Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is one of the greatest movies ever made – possibly the greatest. I say that without hyperbole. At the end of watching this movie, even though there was only one other person in the room with me, I stood up as the credits rolled, unable to contain the puzzled look on my face and started to clap. This is the first and only film to ever get a standing ovation in my living room, and I’m absolutely desperate for everyone else to see it. 

Soy Cuba initially came to my attention over a year ago, when one of the many film folks that I follow on social media talked about how a particular scene featuring a bus should be studied by student filmmakers before they ever even touch a camera. This sparked my interest, but after an exhaustive search for it online, I gave up on ever seeing it and put it in the back of my mind. The film became part of the discourse again recently, when Phil Lord (half of the “Lord & Miller” duo) responded to the announcement of the film’s upcoming Criterion physical release to criticize it as a “distorted Soviet propaganda piece”, saying that the film should be contextualized as such, citing later that he had largely seen Soy Cuba “generally presented as a romantic documentary,” which I think says more about his college than it does about the film. It is Soviet propaganda, to be sure, albeit one that the Soviets didn’t care for much at the time of release (due to its accidental framing of capitalist excess as “cool”) and buried it, leaving the film largely forgotten until it was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and remastered. And bless that man and all his progeny, because this is a treasure. 

The film unfolds in four separate narratives. In the first, a woman named Maria, who lives in a hovel in a slum, goes to a casino to prostitute herself; her john for the night, an American, insists on seeing where she lives rather than taking her back to his hotel room, essentially acting as a tourist in her poverty for the evening before buying her most beloved possession—a crucifix—and leaving her behind. In the second, a sugarcane farmer named Pedro is told by his landlord that he must vacate the property, on which he has just raised his best crop after decades of working the soil, as the landlord has sold the land to United Fruit. In the third, a student rebel named Enrique takes part in the symbolic torching of a drive-in movie theater screen that is showing propaganda about Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba prior to Castro’s uprising. After he rescues a local woman from marauding American sailors, he retires for the night, only to learn the next morning that one of his comrades has been murdered by the police and to find that Batista’s regime is spreading the lie that Castro has been killed as a way of suppressing hope among the rebelling proletariat. In the fourth and final story, another farmer named Mariano is eating his meager breakfast with his family when an exhausted rebel stumbles upon their meager shack and entreats Mariano to join the revolution. The farmer declines, but the trajectory of his destiny is forever altered when Batista’s air forces bomb the valley in which he lives, with deadly collateral damage. 

There are things that the camera does in this movie that utterly boggle my mind. The movie is made up almost entirely of stunning standalone shots, which would be impressive on its own, but there are ways that the camera moves that seem impossible to me. Right from the outset, there’s a sequence at one of the casinos that starts on a rooftop where a band is playing, as the camera zooms in and out on various musicians in a way that organically blends with the music itself, before our audience POV goes over the edge of the building and glides down to the poolside below, even diving below the surface to show off all the shiny, happy people who are having a great time at the expense of the impoverished locals. Even more impressive is a later scene in the third segment, which starts on the left side of a bus as the vehicle is approached by a news-seller on a bicycle. He rides straight up to Enrique’s outstretched hand and puts the paper in it, as the camera strafes leftward to enter the bus and focus on Enrique’s reaction to the news he’s reading. We get a full shot of the rest of the bus that shows that this wasn’t done with some kind of cutaway, either; when the bus comes to a stop, Enrique departs, and the camera stays within the bus to watch him descend, cross the street, and then run up a long set of steps, all without batting an eye. When I was watching this, I turned to my viewing companion and asked “Did we just go through the bus?” before shaking my head and declaring “I can’t figure out how the hell they did that.” It’s a technical masterpiece, a breakthrough on par with breaking through to the technicolor world from drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. A later scene moves away from a massive funeral procession into a building and then climbs to the top of it before panning through a room full of laborers and then back out through their window to watch the march proceed into the distance, unstoppable. It’s stunning. 

It’s not just that mastery of the craft that makes this so impressive, though; it’s the humanity. The story of Maria, from the moment that we first meet her, is one of such tragic hopelessness that it’s impossible not to have your heart break for her. We first meet her as herself, as she encounters a poor fruitseller who is in love with her and dreams of marrying her one day in the nearby chapel, excitedly dreaming about her beauty in her white dress. She is forced to go from here almost immediately to a casino, where three boorish American sex tourists that we have already seen harass her and a few other working girls into drinking with them. One of them, who earlier waved off two of Maria’s colleagues and was accused of being prudish by his buddies, spots her immediately, and he makes it clear what attracts him to her: her faith and innocence, as evidenced by her displayed crucifix. She is entreated to dance and initially hesitant, but ultimately gives in and begins to move with such frenetic energy that she almost loses shape on film, a dervish, as she metaphorically resists the attempts of these capitalist pigs to buy her—buy her body, buy her dignity, buy her innocence, buy her soul—before being forced to relent, and in so doing gives up control of herself. After the tourist spends the night with her, he tells her that he is a collector of crucifixes, and as he lays a couple of bills on the bed, he offers her another, then a second, then lays a third beside her before he takes the symbol of her faith (et al) from her. It’s five bills in total; he pays more for her innocence than for her body, and it’s clear that he’s done this many times and plans to continue to do it forever, pillaging and plundering the colonized world for its body and its soul. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in its overt reminder that, yes, all colonization is predatory, now and for all time. 

Not a day has gone by since my screening that I haven’t thought about this movie, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it. Through the modern lens, it’s impossible not to look at the representation of the suffering of the people of Cuba under Batista and not see in their struggles and in their faces the embattlement and the countenance of all people, everywhere, who suffer under the oppression of colonialism and the evils of an economic system that can only exist by enforcing suffering on others. We are living in a time of great moral darkness, watching the systematic and unconscionable evil that is being forced upon the people of Palestine at the hands of the West and its collaborators, and although this movie is explicitly propagandistic, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this simple fact does not necessarily make its message incorrect or inapplicable. Across all spectrums, all marginalized people are struggling together, and our oppressor is always the same system. To fight that is the only fight that matters. 

I’m not sure when the Criterion disc is expected to be released and I’m not sure that, when it is, it will also mean that the movie will be on their streaming service. You can watch it for free right now, however, as one of your four free monthly borrows with your library card, on Hoopla. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond