The Sugar Curtain (2005) User Reviews

Nostalgic and unsatisfying home movie

[mcnally · 6/10 · 26 December 2006]

I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival. Strangely and almost unintentionally apolitical, this film is a personal remembrance of growing up in the 70s and 80s in Cuba. The director seems to have shot all of the footage herself, making it more like a home movie. And it's incredibly nostalgic, with lots of comparisons of old photos with the present. But the film's thesis, if I can use a word that strong, is impossible to prove in this context, even if it's correct. The director seems to be saying that life in Cuba in her childhood was good, that Castro's revolution was achieving positive results and that the end of the Cold War was disastrous for Cuba. But this is pretty self-evident. We see a lot of run-down or abandoned buildings that were in good repair thirty years ago. We hear interviews with her classmates who agree that things aren't as good anymore. I don't want to sound facetious, but I could probably make a pretty similar film about my own childhood.

When she talks to students at her old high school, about the only privation she can uncover is that they no longer get snacks. In the director's childhood, they got chocolate biscuits and fizzy drinks. But in a society where the government provided so much (and still does, compared with the rest of the world), these examples seem a bit forced. I'm sure life in Cuba is difficult for many, but from the evidence of the film, it still seems to be doing pretty well. For a society that has withstood a trade embargo from the world's richest nation for more than fifty years, and whose biggest benefactor cut it off more than fifteen years ago, it's doing remarkably well. Its children are literate and fed, and it seems to have avoided the extremes of poverty seen in many parts of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Unfortunately, I think the director's complaints are fairly universal. The idealism we feel in our youth turns into disillusionment as we age. The forces of globalization and capitalism are affecting Cuba, even as Castro tries to hold them at bay. The fact that the director and many of her classmates left Cuba in the 1990s (during the "Special Period" that followed the end of the Cold War, a time of tremendous economic hardship for Cubans) also clouds the picture. How does her memory of Cuba as a socialist paradise differ from the memories of the anti- Castro crowd in Miami, who remember pre-revolutionary Cuba as a different kind of paradise? Both are unreliable and nostalgic.

While the film was enjoyable as a window into one person's experience, and it was great to see the modern footage of life on the island, overall I found it unsatisfying.

Memoir of a lost paradise of youth in post-revolutionary Cuba

[Chris Knipp · 7/10 · 11 May 2007]

When the Berlin Wall came down and then the Soviet Union fell Cuba had the rug pulled out from under it. More totally dependent on Russia than they knew, Cubans in the1990's faced a time of devastating scarcity they call the "Special Period." This meant hours waiting for a bus or a loaf of bread; no longer making enough to pay for basic necessities; no longer having security or hope for the future. Camila Guzmán Urzúa made The Sugar Curtain/ El Telón Azúkar to represent her experience and that of members of her generation -- who regard their growing-up time in the 1970's and 1980's as halcyon days of idealism, happiness, and hope. When the "Special Period" came, Guzmán and many others of the best and brightest of her generation left Cuba. This personal documentary is their story, their reminiscence, with a look at people and things in Cuba today filmed for comparison.

"It has been twelve years since I left Cuba," Guzmán writes in a statement to go with her film, "yet it is always on my mind.. . Now I go back and the old country has disappeared." Revisiting Cuba with a camera, Guzmán talks to family and friends and films her old schools and examines photos and documents and historical footage to fill in the background on three decades. If it provides a good deal of general information for non-Cubans along the way, The Sugar Curtain still isn't formal history or polemic. Though she covers good and bad aspects of "her" Cuba, Guzmán is not concerned with abstract critiques, ideological debates, or political analysis. More than anything, her film is the memoir of a childhood and the portrait of a faded dream.

Born in Chile, Guzmán was brought to Havana by her parents after the coup against Allende when she was two. Her parents believed in the ideals of the Cuban Revolution and were enthusiastic participants in its life. She grew up in Cuba, left in 1990 at age nineteen; lived and studied in Spain, England, and Chile; and for the past seven years has studied and worked France.

"We were raised according to 'revolutionary ideals,'" Guzmán says in her statement, "in a place where we all felt equal and where material values had lost importance. We were part of a huge laboratory, full of good intentions, in which the 'new man' that Che Guevara had imagined was being built.. . .We lived with a somewhat precarious daily comfort, used to the rationing or lack of certain products. But in Cuba, still today, people have always improvised (inventar we say) every problem has and still has a solution. . . It came naturally to us to receive medicine and education totally free; we considered it our right. All basic necessities were accessible to everybody. Unemployment didn't exist, everybody had a roof over his head.. . .I remember a sense of solidarity everywhere, and also the constant reminding of the fact the country could be invaded at any time. . " (But she adds in the film that she doesn't remember ever being afraid.) "Now. . .when I see (Cuba's) reality today I feel an immense emptiness inside. . . there is nothing left, only some of my dear friends, the buildings' facades and the sea. I feel as if my childhood has been torn away.. . The intention of this film is to rescue that reality we had when we were children.." Somewhat paradoxically, when Guzmán films students and classrooms in Cuba today, they are still full of the revolutionary ideals -- and as cheerful and happy as in the past. Otherwise everything is different: people feel the need to cheat and steal to survive, one woman says. There are two economies, of the peso and the dollar, and people think ceaselessly of money -- never a concern in the 1980's. The film makes no predictions. It only asks what will happen. The filmmaker says Cuba didn't have "real communism," because its economic situation was artificial, due to the combination of the US blockade and Russian support. The sense of equality and solidarity her generation talks about however was real, in her view. Neither socialism nor capitalism rules Cuba today, she says; both are present. Will western capitalism take over, or will there be a new Fidel-style capitalism? All that's clear is that Cuba's a shell now.

Guzmán's parents are separated and her father lives in Spain. Her mother, who remains in Havana, speaks only very briefly to the camera (with Guzmán seen in a mirror), haltingly expressing an enduring sadness about the coup against Allende and gratitude toward Cuba for the home and security it provided to them, along with citizenship, as it did to many others. The director has a friend who's in a musical group called Habana Abierta, who does a lot of talking; some of his group also speak, and we see them perform one political song at a concert.

Despite the film's sense of a lost paradise, paradoxically the filmed present-day Cuban schoolchildren still unmistakably seem happy. This is notable in classrooms, in school hallways, and most of all on a work-study summer vacation in the country much like the ones the filmmaker experienced at the same age. The saddest moment of the film is when Guzmán and a friend remember the names of several dozen of their good friends, who have all gone, to Chile, Argentina, Brazil, London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Canada, and on and on. One begins to suspect that whatever the voices in Miami may say, the Cuban Revolution nonetheless, for many, for three decades, was a time of great hope and no small accomplishment. Though the camera-work may be clumsy at times, the arc a bit inconclusive, the value of this personal documentary is its emotionally convincing portrait of a vanished childhood and lost ideals.

This first feature by Guzmán was shown as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2007.

Broken dreams

[jotix100 · 7/10 · 21 November 2011]

It is significant that at the end of this documentary, the filmmaker, Camila Guzman, while examining a class photograph with an old school mate, realizes almost all their fellow students in the picture are living in countries as far away as China, Argentina or Sweden and not in their native Cuba. What happened to that generation? That seems to be what Ms. Guzman is trying to analyze on a trip back to Cuba, years after she decamped for Europe herself.

The daughter of filmmaker Patricio Guzman, Camila, who was born in Chile, had to leave after the coup that deposed Salvador Allende, an admirer of the Cuban revolution and a communist himself. Cuba received the tide of new immigrants with open arms. At the time, most Cuban professionals with the means to emigrate, left their country, leaving a gap in the fields they practiced. Ms. Guzman and her family were given a furnished house, probably taken from a family going to the United States, and they were able to start a new life in a society with a communist model that could not be possible in the place they left behind.

Ms. Guzman, like many children of that era, had no idea about the shortages, the needs, or the miseries, less fortunate Cubans were going through at the time. After all, the Soviet Union was supplying its ally with the basics in a country that was not industrialized. Yet, she was a privileged girl with a happy life because all her needs were met without a struggle. In talking to a group of older women, those needs are clearly referred to, when someone explains how workers stole from their work places in order to subsist under the reigning conditions of the time.

In a reflective moment even Ms. Guzman has to admit how that Utopian society which she fondly remembers made her take deep look at herself in a self critical way, and how she was expected to turn in whoever was not considered a true revolutionary at the time. In retrospect, the dream the director was living in her adoptive country turned into a nightmare. While the documentary tries to be fair, it shows a country that is destroyed because of it has been living the slogans of a revolution maintained with Soviet money. That same revolution, ultimately betrayed even sympathizers like Ms. Guzman.

What happened to the 1980's generation in Cuba when the USSR's collapse did away with the "sugar curtain" that covered up Castro's internal contradictions

[hugo_manuel · 10/10 · 18 September 2006]

In the 1960's, a whole generation fell in love with the myth of revolution and gave themselves away to Castro's messianic plan for Cuba's redemption, hauling in hour after hour of labor and sacrifice. By the mid-70's, such hopes and dreams had been severely beaten by more than 10 years of Quixotic economic attempts at transforming, Mao-style, Cuba's nascent cultural, political and social republican status. Castro's failed plan to produce the largest sugarcane harvest ever had left Cubans tired and confused.

Camila Guzman's "The Sugar Curtain" introduces us to the generation whose teenage years happened in the 1980's. Sugar-coated by a mild yet stable economic bonanza heavily supported by the USSR, which would pour in billions of dollars in exchange for Castro's military and strategic support, in the region and around the world, this generation was led to believe their parents sacrifices in the 1960-1970's had not been for nothing and that they were now in charge of taking the "new society" to the next level.

The director shows an exquisite sensibility as well as an even hand at portraying how this generation's dreams and hopes crashed when the USSR's debacle prevented Castro from continuing sugar-coating his system's internal contradictions. Her images and her voice takes us back into history and then to the present with an intense nostalgia that never hits a melodramatic note. At some point, the documentary reminds us of Orwell's 1984 and his premonitions about communist-dictatorships such as Big Brother's slogan "the party is immortal", which was in fact one of Castro's own slogans in the 1980's. With a touch of humor, Guzman's presents how the Cuban Communist Party's newspaper introduced Cubans to the fall of the Berlin Wall by saying "The Democratic German Republic opens its doors to the West", which exactly is how the good son in "Good bye Lenin" tried to help his mother understand the historical event, so she didn't have to lose her sugary vision of communism. Again, life imitates fiction.

This documentary is a very solid start for a young director who shows an able hand, and a poignant vision.

Nice try but no (Cuban) cigar

[anasamas · 4/10 · 14 May 2007]

I am certain that the filmmaker's intention was to go home to Cuba, interview old friends, relatives, and anyone else she could find to document how much things have changed in her homeland in the last twenty years. She manages to find a few mildly entertaining characters who help to make her point but the problem with "The Sugar Curtain" is that we see the changes that have taken place in the past few decades but the viewer is left with the obvious question: "What CAUSED things to change"? The breakup of the Soviet Union is hinted at but did this have a direct impact on the Cuban economy? What about the U.S. embargo on all Cuban products? Many of us have had to resort to smuggling in order to obtain our prized Havana-made stogies! Has the U.S. travel ban to Cuba had a major impact? What about Castro? He is rarely referenced.

Unfortunately, none of these questions are answered. Instead of getting a satisfying documentary, we're left with a half-baked version of "You Can't Go Home Again"