a great deal of the intellectual
work to be done in the years of rapid change following the Special Period
consists of the act of naming—so much so that the central dilemma since
the 1990s has been that of the ‘nombre nuevo’ (new name), rather than
the ‘hombre nuevo’ (new man—the model revolutionary citizen described
by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in 1965) (2014). As Rojas rightly points out,
the term ‘submerged cinema’ has the particular advantage of evoking ‘un
mundo marino o oceánico, más a tono con la globalización’ (a marine or
oceanic world, more in tune with globalisation) (2014). However, as we
have seen, metaphors of water or oceans as both connecting and isolat-
ing also predate what we now think of as globalisation. Indeed, they take
us back to Cuba’s historic status as Pearl of the Antilles, valuable for its
strategic position, connecting various imperial centres and ‘exotic’ desti-
nations as well as recalling tropes of the desert island paradise, or the com-
monplace regarding Cuba as ‘frozen in time’ and so separate from the
rest of the world. As these examples suggest, ‘submerged cinema’ must
be seen as a recent reconfiguration of ‘la maldita circunstancia del agua
por todas partes’ (the damned circumstance of water on all sides), as
Virgilio Piñera so memorably described it in his poem, ‘La isla en peso’
(The Weight of the Island, 1998). The aquatic, marine connotations
of submerged cinema help us to place it in the context of a long-stand-
ing ambivalence articulated by island identity, from which it emerges as
a differential repetition that draws our attention to both continuity and
change in an expanded field (Huyssen 2002) of contemporary Cuban
cinema. However, these same connotations also point to another, more
menacing idea: that of a Cuba faced with the danger of becoming sub-
merged, lost, or erased in a sea of capital, whether it arrives in the form of
gradually rising water levels or a more dramatic, sudden tidal wave.
In turn, this rather alarming vision summons the second, and una-
voidable, frame delimiting the present study: the re-establishment of
diplomatic relations between Cuba and the USA on 17 December
2014. Whilst the agreement between Presidents Barack Obama and
Raúl Castro may have caught the world by surprise, it did not take long
for the media to dust off their well-worn proclamations of impending
26 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
change, imagining a Cuba flooded by US tourists, culture, and capital—a

scenario figured by some as imminent doom and by others as a long-
delayed liberation. A sample of publications from over the years—The
Brink: Cuban Missile Crisis (Detzer 1979); Cuba at a Crossroads: Politics
and Economics After the Fourth Party Congress (Pérez-López 1994);
Cuba on the Verge: An Island in Transition (McCoy 2003); Cuba at a
Crossroads: The New American Strategy (Sanz 2009)—attests to a fet-
ishising tendency that places the island periodically—if not constantly—
on the brink, on the verge, or at the crossroads of radical, irreversible
change. As such, it is hardly surprising that 17 December 2014 and its
aftermath have quickly been assimilated into a long-standing pattern
of prediction and prophecy. Nevertheless, it would be remiss to claim
complete continuity; despite the limitations of Raúl and Obama’s agree-
ments, the roadblocks put in place by the Cuban State and US Senate,
and the more recent reversals initiated by President Trump, ‘17D’—as
the event has become known within Cuba—marks a new inflection in
Cuban culture, identity, and their relationship to the wider world. As
such, and although the perspective advocated here implicitly cautions
against presentism in favour of a recognition of patterns of differential
repetition, the analyses that follow do not reflect explicitly on whether
Cuban cinema will sink or swim on these present tides of change.
Film as Screen: From Freud to Lacan and Back

to Benítez-Rojo
Since the Special Period, then, it has become clearer than ever that films
‘do not simply represent or express the stable features of a national cul-
ture, but are themselves one of the loci of debates about a nation’s gov-
erning principles, goals, heritage and history’ (Hjort and MacKenzie
2000: 4). The combination of a weakened state, a multiplication of film-
makers and perspectives, and an increased interaction with external part-
ners, audiences, and markets has made Cuban national cinema ‘porous’
in relation to the geopolitical outside (López 2007), but also internally
porous, as official and ‘alternative’ spheres mix and interact. This poros-
ity makes each individual film a particular site of confluence and con-
flict, but that is nothing new. As ‘discursive terrains for struggle between
dominant and non-dominant forces over the power to fix the meaning
of the given narrative stock’, films necessarily ‘stage’—or, in my terms,
‘screen’—the historical conditions that constitute the national (Vitali and
Willemen 2006: 8). Influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s discussion of the

multidirectional movements within national cultures, Valentina Vitali
and Paul Willemen have described films as ‘clusters of historically spe-
cific cultural forms the semantic modulations of which are orchestrated
and contended over by each of the forces at play in a given geograph-
ical territory’ (2006: 7). They thus demonstrate an idea particularly
suited to the Chaotic meta-archipelago of the Caribbean: that culture is
‘an unstable terrain’ or unresolved process rather than a fixed content.
Accordingly, this study explores how Cuban cinema from the first decade
and a half of the twenty-first century stages the island’s specific historical
conditions. Moreover, the corpus is chosen to shed light on how film
works to screen struggles between different socio-economic and cultural
forces within the context of a film industry in which the shifting power
relations between state and non-state actors make culture an especially
precarious, changeable ground.
In identifying the ‘screen’ as its second key metaphor, this study
inevitably invokes the Freudian concept of the screen memory ([1899]
1962), according to which a persistent, vivid recollection masks another,
particularly distressing or significant memory. Whereas for Freud, this
memory revolved around and concealed the sexual trauma of castra-
tion, the threats screened by and in these films are social, cultural, polit-
ical, and economic in nature.11 This connection also ties the project to
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical approaches to cinema identified
with prominent film theorists such as Christian Metz (1982), Jean-Louis
Baudry (1975) and, later, Laura Mulvey (1989), for whom issues of
identification, suture, and the Imaginary were paramount. However, as
Joan Copjec has pointed out, by using psychoanalytical frameworks to
figure cinema as a mirror, such studies risked missing ‘Lacan’s more rad-
ical insight’: the mirror is a screen (1989: 54). Emphasising the impor-
tance of the mistake—misrecognition—in Lacan’s thought, Copjec turns
our attention to the difference between subjective looking and the gaze.
This difference consists precisely of nothing; that is, Lacan’s concept of
the gaze emphasises the unknowable behind the visual field—that which
seems to return our gaze and so points to void, lack, or absence. This
11 For scholars such as Sharon Packer, Freud’s choice of term is emblematic of the com-
mon ground, mutual influence, and interaction between psychoanalysis and cinema that
began with the shared cultural, intellectual, and political contexts from which they emerged
(2007: 18).
28 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
nothingness ensures that looking never ends, because it can never find its
object, never return the gaze. Because lack leads to looking, and looking
to lack, the cinema screen can be seen to have a dual function: it both
conceals and reveals the void at the heart of identity.12
By seeing the screen not as a mirror but as a ‘defence, protection,
façade on which the formations of fantasy are elaborated against noth-
ing’ (Lebeau 2001: 58), Copjec set in motion a change in psychoana-
lytic approaches to film to which Screening the Repeating Island is heir.
Whereas in the 1970s, identification was equated with visibility, and
looking with perception, since the 1990s, the central idea of fantasy as
a defensive reaction against ‘nothing’ has reinstated the importance of
Lacan’s order of the Real (Lebeau 2001: 58). These developments are
most associated with Slovenian Lacanian Slavoj Žižek, who has interwo-
ven psychoanalysis with film criticism to demonstrate the idea that fan-
tasy conceals that which cannot be symbolised. This ineffable, impossible
beyond is often referred to as an unbearable ‘kernel’ of the Real. The
unknowable, unbearable kernel that is concealed and (partially, indi-
rectly) revealed by the films examined here is the lack or insufficiency at
the heart of the ‘nation-bound or after-birth condition of being Cuban
at home and abroad’ (González 2006: 2). As we will see, this lack or
void threatens to enter our field of view at those moments where the
allegorical starts to break down into the everyday or the absurd. The
nothingness just beyond the field of vision, behind the images on the
screen, instigates an interminable quest, propelling the subject to ‘[run]
after [Cuba]; after Her and from Her; in signs, syllables, icons, figures’
(González 2006: 2) and—we might add—frames, shots, sequences,
and films. The proliferation that comes to screen nothingness can also
be viewed as a manifestation of the Chaotic patterns of differential rep-
etition that Benítez-Rojo identified as characteristic of the Caribbean.
Whilst a recourse to a universal category (the void, the Real that is so
inescapable it is as if glued to our heel) may threaten to enact an ‘ex-isle’,
12 It is in this sense that the screen memory resembles the fetish: both simultaneously
show and hide or, more specifically, show by hiding and hide by showing. Freud suggested
this parallel when, in 1920, he added a footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(originally published in 1905) in which he compared the screen memory to a fetish:
‘behind the first recollection of the fetish’s appearance there lies a submerged and forgotten
phase of sexual development. The fetish, like a ‘screen memory’, represents this phase and
is thus a remnant and precipitate of it’ (Freud 2001: 154).
eliminating specificity, Screening the Repeating Island shows that the par-
ticular proliferations and images produced by this central insufficiency
have their roots in the specific social, political, economic, and cultural
contexts of twenty-first-century Cuba.
The Structure of the Book

If, according to Benítez-Rojo, the connections, culture, and dynamism
of the Caribbean revolve around and point to a central insufficiency or
‘void’ (1996: 28) and, in Lacanian thought, ‘the visible always raises
the spectre of the hidden, the secret’ (Lebeau 2001: 57), then it is
hardly surprising that much of this book deals with eerie absences, fan-
tastical excesses, and uncanny returns. It is on this note that Chapter 2
begins, by examining the classic animated film, ¡Vampiros en La Habana!
(Vampires in Havana) (Juan Padrón 1985), and its sequel, Más vampiros
en La Habana (More Vampires in Havana) (Juan Padrón 2003) along-
side Cuba’s first zombie film, Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead)
(Alejando Brugués 2011). Figures of the undead that trouble distinc-
tions between presence and absence, the zombie and the vampire are also
transnational cultural icons that are appropriated and reanimated within
a distinctly Cuban context. Approaching these monsters as figures that
‘exist to be read’ (Cohen 1996: 4), it becomes clear that they comment
on the society that produces them ‘by confronting audiences with fantas-
tic narratives of excesses and extremes’ (Bishop 2010: 31). Indeed, this
chapter shows how the extreme situations of a zombie epidemic in Juan
de los Muertos and the international vampire conflicts of the Vampiros
films produce an excess of meanings, thereby simultaneously pointing to
and fighting against the intrusion of the Lacanian Real (insufficiency,
the void) into the nation and its identity. Through a close engagement
with issues of space, humour, and genre, this analysis argues that whilst
Brugués’s zombies shamble towards the dissolution of identity, the pro-
tagonist’s quest to exterminate these monstrous neighbours represents
the reassertion of Cubanness. Furthermore, by examining these zombies
alongside the cartoon vampires of Juan Padrón’s two films, the discus-
sion here suggests that far from being fantastic, the monster (zombie or
vampire) screens something very Real and ultimately inherent to Cuban
national identity: a central insufficiency—a void that, moreover, structures
and makes possible the very survival of identity itself.
30 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
A consideration of these films’ contexts of production illuminates the

way in which vampires and zombies might be seen as spectres, return-
ing to express both recurrent and recent anxieties that haunt Cuba
and Cubanness. Chapter 3 engages more directly still with such issues
of production, reception, and distribution in order to combine close
formal analysis with a consideration of filmmaking as practice in twen-
ty-first-century Cuba. Taking two films that feature child protagonists—a
new development in the island’s cinema (del Río and Colina 2017)—
this chapter argues that the hearts, kites, and child’s play of both Viva
Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata 2005) and Habanastation (Ian Padrón
2011) engage in a screening of fears about the nation, its elusive ori-
gin, and uncertain future. In this way, it proposes that the recent emer-
gence of films about and for children might more accurately be seen as a
differential repetition; the overdetermined children who move through
the directors’ very deliberate depictions of urban and national space con-
ceal and reveal a central anxiety that can better be understood through
notions of ‘banal’ and ‘hot’ nationalism (Billig 1995). By acknowledg-
ing the national and international contexts in which they were marketed
and viewed, it becomes clear that it is necessary to recognise how these
films’ anxious (hot) assertion of Cubanness combines with a pragmatic,
tactical approach to filmmaking. Indeed, the two elements are inextri-
cable, since Cremata and Padrón use figures associated with apoliticism
and affect, exploiting their perceived universality in order to pursue both
personal and national goals. On the one hand, they establish a space for
Cuban culture in the international sphere, simultaneously promoting
their own work and encouraging its acceptance at home. On the other,
they represent Cuba for foreign eyes, thereby recreating the nation and
reasserting its identity. It is in this sense that we must not mistake these
films for children, about children, for child’s play. Instead, Viva Cuba
and Habanastation must be seen as ‘contracandelas’ (fires set to fight
fire), resisting both external and internal threats to Cuba and Cubanness
through a colonisation of affect that shouts, ‘nationally and internation-
ally, our country’s right and duty to exist’ (‘Eliciting Smiles with “Viva
Cuba”’ 2005).
From children overburdened with futurity, we turn to a child protag-
onist who bears the weight of history on his shoulders. Fernando Pérez’s
unusual ‘biopic’, José Martí: El ojo del canario (José Martí: The Canary’s
Eye, 2010), adopts a novel approach to the independence fighter and
intellectual commonly known as Cuba’s national ‘Apostle’. By electing to
show Martí as a child, the director sets out to humanise the historic
icon, reversing the ‘marmorealisation’ enacted through official com-
memorations, the education system, and the omnipresent—now most
commonly plastic, rather than marble—busts. In particular, Pérez’s
emphasis on the young Martí’s gaze attempts to establish spectatorial
identification in order to revive the hero and so deliver the film’s central
injunction: to feel Cuban. At the same time, however, the static, photo-
graph-like presentation of the protagonist highlights the fact that he is a
spectre—an absence that haunts the present—, reintroducing misrecog-
nition and nothingness into the promissory plenitude of identification.
By placing this film alongside another, rather more ludic exploration of
the omnipresence of iconic history—Jorge Perugorría’s Se vende (For
Sale, 2012)—Chapter 4 testifies to the persistence of an anxious dif-
ferential repetition that continuously reinterprets the past in order to
reconstruct and shore up identity in the present. Whereas Pérez aims at
affective revival, Perugorría stages a more literal resurrection of remnants,
as his protagonists plunder the family tomb. Indeed, Se vende’s tag-
line—‘Cuando la muerte es un pretexto para hablar del presente’ (When
death is a pretext to talk about the present)—encapsulates its foreground-
ing of the needs of the present over the weight of the past, and indicates
the novelty of its satirical and pragmatic treatment of history. Whilst
the spectral founding father of El ojo enjoins the viewer to cubanía, Se
vende’s maternal spectre delivers an alternative injunction: to survival,
rather than restoration or revenge. Calling on Barthes, Lacan, and
Derrida’s ideas about photography, traces, melancholy, and mourning,
this chapter explores how these films play with the fetishistic power of
the image, which stands in for that which it simultaneously acknowledges
and recreates as absent or dead. Informed by Svetlana Boym’s distinction
between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgias (2001), the discussion
considers how these reengagements with the past also reassert the needs
of the present and, above all, of survival. Despite the stark differences
between Pérez and Perugorría’s treatments of the past, then, Chapter 4
argues that they both use the weight of history in order to work towards
renewal, combining new with old in a differential repetition that attests
to the vitality of Cuban culture.
The final chapter makes an uncanny return, a differential repetition,
coming back to the troubled distinctions between self/other discussed
in relation to the figure of the monster in order to address questions of
space and belonging in La guarida del topo (The Mole’s Den) (Alfredo
32 D. FEHIMOVIĆ
Ureta 2011) and Jirafas (Giraffes) (Kiki Álvarez 2013). Examining the
way in which boundaries between inside and outside are complicated,
reversed, and undermined in these films, Chapter 5 shows how their
reclusive, anomic protagonists present us with an image of a nation caught
between the comforting allure of the defensive den and the dissolvent
power of the sea. The films’ marginal characters shut themselves away in
dark, domestic spaces, enacting a defensive investment in disconnection
that is gradually revealed to be futile. If shutting oneself away inside in
order to remain outside the mainstream of society is shown to be impos-
sible, then so is connection; rather than providing the precondition for
productive reconnection or reincorporation into a Cubanness-as-synthesis,
disconnection here becomes a kind of anomic drifting, reflecting the
entropy that is an inevitable part of the Chaotic panorama of differential
repetition. As we will see, the films’ ambivalent combination of margin-
ality or difference and continuity or sameness marks a distance from a
productive model of dialectics. However, it also positions them somewhat
pessimistically in relation to an alternative, negative dialectical model—
one that might posit an end goal of mutual recognition and reconcilia-
tion of difference rather than synthesis (Adorno 1990). On the contrary,
these films portray a combination of defensiveness, disconnection, and
drifting that do not offer any such indication of redemption. Informed by
Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary society (1995) and Deleuze’s cor-
relative society of control (1992), the analysis suggests that these figures’
contradiction of the ‘dentro/contra’ (within/against) dichotomy intro-
duced by Fidel Castro’s ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’ may represent an
attempt to tunnel under the field of visibility and power, but it does not
protect them from the reach of control, whose expansive mesh renders
meaningless categories such as inside, outside, underneath, and against.
Departing from a conversation with prominent Cuban film critic Joel
del Río, who notes that ‘En Cuba se está haciendo cine como después de
un gran naufragio, y lo que quedan son los restos’ (In Cuba, people are
making films as though it were after a huge shipwreck, and all that is left
are the remains) (2013), the conclusion reflects on the preceding analy-
ses as attempts to gather up dispersed, fragmentary remains that seem to
resist reassembly into any coherent national identity. It notes the preva-
lence of micronarratives, individual perspectives, and even hedonism in
many recent Cuban films, but argues that the composite fragments of
such works should be seen as symptom-formations—always interpretable
as parts of a broader pattern that undermines divisions between private
and public, individual and collective. The conclusion emphasises that

these ‘restos’ (remains) may themselves be tools for survival, sources of
creativity, and the precarious foundations for new formations. Eschewing
the apocalyptic in favour of the spectral in order to trace continuities and
differential repetitions in Cuban culture, the conclusion lends greater
weight instead to del Río’s suggestion that, as the island drifts out of
the Special Period, there are films that ‘[tratan] de buscar en medio del
desastre qué se salva, o qué se puede salvar’ (try to find what can be sal-
vaged from the disaster) (2013). Indeed, it is the very fact of fragmen-
tariness—the incomplete nature of national identity—that has always
accounted for the drive to repeat and reinvent. The long-standing and
renewed association of incompleteness and fragmentation with metanar-
ratives of Cuban national identity complicates their typical treatment as
marks of postmodernity. The conclusion thus reflects on Cuba’s unique
position in relation to the purported plenitude of identitarian discourses
on the one hand and postmodern fragmentation on the other. It shows
how this in-between state is expressed in cinema through ambigu-
ous figures, variously over- and underdetermined, but always liminal in
some way. The situations in which they find themselves stage uncanny
meetings, mergings, and conflicts between national definitions and
dissolutions.
Acknowledging that the repeating island—the insistent return to the
national—may become a sinister or pathological destiny in Cuban cul-
ture, the conclusion highlights the fact that these films function as sites
that make visible the contact between new and old, local and foreign,
representing creativity even within constraint. At the same time, as the
final frames of Viva Cuba suggest (Fig. 3.4), heightened and intensified
connection presents risks. As global tides of capital come in and Cuba’s
politics are reconfigured by reordered international relations (especially
with the USA), the possibilities and spaces of resistance, difference and
opposition are transformed. Given the dominant metaphors of Cuban
identity—transculturation and the Ortizian ‘ajiaco’—the threat does not
lie in the multiplication of difference and division, which can always be
transformed through synthesis, but rather in their dissolution. Moreover,
if ‘every repetition is a practice that necessarily entails a difference and a
step toward nothingness’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 3), then we cannot ignore
the threat of entropy. The energy contained within Cuban culture that
fuels its anxious quest for identity may eventually dissipate and leave
the island to drown and dissolve. However, working with the ‘restos’
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Trichijulus. Scudder, Mazon Creek, America.
Xylobius. Dawson. Found in the coal in Nova Scotia. Two species found at
Mazon Creek, America.
Order IV. Chilognatha.
Families corresponding to those of the present day. The oldest

specimens come from the chalk in Greenland; most of the others
from amber.
Family 1. Glomeridae. One form, G. denticulata, has been found in amber.
Family 2. Polydesmidae. Two species in amber.
Family 3. Lysiopetalidae. A number of species, amongst which are 6

Craspedosoma, mostly from amber.
Family 4. Julidae. A number of species of this family have been found, some in
amber, some in other Tertiary strata. Amongst the latter a probable example of
Julus terrestris, living at the present time.
Family 5. Polyxenidae. Five species have been found in amber.
Now that we have considered the structure of the Myriapods and the
groups into which they are subdivided or classified, we may proceed
to consider what position they hold in the household of nature. That
they present certain features of similarity to other classes has been
already mentioned, and that this is the fact cannot be doubted when
we look back at the way in which they have been classified in the
works of early writers. For example, Lamarck, the great French
naturalist, classifies them with spiders in his well-known work, La
Philosophie Zoologique, under the name of Arachnides antennistes.
Cuvier, the comparative anatomist, unites them with the Insects,
making them the first Order, while the Thysanura is the second. We
have already seen that one Order of Myriapods, the Symphyla,
bears a great resemblance to the Thysanura. The English naturalist
Leach was the first to establish Myriapods as a class, and his
arrangement has been followed by all naturalists after his time. But
while their peculiarities of structure and form are sufficiently marked
to separate them as a class, it cannot be denied that the older
naturalists were right to recognise that they have many essential
characteristics in common with other classes of animals. And recent
investigations have emphasised this fact. For instance, let us
consider the recent discoveries of the Orders of Symphyla and
Pauropoda, Orders which, while bearing so many of the characters
of Myriapods that naturalists have agreed to place them in that class,
yet resemble in many important points the Insect Order of
Thysanura. This seems to justify Cuvier in claiming the close
relationship for them that he did.
Recent investigations have also brought out more prominently the

resemblances to the Worms. Of late, considerable attention has
been directed to Peripatus (see pp. 1-26), and the resemblances to
the Myriapods in its anatomy and development are such that Latzel
has actually included it in the Myriapods as an Order, Malacopoda.
Now Peripatus also shows resemblances to the annelid Worms, and
thus affords us a connexion to the Worm type hardly less striking
than that to the Insect. This resemblance to the Worms, which
Myriapods certainly bear, was noticed by the ancient writers, and as
they had for the most part only external appearances to consider,
they pushed this idea to extremes in actually including some of the
marine Worms (Annelida) among the Centipedes. Pliny talks of a
marine Scolopendra as a very poisonous animal, and there is little
doubt that he meant one of the marine worms. An old German
naturalist, Gesner, in a very curious book published in 1669 gives an
account of an annelid sea-worm which he calls Scolopendra marina,
and which is in all probability the sea Scolopendra which Pliny
mentions. From Gesner's account it seems to have been used as a
medicine (externally only). "The use of this animal in medicine. The
animal soaked in oil makes the hair fall off. So do its ashes mixed in
oil." It was also pounded up with honey.
This idea of Centipedes living in water survived among later
naturalists. Charles Owen, the author before quoted, mentions them
as amphibious in 1742. "The Scolopendra is a little venomous worm
and amphibious. When it wounds any, there follows a blueness
about the affected part and an itch all over the body like that caused
by nettles. Its weapons of mischief are much the same with those of
the spider, only larger; its bite is very tormenting, and produces not
only pruriginous pain in the flesh, but very often distraction of mind.
These little creatures make but a mean figure in the ranks of
animals, yet have been terrible in their exploits, particularly in driving
people out of their country. Thus the people of Rhytium, a city of
Crete, were constrained to leave their quarters for them (Aelian, lib.
xv. cap. 26)."
Myriapods have been considered to bear resemblances to the

Crustacea, and this to a certain extent is true, though only to a
certain extent, the resemblances being confined to the more general
characteristics that they share with other groups of animals.
Of late years attempts have been made to speculate about the origin
of the Myriapods—that is, to endeavour to obtain by means of
investigation of their anatomy, embryology, and palaeontological
history, some idea of the history of the group. Such attempts at
research into the phylogeny, as it is called, of a group must be more
or less speculative until our knowledge is much greater than it is at
present. But such inquiries have their value, and the schemes of
descent and phylogenetic trees, at any rate, indicate a real relation
to different groups, even if they do not provide us with a real and
actual history of the animals.
There have been two main theories about the descent of the
Myriapoda. One of these derives them directly from the Insecta
through the forms known as the Thysanura, which resemble in such
a degree the Myriapod Orders of Symphyla and Pauropoda. The
other theory holds that the Myriapods, as well as the Insecta, have
been derived from some ancestor bearing a resemblance to
Peripatus. In other words, one theory claims that the relationship of
Myriapoda to Insecta is that of father and son; the other that the
relationship between the two is that of brother to brother. The
arguments by which these theories are respectively supported
consist for the most part of an analysis of the different characters of
the anatomy and embryology and the determination of the most
primitive among them. For example, the supporters of the theory that
the Thysanura are the most nearly allied to the Myriapod ancestor
lay great weight on the fact that some Myriapods are born with three
pairs of legs only, and they compare this stage in the life history of
the Myriapoda to the metamorphosis and larval stage of Insects. For
the supporters of this view the Orders of Symphyla and Pauropoda
are the most primitive of the Myriapods. On the other hand, the
followers of the other theory do not allow that the characters in which
the Myriapods are like Insects are primitive ones, but they lay more
stress on the characters found in the early development, such as the
character of the process of the formation of the body segments, the
mesoblastic segmentation, and the origin of the various organs of
the body.
It may be easily understood that such differences in the estimation of

the primitive characters of the embryology of a group may arise.
Embryology has been compared by one of the greatest of modern
embryologists to "an ancient manuscript with many of the sheets
lost, others displaced, and with spurious passages interpolated by a
later hand." What wonder is it that different people examining such a
record should come to different conclusions as to the more doubtful
and difficult portions of it. It is this very difficulty which makes the
principal interest in the study, and although our knowledge of the
language in which this manuscript is written is as yet imperfect, still
we hope that constant study may teach us more and more, and
enable us to read the great book of nature with more and more ease
and certainty.
If any of my readers should wish for a more full account of the
natural history of this group I must refer them to the following works,
which I have used in compiling the above account. In the first of
these there is an excellent bibliography of the subject:—
Latzel, Die Myriapoden der Oesterreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie, Wien, 1880.
Zittel, Handbuch der Palaeontologie, 1 Abth, II. Bd., Leipzig, 1881-1885.
Korschelt and Heider, Lehrbuch der vergleichenden Entwicklungsgeschichte der

wirbellosen Thiere, Jena 1891.
INSECTA
BY
DAVID SHARP, M.A., M.B., F.R.S.
CHAPTER III
CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF INSECT LIFE–SOCIAL INSECTS–

DEFINITION OF THE CLASS INSECTA–COMPOSITION OF INSECT
SKELETON–NUMBER OF SEGMENTS–NATURE OF SCLERITES–HEAD–
APPENDAGES OF THE MOUTH–EYES–THORAX–ENTOTHORAX–LEGS–
WINGS–ABDOMEN OR HIND BODY–SPIRACLES–SYSTEMATIC
ORIENTATION.
Insects form by far the larger part of the land animals of the world;
they outnumber in species all the other terrestrial animals together,
while compared with the Vertebrates their numbers are simply
enormous. Yet they attract but little attention from the ordinary
observer, this being probably primarily due to the small size of the
individual Insect, which leads the unreflecting to treat the creature as
of little importance. "It can be crushed in a moment" is perhaps the
unformulated idea that underlies the almost complete neglect of
knowledge concerning Insects that prevails even in the educated
classes of society. The largest Insects scarcely exceed in bulk a
mouse or a wren, while the smallest are almost or quite
imperceptible to the naked eye, and yet the larger part of the animal
matter existing on the lands of the globe is in all probability locked up
in the forms of Insects. Taken as a whole they are the most
successful of all the forms of terrestrial animals.
In the waters of the globe the predominance of Insect life
disappears. In the smaller collections of fresh water many Insects
find a home during a portion of their lives, and some few contrive to
pass their whole existence in such places; but of the larger bodies of
fresh water they invade merely the fringes, and they make only the
feeblest attempt at existence in the ocean; the genus Halobates
containing, so far as we know, the sole Insects that are capable of
using the ocean as a medium of existence at a distance from the
shore.
It will probably be asked, how has it come about that creatures so

insignificant in size and strength have nevertheless been so
successful in what we call the struggle for existence? And it is
possible that the answer will be found in the peculiar relations that
exist in Insects between the great functions of circulation and
respiration; these being of such a nature that the nutrition of the
organs of the body can be carried on very rapidly and very efficiently
so long as a certain bulk is not exceeded.
Rapidity of growth is carried to an almost incredible extent in some

Insects, and the powers of multiplication—which may be considered
as equivalent to the growth of the species—even surpass the rapidity
of the increase of the individual; while, as if to augment the
favourable results attainable by the more usual routine of the
physiological processes, "metamorphosis" has been adopted, as a
consequence of which growth and development can be isolated from
one another, thus allowing the former to go on unchecked or
uncomplicated by the latter. A very simple calculation will show how
favourable some of the chief features of Insect life are. Let it be
supposed that growth of the individual takes time in proportion to the
bulk attained, and let A be an animal that weighs one ounce, B a
creature that weighs ten ounces, each having the power of
producing 100 young when full grown; a simple calculation shows
that after the lapse of a time necessary for the production of one
generation of the larger creature the produce of the smaller animal
will enormously outweigh that of its bulkier rival. Probably it was
some consideration of this sort that led Linnaeus to make his
somewhat paradoxical statement to the effect that three flies
consume the carcase of a horse as quickly as a lion.[16]
Astonishing as may be the rapidity of the physiological processes of

Insects, the results attained by them are, it must be admitted,
scarcely less admirable: the structures of the Insect's body exhibit a
perfection that, from a mechanical point of view, is unsurpassed,
while the external beauty of some of the creatures makes them fit
associates of the most delicate flowers or no mean rivals of the most
gorgeous of the feathered world. The words of Linnaeus, "Natura in
minimis maxime miranda," are not a mere rhetorical effort, but the
expression of a simple truth. Saint Augustine, too, though speaking
from a point of view somewhat remote from that of the great Swedish
naturalist, expressed an idea that leads to a similar conclusion when
he said, "Creavit in coelum angelos, in terram vermiculos; nec major
in illis nec minor in istis."
The formation of organised societies by some kinds of Insects is a

phenomenon of great interest, for there are very few animals except
man and Insects that display this method of existence. Particulars as
to some of these societies will be given when we treat of the
Termitidae, and of the Hymenoptera Aculeata; but we will take this
opportunity of directing attention to some points of general interest in
connexion with this subject. In Insect societies we find that not only
do great numbers of separate individuals live together and adopt
different modes of industrial action in accordance with the position
they occupy in the association, but also that such individuals are
profoundly modified in the structures of their body and in their
physiological processes in such ways as to specially fit them for the
parts they have to play. We may also see these societies in what
may be considered different stages of evolution; the phenomena we
are alluding to being in some species much less marked than they
are in others, and these more primitive kinds of societies being
composed of a smaller number of individuals, which are also much
less different from one another. We, moreover, meet with complex
societies exhibiting some remarkably similar features among Insects
that are very different systematically. The true ants and the white
ants belong to groups that are in structure and in the mode of growth
of the individual essentially dissimilar, though their social lives are in
several important respects analogous.
It should be remarked that the phenomena connected with the social

life of Insects are still only very imperfectly known; many highly
important points being quite obscure, and our ideas being too much
based on fragments gathered from the lives of different species. The
honey bee is the only social Insect of whose economy we have
anything approaching to a wide knowledge, and even in the case of
this Insect our information is neither so complete nor so precise as is
desirable.
The various branches of knowledge connected with Insects are

called collectively Entomology. Although entomology is only a
department of the great science of zoology, yet it is in practice a very
distinct one; owing to its vast extent few of those who work at other
branches of zoology also occupy themselves with entomology, while
entomologists usually confine themselves to work in the vast field
thus abandoned to them.
Before passing to the consideration of the natural history and

structure of the members of the various Orders of Insects we will
give a verbal diagrammatic sketch, if we may use such an
expression, with a view to explaining the various terms that are
ordinarily used. We shall make it as brief as possible, taking in
succession (1) the external structure, (2) internal structure, (3)
development of the individual, (4) classification.
In the course of this introductory sketch we shall find it necessary to

mention the names of some of the Orders of Insects that will only be
explained or defined in subsequent pages. We may therefore here
state that the term "Orthoptera" includes grasshoppers, locusts,
earwigs, cockroaches; "Neuroptera" comprises dragon-flies, May-
flies, lacewings, stone-flies and caddis-flies; to the "Hymenoptera"
belong bees, wasps, ants, sawflies, and a host of little creatures
scarcely noticed by the ordinary observer: "Coleoptera" are beetles;
"Lepidoptera," butterflies and moths; "Diptera," house-flies, blue-
bottles, daddy-longlegs, and such; "Hemiptera" or "Rhynchota" are
bugs, greenfly, etc.
Class Insecta: or Insecta Hexapoda.
Definition.—Insects are small animals, having the body divided into

three regions placed in longitudinal succession—head, thorax, and
abdomen: they take in air by means of tracheae, a system of tubes
distributed throughout the body, and opening externally by means of
orifices placed at the sides of the body. They have six legs, and a
pair of antennae; these latter are placed on the head, while the legs
are attached to the thorax, or second of the three great body
divisions; the abdomen has no true legs, but not infrequently has
terminal appendages and, on the under surface, protuberances
which serve as feet. Very frequently there are two pairs of wings,
sometimes only one pair, in other cases none: the wings are always
placed on the thorax. Insects are transversely segmented—that is to
say, the body has the form of a succession of rings; but this condition
is in many cases obscure; the number of these rings rarely, if ever,
exceeds thirteen in addition to the head and to a terminal piece that
sometimes exists. Insects usually change much in appearance in the
course of their growth, the annulose or ringed condition being most
evident in the early part of the individual's life. The legs are usually
elongate and apparently jointed, but in the immature condition may
be altogether absent, or very short; in the latter case the jointing is
obscure. The number of jointed legs is always six.
External Structure.
The series of rings of which the external crust or skeleton of Insects
is composed exhibits great modifications, not only in the various
kinds of Insects but even in the different parts of the same individual,
and at successive periods of its development; so that in the majority
of mature Insects the separate rings are readily distinguished only in
the hind body or abdomen. The total number of the visible rings,
segments, somites, or arthromeres, as they are variously called by
different writers, is frequently thirteen in addition to the head. This
latter part is considered to be itself composed of the elements of
several rings, but morphologists are not yet agreed as to their
number, some thinking this is three while others place it as high as
seven; three or four being, perhaps, the figures at present most in
favour, though Viallanes, who has recently discussed[17] the subject,
considers six, the number suggested by Huxley, as the most
probable. Cholodkovsky is of a similar opinion. However this may be,
the three rings behind the head constitute the thorax, which is
always largely developed, though, like the head, its segmentation is
usually very much obscured by unequal development of different
parts, or by consolidation of some of them, or by both of these
conditions. The third great division of the body, the abdomen, is also
usually much modified by one or more of the terminal segments
being changed in form, or even entirely withdrawn into the interior of
the body. The existence of ten segments in the hind body can,
however, be very frequently actually demonstrated, so that it is
correct to speak of ten as the normal number.
Fig. 47—Diagram of exterior of insect: the two vertical dotted lines

indicate the divisions between H, head; T, thorax; and A,
abdomen: a, antenna; b, labrum; c, mandible; d, maxillary palpus;
e, labial palpus; f, facetted eye; g, pronotum; h, mesonotum; i,
metanotum; k, wings; l1 to l10, abdominal segments; m, the
internal membranous portions uniting the apparently separated
segments; n, cerci; o, stigma; p, abdominal pleuron bearing small
stigmata; q1, q2, q3, pro-, meso-, meta-sterna; r1, mesothoracic
episternum; s1, epimeron, these two forming the mesopleuron; r2,
s2, metathoracic episternum and epimeron; t, coxa; v, trochanter;
w, femur; x, tibia; y, tarsus; z, gula.
It is no reproach to morphologists that they have not yet agreed as to

the number of segments that may be taken as typical for an Insect,
for all the branches of evidence bearing on the point are still
imperfect. It may be well, therefore, to state the most extreme views
that appear to be at all admissible. Hagen[18] has recently stated the
opinion that each thoracic segment consists really of three segments
—an anterior or wing-bearer, a middle or leg-bearer, and a posterior
or stigma-bearer. There seems to be no reason for treating the
stigma as being at all of the nature of an appendage, and the theory
of a triple origin for these segments may be dismissed. There are,
however, several facts that indicate a duplicity in these somites,
among which we may specially mention the remarkable constancy of
two pleural pieces on each side of each thoracic segment. The
hypothesis of these rings being each the representative of two
segments cannot therefore be at present considered entirely
untenable, and in that case the maximum and minimum numbers
that can be suggested appear to be twenty-four and eleven,
distributed as follows:—
Maximum. Minimum.
Head 7 3
Thorax 6 3
Abdomen 11 5
— —
Total 24 11
Although it is not probable that ultimately so great a difference as

these figures indicate will be found to prevail, it is certainly at present
premature to say that all Insects are made up of the same number of
primary segments.
A brief account of the structure of the integument will be found in the

chapter dealing with the post-embryonic development.
The three great regions of the Insect body are functionally as well as
anatomically distinct. The head bears the most important of the
sense organs, viz. the antennae and ocular organs; it includes the
greater of the nerve-centres, and carries the mouth as well as the
appendages, the trophi, connected therewith. The thorax is chiefly
devoted to the organs of locomotion, bearing externally the wings
and legs, and including considerable masses of muscles, as well as
the nerve centres by which they are innervated; through the thorax
there pass, however, in the longitudinal direction, those structures by
which the unity of the organisation is completed, viz. the alimentary
canal, the dorsal vessel or "heart" for distributing the nutritive fluid,
and also the nerve cords. The abdomen includes the greater part of
the organs for carrying on the life of the individual and of the species;
it also frequently bears externally, at or near its termination,
appendages that are doubtless usually organs of sense of a tactile
nature.
In the lower forms of Insect life there is little or no actual internal

triple division of the body; but in the higher forms such separation
becomes wonderfully complete, so that the head may communicate
with the thorax only by a narrow isthmus, and the thorax with the
abdomen only by a very slender link. This arrangement is carried to
its greatest extreme in the Hymenoptera Aculeata. It may be looked
on as possibly a means for separating the nutrition of the parts
included in the three great body divisions.
Along each side of the body extends a series of orifices for the
admission of air, the stigmata or spiracles; there are none of these
on the head, but on each side of most of the other segments there is
one of these spiracles. This, however, is a rule subject to many
exceptions, and it is doubtful whether there is ever a spiracle on the
last abdominal segment. Even in the young stage of the Insect the
number of these stigmata is variable; while in the perfect Insect the
positions of some of the stigmata may be much modified
correlatively with the unequal development or consolidation of parts,
especially of the thorax when it is highly modified for bearing the
wings.
The segments of the Insect are not separate parts connected with
one another by joints and ligaments; the condition of the Insect crust
is in fact that of a continuous long sac, in which there are slight
constrictions giving rise to the segments, the interior of the sac being
always traversed from end to end by a tube, or rather by the
invaginated ends of the sac itself which connect with an included
second sac, the stomach. The more prominent or exposed parts of
the external sac are more or less hard, while the constricted parts
remain delicate, and thus the continuous bag comes to consist of a
series of more or less hard rings connected by more delicate
membranes. This condition is readily seen in distended larvae, and
is shown by our figure 48 which is taken from the same specimen,
whose portrait, drawn during life, will be given when we come to the
Coleoptera, family Cleridae. The nature of the concealed connexions
between the apparently separate segments of Insects is shown at m,
Fig. 47, p. 88.
Fig. 48—Tillus elongatus, fully distended larva.
As the number of segments in the adult Insect corresponds—except

in the head—with the number of divisions that appear very early in
the embryo, we conclude that the segmentation of the adult is, even
in Insects which change their form very greatly during growth, due to
the condition that existed in the embryo; but it must not be forgotten
that important secondary changes occur in the somites during the
growth and development of the individual. Hence in some cases
there appear to be more than the usual number of segments, e.g.
Cardiophorus larva, and in others the number of somites is
diminished by amalgamation, or by the extreme reduction in size of
some of the parts.
Besides the division of the body into consecutive segments, another

feature is usually conspicuous; the upper part, in many segments,
being differentiated from the lower and the two being connected
together by intervening parts in somewhat the same sort of way as
the segments themselves are connected. Such a differentiation is
never visible on the head, but may frequently be seen in the thorax,
and almost always in the abdomen. A dorsal and a ventral aspect
are thus separated, while the connecting bond on either side forms a
pleuron. By this differentiation a second form of symmetry is
introduced, for whereas there is but one upper and one lower aspect,
and the two do not correspond, there are two lateral and similar
areas. This bilateral symmetry is conspicuous in nearly all the
external parts of the body, and extends to most of the internal
organs. The pleura, or lateral regions of the sac, frequently remain
membranous when the dorsal and ventral aspects are hard. The
dorsal parts of the Insect's rings are also called by writers terga, or
nota, and the ventral parts sterna.
The appendages of the body are:—(1) a pair of antennae; (2) the

trophi, constituted by three pairs of mouth-parts; (3) three pairs of
legs; (4) the wings[19]; (5) abdominal appendages of various kinds,
but usually jointed. Before considering these in detail we shall do
well to make ourselves more fully acquainted with the elementary
details of the structure of the trunk.
In the adult Insect the integument or crust of the body is more or less
hard or shell-like, sometimes, indeed, very hard, and on examination
it will be seen that besides the divisions into segments and into
dorsal, ventral, and pleural regions, there are lines indicating the
existence of other divisions, and it will be found that by dissection
along these lines distinct pieces can be readily separated. Each hard
piece that can be so separated is called a sclerite, and the individual
sclerites of a segment have received names from entomotomists.
The sclerites are not really quite separate pieces, though we are in
the habit of speaking of them as if such were the case. If an Insect
be distended by pressure from the interior, many of the sclerites can
be forced apart, and it is then seen that they are connected by
delicate membrane. The structure is thus made up of hard parts
meeting one another along certain lines of union—sutures—so that
the original membranous continuity may be quite concealed. In many
Insects, or in parts of them, the sclerites do not come into apposition
by sutures, and are thus, as it were, islands of hard matter
surrounded by membrane. A brief consideration of some of the more
important sclerites is all that is necessary for our present purpose:
we will begin with the head.
Fig. 49.—Capsule of head of beetle, Harpalus caliginosus: A, upper; B,

under surface: a, clypeus; b, epicranium; c, protocranium; d, gula;
e, facetted eye; f, occipital foramen; g, submentum; h, cavity for
insertion of antenna.
The head is most variable in size and form; as a part of its surface is
occupied by the eyes and as these organs differ in shape, extent,
and position to a surprising degree, it is not a matter for
astonishment that it is almost impossible to agree as to terms for the
areas of the head. Of the sclerites of the head itself there are only
three that are sufficiently constant and definite to be worthy of
description here. These are the clypeus, the epicranium, and the
gula. The clypeus is situate on the upper surface of the head-
capsule, in front; it bears the labrum which may be briefly described
as a sort of flap forming an upper lip. The labrum is usually
possessed of some amount of mobility. The clypeus itself is
excessively variable in size and form, and sometimes cannot be
delimited owing to the obliteration of the suture of connexion with the
more posterior part of the head; it is rarely or never a paired piece.
Occasionally there is a more or less distinct piece interposed
between the clypeus and the labrum, and which is the source of
considerable difficulty, as it may be taken for the clypeus. Some
authors call the clypeus the epistome, but it is better to use this latter
term for the purpose of indicating the part that is immediately behind
the labrum, whether that part be the clypeus, or some other sclerite;
the term is very convenient in those cases where the structure
cannot be, or has not been, satisfactorily determined
morphologically.
In Figure 50 the parts usually visible on the anterior aspect of the

head and its appendages are shown so far as these latter can be
seen when the mouth is closed; in the case of the Insect here
represented the bases of the mandibles are clearly seen (g), while
their apical portions are entirely covered by the labrum, just below
the lower margin of which the tips of the maxillae are seen, looking
as if they were the continuations of the mandibles.
The labrum is a somewhat perplexing piece, morphologists being not

yet agreed as to its nature; it is usually placed quite on the front of
the head, and varies extremely in form; it is nearly always a single or
unpaired piece; the French morphologist Chatin considers that it is
really a paired structure.
Fig. 50.—Front view of head of field-cricket (Gryllus): a, epicranium; b,
compound eye; c, antenna; d, post-: e, ante-clypeus; f, labrum; g,
base of mandible; h, maxillary palpus; i, labial palpus; k, apex of
maxilla.
The gula (Fig. 49, B d, and Fig. 47, z) is a piece existing in the
middle longitudinally of the under-surface of the head; in front it
bears the mentum or the submentum, and extends backwards to the
great occipital foramen, but in some Insects the gula is in front very
distant from the edge of the buccal cavity. The epicranium forms the
larger part of the head, and is consequently most inconstant in size
and shape; it usually occupies the larger part of the upper-surface,
and is reflected to the under-surface to meet the gula. Sometimes a
transverse line exists (Fig. 49, A) dividing the epicranium into two
parts, the posterior of which has been called the protocranium;
which, however, is not a good term. The epicranium bears the
antennae; these organs do not come out between the epicranium
and the clypeus, the foramen for their insertion being seated entirely
in the epicranium (see Fig. 50). In some Insects there are traces of
the epicranium being divided longitudinally along the middle line.
When this part is much modified the antennae may appear to be
inserted on the lateral portions of the head, or even on its under-
side; this arises from extension of some part of the epicranium, as
shown in Fig. 49, B, where h, the cavity of insertion of the antenna,
appears to be situate on the under-surface of the epicranium, the
appearance being due to an infolding of an angle of the part.
There is always a gap in the back of the head for the passage of the
alimentary canal and other organs into the thorax; this opening is
called the occipital foramen. Various terms, such as frons, vertex,
occiput, temples, and cheeks, have been used for designating areas
of the head. The only one of these which is of importance is the
gena, and even this can only be defined as the anterior part of the
lateral portion of the head-capsule. An extended study of the
comparative anatomy of the head-capsule is still a desideratum in
entomology. The appendages of the head that are engaged in the
operations of feeding are frequently spoken of collectively as the
trophi, a term which includes the labrum as well as the true buccal
appendages.
The appendages forming the parts of the mouth are paired, and
consist of the mandibles, the maxillae, and the labium, the pair in this
latter part being combined to form a single body. The buccal
appendages are frequently spoken of as gnathites. The gnathites are
some, if not all, of them composed of apparently numerous parts,
some of these being distinct sclerites, others membranous structures
which may be either bare or pubescent—that is, covered with
delicate short hair. In Insects the mouth functions in two quite
different ways, by biting or by sucking. The Insects that bite are
called Mandibulata, and those that suck Haustellata. In the
mandibulate Insects the composition of the gnathites is readily
comprehensible, so that in nearly the whole of the vast number of
species of that type the corresponding parts can be recognised with
something like certainty. This, however, is not the case with the
sucking Insects; in them the parts of the mouth are very different
indeed, so that in some cases morphologists are not agreed as to
what parts really correspond with some of the structures of the
Mandibulata. At present it will be sufficient for us to consider only the
mandibulate mouth, leaving the various forms of sucking mouth to be
discussed when we treat of the Orders of Haustellata in detail.
The upper or anterior pair of gnathites is the mandibles, (Fig. 50, g).
There is no part of the body that varies more than does the
mandible, even in the mandibulate Insects. It can scarcely be
detected in some, while in others, as in the male stag-beetle, it may
attain the length of the whole of the rest of the body; its form, too,
varies as much as its size; most usually, however, the pair of
mandibles are somewhat of the form of callipers, and are used for
biting, cutting, holding, or crushing purposes. The mandibles are
frequently armed with processes spoken of as teeth, but which must
not be in any way confounded with the teeth of Vertebrates. The only
Insects that possess an articulated tooth are the Passalidae, beetles
armed with a rather large mandible bearing a single mobile tooth
among others that are not so. Wood Mason and Chatin consider the
mandibles to be, morphologically, jointed appendages, and the latter
authority states that in the mandible of Embia he has been able to
distinguish the same elements as exist in the maxillae. In aculeate
Hymenoptera the mandibles are used to a considerable extent for
industrial purposes.
Fig. 51.—Mandibles, maxillae, and labium of Locusta viridissima: A,

mandibles; B, maxillae (lateral parts) and labium (middle parts)
united: a, cardo; b, stipes; c, palpiger; d, max. palp.; e, lacinia; f,
galea; g, submentum; h, mentum; i, palpiger; k, labial palpus; l,
ligula; m, paraglossa (galea); n, lacinia; o, lingua.
The maxilla is a complex organ consisting of numerous pieces, viz.

cardo, stipes, palpiger, galea, lacinia, palpus. The galea and lacinia
are frequently called the lobes of the maxilla. The maxilla no doubt
acts as a sense organ as well as a mechanical apparatus for
holding; this latter function being subordinate to the other. In Fig. 68,
p. 122, we have represented a complex maxillary sense-organ.
The labium or lower lip has as its basal portion the undivided
mentum, and closes the mouth beneath or behind, according as the
position of the head varies. In most Insects the labium appears very
different from the maxilla, but in many cases several of the parts

National Identity in 21St Century Cuban Cinema Screening The Repeating Island 1St Ed Edition Dunja Fehimovic Full Chapter

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National Identity in 21St Century Cuban Cinema Screening The Repeating Island 1St Ed Edition Dunja Fehimovic Full Chapter

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National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban

Cinema: Screening the Repeating

“Combining a broad ranging theoretical framework with close readings of

“More than a half-century after revolutionary films astounded international audi-

ISBN 978-3-319-93102-9 ISBN 978-3-319-93103-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945190

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: tareo81/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

An earlier version of a section of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Not Child’s

1 Introduction: Screening the Repeating Island 1

2 A Cuban Zombie Nation?: Monsters in Havana 41

3 Not Child’s Play: Tactics, Strategies, and Heterotopias 89

Film as ‘Contracandela’: Fighting Fire with Fire 107

4 Time ‘Out of Joint’: Icons, Images, and Archives 145

5 Of Moles and Giraffes: Recluses, Drifters, and

6 Conclusion: Shipwrecks and Seasickness 247

Introduction: Screening the Repeating

A horde of zombies shuffles along the Malecón in the blinding m ­ idday

© The Author(s) 2018 1

starts to appear as a ‘discontinuous conjunction’ of ‘uncertain voyages of

attempts to screen—simultaneously displaying and concealing—an anx-

Spiralling Outwards: Cubanía, Diaspora, Transnation

Elusive Nation, suggest, in Cuba a range of sociopolitical, historical, and

of Cubanness that does not require the conjuncture of citizenship and

3 Studies such as ‘Exilio, insilio y diáspora’ (Ingenschay 2010) or ‘Between

echoes the anxiety so eloquently expressed by Eduardo González, who

The Problem of Framing: Inventing Borders, Setting

4 Perhaps most famous of these is Ortiz’s notion of ‘transculturation’, which aimed to

culture through ‘the importation, and even the smuggling, of foreign

to which it must be related – in an act of (never completed) comple-

Cuba as Cork: Drifting through the Special Period

epic metanarratives that had ordered and given meaning to everyday

and unofficial allowed what had previously been considered ‘inferior’,

The feeling of being adrift in an extended state of exception also

Film in the Special Period

Active Therapy and Neurobiology (SATAN) and its director (who

inclusive and eclectic vision of Cuban culture and nationhood’ (Chanan

Film since the Revolution: The Story of a National

the constraining requirements of social, national, political commitment,

Given their very specific focus on Cuba’s history, culture, society,

Continuity and Change: Street Filmmakers

certain kinds of criticism only to reincorporate them into the mainstream

or non-existent budgets and new technologies to create innovative and

accommodate and accommodate itself with these phenomena, the spread

change, imagining a Cuba flooded by US tourists, culture, and capital—a

Film as Screen: From Freud to Lacan and Back

Willemen 2006: 8). Influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s discussion of the

The Structure of the Book

A consideration of these films’ contexts of production illuminates the

and public, individual and collective. The conclusion emphasises that

Order IV. Chilognatha.

Families corresponding to those of the present day. The oldest

Family 1. Glomeridae. One form, G. denticulata, has been found in amber.

Family 2. Polydesmidae. Two species in amber.

Family 3. Lysiopetalidae. A number of species, amongst which are 6

Family 5. Polyxenidae. Five species have been found in amber.

Recent investigations have also brought out more prominently the

Myriapods have been considered to bear resemblances to the

It may be easily understood that such differences in the estimation of

Latzel, Die Myriapoden der Oesterreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie, Wien, 1880.

Zittel, Handbuch der Palaeontologie, 1 Abth, II. Bd., Leipzig, 1881-1885.

A horde of zombies shuffles along the Malecón in the blinding m idday

The Problem of Framing: Inventing Borders, Setting

Cuba as Cork: Drifting through the Special Period

Continuity and Change: Street Filmmakers

Film as Screen: From Freud to Lacan and Back