Two decades ago, León Ichaso’s 1996 film Bitter Sugar couldn’t get a break even from its most sympathetic critics. Achy Obejas, for example, started her review for the Chicago Tribune acknowledging many of its merits. She praised the “nuanced, rich portraits” that Cuban exile actors Miguel Gutiérrez, René Laván and Mayte Vilán made of Cubans struggling with the dire living conditions in Cuba immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. She remarked on the “surprisingly innovative” black-and-white cinematography, praising its experimental mix of shots—some taken illegally by a clandestine auxiliary crew on location in Havana; others based on scripted scenes filmed by Ichaso in Santo Domingo; plus rough footage donated by independent island journalists of the infamous maleconazo impromptu protest on August 1994. Still, like most reviewers at the time, Obejas believed that overt anti-Castro politicking compromised the artistic integrity of an otherwise promising film. Rather than “a personal, artistic testament,” Bitter Sugar was “ultimately flawed,” since its Castro-demonizing climax ended up transforming the movie into a single-minded political statement. But is the film really so single-minded?
In the movie the protagonist is Gustavo Valdés. Played by Laván, he is an ambitious Communist youth loyal to the regime and to the ideal of the “New Man.” Recently graduated from the Lenin High School with high marks, he waits for a state scholarship to come through to go study engineering in Prague. However, Gustavo realizes the hypocrisy of the Castro regime as he witnesses how, in order to cope with the post-Soviet crisis, the state constructs a system of economic and social apartheid that caters to the whims and the profitability of a growing and quite predatory touristic industrial complex.
The issue here is of survival in catastrophic times. The film registers the impact, at the human level, of neoliberal globalization on a Cuba made harrowingly vulnerable after losing the Soviet subsides that had made its brand of socialism more or less sustainable for thirty years. Gustavo sees how this skewed system perturbs the life of each of his loved ones. His father Tomás, played by Gutiérrez, is a respected psychiatrist and widower who once believed in the revolution, but becomes a sardonic and disillusioned alcoholic as he is forced to work as a lowly piano entertainer to make ends meet. State police harass and detain his brother Bobby, a rebellious, anti-establishment rock musician, as part of a security initiative to keep streets clean and venues free of disruptive dissidents. In angry protest, Bobby deliberately infects himself with the AIDS virus and ends up confined in an asylum reminiscent of the 1960s UMAP camps.
Gustavo then has to overcome jealousy and shame as he realizes that Yolanda, his Castro-hating, distraught girlfriend, played by Vilán, has been prostituting herself at hotels with foreigners under the tacit lenience of state police in charge of surveillance. In a confrontation with his Lenin High School mentor Professor García, Gustavo confirms what he’s been suspecting all along—that the scholarship was a sham, the last simulation of an international socialist support system now defunct. Shaken by such betrayal and humiliation, when Yolanda, who has agreed to marry him, decides to tearfully join the 1994 rafter exodus, Gustavo stays behind.
“Fleeing is not the answer”, he tells himself. Gustavo’s behavior then takes a desperate and very implausible turn. At a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolución, he lurches for the gun of an undercover officer and aims at the Líder Máximo, who is warning the public about harder times to come. “I’m not going to pretend that things are looking rosy. We have a tense situation with the fuel supply,” we hear Castro himself say as a security sniper spots Gustavo in the thick of the crowd and kills him with one clean shot while the crowd remains unperturbed. The camera rises to register Gustavo as a martyred body, a defeated angel, while intercutting to a grainy, rather Satanic, close-up of footage of the dictator himself, giving one of his “Special Period” speeches. Fidel thus appears identified as the unequivocal evil cause of the island’s predicament. Obejas was not impressed: “The film’s final blow to credibility comes at the end, when Ichaso, instead of trusting the viewer to understand his message, resorts to melodrama. The conclusion, while purely cathartic for exiles, is pure propaganda.”
The film’s far-fetched climax did not only displease newspaper reviewers such as Obejas. Despite its many supporters and a big promotional push by the Cuban art community in the states, several prestigious film festivals declined to screen it. The film ran to acclaim at Miami and Chicago, but the New York Film Festival turned it down, leading to a controversy in the New York Post that spread and made national news. In a letter to the Post editor and in ensuing press interviews, Ichaso and other Cuban filmmakers in the US accused festival chairman Richard Peña of unjustly ignoring Bitter Sugar and other deserving Cuban-themed submissions that had a strong anti-Castro slant. The writers argued that Peña’s “pattern of intolerance” toward films made by Cuban exiles dated back to 1980s, when Peña, a friend to many directors of the Cuban Institute of Film Arts and Industry (ICAIC) and a regular guest at the Havana Film Festival, accused Orlando Jiménez Leal and Nestor Almendros of intending their 1984 prize-winning Human Rights documentary Improper Conduct (which denounced state persecution of homosexuals in Cuba) as “an attack [against] the stability of Cuban revolution.” Peña responded by echoing Obejas’ complaint, saying that Bitter Sugar had not been selected since it failed as a work of art: “Bitter Sugar had some merits, but parts of it are very clunkily directed and acted…it didn’t make a strong impression.” Informed of Peña’s renewed dismissal, Ichaso retorted in a Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel article: “Mr. Peña is afraid of severing his close ties with Havana…He doesn’t want to get down there and have his bottom spanked.”
Despite its controversial ending, contemporary viewers of Bitter Sugar should in any case appreciate Ichaso’s work differently and not just as a movie fixated with Castro or with demonizing castrismo per se. In the rest of the film, Castro’s image is not treated ominously as a dangerous evil icon. When Castro’s face first appears, it is connected with the Guevarian ideal of the “New Man” as Gustavo gives himself a revolutionary pep talk while looking in the mirror with Fidel’s photo behind him. Later, a huge, building-size street poster of Fidel’s youthful profile—no older than 40 and haranguing a microphone with famous passion—is repeatedly associated with the character of Soraya, a jinetera or street prostitute that we see on the prowl for clients throughout the film.
This recurring motif suggests that Fidel’s regime is not based on a cult-of-personality, repressive state-of-force following the model of Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il-Sung. Rather, Castro/Soraya represents the dependent neo-colonial territory that has to prostitute itself romancing world powers and foreign corporate investors in order to survive, one that has lost its previous Soviet “sugar daddy” and now has to sell its charms and favors to new global “johns.” In the movie, these new “johns” are the representatives of Italian and Spanish financial conglomerates that have colluded with the Cuban communist party and armed forces in order to make all islanders contribute their share of sweat, blood, and sex to a tourist-centered capitalist economy servicing global leisure. “My son,” Tomás tells Gustavo during a visit to his mother’s tomb, “We are back to colonial times. The revolution is on sale.”
In Retrospect
Bitter Sugar should thus not be remembered as a run-off-the-mill anti-Castro propaganda film as much as a layered portrayal of post-Soviet disillusion in Cuba: the state of existential melancholia or desencanto that critics such as Odette Casamayor, Esther Whitfield, Jacqueline Loss and Jorge Fornet have diagnosed in the post-89 fictions written by Cuban writers who either chose or were raised to support the revolution—such as Wendy Guerra, Ena Lucía Portela, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, and Leonardo Padura.
As with these works of literature, Bitter Sugar deals with the traumatic loss of ideals among desperate Cubans acutely vulnerable to a new global hegemony of capitalist exploitation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most of the movie thus doesn’t reflect the unrelenting anti-Castro, anti-communist, and anti-twenty-six-of-July guerrilla movement grudge of previous Cuban exile film productions. It grants a measure of legitimacy to aspects of the revolution before the collapse of the Soviet Union since this movie was made to appeal to those who, like Gustavo, had believed in the revolution in one way or another until that point.
The under-acknowledged artfulness of Bitter Sugar becomes clear once we see how Ichaso opens up his film up to an archive of revolutionary visual, filmic, and literary influences and idioms—many of ICAIC extraction—that could resonate with Cuban island viewers in the 1990s. In several interviews Ichaso explained that he conceived Bitter Sugar as a film to be seen inside Cuba by way of bootleg VHS tapes. Then, as today, pirated media had a wide informal distribution through a strong network of home theaters with video-players—despite the embargo and state security vigilance.
Asked in 2000 whether he knew if the film had ever been screened on the island, Ichaso replied with a hyperbolic claim and a personal anecdote: “Bitter Sugar became a huge, huge video film [in Cuba]. In 1998 a friend of ours went to Havana and […] located my nanny. She called me in L.A. […] and the next thing she says was, ‘I saw Bitter Sugar. Why in black and white?’ My nanny that I hadn’t talked to since 1961!” With news about Cuban ruination and pauperization, the rafter exodus, and the AIDS quarantine centers saturating world media in 1994, exile artists like Ichaso were inspired to intervene in their own way to give the regime a final push towards transition.
In the case of Bitter Sugar this did not mean instigating the exile fantasy of assassinating Castro—“I am a film maker, not a terrorist” was a line Ichaso repeated in interviews while promoting the movie. (I personally believe that the film’s absurd climax and “ultimate flaw” may have been Ichaso’s pragmatic concession to financers focusing on mining Miami’s box office returns, although I can’t prove this). Instead, it meant addressing Cubans on the island in a more direct and powerful way, one that would take fully in mind the nature of their predicament rather than replicate the propaganda of Radio and TV Martí and other US anti-Castro venues. Ichaso may have wanted to destabilize Castro’s hegemony, as Peña worried regarding Improper Conduct, but in a way consonant with critical views from within the island rather than from the exile community.
Evoking Gutiérrez Alea
In order to achieve this balance between local and exile film narrative and esthetic expectations, Ichaso, who left Cuba at fourteen in 1963 and thus could not draw on his own experience to achieve the film’s “insider pathos,” had to engage two major influences, those of two Cuban artists who had once worked inside the revolution and remained independent enough to express critical desencanto with its process.
The first is celebrated ICAIC film director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. On the one hand, Bitter Sugar pays homage to Gutiérrez’s Alea’s 1967 classic Memories of Underdevelopment in its experimental filmic depiction of personal and generalized alienation in Havana during a traumatic moment of geopolitical and global realignment. So claimed Ichaso himself in an April 1997 interview with Mexico’s Reforma newspaper: “We filmed in black-and-white film to evoke that movie that I so admire, Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment, specially the montages of the protagonist roaming through Havana, which were very similar.” Bitter Sugar alludes to Memories right at the start by using the ICAIC signature font type in its opening credits over a montage sequence that, like that in Alea’s film, mixes takes of recognizable Havana streets and sites to then shift into a frenzied musical performance and dance.
In Memories a man is killed and carried away during a rumba bembé. In Bitter Sugar an underground hard rock concert is interrupted by abusive state police. At the same time, Bitter Sugar both engages and refutes the melancholic optimism of Strawberry and Chocolate, Gutierrez Alea’s 1994 international movie hit that, although critical of revolutionary homophobia, expressed confidence in the revolution’s capacity to reform itself by recognizing and rectifying its mistakes. In his film, Ichaso makes bitter that movie’s sweet sadness.
The second influence, certainly the most important, is that of Ichaso’s father, the poet Justo Rodríguez Santos. Critics obsessed with the failed “clunky ending” have so far failed to fully appreciate how or why the film references Rodríguez Santos’s work at the very start of the film. The movie opens with an epigraph by the poet, two stanzas from “Retornos” (Returnings), a poem dedicated to fellow poet Gastón Baquero, from Santos’ 1979 collection Los naipes conjurados: “I will return where the sea / with clearest accent / unveiled to me its winding legend and / retrieve the lost mandolin that / waves its blind arms in the wind! / I will sail across my smile anew / I will converse with my broken words / My eyes will recover their gulls and / from my ashes a star will be born.”
His Father’s Story
In Bitter Sugar Ichaso reconstructs his father’s story of disillusionment with the revolution by lifting it from the 1960s and bringing it to the 1990s. Born in 1915, Rodríguez Santos was part, with José Lezama Lima and Baquero, of the cohort of poets that collaborated in all the journals that Lezama Lima edited, from Verbum (1936) up to Orígenes (1944-1956). The author of vibrant, formally exquisite poems full of Lorquian echoes and Whitmanian flashes, Rodríguez Santos stood apart from the core Orígenes group in that he was not a pious, practicing Catholic. He was instead an eccentric artistic outlier who relished counter-cultural trends and embraced a beatnik-like radical ethos in his forties; in Recuerdos compartidos, a 1980 book of reminiscing anecdotes, his daughter Mari Rodríguez Ichaso, a co-producer of Bitter Sugar, remembers him as “the first hippy I ever met.”
Probably inspired by the work of Man Ray and Max Ernst, Rodríguez Santos also became an experimental photographer. He incorporated some of their odd camera angles, startling light-and-shadow scenarios, montages, and other surrealist concepts into his studio work. In the 1950s he became a commercial filmmaker, TV and radio producer, and broadcaster who devised “audio-poems” for radio theater. With Virgilio Piñera and José Rodríguez Feo, Rodríguez Santos was also one of the few origenistas who wholeheartedly embraced Castro’s revolution from its beginnings; others, like Cinto Vitier and Fina García Marruz, would do so much later. As a poet, he became one of the most enthusiastic propagandists of the Castro saga, writing a long epic poem commemorating the 1953 Moncada attack on its tenth anniversary titled La epopeya del Moncada. It became required reading in Cuba’s schools and was translated to most languages of the socialist bloc. The poem even earned the praise of Mao Zedong.
In the first decade of the Revolution, Rodríguez Santos thus became Fidel’s bard, the revolution’s Homer. However, after a 1967 trip to Russia and China that disheartened him deeply (just like Gustavo’s failed trip to Prague), Rodríguez Santos saw the error of his beliefs, became bitterly disillusioned with Cuba’s socialist adventure, and, after months of hardships, defected in Mexico to join his estranged family in New York City. He continued writing and publishing poetry while working as creative director in ad agencies. In 1972, according to the New York Times, he became director of advertising at Goya Foods in Seacaucus, N.J. Could it be that an Orígenes poet and former Castro apologist may also have authored the commercial slogan “If it’s Goya it has to be great”?
Just like in Bitter Sugar, the Rodriguez-Ichaso story is one of a family clan split apart by its disagreements over Castro’s revolution. Antonia Ichaso, Justo’s wife and sister of the noted essayist Francisco Ichaso, was a member of a high middle class, anti-communist Catholic family of intellectuals and media personalities that fled the country when Cuba became aligned with the Soviet Union. Antonia left with the children the year after Justo wrote the poem that consecrated him as Castro’s Homer; Justo stayed behind to live up to his convictions. The fierce, bitter tone of disenchantment and defeat in the drunken lines of Tomás throughout the film, that of a former militant forced to become an entertainer for the revolution who stayed in the island even though his wife had begged him to leave, were probably inspired by father-and-son exchanges between Justo and León after they rejoined and reconciled in New York City: “I’m exhausted, busting my balls pounding the piano […] in a shitty job for this joke of a revolution and I didn’t leave because I believed in it. There’s never been a love story more beautiful than this revolution.”
After their reunion Justo and León would become frequent collaborators, filming ad campaigns in Puerto Rico, New York, and Miami. The intricate lighting and atmospheric use of shadow in Bitter Sugar’s cinematography pays homage to Justo’s photographic work. Justo died in 1999. Even at his old age, he appears to have been involved in the film’s genesis and production process just as his daughter was; his name and Antonia’s appear at the end of the acknowledgments in the credits. But the scripted lines that most resonate with the Rodriguez Santos-Ichaso family experience are those of Gustavo’s mentor, Professor García.
Admitting his duplicity when confronted by Gustavo, he says that he keeps supporting the revolution out of a stubborn sense of pride: “I have to keep playing the game. It is was it is […] My whole family is in Miami. What do you want me to tell them, that I messed up [me equivoqué]? I can’t do that now. I’m screwed [me jodí].” Swallowing pride and accepting the shame of false dreams and betrayed love is just what Justo had to do when he reunited with his family to say “me equivoqué.” That is the contrite self-recognition this film was designed to inspire in Cuba’s party faithful and loyalists. Despite its “clunky” melodramatic climax, it was not about encouraging Cubans to run out, grab a gun, and go take care of Castro.
Because it is a compassionate and complex portrayal of Cuban vulnerability during the Special Period crisis rather than a film only catering to anti-Castro fanaticism, Bitter Sugar survives as a document of its time. By incorporating the works of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Justo Rodríguez Santos into its visual vernacular, it in fact opened a way in which to conceive and interpret Cuban diaspora and island film productions as part of one cinematic matrix and experiential culture—rather than an image war between ideological extremists.
Feature image: René Laván as Gustavo on the right with Mayte Vilán as Yolanda, Gustavo’s girlfriend. Publicity still provided by Mari Rodríguez Ichaso.
Note: All translations in this article are by the author.