Socialist Solidarity and Transnational Identity: Letters of Czechoslovak Film Laboratory Technician and His Wife from Cuba, 1963-1966

• In Event: Negotiating Socialist Internationalism: Latin America, the Soviet Union, and the Socialist Bloc

Abstract

In October 1961, a delegation from the Czechoslovak State Film traveled to Havana to assess the overall functioning of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industries (ICAIC), founded in March 1959. They discovered the most urgent problems were the scarcity of qualified artistic, technical, and economic personnel. The delegation’s protocol set the Czechoslovak technical assistance to Cuba for the entire 1960s. Its most important initiative was sending Czechoslovak experts to train ICAIC’s technicians. This paper focuses on one of them, Emil Karabec, who arrived in Cuba a few days before Christmas 1963 with two other experts, Petr Karfík and Tonda Jarůšek, to offer 18-months laboratory course in the newly founded ICAIC’s film school. Karabec and his wife, who joined him with their daughter at the end of April 1964, wrote weekly letters home. I argue their letters reveal as much about the institutional aspect of the Cuban Revolution, cultural differences between Czechoslovakia and Cuba, and Czechoslovak technical aid to ICAIC as they do about both protagonists’ transnational identity. This paper is based mainly on archival documents from the National Film Archive in Prague and a private collection of the only daughter of Emil and Marie Karabcovi, who was in Havana with them in the 1960s.

Author

• Magdalena Matuskova, Clemson U