Soy Cuba

Soy Cuba is yet another film made from the view of Russians about Cuba and the lead up to the Cuban revolution. Which seems to be quite an odd thing, wouldn’t one need to be apart of that nationality to really understand the full impact of a revolution? To get back on track, Soy Cuba depicts different peoples journeys before the revolution occurs and makes the audience really feel sympathy towards these people and how they are living. The movie makes one feel like this revolution did need to happen for the sake of these peoples well being.

The movie depicts very well the struggle for lower classes, the ghettos where many people were forced to live, and the American influence on people who did not seem to want it. American was very much portrayed as the big brother that picked on the little brother, which depending on ones perspective, they could be seen that way. The economic depiction of these people coincides with Susan Eckstein’s description of what the economic world was before the revolution. Her details and charts could get extremely confusing to someone who is not an economist but it was clear that the point she wanted to make was that the revolution was a very good thing for the people economically. The rich might not have benefited and therefore most fled the country and it equalized the country greatly. This thought is a very encouraging one to read after seeing a movie so filled with sadness and economic struggles.

Through both the Eckstein and the de la Fuente articles the phrase “with all and for all” seems to pop up frequently, especially in the Fuente one. This idea of Cuban’s being segregated by race and racial issues is not a topic that could easily be picked up by the movie, which is quite distressing. Both articles deal greatly with how much of an issue the race question was in Cuba, a white Cuba versus a mixed Cuba. The movie does not seem to show this that clearly, it depicts Cubans as being united in knowing that a revolution needs to occur to better themselves more for economic reasons than for racial equality. However, this unity is expressed well in the Fuente article when it says “They were neither black nor white, but Cubans”. That line seems to boil everything in the movie down even though race did not seem like such a huge factor. When it came down to the need or revolution, race did not matter. Making a better life for their selves and making a better Cuba did matter.

The best line from the Fuente article was a citation that he made, "Cuba's soul is mestizo (half- breed),"Nicolas Guillen (1972, vol. 1: 114) wrote in 1931, "and it is from the soul, not the skin, that we derive our definite color. Someday it will be called 'Cuban color.'" It feels as if this is the best depiction of the movie and of Cuba. In the end race did not matter, revolution did and a revolution could not occur with just one racial group backing it. They needed the whole of Cuba to participate. Racial lines could have broken the entire movement but it did not and that seems to be the moral of the story.