The future's past: re-imaging the Cuban revolution

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Jeffrey Skoller

TropiCola is a marvelously loud film with characters talking, arguing and yelling at each other nearly nonstop from beginning to end, except when energetic Afro-Cuban music takes over. Using the genre of the telenovella, Latin America's version of the soap opera, the narrative of the tape is structured around the interlinking stories of two families. These scenes are shot in digital color video and are performed on location in houses or on quickly built makeshift sets. Fagin combines a tightly composed tableau-style static camera and a Cassevetes-like in-the-middle-of-the-action hand-held camera, skillfully photographed by Igor Vamos. These colorful dramatic sequences are intercut with a movingly lyrical black and white portrait of the city of Havana shot on 16mm film. This footage is shot in the hallmark style of the Cuban verite style documentaries of the 1960s, recognized most notably in the films of Santiago Alvarez. Fagin managed to get Pablo Martinez, one of Alvarez's cinematographers, to shoot these sequences in which many of the characters are seen walking around the streets, in open air markets, talking to people and moving from one scene to the other. This black and white footage of Havana is used to link the different dramatic scenes, giving respites for the viewer to reflect on the intensely verbal interactions between characters and, most significantly, to give a sense of Havana as a uniquely funky place in which nineteenth-century colonial buildings butt up against 1920s Art Deco and 1950s-style American architecture. The mixing of the color video footage with its hard edges and garish lighting with the more impressionistic, grainy black and white film footage creates lovely textural juxtapositions of past and present. The images of the streets of Havana recall the romantic heyday of the revolutionary '60s as seen in the unique neo-realist style of early Cuban films such as Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). The video footage seems to evoke an eternal present, which is a perfect medium for watching the melodramatic performance of present-day problems.

Of the two families that are at the center of TropiCola, one is white and middle-class. The father, Raul, a long time member of the Communist party and a deep loyalist to the Revolution, discovers that his daughter Katia has become a jinotera, embodying the growing population of young Cuban women who have begun to supplement their meager or non-existent income by being escorts and/or prostitutes, catering to the burgeoning Euro-tourist industry. For Katia, becoming a jinotera and perhaps marrying a foreigner is a solution to her feeling that her life in Cuba is going nowhere and it becomes a way to make a living that might make her dreams of the good life come true. At the same time Raul's wife expresses her desire to leave Cuba for Miami to join the rest of her family. As a good Revolutionary and Party member, he feels that what his wife and daughter are doing is a betrayal of the ideals that have guided his life. At the same time he also seems to understand the reasons for their behavior. These events throw Raul (who is wonderfully portrayed by Mario Balmaseda who played the young revolutionary worker in Sara Gomez's seminal 1974 film One Way or Another) into a crisis of confidence in the ability of the Revolution to meet the needs of the people.