Yara. The Red Majesty of Cuban Cinema

A long queue, a very, very long queue, under a beautiful blue vintage sign: YARA. As I walked, I was hypnotized by a huge red modernist building with a roundish edge that reminded me of a dawning sun. I immediately felt the urge to take a picture with my disposable camera. I crossed the street anxious that the queue under the building would fade, and people would disappear; that the geometrical composition wouldn’t appear in my analogue souvenir. I was squatting on the pavement, trying to get the best angle and a decent light, while asking my host Margarita what sort of things this place was selling. She didn’t quite get my question, so I repeated myself, sure that the incomprehension lay in my poor “spanishized” Italian. Margarita still didn’t get my question because nothing was being sold there. YARA is a cinema, THE cinema, the most important in Havana, of Cuba, maybe even the oldest of all Central America — and the biggest. At least that is what Margarita argued.

It was love at first sight, although I thought such a thing exists only in movies. I was enchanted by its forms and astonished by its dimension. In Europe, the only theaters that big are multiplex, the highest expression of capitalistic art. Margarita encouraged me to go watch something one of the following days — which meant watching the only movie available in all the cinemas on the island: Insumisas directed by Laura Cazador and Fernando Pérez. She had already watched it and she found it “an ok movie, a bit strange but the actors are nice, and the landscapes are amazing. It’s about this Swiss doctor falling in love and marrying a local woman, in Baracoa in the 19th century and…”. I managed to stop her just in time, before she spoiled it all. While we kept walking towards a concert in a close-by square, Margarita explained to me how the cinema system works in Cuba, or at least in Havana.

“Usually only one movie at a time is released in the cinemas of the whole island and projected many times a day for almost a month. That’s why almost everyone in Cuba sees the same movies. In the meantime, the costs of distribution are reduced to the minimum. Many people go to the cinema because the ticket’s price is very low, something like 0,10 $, almost a fifth of a bus ticket. Everyone goes to the movies in Cuba because it’s cheap. If you don’t have anything to do, or it is raining, or you want to enjoy the air conditioning, you just go to the movies. You don’t need to arrive at the exact time the film begins. You just get in and leave whenever you want because it’s cheap!”

Many Cubans are cinephiles and the average public is quite educated and demanding. Just after the revolution, the government inaugurated the cine moviles campaign. More than 100 redesigned trucks, each equipped with 16 mm projectors and a technician, were sent across the country. In Cuba’s most remote areas, where there were no cinemas yet, the trucks showed movies like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Berlin year zero, and other international classics.

Nowadays, most of the movies shown in Cuba are locals/ Latin American international co-productions, often chosen among those presented at the International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema. YARA is one of the main venues for this important event that takes place every year in Havana. And “of course” everything is controlled by the government, Margarita pointed out. Politics and cinema in Cuba are so entangled? Margarita looks at me with pity and while giggling adds “Niña, everything is politics here!”

In the capitalist West, the film industry is heavily controlled by distribution companies. While in Cuba there is a specific institution taking care of everything. On the 23rd of May 1959, only three months after the revolution, Fidel Castro created the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos) which oversees all the aspects of the film industry: the training of film students, the production of newsreels, documentaries and movies, the supervision of Cuban cinemas, the import and export of movies and, of course, the censorship. However, what is most impressive is that, within the same law, movies are defined as art. As such, movies are considered an instrument for the development of personal and collective consciousness. To put it differently, cinema in Cuba soon became a political “weapon”, as one of the directors of the ICAIC defined it in the ‘70s.

But what does this mean today? Can this law still be considered a revolutionary act implemented to return the cinematographic art to the Cuban people, after years of Hollywood’s hegemony? Or is it just a way to justify ICAIC’s propaganda? I asked many people in Cuba and read books and essays about the topic. Accordingly, many opinions were unveiled on the link between cinema and the political in the broader sense. But nothing opened my eyes and shaped my thoughts like watching an actual movie in YARA.

I still remember my excitement on my way to Yara to watch Insumisas. It was a warm mid-March afternoon, and I was wearing a blue dress with white stitched flowers, my hair tied up in a high ponytail. I was all dressed up. as I was going on a date, a date with a cinema, THE cinema. I had forgotten the conversation with my host and all the thoughts about cinema and politics, I had no prejudice but some sort of expectation.

What I remember, very well, is my stomach getting tight and tingling while walking through the Barrio Chino. I passed in front of the hairdresser where all the young hipsters of the block hung out drinking rum and chatting. I walked through the picturesquely dirty street of San Rafael avoiding the trash floating on the open-air sewer and the ball of the kids playing around. I ended up on Padre Varela, where I took the bus which passes close to the University and the Hotel Havana Libre. Along the way, I was nervous but also excited and alert. I relaxed a bit only when I got off the bus, on the corner between Calle L and Avenida 23, and I finally saw YARA.

As I hoped, the queue was long but fast. I wanted to enjoy the suspense. As with every important appointment, I arrived a bit early and took my time to admire the building and observe the people around me. I crossed the street to look at YARA in her full majesty. The firmness of this red block seemed completely out of place in one of the most chaotic junctions of Havana. The old timers’ engines roaring, people chatting loudly and walking around in various directions, reggaeton, rumba, and salsa were coming from every corner and mixing into an indistinctive sound. In the meantime, the dances had been opened up, and slowly, just around the entrance, couples were meeting, groups forming, and loners were buying cotton candy. I was hypnotized.

I got my ticket and slowly walked in, through the glass doors, while admiring the posters of old movies and concerts hanging on the walls. Thinking of it now, I wished I would have taken more time to look at them, but back then I was worried about not finding a good seat, so I rushed into the main room. It was enormous, dark, half-empty and so, so, so damn cold. I was a bit disoriented and just sat somewhere in the center-right. Suddenly, a nun appeared on the screen, and then a baby started crying. I was not paying too much attention, still meditating on finding a better place, when I realized that this was the beginning of the actual movie. Of course, in Cuba, there is no advertisement before the show.

As soon as I realized the movie has started, I tried to focus very hard on the plot to understand the dialogues in Spanish. However, the couple next to me were giggling quite loudly, and definitely not because of what was happening on the screen.

A girl was walking around the room while whispering in a mellow way “Cigarettes, popcorn, peanuts peanuts peanutssssss…”. People whistled and catcalled her. At some point, when the seller was further down the room, someone came in from the central doors and, while standing in the middle of the hallway panting, started calling “Alonso?! Alonso?! Alonso?!”. “Here, I am here! Heeeere!” someone answered from the other side of the room. I was lost. What was happening on the screen? And in the room? Just when I was trying to get back to the movie all the audience burst into an “oooooh” and some smart ass said: “I told you so, I knew it!”.

Apparently, the Swiss doctor of the movie, was a woman dressed as a man, because back then women were not allowed to practice medicine in Cuba. On top of that she had just married a local woman. Luckily my host Margarita had partly spoiled the movie a few weeks before, so I could catch up with the story. Anyway, from that moment on, the hell broke loose in the room. Many people started asking the whole audience “Can you imagine?” “Are they serious?” “This is not possible, right?”, others started talking directly to the characters of the movie, trying to make them aware that the doctor is actually a woman, marrying a woman, and not a man as she pretended to be. Some other started leaving the room, outraged or perhaps just bored? Towards the end, during a scene where the doctor was explaining to some men the basics of female pleasure, a guy yelled “This doctor is crazy!” while a woman replied, “Just shut up and listen, you might learn something!”.

The movie ended, and so did the comments. While leaving the cinema people were already talking about other things like dinner, the weather, the coming weekend and Donald Trump. I was very confused and went home a bit irritated and disappointed. I felt as when you go on a date with high expectations but very soon you find out that the person you fancied is loud and arrogant, and a bit ignorant as well. I entered my apartment and found Margarita watching a movie, an old Italian movie from the sixties. She asked me why I did not like the movie I watched, since I had such a skeptical face. I didn’t know. There was such a mess during the screening that I couldn’t tell anything about the movie itself. I told her I had the impression that the audience was a bit shocked, because of the lesbian relation and the doctor crossdressing. She didn’t agree. But I insisted, pointing out that everyone was commenting out loud and giggling. Surprised, she asked if we don’t do the same in Italy? I firmly denied it: we don’t talk during the movies. “You don’t discuss politics in the cinema!” Margarita blurted with a tone I still struggle to interpret.

Her reaction was a statement, she wasn’t in a conversation anymore, she just found out something new about Italians. As a result, disoriented, I went to bed mumbling and trying to recall the many nights I spent in cinemas in Bologna or Berlin, at the hipster WOLF, the old d’ Essai cinema, the famous cinematheque LUMIÈRE, the neighbourhood nest IL KINO, and the cold-war remainder NEUES OFF. For sure, nothing reminded me of the experience I just had in YARA, the red fortress, where cinema and politics nourish each other.

A few days later, I was walking on a small street in Havana Vieja and my eyes were caught by a small block of papers pinned on a wooden door. I went closer and found out that the building was an evangelical church, and the papers were advocating against same-sex marriage. Discussions about same-sex marriage and article 36 of the constitution, which was regulating it, were ongoing for a bit around the island. Exactly around the same time, March 2019, the Cuban government had just begun popular consultation to legalize same-sex marriage and introduce it into the family code. Suddenly, as I started paying attention to that topic, hints of it were traceable everywhere: in the newspaper Granma, on Television, in songs, in graffiti around the city, in people’s discussions while queuing… and of course, I thought about the time I watched Insumisas at YARA. Now, after months and months have passed, as I look at the picture I took of YARA, where of course the queue doesn’t appear as I hoped for, I recall all this, and reach a very simple conclusion: in Europe, we don’t discuss politics in the cinema, politics are discussed in the movies that we watch at the cinemas. At least sometimes.