AfroCuba
Race Raza
This documentary attempts to tackle the racial problems in Cuba today, through the voices of researchers, officials, musicians, artists and the general public.
Director Eric M. Corvalán Pellé
Genre Documentary
Year 2008
Length 35 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles English
Y tenemos sabor
Documentary which demonstrates a series of instruments (especially percussion) used in the more traditional versions of Afro-Cuban music. Includes examples of dance music and concludes with a Latin jazz session.
Director Sara Gómez
Genre Documentary
Year 1968
Length 24 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles None
The Last Supper La ultima cena
Director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Genre Drama
Year 2002
Length 82 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles English
Black and Cuba
Black and Cuba follows street-smart Ivy League students who are outcast, band together, and adventure to Cuba. The travelers confront realities behind myths of color-blindness and social mobility.
Director Robin J. Hayes
Genre Documentary
Year 2015
Length 82 min.
Language English and Spanish
Subtitles English
Alabbá
Alabbá looks at the fascinating history of Santería and how its historic roots have transformed into a contemporary religion in modern-day Cuba. Focus is on three women of African descent who arrived in Cuba in the 19th century, tracing their influence on the development of Santería. The documentary includes interviews with current practitioners and historians
Director Eliezer Pérez Angueira
Genre Documentary
Year 2010
Length 40 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles None
Voices of the Orishas
This is an ethnographic documentary which demonstrates the survival and strength of the Yoruba cultural and religious heritage in the contemporary life of Caribbean African-Hispanics. The program was filmed in Havana among practitioners of Santeria, and documents a ritual ceremony that features dancing, singing, praying and drum beating, invoking the twenty-two Orishas, or deities of the Yoruba religion.
Director Alvaro Perez Betancourt
Genre Documentary
Year 1993
Length 37 min.
Language Spanish and Yoruba
Subtitles English
The Tumba Francesa
In Cuba, Sulaidy learns the Tumba Francesa, an old French dance that her ancestors have kept alive from the time they were slaves, hundred of years ago. Andrea and his husband, Flavio, are the presidents of the Tumba of Santiago. They fear for the future of this dance. To perpetuate tradition, they take the children in hand and teach them to play and to sing. They struggle to teach younger people so that the Tumba lives on.
Director Jean Queyrat
Genre Documentary
Year 2006
Length 51 min.
Language English
Subtitles None
The Scorpion El Alacrán
Homage to Santos Ramírez, author of the 'comparsa' El Alacrán in 1938. This colorful program documents the history of the Afro-Cuban tradition. First performed by whites dressed in blackface in the early 1990s, Santos Ramírez transformed The Alacrán into the most famous African comparsa celebrated in Cuban carnival.
Director Gloria Rolando
Genre Documentary
Year 1999
Length 20 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles English
Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories
Pablo Elliot Foster Carrión interviews members of his family who left Cuba in 1962, including his grandfather, Pablo Abraham Foster, his father, Pablo Foster, his uncle Rubén Foster, and his aunt Diana-Elena Matsoukas. He learns of their experiences in Cuba, as well how they grew up in the Bronx. His father makes a return visit to Cuba, in 1995 with his wife and daughter, in order to see the landmarks of his childhood, and to visit with his aunt who was left behind. Family members talk about their complex identities as Afro-Cuban immigrants and as Americans.
Director Pam Sporn
Genre Documentary
Year 2000
Length 56 min.
Language English and Spanish
Subtitles English
Yo soy hechicero I Am a Sorcerer
It's all in a day's work for Juan Eduardo Núñez, a Cuban refugee who leads a religious congregation at his home in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. We meet Eduardo in his inner sanctum, a backyard garden shed in a subdivision near Atlantic City. Eduardo, possessed by a spirit named Miguel, recounts how he was captured as a slave in 1490; a gunshot victim seeks treatment; a young woman seeks romantic advice; Eduardo's wife, a Pentecostal, tells us that her husband is an instrument of Satan. Yo Soy Hechicero captures the intensity and spirituality of Eduardo's practices and gives a rare glimpse inside a mysterious and little-known world.
Director Ron Stanford
Genre Documentary
Year 1996
Length 48 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles None
From Maids to Compañeras
Former Black women domestic servants tell the story of their transformation from dispossessed and poor to full participants in the new social order after the Cuban revolution of 1959.
Director Jean Weisman and Belkis Vega
Genre Documentary
Year 1998
Length 24 min.
Language Spanish
Subtitles English
Sources
Allen, Jafari Sinclaire. "Looking Black at Revolutionary Cuba." Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 1 (2009): 53-62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27648159.
Aufderheide, Pat. "Latin American Film." Black Camera 3, no. 1 (1988): 3-4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761405.
Benson, Devyn Spence. "Sara Gómez: Afrocubana (Afro-Cuban Women’s) Activism after 1961." Cuban Studies, no. 46 (2019): 134-58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26614620.
Ebrahim, Haseenah. "Sarita and the Revolution: Race and Cuban Cinema." Revista Europea De Estudios Latinoamericanos Y Del Caribe / European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, no. 82 (2007): 107-18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25676257.
Giral, Sergio, Julianne Burton, and Gary Crowdus. "CUBAN CINEMA AND THE AFRO-CUBAN HERITAGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH SERGIO GIRAL." The Black Scholar 8, no. 8/9/10 (1977): 62-72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41058663.
Hayes, Robin. "Black and Cuba: Liberation, African American Studies, and the Tools of Third Cinema." Black Camera 7, no. 1 (2015): 42-59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.7.1.42.
Martínez-Echazábal, Lourdes. "The Politics of Afro-Cuban Religion in Contemporary Cuban Cinema." Afro-Hispanic Review 13, no. 1 (1994): 16-22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42656432.
Otero, Solimar. "Ikú and Cuban Nationhood: Yoruba Mythology in the Film Guantanamera." Africa Today 46, no. 2 (1999): 117-31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187270.