Next Monday, October 26, the Institute of Hispanic American Literature (ILH) at the University of Buenos Aires will host the screening of restored shorts by Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián, who was persecuted, imprisoned, and committed to psychiatric hospitals by the Cuban regime until his ultimate exile in Miami.
The event, part of the La.R (Latin Americanists Online) series and organized by the Caribbean Studies Group of the ILH, will take place at 6:00 PM in the Ángel Rama Room, located at 25 de Mayo 221, third floor, in the city of Buenos Aires.
The presentation will be led by the Puerto Rican essayist and professor Julio Ramos (Río Piedras, 1957), and the event will include a dialogue with the Cuban writer Marcial Gala, who has been residing in Buenos Aires for several years.
Ramos is one of the most authoritative academic voices on the work of Guillén Landrián: he co-directed the documentary Returning to Havana with Guillén Landrián (2013) alongside Raydel Araoz and co-edited, with Dylon Robbins, the book Guillén Landrián or the Filmic Disarray, published by Almenara Editores in 2019.
Nicolás Marcial Guillén Landrián was born in Camagüey on June 30, 1938 and passed away in Miami on July 21, 2003. He was the nephew of the Cuban national poet Nicolás Guillén and worked at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) from 1962 to 1972, where he produced around twenty documentary short films.
The Digital Encyclopedia of Cuban Audiovisual describes him as "one of the most important and irreverent documentarians in Latin American cinema who, however, after being expelled from ICAIC in 1973 for ideological reasons, remained in the shadows. He experienced imprisonment several times, accused of 'dangerousness' and 'ideological diversionism,' as well as various admissions to psychiatric hospitals."
One of his most famous works, Coffea Arábiga (1968), transformed a propaganda assignment about coffee cultivation in the Cordón de La Habana into an experimental montage piece. The documentary incorporated the song "The Fool on the Hill" by The Beatles in a sequence showing Fidel Castro ascending to a podium, a connection that caused discomfort among certain official viewers and contributed to the controversies surrounding the film and its subsequent censorship.
Guillén Landrián himself left evidence of the marginalization he experienced at ICAIC: "I was humiliated and ostracized throughout my time at ICAIC, and they censored my films — they claimed — due to my social behavior."
After being expelled from the ICAIC, Guillén Landrián was confined to the Carbó-Serviá ward of the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana —known as Mazorra— at the request of state security, where he received electroconvulsive treatment. He left for exile in 1989 and did not return to Cuba.
His filmography, overlooked for decades, began to regain visibility since the late 1990s, in a process that gained particular momentum from 2000 onwards, when Ociel del Toa (1965) and Coffea Arábiga (1968) were screened at the first National Young Audiovisual Showcase organized by ICAIC, held in Havana. The subsequent editions of the event continued to revive his documentaries and introduce them to new generations of filmmakers.
Years later, the recovery and restoration efforts enabled a renewed international circulation of his work, including the short films En un barrio viejo (1963), Ociel del Toa (1965), Los del baile (1965), Coffea Arábiga (1968), and Taller de Línea y 18 (1971), showcased at international festivals and retrospectives.
However, this recovery has not been without tensions. In December 2023, during the presentation of the documentary Landrián —directed by Ernesto Daranas— at the Havana Film Festival of New Latin American Cinema, Daranas himself publicly denounced the persistence of censorship in Cuba: "The real problem has never been our films, but rather the reality to which they must respond. [...] That is why censorship persists. That is why the right to dissent is criminalized."
Months later, in February 2025, Cuban journalist Yania Suárez was expelled from the Ludwig Foundation in Havana after questioning, during the debate of that same documentary, the omissions regarding the possible link between Guillén Landrián and the Cuban Human Rights Committee, as well as his participation in the First Exhibition of Dissident Art in 1988.
Suárez denounced that the official "rescue" of the filmmaker has been conducted by the ICAIC itself —the institution that pursued him— to align it with the regime's narrative, erasing his dissident dimension.
That debate about the filmmaker's selective memory could serve as the backdrop for the academic event in Buenos Aires, where his restored short films will reach a Latin American audience more than two decades after his death.
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