In 1969, Alfredo Guevara, the head of Cuba's state film institute (the ICAIC), argued that the United States had colonized the minds of Latin Americans. American “comics, radionovelas, telenovelas” and “a good portion of North American cinematography” had succeeded in “conditioning not only the taste but also the reader, radio-listener, and spectator's capacity for comprehension,” observed the functionary ([1969] 1998, 41–42). Arguments such as this were widespread in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. In Cuba, resistance to American cultural imperialism led to an often-repeated insistence that filmmaking in the nation came into its own only with the defeat of General Fulgencio Batista and the establishment of the ICAIC.
Feeney agrees that there was little significant film production in early twentieth-century Cuba. But by switching the focus of analysis from production to film business practices and reception, her book demonstrates just how rich and significant a role cinema played in the lives and political imaginaries of Habaneros prior to 1959. Through an analysis of the impact of Hollywood in Havana, Feeney argues that the Cuban Revolution, far from being a reaction against the United States, might better be seen as “an expression of a highly idealistic version of (Pan-) Americanism,” as Cubans demanded the fulfillment of the promises of freedom and democracy on display in the Hollywood films that filled the capital's theaters (7).
At times this argument can seem overstated. By taking Hollywood as her focus, Feeney acknowledges but sidelines some Cuban intellectuals’ attempts to promote other national cinemas, including those of Latin America and Europe, at key moments in Cuban history. Feeney's argument that Cubans’ participation in the 1959 revolution itself was inspired in part by their desire to emulate Hollywood heroes (200–01), or to realize in practice ideals in Hollywood films. At first glance, such an argument risks reducing our understanding of Cuba to a one-way relationship to the United States, in which Cubans find all inspiration for action in American models.
Feeney's book, however, quickly puts such concerns to rest, providing a rich and detailed history that also demonstrates how some Cubans resisted American narratives or employed Hollywood to advance their own revolutionary nationalist projects. The main stars of Feeney's book are the American and Cuban businessmen and employees involved in Havana's film business community, known as the film giro; an emerging group of professional Cuban film critics, some of whom served as mentors for post-1959 Cuban filmmakers; and the Hollywood Left, a loose coalition of left liberals and radicals who supported Roosevelt's New Deal.
Beginning her account with the first film screening in Havana in January 1897, Feeney recounts in Chapter 1 how Hollywood displaced European films following World War I, acquiring 95 percent of Cuba's market share and transforming the island into Hollywood's ninth most important foreign market. These statistics, along with explanations of the strong-arm tactics used by US studios in Cuba, provide ample evidence for Hollywood's early hold on the island's filmgoing. Nonetheless, Feeney insists that even this period saw some resistance to US cultural dominance. In Chapter 1, for instance, she recounts how exhibitors featured live Cuban acts between film reels and Cuban musicians played Cuban dance music to accompany silent films, sometimes in ways that jarred with films’ narratives. Cuban exhibitors, meanwhile, banded together to resist the more extortionist policies imposed on them by US studios.
A complicated relationship to Hollywood also characterized the rise of official film criticism in Cuba. In Chapter 2, Feeney introduces readers to the minoristas, a group of Cuban intellectuals and artists who in the 1920s drew inspiration from ideas ranging from humanism to Marxism in order to resist both Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado and US imperialism. The minoristas, recounts Feeney, played an important role in establishing film criticism as a serious intellectual—and male-dominated—pursuit. Key to her overall argument, Feeney notes that while some minorista film critics rejected Hollywood's cultural imperialism, others used their writings to draw out meanings in American films that supported their own revolutionary Cuban nationalism. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was a favorite, with minorista critics arguing that Chaplin's Little Tramp character exposed an immoral and unjust society.
As the popularity of Chaplin among the minorista film critics suggests, the work of the Hollywood Left played an important role in Cubans’ relationship to Hollywood. In Chapters 3 and 4, Feeney charts what she describes as a “renewed optimism about their island's Americanization” on the part of many Cubans, including film critics and workers in the film giro, that lasted from the early 1930s through World War II (71). Prompted by resistance to fascism as well as a belief that Roosevelt's New Deal policies lined up with their own vision of a more equitable society, the Hollywood Left collaborated with US state officials during this period in an attempt to win Latin Americans over to hemispheric solidarity.
The optimism of both Cubans and the Hollywood Left for the American Way, however, was disappointed in the aftermath of World War II, as American politics turned away from the New Deal and to capitalism as the source of prosperity for all. In Chapter 5, Feeney recounts how Left filmmakers turned to film noir to criticize post-war American society, while anticommunist purges swept through Hollywood. Cuban film critics, meanwhile, returned to their earlier resistance to Hollywood's imperialist effects and worked to uncover meanings in film noir that cooperated with Cuban nationalism. In the final chapter of the book, Feeney charts the growing tensions between Cuban and American workers in the Cuban film giro, as well as the role of film critics and cine clubs in the struggle against Batista and American intervention during the 1950s.
In sum, this book is an impressive accomplishment. It sheds new light on a long overlooked period of film history in Cuba, while also contributing to a growing scholarship on cinema exhibition and reception outside of the Global North. Well-researched and engaging, Feeney's book will be an important touchstone for scholars of Cuban and Latin American cinema and history and for all those interested in reevaluating the global impact of Hollywood.
