July 2019
Fausto Canel

BIO

GUEST:
FAUSTO CANEL

HOST:
LYNN CRUZ


Bio:

Fausto Canel
(Havana Cuba, 1939)

Fausto Canel’s film production ventures into diverse audiovisual media within cinema and television. Going into exile in 1968 and settling in Paris, he pursued a career as an essayist and fiction writer. The selection criteria for the Screening was established based on the dialogue with the filmmaker, and the curiosity about his absence in the official history of Cuban cinema.

PROGRAMMING: JULY 2019

Friday, July 26 at 8pm


El final (tercer cuento del largometraje Un poco más de azul) (1964) / 30’

Espera (1977) / 12’


Saturday, July 27 at 8pm


Desarraigo (1965) / 77’


Sunday, July 28 at 8pm


Papeles son papeles (1966) / 90’

INTERVIEW

Fifty-one years after Fausto Canel’s 1965 film Desarraigo [Uprooted] was condemned to the darkness of the vaults of the Cuban Cinematographic Institute (ICAIC), it was screened at the Charles Chaplin Cinema on Friday, January 15, 2009, upon the initiative of Luciano Castillo, the director of the Cuban Cinematheque. Previously, Castillo had screened it on national television on the program De cierta manera [In a Certain Way], which he writes and hosts. The Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism (INSTAR, for its initials in Spanish) directed by visual artist Tania Bruguera, decided to go a step further and include four of Canel’s fiction films in the program: El final [The End] (1964), Espera [Wait] (1977), Desarraigo, and Papeles son papeles [Papers are Papers] (1966). They were screened during the Directors Series of the Independent Film–Pending Film Festival, which takes place during the last weekend of the month at Tejadillo 214 in Old Havana. It was the Cuban premiere of Espera, a short film shot in Spain. This conversation will focus, however, on the films that were shot in Havana.

Because Canel could not attend the presentations of his films due to bureaucratic obstacles, after each screening, we played the audio clips of his answers to the questions that I had previously sent him by email.

The history of Cuban cinema took shape after the triumph of the Revolution. Canel does not appear in the catalogs of Cuban cinema, despite the fact that, at just nineteen, he participated in the founding of the ICAIC. Before starting this interview, I must thank Fausto for having contacted me through Facebook. His motivation for doing so is another story that I have previously told.

El final (1964) is your short film within the film Un poco más de azul [A Little More Blue] (which is also comprised of Elena, by Fernando Villaverde and El Encuentro [The Encounter], by Manuel Octavio Gómez). Fausto, if the script for this film was approved by the ICAIC, why wasn’t the film later released?

In 1964, the ICAIC decided to increase its production of feature films. Until then, they produced two a year, generally with professionals like Titón and Julio García Espinosa, who had been trained at the experimental center in Rome and, therefore, it was presumed, they knew how to make films. We started by making documentaries and, by that time, the ICAIC thought (although they weren’t sure) that we had matured enough to make fiction films. So, we decided to propose a project with three stories. At that time, Cuban cinema was very propagandistic, very marked by the epic of the Revolution, but we wanted to make a more realistic film, something that reflected more closely what was happening during that year. We suggested the title be that of one of Kandinsky’s paintings, A Little More Blue, which I imagine Kandinsky gave it for the very same reasons that we stole it: things in Russia during that time were certainly very red.

The stories were written, presented, accepted, filmed, and edited, but when the film was ready to copy for distribution, Alfredo Guevara decided not to release it, with the exception of Manuel Octavio’s story, which had no major political issues. While ours, you might say, after just one year, was already outside of the official party line. Alfredo had intended to release this new production to create a more open and liberal image than the one he himself had created after banning the movie PM. But, of course, at the end of 1964, all the fights with Blas Roca and the attacks by the Popular Socialist Party (formerly the Communist Party) made it risky to release a film of this nature. So he banned it, and for all these years it was sitting there, but missing.

A few years ago, Luciano Castillo took the trouble to go to the studio and look for it, because we knew that the negatives had been cut and were ready to be made into a feature film, if only the order had not been given to not do so. The negatives were there, and Luciano found them, made some copies and screened the film for one day at the theater. One day is not enough, but hey, one day is one day.

The Argentine writer/playwright Mario Trejo is someone with whom you collaborate often in the writing of your scripts. You co-wrote El final and also Desarraigo. How did you decide to work with him? How personal is El final with respect to Desarraigo? I am referring especially to the character of the director played by Jorge Fraga.

Mario Trejo was a very important figure in my life at that time. He was ten or twelve years older than me, but with experience and culture that I did not have. He was the one who introduced me to jazz, bossa nova, European literature… He introduced me to people who were not yet well-known, like Bertolucci, Gato Barbieri, etc. At that time, my contact with him was very important for me. I don’t know whether Desarraigo or El final is more personal. I think they are films that emerged in the moment, and we were lucky enough to be able to write them within the existing parameters of the time, which were, despite everything, quite open. In El final, what I was trying to express was the population’s sense of anguish. A city like Havana, Havana’s middle class, Havana’s professional class, that would never have thought of or wanted to leave Cuba, and suddenly found that their professions and job opportunities disappeared. In this film, I focus on an industry that revolves around doing photography for publicity. The directors, writers, the people who worked in the advertising agencies. Overnight, all those people stopped having not just a job, but a profession; in Cuba, advertising had disappeared. These people, even against their will, had no choice but to emigrate, and that’s what I was trying to reflect in that film. The woman, the character played by Norma Martínez, is not necessarily a counterrevolutionary or anti-Castro. On the contrary, if you asked her, she would quite certainly agree with and be in favor of the changes that were needed in Cuba, but she didn’t want to lose her job. Are revolution and advertising incompatible, or aren’t they? And they offered her work outside of Cuba, and in fact, the advertising industry moved almost entirely to Puerto Rico, where they reestablished the same agencies and production houses. Directors like Orlando Jiménez Leal, who had always earned a living directing commercials, went there and subsequently everyone else connected to him did, too. Those who at the time were working in television, such as with soap operas, radio dramas—Caridad Bravo Adams, La Fiallo—went to Venezuela because the country had a prominent television industry that was willing to take in the talent that came from Cuba. They knew it was important talent. In effect, Havana had served as a reference, not just for the Caribbean, but for all of Latin America. Goar Mestre, who was the owner and director of CMQ, went to Buenos Aires, and all of them created new movements and enriched both advertising and television. I did not want to leave Cuba at that time. The character played by Jorge Fraga is a television director who is connected to the revolution and wants to continue working and making television, which was a very important medium in Cuba at the time.

Regarding Mario Trejo’s worries: he was a person who had made a name for himself as a poet in Buenos Aires, but he had left because the political problems, etc. began. First, he went to Brazil. He got very involved in Brazilian music and understood it very well. He bought records that he took with him to Cuba and that I listened to thousands of times. We would meet at my house to listen to them on my record player. Mario lived in the Habana Libre [Hotel] and didn’t have a record player. Later, he went to Italy. He wrote and made a film with Bernardo Bertolucci, and that’s how they became friends. Gato Barbieri was his friend from Buenos Aires, as was Lalo Schifrin. But Lalo was in New York, playing with Gillespie and later he went to Hollywood and made a fortune as a film and television musician. So then Mario comes to Cuba with a globetrotter’s vision. While he was not rootless—Mario was still fully Argentine—you might say that when he arrived to Cuba he felt distant from patriotic sentiments and was interested in the Cuban Revolution. He had a contract to teach Cuban filmmakers screenwriting, which was one of the production areas that was most lacking.

The ICAIC at that time wasn’t able to offer good screenwriting courses. José Revueltas, a Mexican screenwriter, was there, but he was very, very involved in the Communist Party and greatly influenced by socialist realism. The same thing happened with Sabatini, who was connected to neorealism, that, by 1964 was even more dead than before. So nobody paid any attention to those gentlemen, nor did they bother to attend their classes, or follow them, or to learn from them. And since there was no one else who came to teach us, we were there without the slightest idea of what a movie script was. Somehow, since Mario came from writing plays, he knew the structure of the three acts, the conflicts, dramatic development, etc., etc., and so that was useful, at least for me. It was helpful to me in understanding what a movie script is. But in any case, I tell you, many years passed, and I really had to go to Hollywood before I understood the importance of a film script, because in Europe there is that legacy of the nouvelle vague where the script has no importance. There’s this idea that one can go out into the street and improvise with the actors. All of that is very nice and maybe sometimes it turns out well, as happened to Godard with some of his films, but it’s not the best school, and it’s not the best way to make a movie.

What unites you and what separates you from Fernando Villaverde and Manuel Octavio Gómez?

I always felt torn about Octavio Gómez because he was very pro-government and not extremely talented. He was a good person capable of doing the right things. In fact, the only film of his that really created any buzz was La primera carga al machete [First Charge to the Machete], and that is really a film by his photographer, not by him, and that is unfortunate. It’s an exercise in visual style but it’s not applicable to anything, right? I was closer to Fernando. His story Elena is beautiful. Go see it, now that you can because Luciano premiered it. And notice how its structure is so new and different. I maintain a friendship with him and his wife, Miñuca Naredo, who wrote the scripts with him and also starred in some of his films. The story of Elena features her. He wrote several books when he lived in Miami and worked as a journalist… they both did! And now they are happily retired in Barcelona, speaking Spanish, which is dangerous in and of itself…

When one watches El Final, especially the moment in which the car carrying the protagonist advances towards the tunnel, enters the darkness, and the voice of Fidel Castro reverberates as he gives a speech about the nationalization of US companies… that sound floods everything. That is, it leaves no room for your character, the model. I think the film would be censored even today. Also, at INSTAR we saw what is known as the director’s cut. Could you comment on it?

Even today it would be censored… well the fact that they screened it for one day and at the cinematheque and nowhere else… not releasing it for even a week in another cinema, that shows that it would be [censored]. Even if they don’t want to say it, it’s a movie they don’t want to be shown and not because it’s old—I don’t think the movie is boring because it’s fifty years old. It’s fifty years old and yet I don’t think you’ll notice the wrinkles, frankly. What’s for sure is that the film maintains validity. Perhaps not the first story, because it’s about the insurrection against Batista and that was a different time, a different attitude, another type of persecution and another type of dictatorship, therefore for a Cuban today the situation of the persecuted of Batista’s time is almost incomprehensible. What’s more, despite everything, the freedom they did have is incomprehensible. But the movie remains pertinent. I’m glad it came out, not because of me, but because now people there have it.

At some point it will be screened again, and it will be seen, and in thirty years someone will find it and study it. I think it’s important to see the key moments in the development of Cuban cinema. That film got what it wanted: to be different at a time when the movies that were made were very conventional and trite. They were all the same stories about the Sierra Maestra, the same guerrillas, the same I don’t-know-what. And by 1964 this was not effective in a dramatic sense and—much less—spectacularly interesting. That is why the film scene was not advancing. And this film wanted to break with that, and it succeeded… And you’re right, the key moment, the most important of the film, is when that taxi enters a tunnel that has no exit, that does not end, and Fidel Castro’s voice is heard marking the moment when he nationalizes all US companies in Cuba. This was obviously an important moment, when the hinge switched directions and the country broke with the United States. And from that moment, the consequences we are all familiar with began. On the one hand, the stupidity of Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs], and on the other, the breakdown of economic freedoms, which little by little led the country to ruin; and simultaneously, the Caribbean Crisis, an intense time, about which I remember writing in one of my books.

One Saturday night we were in the restaurant of the FOCSA building having dinner with a Polish delegation that was in Cuba for a week of Polish cinema. The Caribbean Crisis was happening at that moment and you could see through the windows illuminated dots on the sea, off on the horizon. You could see the dots from the FOCSA, and those dots were American warships that were there ready to attack. And we were there talking about film with the Poles. The most peculiar thing was that every so often a boy from the Polish embassy would come and bring a piece of paper to the ambassador who was in attendance. He would very discreetly read it and put it in his pocket. After a while, the boy would return with another piece of paper, and we’d say, “now what?” Another interesting thing happened just before that dinner, which I went to, by the way, with Norma Martínez, the actress (to whom I was married). I called the newspaper, Revolución, where I was a film critic, and I asked what was going on. They told me: “Fidel just knocked down a U2,” and I said, “Ah, now’s the time…” Of course, the news was false; Fidel had not taken down a U2. That was just the mythologizing of the leader, which was unfortunate, but it was the tone in which things were carried out. Everything was Fidel Castro. In truth, it was a Soviet general who had shot down an American plane, a U2, which was taking photographs and had passed over Guantánamo. When it got over Holguín, the Russians purposefully fired a rocket there because they didn’t want the Americans to know about all the military devices they had around the Guantánamo base. So that was the backdrop as we were having dinner at the FOCSA tower...

Returning to the ending of El Final, I think the most important thing in that film from a dramatic point of view is that moment in the tunnel, where the woman goes into that hole from which she never leaves. That hole which is exile, despair... it represents many things. Exile can turn out very well, but it can also go very badly. It can be tricky, you have to be very careful with exile. There’s no need to mythologize exile, although sometimes it has been necessary for us, for me, for Villaverde, etc.. It was important, essential. Otherwise, we would have died of disgust in that environment. Going back to the ending of El final, that moment in which Fidel’s voice emerges, I’d say, is the key to everything the film is trying to convey. Alfredo Guevara realized this and asked me to take out Fidel Castro’s voice because if he ever were to decide to release the film—which he never did, of course—he needed to have a film without that speech. And I had to do it, there was no other choice. And the version that Luciano Castillo has in Cuba is Alfredo’s version, which was the one that stayed at ICAIC. When I received that version on a disk which Luciano brought from Cuba, I put the film on my computer and I added it. I added the speech back. I found it easily on YouTube. All of Fidel Castro’s speeches are on YouTube. I knew which speech it was, I found it, and I added it back to its original place. That is to say, I restored the version that is in the ICAIC so that it matched my version, the one that I had presented, where the character enters the tunnel and is overwhelmed by that endless darkness and the voice of Fidel Castro.

When I think of the Fausto Canel of that time, twenty-five or twenty-six years old, I can’t help but imagine how far you would have come as a filmmaker in your technical pursuits. Staging with depth. Long takes. Panoramic views. Misfit characters. I don’t think you would be able to fit into that world where the final cut ended up being considered ideological. Do you think that your nonconformity back then was due to your youth, or is it something that has accompanied you even since you left the island?

Was my nonconformity due to my youth… I don’t know, I think yes and no, there is indeed a certain desire for purity when one is twenty-five years old as I was when I made this film. But—unfortunately for me—I have always been very nonconformist, I say unfortunately because I imagine that if I had been a shameless opportunist, I would have been given more comfortable roles in ICAIC, even outside of ICAIC… But I don’t know, I would have died of shame. Yes, there is a certain nonconformity of youth, but I have continued to be like that all my life. All my life, I have had issues with power, especially when power is exercised in a stupid way. What bothers me is the stupidity behind power, which has always created problems for me because I simply can’t stand it. And this was one case. But I think that if I went back in time I would do it again, I would have done the same thing. I have done things that have greatly set me back in my career and have set me back economically and have created many problems for me and have been equivalent in this sense. What I mean is that they were equivalent to my saying NO. It is very important to know how to say NO.

In 1968, when you left, practically expelled from Cuba with Fernando Villaverde, Miñuca Naredo, Eduardo Manet, Alberto Roldán, Roberto Fandiño, did you have any projects abroad, or idea of what you would do?

Well, when I left Cuba, I didn’t have any projects in mind. My project was to survive. I had nothing. When I arrived at Barajas airport at four in the morning I arrived without a coat, and I can’t even describe the cold up there on the plateau. But luckily and miraculously, as happens with miracles, I look through the glass of the airport windows and who do I see but Yolanda Far, the actress from Desarraigo. Yolanda opened her eyes wide, as if to say, “What is happening?” And when we finally exited after picking up our bags, I told her: “Yolanda, give me three pesetas, I need to call Ramón Suarez.” That’s what it cost. Three pesetas is less than five cents, five cents of a dollar. I had contacted Ramón by mail to arrange to stay at his house, but I needed him to know that I had just arrived and that I had no money. I had planned to take a taxi and that Ramón would pay for it when I arrived at his house. Yolanda had to give me three more pesetas; this underdeveloped boy from the tropics didn’t even know how to use a European telephone. Then, Yolanda was kind enough to take me to Madrid in her taxi. She had come to pick up Gladys Triana, the painter who was on the same flight as me. Hugo Consuegra was on it too. We were all escaping from “paradise”—we couldn’t hold in our happiness. But to answer the question, I had no project in mind. My French wife had been in Cuba with me, but they hadn’t let us leave together. She left on a German ship that rented bunks. I had to take her to Nuevitas and I stayed there for a week worried sick thinking that those people were not going to let me leave, but eventually they did. When I arrived in Madrid, I waited for her. I translated an Algerian play in French into Spanish. I earned a little money through that. With those meager earnings, we bought the basics. We bought coats, because it was already November when it’s already a bit cold in Europe. Later, we went to Barcelona, where we stayed with some friends. Then we took the train and went to Lyon where her family lived, and that’s how my exile began… but there was no project.

Papeles son papeles is the only film that deals with the currency change in revolutionary Cuba. I have read that the idea for Papeles son papeles was Titón’s [Tomás Gutiérrez Alea]. If you could tell me how it came about, and also expand on your foray into comedy… I sense that there was, if not self-censorship, a desire for your films to be seen. Did you know that we are once again on the verge of money being turned into paper? What do you think of the current situation with respect to the film?

Titón had written three quarters of a page of an idea that was precisely the change of currency and how that affected a group of bourgeois Cubans who were saving money to leave Cuba or whatever. I made the ICAIC buy it because ideas were bought at that time. I also did it with the intention not just to make a comedy, but a light comedy, I would say. Like the ones that Titón made. Las doce sillas [The Twelve Chairs], for example. But to create a detective-comedy within that genre. There is a film that is a classic in that area: Beat the Devil. Truman Capote wrote the script, it’s directed by John Huston, and has Humphrey Bogart. It’s a film that falls within the structures of a crime film, but has a comedic tone, and works at all levels. It was an opportunity for me, between the end of ’65 and the beginning of ’66, an excuse to recreate a bit of Havana from the beginning of the sixties, when there were still casinos, when the city had not begun to deteriorate. An opportunity to photograph that magnificent city that, by that time, was beginning to die, to slip through our fingers. Unfortunately, Mario Trejo had already left Cuba. So I thought of Gloria Parrado, who had written scripts for television and had at least a basic sense of drama. Frankly, I don’t think the best part of the movie was the script. And now I have no choice but to pause a moment to discuss this issue. As I’ve said before, in Cuban cinema at that time, there was not much professionalism with scripts. Perhaps, specifically because they had studied in Rome, Julio and Titón had a little bit, a very minimal sense of what a movie script was, but not very much. And unfortunately for Julio, he was still very influenced by this background. This illness would go away when he made Las Aventuras de Juan Quin Quin [The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin], which is indeed a very interesting film. But at that time, Cuba Baila [Cuba Dances] and all of those films were very influenced by Italian neorealism, Sabatini, and proletarian sentimentality… and that didn’t work. And of course I wasn’t on that wavelength. What I wanted to do was make a big joke about the whole situation, which was both dramatic, but simultaneously hilarious, because the whole city was left with their jaws wide open when they realized that what they had in their pockets was nothing more than pieces of paper. I don’t think the film is trying to say anything more. It’s just visually stimulating film that shows a location, a city, and entertains an audience. Of all my films, of course, it was the most commercially successful.

I have no idea what is happening in Cuba, much less with the currency. If they change it again, it would be good if they released the film again, don’t you think?

The foray into comedy had nothing to do with the problems or the pressures that existed at the time. While it is true that it was not a good idea to continue insisting on making films like El final and Desarraigo, nobody forbade me from it. Therefore, I cannot say that I had to go one route because they kept me from going some other way. I hadn’t even tried it. Probably even without any pressure, I would have done exactly the same thing; I simply wanted to indulge myself in making a crime comedy.

You say that you wanted to make a detective story and mock everything, from the thugs to the dumb bourgeois, who were very easy to make fun of, although misfits also make appearances, and you also make fun of authority. Was this related to your temporary disappearance at the hands of State Security for your affair with an American student?

If I understand what you mean by “mocking the bourgeoisie,” there was indeed a very mockable bourgeoisie because they faced their problems in a very frivolous and silly way, without any political seriousness. Therefore, it was very easy for the regime to obliterate them and for me, there was nothing that I could highlight as particularly valid. But it is not that the bourgeoisie is easy to make fun of on its own. But what remained of the Havana bourgeoisie at that time, after the upper classes had left, were petty bourgeois classes whose values were very uninteresting, to be honest, and whose response to the Revolution’s abuse was very clumsy, silly. So, of course, that did not inspire any respect. So, since I am obliged to speak of this, I repeat that the Cuban bourgeoisie, not the upper bourgeoisie who had created the great Cuban economy from the beginning of the century, but the Havana bourgeoisie, who were those who stayed mainly at home—they left a lot be desired.

As for my disappearance, that’s a longer conversation. The reason I included those misfit thugs in Papeles… is because I've been a nonconformist myself. And back then, the military was so omnipresent that they made you feel uncomfortable. I was banned in 1963. That same year the first delegation of disobedient American students arrived. And this is the key part of the story: they were disobedient because they had disobeyed the orders of the US State Department, which had told them that they could not travel to Cuba. But at the same time, the Cuban State Security sent me a message through Raúl Taladrid, the vice president of ICAIC at that moment. Alfredo told me to stop seeing the American girl I was dating, and I said to myself “well, why should I stop seeing this girl if I’m not committing any crime,” so I also disobeyed. This is a story of disobedience on both sides that ends with me spending nearly a month in a cell of the State Security, first in Cárdenas, then in Matanzas, and finally in Havana. I managed to get a note out of jail and get myself out. I can say, “get myself out” because if I hadn’t done that, no one would have found out that I was in prison. All of this is to say that an unnecessary, clumsy violation was committed against me and against her because that girl arrived with all the enthusiasm of young Americans for the Cuban Revolution, and left, I’m not saying that she was counterrevolutionary, but yes very, very, very negatively impacted. In other words, all the propaganda that they had tried to do with the Americans fell apart because the group found out what happened. The group discussed it among themselves and were scandalized by what was happening. I was supposed to have shown up to film on a Monday and the crew was left waiting for me.

On the first day of filming for Desarraigo, they kept waiting for me and when I didn’t show up they called my house and then they called my parents’ house, and no one knew where I was until three weeks later, when I showed up by the Holy Spirit’s work and grace. I asked myself, “And now what?” Finally, work on the film started, and Alfredo Guevara had the sense to say, “Don't start filming in Havana. The girl is still in Havana. Start filming in Nicaro.” So I went, and I didn’t see the girl again until ten years later when we met in San Francisco where she told me what had happened to her and I told her what had happened to me. And when I went to the first day of filming in Nicaro, I gathered the crew and told them, “Look, gentlemen, a month ago we were about to start filming in Havana and I didn’t show up, and I think I have an obligation to explain why I didn’t make it to film the first day of the shoot, and this is what happened.” And I told them the story. Nobody made any comments, everyone took the information in, and we started filming without the slightest problem.

Papeles son papeles must be among the first Cuban films to address the issue of political imprisonment through the character of Carlos, Nancy’s brother (Lilian Llerena). Although it is never made explicit—nor do we know more about this man than what his sister narrates, that is, that he owns a factory, he resists nationalization, and that he is detained—it is also said that he will be prosecuted and it is not known how much time they’ll give him. Is this character based on a personal experience? Do you have any other anecdotes with regards to this?

Gloria Parrado, the screenwriter, and I decided that the film would be a panorama of the non-Castro world of those early years. Those who lost their businesses were the most aggressive ones. Hence the (never-seen) character of Nancy’s brother. It was not based on anyone in particular that I knew, but on what we all knew, since everyone—even if some a bit less and some a bit more—knew someone with this profile. Reynaldo Miravalles was the lawyer for that company. Sergio Corrieri was an important employee. Even though this was something we all knew, you had to be careful that that background story didn’t consume the rest of the movie. We also ran the risk of the whole script being censored. Two years earlier it might have been okay, but not anymore. Gloria referenced cases that she knew, but the details in the film are generic, since most of the owners who refused to have their businesses nationalized went to jail and were later tried. Those who did not want to go to jail simply handed over their factories and left the country. It was a chaotic time that gave rise to a lot of white-collar crime and trafficking in the country’s black market. And from that arose the government’s idea of changing the currency.

How long did the movies take, between shooting, filming and post-production? What was the process of selecting the actors? Was there a casting agency or did you recommend them yourself? Was it more difficult to direct a comedy? Tell me a bit about your creative process, if you could choose your own team, etc.

Between writing the script, preparing it, filming it, and editing it, it took a year and three months. The actors were not organized among themselves; there was no casting department. Since we went to see plays at the Teatro Estudio, the National Drama Ensemble, etc., we knew who was who among the actors. We also saw them in other movies. That is one of the reasons why the same names are repeated so much, because deep down there was no access to new talent. The only exception, it must be mentioned, was Humberto Solás, who was the only one who took the initiative to go east, to the mountains, to find that wonderful girl who played the role of Manuela, La Legrá. But in Havana we had to resort to the usual actors, the ones we saw in all the plays and who were part of all the movies. Regarding the actors, yes, it was easier to direct them in comedy. I think that Cubans have a sixth sense for making jokes. All you had to do was poke them a bit, or rather orient them more than poke them, so that they knew where the shots were being taken from. At ICAIC, you could choose your team; in fact, as you saw, while I still could, I had Mario Trejo as screenwriter, Hajdu as photographer, and Carlos Menéndez who was a wonderful editor. He started working with me from the time we used to do educational documentaries, from the time of El tomate nada más y nada menos [The Tomato, Nothing More and Nothing Less]. You could form your own team and keep it, there was no issue with that. Nobody imposed anything upon you. In this sense, the ICAIC was really quite open. Afterwards, I don’t know what happened. In the seventies, I have no idea what happened. It’s just that I was so far from that world and so involved in other worlds, and in other problems, and had other needs… In addition, very importantly, in France, the country where I went into exile, there were only four or five Cubans—Ramón Alejandro, the painter, Néstor Almendros, and two or three more, Severo Sarduy, for example, and that was all. Cuba was not part of my everyday life. Plus, I was married and my French in-laws thought of Cuba like people thought about Martinique or Guadeloupe, that is, just another Caribbean island...

How did the public receive your film? You already told me that it was a success, but if you could expand… Are there reviews of your films?

Papeles son papeles was screened at the Karlovy Vary Festival and at the same time I was also invited to take Desarraigo to the Filmmakers’ Union of Moscow. Titón took La Muerte de un burócrata [Death of a Bureaucrat], which we later took to Hungary and to a kind of Cuban cinema week, which was wasn’t quite a festival, but it was screened. Are there critiques of the films from the time? Of course there are… and there are photographs of the shoots. All of these are in my files. I’ve already said that Papeles was a fairly large commercial and public success because people really liked the idea of the comedy. Making fun of the country’s political situation worked very well, to put it that way. It’s a shame that I couldn’t take my films with me. They didn’t want me to stick out and become an example for other Cuban filmmakers who hadn’t stayed; some, for fear of the unknown, or of exile, but not for lack of desire. And of course, if it had been easy for me to recover my career, the other filmmakers would have immediately tried to do the same. And the goal of State Security was precisely to obstruct that.

Nonetheless, you had the opportunity to make a feature-length fiction film, Power Game, which was a Spanish and United Kingdom co-production. We would also like to include it in our Festival. I understand that you went to Cannes with the film.

In 1982, my movie, Power Game, which was then called The Threat, was indeed taken by its English co-producer to the Cannes Film Festival. To my surprise, the Cuban film Cecilia was also participating, and one afternoon, returning to my hotel, I ran into the film’s director Humberto Solás, editor Nelson Rodríguez, and poster designer Fernández Reboiro. It was a narrow street without sidewalks, and we were all walking down the center of the street. I was going up, they were going down, and so crossing paths was inevitable. Suddenly, one of them saw me and in an instant the group disappeared from the center of the street and retreated to the windows of the stores on both sides, pretending to have an unusual interest in the expensive bikinis they were selling. I passed by without flinching, already accustomed as I was to meeting my old colleagues from ICAIC in Europe, some true friends, who, affected by sudden amnesia, didn’t recognize me, didn’t speak to me, nor did they seem to have any idea of who I was. I went to the restrooms of the palace of the San Sebastián Festival, desperate after a projection of Novecento, by Bertolucci, which lasts more than three and a half hours. There, I found Humberto Solás at the urinal next to me. He was so desperate to relieve himself that he squirmed uncomfortably from side to side to avoid having to acknowledge my presence, just a foot and a half away.

As soon as I returned to Madrid after Cannes, I went to visit my friend Roberto Fandiño, a Cuban filmmaker who was also in exile, and to my great surprise it was Fernández Reboiro who opened the door. “Fausto,” he said, “how good to see you!” “How good?” I replied. “Two days ago you were not even capable of greeting me.” “Yes, but we were scared. The movie hadn’t been successful and we were deciding whether or not to stay. In the end, Humberto and Nelson returned to Havana, I stayed at the Barajas airport. That night Alfredo invited me to go with him to look for you in the cafés on the Croisette. I knew that you had made a film and that it had been shown at the festival. He wanted to talk to you, but he didn’t tell me why.” Coincidentally, in the festival programming, Power Game appeared on the same page as Cecilia.

Speaking of the Cannes Film Festival, I remember you mentioned a letter that you and other exiled filmmakers wrote and sent to Variety magazine as a protest. Could you tell me about it?

Yes, in 1986 we learned that Héctor García Mesa, then the director of the Cinematheque of Cuba, had done an interview with Variety, the most important professional press on American film. In it, he assured that the Cinematheque kept all of the films produced in Cuba throughout its history in its archives. That spurred us to write a letter to the editorial staff of the magazine to denounce ICAIC’s successful complete erasure of our films, both from cinemas and from books, since we had left Cuba at the end of the sixties. To our surprise, Variety published the letter in its special edition for the Cannes Film Festival that year, highlighting it visually. I can imagine the rush in the corridors on the seventh floor of the ICAIC, when Alfredo Guevara read the letter (or it was read to him, since Guevara, like Bito Manué, did not speak English). The ICAIC immediately rushed to make a retrospective of Cuban cinema at the Pompidou Museum, which it then took to New York and later to Los Angeles. As if by the hand of revolutionary magic, the exhibition screened Papeles son papeles (although not Desarraigo, which was my most awarded film internationally) and La Ausencia [The Absence], by Alberto Roldán, who had also disappeared from the map since Alberto asked the ICAIC to allow him to leave Cuba and travel to Europe. After laying the brickwork for eleven years, Alberto had to wait for his departure from Cuba. I will send you the publication of the letter in Variety. In English, of course.

To close this first cycle of your films at INSTAR, it would be great if you could offer a message to the young filmmakers who produce films in Cuba.

The message: think hard about which messages…. continue, persist. Today, there is this extraordinary thing happening that you can make a film with a telephone, something that was impossible in my time. In every film of mine, I moved around the city with five or six trucks, ha! It’s not a joke! Now with just a small pocket camera you make a movie. You have to do it, you have to make movies, period, you have to.

-You can also access the interview HERE