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The Cuban filmmaker Orlando Rojas harshly criticized on Saturday an exhibition inaugurated at the Casa de Titón and Mirta, in Old Havana, which proposes a supposed affinity between the dictator Fidel Castro (1926-2016) and the director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996), a comparison he described as an act of “ideological sleight of hand.”
In a lengthy Facebook post, Rojas questioned the exhibition titled “Fidel and Titón, two men with the same perspective,” organized by the Office of the Historian of Havana and the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industries (Icaic).
According to the director, the exhibition aims to draw an ethical and political parallel between the leader of the Cuban revolution and the renowned filmmaker, which, in his opinion, does not correspond with reality.
Rojas recalled his personal and professional relationship with Gutiérrez Alea, whom he assisted as a director in the film Los sobrevivientes, and emphasized the intellectual honesty of the author of Cuban cinema classics such as La muerte de un burócrata (1966), Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), and La última cena (1976).
In his testimony, he emphasized that the director always maintained a critical stance towards authority and that his work and public behavior were marked by openness.
The filmmaker challenged the notion that both shared a common vision of the revolutionary process and emphasized that, over time, Castro and Gutiérrez Alea interpreted Cuban reality from opposing perspectives.
In his account, he evoked conversations and moments experienced over decades of dialogue with Titón that, he claims, disprove any equivalence between them.
"In more than two decades of dialogue with Titón, I find not a single clue that confirms any ethical or political similarity between their respective roles," Rojas stated.
He even quoted a phrase he heard directly from Titón during private lessons in cinematic grammar: "Fidel's revolution was a good script, but a terrible film."
Among the episodes mentioned, he recalled the conflict that erupted in 1991 following the censorship of Alice in Wonderland, when a group of 18 filmmakers from Icaic remained in permanent assembly to prevent the institute from being subordinated to political control structures linked to the Communist Party.
He also recalled the tensions that surrounded the premiere of Guantanamera (1995), the last work of Gutiérrez Alea, when he remembered the film was the target of attacks promoted by sectors of the political power.
In that context, Rojas maintained that the director was aware of the limits and contradictions of the Cuban revolutionary project.
Building on that personal experience, the filmmaker stated that the comparison suggested by the exhibition overlooks the differences between Castro's political leadership and the critical perspective that characterized the filmmaker.
In his text, he argued that the failure of the revolutionary project cannot be explained solely by external factors and attributed it also to decisions made from the top of the power structure.
Rojas's critique also extended to the current context of the country. Amid what he described as a city and a country in ruins, he considered the exhibition an attempt to rewrite the cultural and political memory of Cuban cinema.
The filmmaker stated that many artists who worked within the Icaic, sometimes facing censorship, saw Gutiérrez Alea as a champion of creative freedom.
In that regard, he recalled figures such as Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938-2003) and Sara Gómez (1942-1974), whom he regarded as examples of a cinema that also experienced tensions with cultural control structures.
Rojas concluded his reflection with a personal note by recalling his own experience of censorship with the film Closed for Renovations, which was banned at the time by the then president of Icaic, Alfredo Guevara (1925-2013), an episode in which, he claims, he received the supportive backing of Gutiérrez Alea along with other directors.
The filmmaker's publication has rekindled the debate about the relationship between culture and power in Cuba and how the official discourse tries to reinterpret the figure of one of the most influential directors in Latin American cinema.
The exhibition was set up in the former home of the filmmaker and his wife, actress Mirta Ibarra, provided by the Office of the Historian and transformed into the Tomás Gutiérrez Alea Center for Audiovisual Promotion and Research.
The inauguration takes place as the regime multiplies its propaganda efforts surrounding the centenary of Castro. On Friday, the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel opened another exhibition about the dictator at the José Martí Memorial.
Additionally, the V International Colloquium Patria was held, which included a screen with artificial intelligence from the Russia Today channel in Spanish to take pictures with a young Castro.
All of this is happening while Cuba is experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis, with multiple collapses of the National Electric System and blackouts described by experts as worse than those during the Special Period of the 1990s.
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