Revolutions within: Criticism and ambivalence in post-Soviet Cuban cinema

This dissertation examines how new aesthetic ideologies and film styles express late socialist anxieties about the state and Cuba's recent immersion in the global market. Drawing on two years of archival research, semiotic analysis of traditional and digital Cuban films, and ethnographic fieldwork with foreign producers, state functionaries, and Cuban film professionals, I track the transition of Cuban film production from a centralized system of state patronage to a decentralized mode facilitated by digital technologies, international co-productions, and changing state policies. I investigate how Cuban filmmakers are cultivating new professional identities in response to the competing demands of the state, the international market, and local and diasporic audiences.;My work makes three principal interventions into studies of late socialism, the state, and media. First, I challenge monolithic representations of the socialist state, examining instead how intellectuals struggle with other factions for control over state power. Cuban filmmakers, I argue, have long fought to expand the boundaries of social criticism while preserving socialist commitment. Second, I contend that, since the late 1980s, the Cuban state has contained political protest in new ways: not (or not only) through repression, but rather by allowing it a limited forum in certain arts, of which cinema has one of the broadest mass audiences. Far from achieving the transparent public sphere to which Cuban filmmakers aspired, however, this new "openness" paradoxically exacerbates political paranoia. As censorship becomes increasingly difficult to track and filmmakers grow more dependent on the foreign market, spectators vary between reading social criticism in films as the sign of intellectuals "speaking truth to power," as propaganda for a state trying to refashion its global image, or as a publicity stunt to satisfy audiences eager for images of socialism on the decline. Finally, I show how Cuban filmmakers struggle to disrupt these paranoid readings through film genres such as bureaucrat comedy and national romance as well as through an aesthetics of feeling and the senses. I argue that in a context where political cinema has acquired a new market value, filmmakers both capitalize on and resist interpretations of their films as national allegory.