Attendees at the 37th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. Vendors with shopping carts sell concession snacks as audiences pour in to Havana, Cuba’s Yara theater.
Growing up, I never truly appreciated my mom’s esoteric taste in film. She would find a random French movie on cable, and tell my sister and me to watch it with her. She’d wake us up on Saturday mornings for a public access show sponsored by a local Indian restaurant that would play a solid hour of Bollywood music videos. When a movie was too melancholic or abstract, she complained it was “too Russian” for her.
My mom spent the first 14 years of her life in Cuba before she and her family were uprooted. She brought only the clothes on her back and the memories of a childhood now over. Moved to a country she was taught to despise in school—I’m not sure she ever really made peace with those lost years of resettlement and alienation. She never let my sister and me forget where we came from. It’s an inescapable part of who she is and who I am. I grew up listening to the stories of her time in Cuba, of how radically different my life would be were we to have remained on the island and how lost we were between two cultures. My family is scattered, and I’ve yet to meet them all.
One thing she passed on, intentional or not, was her love of movies and how closely they were tied to her memories of Cuba. We used to dress up for the movies and go as a family. Even when I was little, my dad would grouse at how often we used to go. His family was not one for the movies when they had a TV at home in the States. My mom however, grew up walking to the movies every weekend with her brothers and parents. It was simply what you did in Havana as a family.
Before I went to the island for the first time, I wanted to map out her memories of the theaters and films she saw in Cuba.
“I remember my first movie was when I was four or five,” she told me. “I remember there was a long line to get in. I had a little popcorn and a little candy while watching a big, big screen. It was special.”
The family had a black and white TV at home, but going to the movies, “a big screen full of color,” was a spectacle to be remembered. Mom doesn’t remember what she saw that first day (only that it was cartoons), but the feeling that this was something special never left her. It’s another thing she passed on to me.
The name of the theater escapes her. It’s been decades since she last saw its tiny entrance and crowded aisles. “I can envision the walk from my house—it wasn’t very far,” she remembered. “We used to do it every Saturday and Sunday. Saturdays with my mom and Sundays with my mom and dad.” They would walk down Havana’s Fifth Avenue, a scenic path modeled on New York’s famous street before it became a commercial hub. “In the center of the avenue, there was a clock tower with gardens all around. I saw pictures from the 50s of Fifth Avenue in New York, and it looked just like the one in Cuba. Families would spend the afternoon there.” I was told that I’m to report back from my visit if the gardens still stand.
At times, my mother’s family would visit relatives on their way to or from a theater. “Especially on the weekends, it was mostly families at the movies. You didn’t see a lot of teenagers by themselves. You’d see families with extra kids because a mom would take a friend of the kids.” She admitted not everyone there could indulge a movie habit like her family used to; her dad worked two jobs to afford the small luxury.
Never had I thought about the first time she had seen the movie, and never did I picture her watching it in a large auditorium with concrete floors and minimal trimmings aside from thin burgundy curtains flanking a worn stage.
According to her, Cuban theater owners were sticklers for the country’s age-based rating system. Even if you were a few months shy of 13, you could be turned away. My mom missed out on all of Sean Connery’s James Bond films because they were rated above her age. And if a theater oversold tickets to a show, it was buyer beware. “There would be no seats, and you would have to walk out to wait for the next show. Refunds are the American Way.”
“I remember seeing Sleeping Beauty in theaters and I loved Aristocats! It was my absolute favorite. I was ten when I saw it.” Then she mused, “I don’t know how we got so many Disney movies in Cuba, but we got them.” They must have been apolitical enough to pass Cuban censors, who would turn away movies with Revolutionary-tinged scripts about “Rebels” and “Empire” like Star Wars. My mom caught Return of the Jedi after she moved to the States, unaware of the craze that preceded it. “No one on the island had heard of it.”
But even the censors couldn’t say no to Barbra Streisand. “I saw Hello Dolly when I was 13 years old, and I fell in love with Barbra Streisand right there and then,” she giggled at the memory. “I think I saw it that week five or six times. The movies were only a peso, so my father could afford for me to go to the movies everyday if I wanted to.”
I watched Hello Dolly with her many times before, heard her singing along with the movie as she taught me to sashay like Dolly does during her big number. What sounded so familiar to me became estranged when my mom told me where she watched it: The Karl Marx Theater that was near her home. Never had I thought about the first time she had seen the movie, and never did I picture her watching it in a large auditorium with concrete floors and minimal trimmings aside from thin burgundy curtains flanking a worn stage.
She was also obsessed with the Japanese samurai films imported under the banner of “Samurai Oichi.” She loved romantic Polish films, Italian Euro-spy knock-offs, British costume dramas, Spanish and French comedies, especially those of Louis de Funès. “Even though you had to read, the jokes transcend, just like Charles Chaplin.” Long before I dove headfirst into studying silent comedy, my mom had grown up with all the classics. “Every Sunday morning on the TV, they played all the silent movies. That’s how I got to meet Charles Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton.”
Although she teased that I could get as “miserable as a Russian movie,” she didn’t see many of those films in theaters. “Most of them were about hunger prior to the Revolution, so period pieces,” but not the opulent ones she adored. “Some were inconclusive, they had no meaning, and you didn’t get anything from them. Was there a purpose to the movie to begin with?” The Soviet imports failed to connect with the young girl growing up in a Communist country experiencing its first economic freefall in the 70s.
Cuban cinema was all but closed to her; the state sanctioned productions dealt heavily with sex and were rated for much older audiences. “As I kid, I only saw two good Cuban comedies. One was called The Twelve Chairs and the other was a comedy about the Revolution, which was more propaganda than anything.” She remembered there were renegade filmmakers making movies to criticize the government. They would send their rouge films abroad to festivals, only to be imprisoned as dissidents at home.
She paused. “You know, I used to love getting popcorn and candy as a kid. There were little kiosks outside the theater to buy snacks. But as I got older, that did not exist anymore.”
I froze. It was the rare moment I recognized something from Cuba that wasn’t from my mother’s memories. I had read about the 70s economic bust that is more or less credited with killing The Golden Age of Cuban Film which gave us movies like Memories of Underdevelopment, Death of a Bureaucrat, Lucia, and The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin. It’s strange to think of going to the movies without the sound of popcorn crunching, drink swishing, and candy rattling. It wasn’t an experience my mom would have again until after she made the frightful escape north.
About a decade later, she took me to my first movie. Like her, I don’t remember what it was, but it was a cartoon that filled the big screen with color.