Cuban Revolutionary Cinema: Memories of Underdevelopment

Framing the unfolding of time in Tomás Gutierréz Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) is the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 1961 and the October Missile Crisis of October 1962. The film opens in the Havana airport, in the midst of the departing first wave of exiles from
Cuba, as the bourgeois anti-hero Sergio, equivocally kisses his parents and wife goodbye. It ends with Sergio deep within an existential crisis: is it the island in which he lives or he who is “underdeveloped”? And yet, while intense historical moments frame the film, it is the gaze of a black woman
through a dancing crowd that first fixes the camera and the viewer, and the dissolution of the face of Sergio as he walks in solitude that leaves the viewer in a state of questioning.

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