Thursday December 4, 2025 | 9:00AM  10:45AM

LBC 203 Stibbs

Session Abstract

The contemporary Caribbean mediascape exists in a state of dichotomy. As Jossianna Arroyo notes, Caribbean images often function not as direct reflections of reality, but as metaphorical incursions into two opposing imaginaries: one of leisure, upheld by idyllic beaches, resorts, and natural beauty; the other of extreme violence, political unrest, and ecological disaster. Tracing how media circulate affect and power through narratives shaped by tourism, authoritarianism, and imperial dominance, this panel engages with the tensions between the Caribbean’s promise of paradise and the signs of environmental collapse. Through case studies from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Mexican Caribbean, the panel explores how film and media in the Hispanic Caribbean depict human and non-human life amid environmental degradation and neocolonial control. The presentations address intersecting issues of environmental justice, colonial memory, and hegemonic authority.

 

• Reynaldo Lastre (College of the Holy Cross), chair and moderator), “Nuclear Toxicity as Political Critique in Blue Heart by Miguel Coyula”

This presentation offers an ecocritical analysis of the Cuban science fiction film Corazón azul (Blue Heart, Miguel Coyula, 2021), which imagines the devastating consequences of nuclear technology through a dystopian lens. The film stages ecological collapse and authoritarianism as mutually reinforcing processes, embedding nuclear toxicity within a broader critique of environmental degradation, political repression, and failed techno-utopian promises. Drawing on ecocinema theory, particularly the work of Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Seán Cubitt (2013), I argue that cinema serves not only to document ecological crises but also to activate ethical reflection and inspire the imagination of alternative futures. As these scholars contend, ecocinema can provoke, disturb, and engage its audiences, challenging dominant modes of production and their environmental consequences. Blue Heart constructs an alternate Cuban history in which the Juraguá nuclear power plant was completed and triggered a catastrophic accident. The resulting radioactive contamination affects both human subjects and the surrounding environment, while the government denies the disaster in order to preserve its political legitimacy. Coyula’s film uses this speculative scenario to explore how toxicity disrupts official narratives, transforms bodies, and generates forms of resistance. Toxic exposure becomes a metaphor for the instability of ideological systems and the unpredictable effects of technological modernity. Additionally, I consider the productive ambivalence of toxicity. Drawing on Robert A. Rushing’s work on cinematic toxicity, I explore how contamination functions not only as a threat but also as a narrative of potential transformation. While many films frame toxic exposure as a danger to be neutralized, others—Blue Heart among them—portray it as a force capable of generating new forms of subjectivity and power. In doing so, the film challenges inherited binaries of nature and technology, health and contamination, and invites a critical reflection on the intersections between science, sovereignty, and ecological justice.

• Emily A. Maguire (Northwestern University), “Slugs at the Door, Tentacles in the Bedroom: Environmental Crisis in José Luis Aparicio’s Tundra”

 In the speculative fever dream that is Cuban director José Luis Aparicio’s short film Tundra (2021), the citizens of Havana ignore the scenes of environmental crisis that surround them. The film’s protagonist, Walfrido Larduet, goes about his day as an electrical inspector, nearly oblivious to the omnipresence of pesticide sprayers and posted warnings about hazardous substances and only minorly concerned the gigantic slug-like creatures that have invaded both public spaces and his living room. Instead, he spends his free hours searching Havana’s urban wastelands for a mysterious woman he may or may not have hallucinated, who he witnesses copulating with a many-tentacled being. Although the near apocalyptic scenario of Aparicio’s film remains focused on local detail, revealing little about the state of Cuban society, this talk reads the film’s environmental dimension as a stand-in for the political. If Donna Haraway urges us to “stay with the trouble,” to be present to the complexities of our current existence and to “make kin” with the creatures around us, the disengagement of the film’s human protagonists from their changing environment signals broader socio-political crises. Seen in this context, Larduet’s fantasies, like the film’s speculative dimension, open a door to alternate ways of being.

• Juan Carlos Rodríguez (The Georgia Institute of Technology), “Vieques, Archives, Bodies: The Quest for Environmental Justice Across Media Practices”

For more than 60 years, the military facilities on the island of Vieques were part of the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility (1941-2003), on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. The US Navy trained its military forces by simulating war situations that included amphibious landings, naval gunfire, and air-to-ground bombings, some of which were conducted with live explosives. Over the past 26 years, I have developed various media projects that explore the history of Vieques, both before and after the US Navy’s departure from the island in 2003. My public digital humanities project, Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive, is a collection of interviews that tells the story of Vieques’s demilitarization movement. Using materials from the Vieques Struggle project, I completed my first long feature documentary, Vieques: A Living Archive. The film focuses on the environmental and health costs of the US military presence while looking at the dilemmas of post-Navy Vieques. The toxic waste of the US Navy has compromised the future, leaving Viequenses with all the uncertainties of an irreversible ecological crisis. Limited access to health services poses a risk for Viequenses, a population with a higher cancer rate than the rest of Puerto Rico. In this presentation, I share some lessons on how to elaborate archival media projects, based on social and environmental justice struggles, that examine practices of listening, language, and performance to explore the complex and intertwined history of bodies and territories. I will also examine how different media practices involving still and moving images open possibilities to raise questions about environmental justice in connection to concepts such as the nomos of the earth, biopolitics, slow violence, the Black Anthropocene, and civil disobedience.

• Justo Planas (Le Moyne College), “Framing Paradise: Mexican Film and the Tourist Imaginary of the Caribbean”

A promotional video of Yucatán Dive Trek invites divers of all levels to venture into the protected area of the Banco Chinchorro Biosphere Reserve, under the incentive that it is “accessible only by special permit.” Under the water—the video promises—tourists will find pristine reefs, manatees, and crocodiles; above the water, ancient Mayan ruins await. The experience—they say—is well off the beaten track.
Featured in several notable film festivals, from Havana and Miami to Toronto and Berlin, the Mexican film Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio, 2009) is also set in the protected and prohibitive Banco Chinchorro. In analyzing Alamar and its representation of human and non-human beings, this presentation interrogates the interplay between film and tourism in the Caribbean.
On the one hand, I connect Alamar with a trend in Latin American films favored by major festivals, characterized by what Laura Podalsky terms an aesthetic of detachment, which combines characters seemingly removed from reality with an embodied spectatorship. For Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula, these films present visually and mentally comfortable images while enhancing “a distant window, peeking at another culture from the safety of high above.”
On the other hand, my presentation analyzes this aesthetic within the touristic brand of fantasy created by and aimed at First World consumers, which, as Echtner and Prasad demonstrate, reduces the reality of many Caribbean spaces to a “sand and sea” type of marketing and experience. I demonstrate how Alamar plays on what Christoph Hennig defines as touristic myths, including the myth of nature, the noble savage, and the paradise.
Understanding the connection between Caribbean cinema and tourism can shed light on how certain narratives gain global traction, often achieving greater success in film festivals and academic circles. At the same time, interrogating the aestheticization of Caribbean ecotourism can open space for more grounded conversations on environmental justice.