Saturday December 6, 2025 | 9:00AM – 10:45AM

Greenleaf Conference Room (Jones Hall, 1st Floor)

Roundtable Abstract

Este panel explora cómo los cines cubanos contemporáneos, dentro y fuera de la isla, se reconfiguran a través de estéticas intermediales, archivos afectivos y narrativas diaspóricas que traspasan los límites del cine nacional. A partir del concepto de “La Gran Cuba” propuesto por Ana López (1993), se examinan producciones audiovisuales que cuestionan la política de la memoria, la representación de la migración, la maternidad, el género y el trauma colectivo, con el objetivo de articular una constelación de nuevas formas de expresión transnacional y de resistencias tanto estéticas como ideoteméticas.

En un momento en que las condiciones geopolíticas y culturales desafían la circulación de saberes y la movilidad de cuerpos e imágenes, este panel propone un diálogo que parte del análisis de filmes contemporáneos como Parole de Lázaro González, Venecia de Kiki Álvarez,

Adiós Cuba de Rolando Díaz, Los puros y La línea del ombligo de Carla Valdés León, El aniversario de Patricia Ramos, Código Marcos de Patricia Pérez y Liena Cid, Otra isla de Heidi Hassan, y Loud and Clear de Daniellis Hernández para responder a preguntas que interrogan por ¿cómo se produce y circula el audiovisual cubano contemporáneo dirigido desde y fuera de la isla?, ¿de qué modo la intermedialidad opera como un puente entre lo íntimo y lo histórico en las narrativas del cine cubano más allá de la nación?, y ¿cómo podemos transformar nuestra labor académica de investigadores y docentes en una plataforma activa para el reconocimiento, y la proyección de voces, estéticas y memorias desplazadas?.

En resumen, en lugar de entender el cine cubano como una categoría monolítica e inamovible, el panel propone pensar en su visibilización como un campo activo, transfronterizo y en constante reinvención donde emergen nuevos modos de narrar el hogar, el hogar, la experiencia diaspórica, y las representaciones de raza, género y nación. Este enfoque se sitúa en territorios intersticiales marcados por el in-betweenness, donde los límites entre archivo y repertorio, isla y diáspora, cuerpo y tecnología se desdibujan, abriendo espacio a una producción transfronteriza, intermedial y afectiva que reclama pertenencia y visibilidad desde el margen.

Presenters

• Margaret Frohlich (Dickinson College), “Intermediality and Archive in Rolando Díaz’s Adiós Cuba”

Since 2021, Cuba has experienced the largest migratory wave of its history with a precipitous decline in its population. The difficulty of estimating the exact number of people who have left the country contributes to the invisibility of their lived experience of exodus. ¿Where does the body in exodus reside? It leaves the boundary of the nation-state that registered its presence and rendered it intelligible, at least in official terms. How does the body in exodus, on the way out, come to in-habit a state of belonging? Cuban director, Rolando Díaz, who has lived in Valencia, Spain for decades, boldly confronts the horrors of the Cuban exodus in his most recent film Adiós Cuba (2025). This paper examines how the film’s use of intermediality amplifies cinema’s potential to act as a repository of cultural memory. Adíos Cuba follows protagonist, Caridad (Yuliet Cruz), in her creation of a theatrical production about embodied experiences of the Cuban exodus. Caridad and the theatrical team’s cooperative and creative efforts are based on real-life, first-person

accounts. The film blends the genres of documentary and fiction and incorporates multiple types of media: theatrical performance, still image photography, text, and music. This approach weaves together the ephemeral nature of theatrical performance and the more lasting archival quality of the image and blurs the production time of fiction film and the real-time of documentary. The resultant aesthetic of departure interrupts and pushes beyond the temporal and spatial locks of the nation-state to welcome what Ana López theorized as “Greater Cuba”.

• Zaira Zarza (Université de Montréal), “Feminist Refugee Narratives in Cuban Cinema: Migration Documentaries by Women Diasporic Filmmakers”

Amid ongoing waves of migration caused by war, climate change, and political and economic crises, migration has resurfaced as a defining issue of the twenty-first century. In addition, diasporic experiences—shaped by displacement, integration, and return—are increasingly challenged by xenophobic policies worldwide. In response, diasporic filmmakers have turned to social justice documentaries (Bönisch-Brednich and Meyer 2024, Hiltunen 2019, Zalipour 2019) as powerful tools to contest humanitarian discourse and expose the limitations of compassion-driven narratives that often overlook the structural consequences of migration or depict them through an alien “view from above” (von Moltke 2024: 479). Documentaries also play a crucial role in creating emotional connections with viewers, raising awareness, inciting

responsibility, and fostering empathy toward refugees, asylum seekers, temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants (Briciu 2020). This paper analyzes how Cuban diasporic filmmakers address these themes in two selected films focused on women refugees. Heidi Hassan’s Another Island (2014) portrays the journey of a dama de blanco who, after arriving in Spain with her family, becomes homeless and spends eight months camping in protest outside the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Similarly, as a member of the Berlin-based organization Women in Exile, Daniellis Hernández produced Loud and Clear (2016) to record the complex journeys of African and Eastern European women seeking asylum in Germany. Both low-budget and deeply committed films present shared traumatic migration experiences by centering gendered and racialized dimensions of political refuge and championing feminist agency and community building as key strategies to thrive in forced displacement.

• Maybel Mesa Morales (Lycoming College, chair and moderator), “Maternar el archivo: intermedialidad afectiva y resistencias íntimas en el audiovisual cubano realizado por mujeres”

Este trabajo propone la noción de maternidad intermedial como una herramienta teórica para pensar el cuerpo materno como un archivo vivo, donde confluyen capas de memoria personal y colectiva. Me apoyo en los aportes de Laura U. Marks sobre la visualidad háptica, de Marianne Hirsch sobre la postmemoria, y de Diana Taylor sobre el archivo y el repertorio, para analizar cómo en un corpus de filmes de las directoras Patricia Ramos (El aniversario, 2022), Carla Valdés (Los Puros, 2020 y La línea del ombligo, 2024) y Patricia Pérez junto a Liena Cid (Código Marcos, 2025), se presentan figuras maternas que a través de gestos, objetos, fotografías, grabaciones, silencios y texturas, se transforman en soportes afectivos capaces de mediar entre lo íntimo y lo político, entre la historia familiar y la memoria nacional. Estos cuatro filmes establecen un diálogo intermedial e intergeneracional mediante una constelación de imágenes caseras, grabaciones de voz, cartas, música y fotografías que se yuxtaponen, ya sea implícita o explícitamente -como en el caso de la obra de Valdés- con materiales de archivo estatal. Sin embargo, en lugar de reproducir narrativas heroicas, las directoras optan por un lenguaje cinematográfico fragmentario y sensorial que sitúa la escucha, la fragilidad y lo doméstico como centros de la experiencia histórica. Estas propuestas audiovisuales no se erigen desde la confrontación directa, sino desde la yuxtaposición con lo cotidiano, lo afectivo y lo relegado, articulando así un contraarchivo que interpela los modos institucionales o “icaicentristas” (García Borrero) de representar tanto la experiencia maternal como el pasado nacional. Por tanto, la presentación advierte cómo las maternidades intermediales configuran una poética de resistencia, ginocrítica (Zecchi) donde la memoria se encarna en cuerpos, objetos y vínculos, desplazando las lógicas hegemónicas de representación por un archivo vivo en constante transformación, donde se negocian los afectos, memorias, roles maternos y horizontes políticos a nivel nacional y transnacional. Por otro lado, la presentación sitúa estos audiovisuales en el contexto académico norteamericano y los esfuerzos por imaginar modos de visibilización del cine de mujeres para presentar mi contribución a través de un proyecto de humanidades digitales desarrollado durante dos veranos con el apoyo de tres estudiantes. Emerging from the Shadows: Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Cuban Cinema es un proyecto incipiente en fase de desarrollo, que consiste en un sitio web con una base de datos de realizadoras cubanas, junto a 8 entrevistas conducidas en Cuba, la EICTV y Miami en el verano 2023 a directoras, productoras, docentes y críticas de cine. El sitio también recoge una muestra de carteles y

recursos pedagógicos dentro de los que se encuentran trabajos de mis estudiantes como video ensayos y portafolios.

• Michelle Leigh Farrell (Fairfield University), “Homelessness Across Borders and Mediums: The Politics of Movement in Lázaro González’s Parole (2024)”

Created during the build-up to the 2024 US elections and awarded best documentary at The Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale University (LIFFY) only days after the current US administration’s November election, Lázaro González’s Parole captures an ephemeral geopolitical moment. Combining WhatsApp voice messages of his mother in Cuba with the complex soundscape and images of his urban realities in California, the title offers a play on the word “parole”. First, in terms of speaking or “parlare”, off-island son and on-island mother struggle to communicate their own local realities across distance despite their increased access to digital technologies in both countries. As the two attempt and fail to digitally express their decisions to leave or stay, the film continues decades of missed communications captured in cinemas of La Gran Cuba harkening back to Padrón’s digital 2001 film Video de familia. González offers a look at his status in the US as a type of figurative and privileged

homelessness while he directs the camera to share images of California residents living unhoused in the streets of San Francisco. Adding to the changing stories of La Gran Cuba and reshaping of exile cinemas to diasporic cinemas, Parole is filmed in the US during the Biden-Harris policy. Referencing the short-lived humanitarian immigration parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans the personal and the political unite. The documentary serves as an archive to the ephemeral program while hinting at parallels between Cuban and US treatment of citizens, migrants and immigrants as pawns in a larger and unstable geopolitical chess game as a high-stakes dialogue happens with loud speakers and few listeners. The film concludes with looming news of the policy’s end, as community members face uncertainties and looming moves ahead. The documentary asks its viewers to consider the weight of borders, policies, and figurative and literal states of homelessness while also thinking about the personal stories behind such decisions. I conclude by reflecting on film critic Patricia White’s call to not only analyze the workings of films as text, but also her urge to consider “the travels of films” themselves. These travels include how the films that we see and those we have access to form part of a web of institutional questions of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception in a larger landscape of power or in other words- the geopolitics of film(13). As questions on whether finding a literal home is even possible for those in the film, I conclude with a look at how specific films such as this one reach audiences through collaborations with ephemeral small film festivals and hopefully find more stable archival homes in the near future so that these border crossings and intimate stories remain visible and find audiences open to listening.

• Ruth Goldberg (SUNY Empire State College), “Venecia and Me: A Post-Viral Inquiry on Autotheory, Cuban Cinema and Narrative Healing”

In this presentation, I describe the process of writing a book about the film Venecia (Kiki Álvarez, 2014) against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which I came to understand this film about female friendships as a feminist healing narrative. In collaboration with screenwriter/actress Claudia Muñiz, I examine Venecia through mythic tropes, Black feminist thought, and the praxis of relational scholarship. The book is an experiment in autotheory, shaped by my experience of teaching film and mythology in Cuba over many years; my close friendships with Kiki Álvarez and Claudia Muñiz, and the experience of adapting to life with Long Covid and a neurodivergent brain: inviting ruptures of form, of critical distance, and of inherited academic authority. The project reflects on Venecia as an unconscious re-telling of the canonical Cuban narrative Cecilia Valdés, offering a counter-narrative and a vital corrective to the essentialist trope of the “tragic mulatta” that lives on in cultural mythologies about mixed-race women in the Americas. At the same time, the book maps a journey: from illness to insight, from isolation to communion. Framed around Carl Jung’s enduring question “What is the myth you are living?” the project explores the concepts of “narrative healing” to look at the conditions under which change can become possible, both within individual lives and in the life of a nation.