Broadly speaking, the postcolonial condition is one founded on the reinterpretation of a liberated state - by its emancipated & by its spectators - upon its emergence on the 'world scene'; after what had been a prolonged subjugation to an aggressive foreign power. The postcolonial work attempts to chronicle the hearkening/awakening history of a collective spirit freed from a dependency on foreign interpretative modes. The postcolonial subject, removed at great pains from the historical hierarchy of a greater sovereign state, suddenly has to initiate its own history, its own voice in monologue rather than in chorus, has to reactivate the historical mode at year one, using a completely reformed, upgraded set of tools. The acquisition of speech prompts the need for responsibility in self-narrative: the liberated subject has not only to describe the medium by which liberation was gained - which presents formidable problems in that the liberated subject will have to reject on principle the narrative modes it had learned from foreign influence, in preference to its own, yet undeveloped, if not terminally suspended traditional modes - but also the root principle which had caused the need for liberation: namely a nostalgia for the native tradition, and indubitably a geographical reflex irreproducible in other spheres, committed to renewing dialogue with the land-character that had formed the content of its people and kulchur. But the postcolonial condition as such would only be so in an ideal paradigm, in which the sudden fact of self-reliance would smoothly translate to inviolable independence in an improbably malleable world scheme. In truth, the foreign aggressor does not ever fully depart, the scars of enforced labor and siphoned industry remain indelible, the ghosts of a confused history remain scattered throughout the land's topological enclaves. The children of a land are never pure: they are seeds mixed with the bitter and the sweet of the colonizer and the colonized. Intrinsic man is a mestizo; intrinsic woman is a mulata.
Soy Cuba's opening voiceover asks, in allusion to the post-Columbus heritage of free market exploitation and slavery, 'Why is it that sugar can be so bitter at times?' Not a unique inversion, but the film is far more than a talented piece of 'propaganda' (those who insist on this point alone are content to leave puzzles uncollected, and enjoy redundancies as if they were delicacies of a kind to smack fattened lips to.) I am Cuba is utterly, absolutely, evidently a film 'about' Cuba, but it is a Cuba (the Cuba, symbolic & archetypal, if you will) emergent with powers that extend beyond the regional aspect, and attempts a discovery that (very likely unknowingly) overshadows the reductionist historical urgency of its time period (the cuban missile crisis, the cold war, etc.) through force of lyricism & enthusiasm. The enthusiasm is for the mechanism of man on display before the camera: as whore, as capitalist; as farmer, student, mother, and soldier; in short, man as an Idea, and humankind: the grain of the image. Most importantly, the enthusiasm for Cuba is one for its landscape & aura as a persistently cinematic idea, as cinematic performance, as the cinematic medium in translation (from the original text of the cuban idiom). The content assumes the form, and the country resolves the landscape, from which the camera eye extracts the sweet from the canestalk. Cuba calls forth the camera as a prince his bride: her dowry, her sierras, her green valleys and sugarcane fields, green or burning, or laughing in the sun of toil like slaving children set loose on the distant prospect of the city with a few coins in their pouch and a coca-cola in their wornout hands.
The soviets who arrived in Cuba to film were not communists but russians; their effort - Kalatazov's, Yevtushenko's, et al - represents a summation & condensation of the early russian school of cinema, in which the elements that had shaped russian cinema as an integral whole are laid out by Kalatazov (perhaps as a kind of scholastic reflex) in a stream of characteristic references: Eisenstein's exorbitant political lyricism (cf. the elaborate funeral parade scene); Dovzhenko's physicality (cf. the scene involving the sugarcane farmer's rage at his dispossession, in which the camera is used to slash - at the sugar cane, at the sun & sky - as if it were a machete); Vertov's on-location kino pravda (cf. the 'film truth' contained in filming a film about Cuba, in Cuba, using Cuban actors); Pudovkin's character-type tableaux (evident in Soy Cuba's 4 tableaux composed by following the thread of a few archetypal character personalites, i.e. the student, the prostitute, the soldier, etc.).
That Soy Cuba is a film as much about russian film history & technique as it is about Cuba highlights a remarkable facet about its position in world film: it may well be the 1st ever postmodern film to have achieved (latent) success using a strategy of aestheticized globalization: a film about globalization in a way, in which history is gathered through a collaboration of two cultures unknown to each other except through the enlightened objectivity of film: Russia & Cuba are meant to be taken as one entity, one body, one continuous stream of history, not through ideology but through the imperious order of art.
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