Afro-Cuban Histories through a Fractured Lens: Gloria Rolando’s Insurgent Cinema

• In Event: Social Evaluations and Transitions in Latin American Film

Abstract

Cuban director Gloria Rolando’s prolific career producing independent documentaries in Cuba began in the early 1990s. Her success is in many ways remarkable considering that her work has been defined by the conditions of scarcity and instability in Cuba’s cinema industry during and after the periodo especial. In her efforts to produce “un cine de muy pocos recursos,” Rolando began to create documentaries using more affordable video technologies instead of film, enabling her to work partially outside the purview of the national film institute, ICAIC. Rolando’s acute awareness of the economic and political insecurity of her position as a black woman making independent documentaries in Cuba undoubtedly informs her approach to her principal subject matter: the historical and cultural experience of Afro-Cubans. This presentation examines how her recent three-part documentary on the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), Voces para un silencio complements her earlier docu-drama piece, Raíces de mi corazon which dramatizes the process of rupturing the historiographic silences surrounding the 1912 massacre of thousands of PIC supporters. I argue that her work should be conceived as much more than a simple corrective effort to promote inclusion of Afro-Cuban histories within the official nationalist narratives. Rolando’s video projects call for re-imagining the terms in which Cuba’s past is remembered, and offer a starting point for crafting an oppositional cinematic aesthetics capable of challenging the dominance of an historico-visual archive whose construction has been governed by Eurocentric, colonial, and racial paradigms.

Author

• Patrick Crowley, Binghamton University