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PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT A CHANGING CUBA

admin / August 30, 2015 / Screens

CSAR A. SALGADO: Why we should watch

BITTER SUGAR again today

1.
Two decades ago, Len Ichasos 1996 film Bitter Sugar couldnt get a break even from its most
sympathetic critics. Achy Obejas, for example, started her review for the Chicago Tribune
acknowledging many of its merits. She praised the nuanced, rich portraits that Cuban exile
actors Miguel Gutirrez, Ren Lavn and Mayte Viln made of Cubans struggling with the dire
living conditions in Cuba immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. She remarked
on the surprisingly innovative black-and-white cinematography, praising its experimental mix
of shotssome taken illegally by a clandestine auxiliary crew on location in Havana; others
based on scripted scenes filmed by Ichaso in Santo Domingo; plus rough footage donated by
independent island journalists of the infamous maleconazo impromptu protest on August 1994.
Still, like most reviewers at the time, Obejas believed that overt anti-Castro politicking
compromised the artistic integrity of an otherwise promising film. Rather than a personal,
artistic testament, Bitter Sugar was ultimately flawed, since its Castro-demonizing climax
ended up transforming the movie into a single-minded political statement. But is the film really
so single-minded?

In the movie the protagonist is Gustavo Valds. Played by Lavn, he is an ambitious Communist
youth loyal to the regime and to the ideal of the New Man. Recently graduated from the Lenin
High School with high marks, he waits for a state scholarship to come through to go study
engineering in Prague. However, Gustavo realizes the hypocrisy of the Castro regime as he
witnesses how, in order to cope with the post-Soviet crisis, the state constructs a system of
economic and social apartheid that caters to the whims and the profitability of a growing and
quite predatory touristic industrial complex. The issue here is of survival in catastrophic times.
The film registers the impact, at the human level, of neoliberal globalization on a Cuba made
harrowingly vulnerable after losing the Soviet subsides that had made its brand of socialism
more or less sustainable for thirty years. Gustavo sees how this skewed system perturbs the life
of each of his loved ones. His father Toms, played by Gutirrez, is a respected psychiatrist and
widower who once believed in the revolution, but becomes a sardonic and disillusioned
alcoholic as he is forced to work as a lowly piano entertainer to make ends meet. State police
harass and detain his brother Bobby, a rebellious, anti-establishment rock musician, as part of a
security initiative to keep streets clean and venues free of disruptive dissidents. In angry
protest, Bobby deliberately infects himself with the AIDS virus and ends up confined in an
asylum reminiscent of the 1960s UMAP camps.
Gustavo then has to overcome jealousy and shame as he realizes that Yolanda, his Castro-
hating, distraught girlfriend, played by Viln, has been prostituting herself at hotels with
foreigners under the tacit lenience of state police in charge of surveillance. In a confrontation
with his Lenin High School mentor Professor Garca, Gustavo confirms what hes been
suspecting all alongthat the scholarship was a sham, the last simulation of an international
socialist support system now defunct. Shaken by such betrayal and humiliation, when Yolanda,
who has agreed to marry him, decides to tearfully join the 1994 rafter exodus, Gustavo stays
behind. Fleeing is not the answer, he tells himself. Gustavos behavior then takes a desperate
and very implausible turn. At a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolucin, he lurches for the gun of
an undercover officer and aims at the Lder Mximo, who is warning the public about harder
times to come. Im not going to pretend that things are looking rosy. We have a tense situation
with the fuel supply, we hear Castro himself say as a security sniper spots Gustavo in the thick
of the crowd and kills him with one clean shot while the crowd remains unperturbed. The
camera rises to register Gustavo as a martyred body, a defeated angel, while intercutting to a
grainy, rather Satanic, close-up of footage of the dictator himself, giving one of his Special
Period speeches. Fidel thus appears identified as the unequivocal evil cause of the islands
predicament. Obejas was not impressed: The films final blow to credibility comes at the end,
when Ichaso, instead of trusting the viewer to understand his message, resorts to melodrama.
The conclusion, while purely cathartic for exiles, is pure propaganda.
The films far-fetched climax did not only displease newspaper reviewers such as Obejas.
Despite its many supporters and a big promotional push by the Cuban art community in the
states, several prestigious film festivals declined to screen it. The film ran to acclaim at Miami
and Chicago, but the New York Film Festival turned it down, leading to a controversy in the
New York Post that spread and made national news. In a letter to the Post editor and in ensuing
press interviews, Ichaso and other Cuban filmmakers in the US accused festival chairman
Richard Pea of unjustly ignoring Bitter Sugar and other deserving Cuban-themed submissions
that had a strong anti-Castro slant. The writers argued that Peas pattern of intolerance
toward films made by Cuban exiles dated back to 1980, when Pea, a friend to many directors
of the Cuban Institute of Film Arts and Industry (ICAIC) and a regular guest at the Havana Film
Festival, accused Orlando Jimnez Leal and Nestor Almendros of intending their 1979 prize-
winning Human Rights documentary Improper Conduct (which denounced state persecution of
homosexuals in Cuba) as an attack [against] the stability of Cuban revolution. Pea responded
by echoing Obejas complaint, saying that Bitter Sugar had not been selected since it failed as a
work of art: Bitter Sugar had some merits, but parts of it are very clunkily directed and actedit
didnt make a strong impression. Informed of Peas renewed dismissal, Ichaso retorted in a
Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel article: Mr. Pea is afraid of severing his close ties with Havana
He doesnt want to get down there and have his bottom spanked.

Despite its controversial ending, contemporary viewers of Bitter Sugar should in any case
appreciate Ichasos work differently and not just as a movie fixated with Castro or with
demonizing castrismo per se. In the rest of the film, Castros image is not treated ominously as a
dangerous evil icon. When Castros face first appears, it is connected with the Guevarian ideal
of the New Man as Gustavo gives himself a revolutionary pep talk while looking in the mirror
with Fidels photo behind him. Later, a huge, building-size street poster of Fidels youthful
profileno older than 40 and haranguing a microphone with famous passionis repeatedly
associated with the character of Soraya, a jinetera or street prostitute that we see on the prowl
for clients throughout the film. This recurring motif suggests that Fidels regime is not based on
a cult-of-personality, repressive state-of-force following the model of Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il-
Sung. Rather, Castro/Soraya represents the dependent neo-colonial territory that has to
prostitute itself romancing world powers and foreign corporate investors in order to survive,
one that has lost its previous Soviet sugar daddy and now has to sell its charms and favors to
new global johns. In the movie, these new johns are the representatives of Italian and
Spanish financial conglomerates that have colluded with the Cuban communist party and armed
forces in order to make all islanders contribute their share of sweat, blood, and sex to a tourist-
centered capitalist economy servicing global leisure. My son, Toms tells Gustavo during a
visit to his mothers tomb, We are back to colonial times. The revolution is on sale.
Bitter Sugar should thus not be remembered as a run-off-the-mill anti-Castro propaganda film as
much as a layered portrayal of post-Soviet disillusion in Cuba: the state of existential
melancholia or desencanto that critics such as Odette Casamayor, Ester Whitfield, Jacqueline
Loss and Jorge Fornet have diagnosed in the post-89 fictions written by Cuban writers who
either chose or were raised to support the revolutionsuch as Wendy Guerra, Ena Luca
Portela, Pedro Juan Gutirrez, and Leonardo Padura. As with these works of literature, Bitter
Sugar deals with the traumatic loss of ideals among desperate Cubans acutely vulnerable to a
new global hegemony of capitalist exploitation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most of
the movie thus doesnt reflect the unrelenting anti-Castro, anti-communist, and anti-25 of July
guerrilla movement grudge of previous Cuban exile film productions. It grants a measure of
legitimacy to aspects of the revolution before the collapse of the Soviet Union since this movie
was made to appeal to those who, like Gustavo, had believed in the revolution in one way or
another until that point.

2.

The under-acknowledged artfulness of Bitter Sugar becomes clear once we see how Ichaso
opens up his film up to an archive of revolutionary visual, filmic, and literary influences and
idiomsmany of ICAIC extractionthat could resonate with Cuban island viewers in the 1990s.
In several interviews Ichaso explained that he conceived Bitter Sugar as a film to be seen inside
Cuba by way of bootleg VHS tapes. Then, as today, pirated media had a wide informal
distribution through a strong network of home theaters with video-playersdespite the
embargo and state security vigilance. Asked in 2000 whether he knew if the film had ever been
screened on the island, Ichaso replied with a hyperbolic claim and a personal anecdote: Bitter
Sugar became a huge, huge video film [in Cuba]. In 1998 a friend of ours went to Havana and
[] located my nanny. She called me in L.A. [] and the next thing she says was, I saw Bitter
Sugar. Why in black and white? My nanny that I hadnt talked to since 1961! With news about
Cuban ruination and pauperization, the rafter exodus, and the AIDS quarantine centers
saturating world media in 1994, exile artists like Ichaso were inspired to intervene in their own
way to give the regime a final push towards transition. In the case of Bitter Sugar this did not
mean instigating the exile fantasy of assassinating CastroI am a film maker, not a terrorist
was a line Ichaso repeated in interviews while promoting the movie. (I personally believe that
the films absurd climax and ultimate flaw may have been Ichasos pragmatic concession to
financers focusing on mining Miamis box office returns, although I cant prove this). Instead, it
meant addressing Cubans on the island in a more direct and powerful way, one that would take
fully in mind the nature of their predicament rather than replicate the propaganda of Radio and
TV Mart and other US anti-Castro venues. Ichaso may have wanted to destabilize Castros
hegemony, as Pena worried regarding Improper Conduct, but in a way consonant with critical
views from within the island rather than from the exile community.

In order to achieve this balance between local and exile film narrative and esthetic expectations,
Ichaso, who left Cuba at fourteen in 1963 and thus could not draw on his own experience to
achieve the films insider pathos, had to engage two major influences, those of two Cuban
artists who had once worked inside the revolution and remained independent enough to
express critical desencanto with its process. The first is celebrated ICAIC film director Toms
Gutirrez Alea. On the one hand, Bitter Sugar pays homage to Gutirrezs Aleas 1967 classic
Memories of Underdevelopment in its experimental filmic depiction of personal and generalized
alienation in Havana during a traumatic moment of geopolitical and global realignment. So
claimed Ichaso himself in an April 1997 interview with Mexicos Reforma newspaper: We
filmed in black-and-white film to evoke that movie that I so admire, Tomas Gutierrez Aleas
Memories of Underdevelopment, specially the montages of the protagonist roaming through
Havana, which were very similar. Bitter Sugar alludes to Memories right at the start by using the
ICAIC signature font type in its opening credits over a montage sequence that, like that in Aleas
film, mixes takes of recognizable Havana streets and sites to then shift into a frenzied musical
performance and dance. In Memories a man is killed and carried away during a rumba bemb. In
Bitter Sugar an underground hard rock concert is interrupted by abusive state police. At the
same time, Bitter Sugar both engages and refutes the melancholic optimism of Strawberry and
Chocolate, Gutierrez Aleas 1994 international movie hit that, although critical of revolutionary
homophobia, expressed confidence in the revolutions capacity to reform itself by recognizing
and rectifying its mistakes. In his film, Ichaso makes bitter that movies sweet sadness.
The second influence, certainly the most important, is that of Ichasos father, the poet Justo
Rodrguez Santos. Critics obsessed with the failed clunky ending have so far failed to fully
appreciate how or why the film references Rodrguez Santoss work at the very start of the film.
The movie opens with an epigraph by the poet, two stanzas from Retornos (Returnings), a
poem dedicated to fellow poet Gastn Baquero, from Santos 1979 collection Los naipes
conjurados: I will return where the sea / with clearest accent / unveiled to me its winding legend
and / retrieve the lost mandolin that / waves its blind arms in the wind! / I will sail across my
smile anew / I will converse with my broken words / My eyes will recover their gulls and / from
my ashes a star will be born.

3.

In Bitter Sugar Ichaso reconstructs his fathers story of disillusionment with the revolution by
lifting it from the 1960s and bringing it to the 1990s. Born in 1915, Rodrguez Santos was part,
with Jos Lezama Lima and Baquero, of the cohort of poets that collaborated in all the journals
that Lezama Lima edited, from Verbum (1936) up to Orgenes (1944-1956). The author of
vibrant, formally exquisite poems full of Lorquian echoes and Whitmanian flashes, Rodrguez
Santos stood apart from the core Orgenes group in that he was not a pious, practicing Catholic.
He was instead an eccentric artistic outlier who relished counter-cultural trends and embraced
a beatnik-like radical ethos in his forties; in Recuerdos compartidos, a 1980 book of reminiscing
anecdotes, his daughter Mari Rodrguez Ichaso, a co-producer of Bitter Sugar, remembers him as
the first hippy I ever met. Probably inspired by the work of Man Ray and Max Ernst, Rodrguez
Santos also became an experimental photographer. He incorporated some of their odd camera
angles, startling light-and-shadow scenarios, montages, and other surrealist concepts into his
studio work. In the 1950s he became a commercial filmmaker, TV and radio producer, and
broadcaster who devised audio-poems for radio theater. With Virgilio Piera and Jos
Rodrguez Feo, Rodrguez Santos was also one of the few origenistas who wholeheartedly
embraced Castros revolution from its beginnings; others, like Cinto Vitier and Fina Garca
Marruz, would do so much later. As a poet, he became one of the most enthusiastic
propagandist of the Castro saga, writing a long epic poem commemorating the 1953 Moncada
attack on its tenth anniversary titled La epopeya del Moncada. It became required reading in
Cubas schools and was translated to most languages of the socialist bloc. The poem even
earned the praise of Mao Zedong.

In the first decade of the Revolution, Rodrguez Santos thus became Fidels bard, the
revolutions Homer. However, after a 1967 trip to Russia and China that disheartened him
deeply (just like Gustavos failed trip to Prague), Rodrguez Santos saw the error of his beliefs,
became bitterly disillusioned with Cubas socialist adventure, and, after months of hardships,
defected in Mexico to join his estranged family in New York City. He continued writing and
publishing poetry while working as creative director in ad agencies. In 1972, according to the
New York Times, he became director of advertising at Goya Foods in Seacaucus, N.J. Could it be
that an Orgenes poet and former Castro apologist may also have authored the commercial
slogan If its Goya it has to be great?

Just like in Bitter Sugar, the Rodriguez-Ichaso story is one of a family clan split apart by its
disagreements over Castros revolution. Antonia Ichaso, Justos wife and niece of the noted
essayist Francisco Ichaso, was a member of a high middle class, anti-communist Catholic family
of intellectuals and media personalities that fled the country when Cuba became aligned with
the Soviet Union. Antonia left with the children the year after Justo wrote the poem that
consecrated him as Castros Homer; Justo stayed behind to live up to his convictions. The fierce,
bitter tone of disenchantment and defeat in the drunken lines of Toms throughout the film,
that of a former militant forced to become an entertainer for the revolution who stayed in the
island even though his wife had begged him to leave, were probably inspired by father-and-son
exchanges between Justo and Len after they rejoined and reconciled in New York City: Im
exhausted, busting my balls pounding the piano [] in a shitty job for this joke of a revolution
and I didnt leave because I believed in it. Theres never been a love story more beautiful than
this revolution.

After their reunion Justo and Len would become frequent collaborators, filming ad campaigns
in Puerto Rico, New York, and Miami. The intricate lighting and atmospheric use of shadow in
Bitter Sugars cinematography pays homage to Justos photographic work. Justo died in 1999.
Even at his old age, he appears to have been involved in the films genesis and production
process just as his daughter was; his name and Antonias appear at the end of the
acknowledgments in the credits. But the scripted lines that most resonate with the Rodriguez
Santos-Ichaso family experience are those of Gustavos mentor, Professor Garca. Admitting his
duplicity when confronted by Gustavo, he says that he keeps supporting the revolution out of a
stubborn sense of pride: I have to keep playing the game. It is was it is [] My whole family is in
Miami. What do you want me to tell them, that I messed up [me equivoqu]? I cant do that now.
Im screwed [me jod]. Swallowing pride and accepting the shame of false dreams and betrayed
love is just what Justo had to do when he reunited with his family to say me equivoqu. That is
the contrite self-recognition this film was designed to inspire in Cubas party faithful and
loyalists. Despite its clunky melodramatic climax, it was not about encouraging Cubans to run
out, grab a gun, and go take care of Castro.
Because it is a compassionate and complex portrayal of Cuban vulnerability during the Special
Period crisis rather than a film only catering to anti-Castro fanaticism, Bitter Sugar survives as a
document of its time. By incorporating the works of Toms Gutirrez Alea and Justo Rodrguez
Santos into its visual vernacular, it in fact opened a way in which to conceive and interpret
Cuban diaspora and island film productions as part of one cinematic matrix and experiential
culturerather than an image war between ideological extremists.

Csar A. Salgado

Csar A. Salgado (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese and Program in Comparative Literature, UT
Austin) teaches graduate seminars on the New World Baroque, the Orgenes group of writers,
and Caribbean archival fashioning as well as Visualizing Cuba, an undergrad introduction to the
politics of visual and film culture in the island and its diaspora. He was a member of the editorial
board of Cuba, the 2011 Gage Cengage encyclopedia.

Note: All translations in this article are by the author.

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