Viva Cuba (2005) (Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti)

Having only seen a handful of Cuban films in my day, I was starting to get familiar with the heavy-handed approach that wielded together both the narrative and its requisite reflection on Cuban politics. However, with Viva Cuba I was surprised to find a relatively low-key and touching portrayal of a group that has been largely ignored by its native filmmakers. It’s about the current Cuban exodus that is observed through the eyes of 2 children.

While acclaimed in the festival circuit, it most notably won the Grand Prix at Cannes for the best children’s fare and was Cuba’s official submission to the Academy Awards last year. Helmed by Juan Carlos Cremata, a successful Cuban director with a controversial past, Viva Cuba is less an indictment of flawed USA-Cuban relations than it is about the lives of its characters, the duo of Malu (Malú Tarrau Broche) and Jorgito (Jorge Milo). They are 11-year-old classmates and best friends at the brink of their burgeoning adolescence who are being kept apart by their families. Jorgito comes from a poor, working class background with strong roots in the Cuban communist revolution while Malu’s family is staunchly Catholic, well-off and relentlessly bourgeois.

As circumstances unfold for Malu starting with her grandmother passing away, her mother makes a decision to immigrate to the US to marry her boyfriend. Unwilling to give up her life in Cuba and her friendship with Jorgito, Malu resolutely makes up her mind to travel to the other end of Cuba to convince her estranged father to refuse signing the obligatory papers for her impending migration.

Fundamentally, it’s a sincere ode to a simple time in everyone’s lives, when nothing was impossible with the innocence and sincerity of youth. The director stoops down to the level of the young protagonists, seeing everything as they do with the crystal-clear ingenuousness in which the film is handled makes this a very accessible and has a universal film.

Although it does not hit you over the head with its political messages, the atmosphere is heavy with topical issues such as immigration, segregation and what it means to have personal liberties. The localised issues are used as a backdrop for the 2 friends to balance their own developing perceptions of life against the reality they live in. The polarising dimensions of Cuba are evident in the families the children belong to with each having a strong, disparate political leaning and opinions of how the country should be run.

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