By Jean Stubbs, 27 September 2020
After three virtual Q&As following screenings of the film, Michael and I were already beginning to feel like ‘old hands’ fielding online debate with varied audiences. Then, on 8 September, we geared up for potentially more of a ‘trial by fire’ with scholars and postgraduate students conducting a wide range of research on Cuba beaming in from their various locations in the UK and abroad.
The occasion was a special session as part of this year’s Cuba Research Forum Annual Conference XXIII, hosted by Forum and Cuba Research Centre Co-directors Antoni Kapcia and Parvathi Kumaraswami at the University of Nottingham. While the Q&A this time covered some of the same ground as on previous occasions, it also gave rise to further reflection. Particularly interesting was our exchange with Tony and Par themselves, in the context of their own research on Granma province. They were struck by the similarities in the documentary between Caibarién and Remedios in Villa Clara province and those they had found in their own work between Manzanillo and Bayamo in Granma province. Aside from the striking visual architectural similarities, including the bandstand in the central square, Caibarién and Manzanillo each share a ‘Cinderella status’ in relation to Remedios and Bayamo, respectively, and this had carried over from the past to the present.
A further question they raised was our perception of to what extent the dynamic was changing in terms of empowering the local municipality. This went straight to the heart of a key question we faced early on in our filming in Caibarién, when two problems surfaced. The first was with local immigration officials, who thought we should have had journalist visas for filming. That misunderstanding was cleared up quickly enough, when we explained we are academics and what we were filming was for an educational documentary. The second was with local government officials concerning our filming permission, and that was never cleared up. We had been given filming permission from ICAIC, the Cuban Film Institute headquartered in Havana, which is the Institute that gives all such permissions. We had this in writing, and it had supposedly been communicated via the appropriate channels to both the provincial Villa Clara level in Santa Clara and the local level in Caibarién. To all intents and purposes, this had not happened. We stayed a further week in Cabairién, while our colleagues in Havana at the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity tried to sort this out with ICAIC, but ultimately had no option but to return to Havana.
How might have panned out differently since then, under the new measures intended to give greater powers and wherewithal to the municipalities to address their own problems, we shall never know. However, what it did for us was to channel a whole new direction of filming in the third part of the documentary, which was the reforestation and ecotourism in Las Terrazas and the organic farming in Finca Marta, in Artemisa province. This afforded us the possibility to explore two initiatives beyond our original scope, the former dating back to the 1960s and the latter a venture undertaken in the last decade. Uncannily, each gave the documentary added relevance in the current situation, whereby Cuba’s beach-resort and city tourism has been so badly hit by Covid and when domestic crop and livestock food security has become such a major issue.
The Forum again proved to be a moment to reflect on the wider ramifications beyond Cuba, many of the issues tackled in the documentary being by no means of relevance only to Cuba. It was precisely the marriage between the local and the global, past and present, which had first led us to film what for us on our Commodities of Empire Project would nurture local and global debate and awareness and hopefully serve as a pilot for other documentaries of this nature.
We’ll be reporting on screenings + Q&A scheduled over the coming year – for now virtual, of course – so watch this space!