The Sugar Curtain

by Camila Guzmán Urzúa, Director
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2007
DVD, 82 mins., color
DVD Sales: $440 US; rental: $150 US
Distributor’s website: http://www.icarusfilms.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

mosher@svsu.edu



Nostalgia in one’s late-thirties is a terrible thing. This reviewer recalls vigorously championing a proposed issue of the online journal Bad Subjects on the 1970s, for he was baffled how the progressive politics (integration, war avoidance, post-Watergate vigilance) of that decade crumbled beneath Reaganism and the lowered expectations of the Clinton era. Needless to say, younger editors were baffled at my campaign. Yet at this point, the maker of “The Sugar Curtain” might understand.

Camila Guzmán Urzúa and her classmates are now pushing 40 years old, most living in Europe or South America, and they look back with sadness at the disappearance of the Cuba in which they grew up, a land attentive enough to the needs of its schoolchildren to appear to them a socialist paradise. Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s could afford to be paternalistic, for the Soviet Union then subsidized the island's economy. Urzúa left Cuba in 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet state and the end of its largesse to Cuba. The USSR’s collapse left its tiny Caribbean client in economic shambles by the mid-1990s. This “Special Period” meant a decade of severe shortages in the necessities of daily life, their duration never as temporary as the authorities assured.

Urzúa was born in Santiago de Chile in 1971, and after the coup of September 11, 1973 her family moved to Cuba. Her mother is interviewed about the hospitable welcome exiles received, while the filmmaker is glimpsed in the bedroom mirror, operating her inquisitive camera. Other intellectuals her age are shown, first in photos as schoolchildren then as adults speaking their recollections and current perspectives. Members of the band Habana Abierta hang out, reminisce and grumble, and then are shown bringing the crowd to their feet in a lively concert. They visit Young Pioneers’ holiday excursion sites, now in ruins, as reminiscences pour out. A reviewer in the corpulent United States, a nation plagued with childhood obesity, can’t feel too much outrage to learn from a little boy that kids at one camp still in operation are now no longer served multiple snacks and sundaes, merely “breakfast, lunch and dinner”.

Evidently the kids of Urzúa’s generation had a sincere, spirited faith in their Cuba. The devotion and optimism of the first and second generation of revolutionary Cubans is not to be discounted, nor what patriotism remains (and would be greatly fired up by US invasion or interference). As with so many other nations around the globe, Cubans’ problems and disillusionment result from internal and external forces, both governmental and international policies, bad political and economic decisions made inside and out. And more change is soon to come. The evening of the day this DVD arrived, TV comedian Jay Leno purported to show Fidel Castro in his retirement: a skeleton with a long gray beard, brandishing a cigar.

It’s enjoyable to see the streets, buildings, and faces of Cuba here as the filmmaker explores them along with her talkative participants. The film has a tropical pace, and at times one almost expects one of these Generation Xers to shrug “Whatever”. The mid-century American writer Thomas Wolfe wrote "You can't go home again", and one of his contemporaries declared the past to be “another country”. Camila Guzmán Urzúa has challenged those assumptions by looking—in a very personal way—behind the tattered “Sugar Curtain”.