Art Transcends Politics at Cuba Film School : Movies: Students, mostly from the Third World, get a grounding in the cinematic arts at the Castro-supported Escuela de Cine y TV. Students get a measure of freedom of expression not seen elsewhere on the island.

In a small, darkened workroom at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV, student filmmaker Elba Rios showed off a newly edited version of her artsy black-and white movie “Behind the Veil.”

“This is the day after they made love and we are going to see who this person is who was making love with the gardener,” said Rios, 27, in introducing a scene.

The camera zoomed in over a landscape of rumpled bedcovers, revealing a “sexually liberated” mother superior. The lens followed the nun as she rose, ran down a hallway to a fountain and splashed herself dreamily with water.

Actress Paula Ali plays the mother superior opposite actor Adolfo Lluauarado’s gardener. Big names in Cuban film and television, both were paid professional salaries for appearing in Rio’s movie.

Rios figures “Behind the Veil” cost $35,000 to $40,000 for 10 days of filming. But students at this modern campus about 40 miles outside of Havana are not required to pay out funds. “We never see money,” she said. “We never have to touch money.”

One of 65 pupils completing a two-year course, Rios, formerly a student at UC Berkeley, has learned the art of filming, editing, producing and directing movies here--all the while paying not a cent for her estimated $15,000-a-year education.

Her experience at the Escuela Internacional sheds light on an anomaly in today’s Cuba, where it is rare to find a state-supported institution subsidizing the education of foreigners at a time when Cubans are struggling to ride out a bleak post-Cold War economy.

Despite consumer and cash shortages on this Caribbean island, the students of this international school--many of them from such far-flung, disadvantaged countries as Ethiopia, Ghana and Vietnam--still benefit from the grand, original mission of the institution’s founders.

In 1986, when Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez emerged as the main backer of the school, its founders decreed they would recruit mostly Third World youths and train them in the art of film and television so they could return to their homelands to aid in modernization.

The school provided full scholarships for everyone, offered hands-on training, state-of-the-art equipment and even paid students’ plane fares to and from Cuba.

And there’s more: Celebrity workshops were set up, led by Hollywood luminaries and Latin American filmmakers; a staff of campesinos was hired to keep the cafeteria fully stocked; and students were afforded the luxury of shooting movies in 35mm film, as is the norm for feature film producers.

(At USC, a student wishing to use film more costly than 16mm must pay the extra tab, said Roger S. Christiansen, an assistant professor at the university’s School of Cinema-Television. “This is expensive stuff,” he said of the film Rios and others use.)

Finally, with the support of Cuban President Fidel Castro--who funnels resources into the school but so far seems to have lived up to his promise not to suppress artistic expression there--the students’ work has been aired on Cuban television and at the Latin American film festival staged annually in Havana.

From a creative standpoint, however, all is not ideal on this bougainvillea-shrouded, sun-splashed campus, situated in an agricultural region where oxen and carts have replaced farm trucks idled by a lack of gasoline.

Due to the scarcity of fuel, the students have had to find ways to cope with a new “mileage perimeter” that limits filming to within a 5-10 mile radius around campus. As it turns out, the restriction has also limited the aspiring filmmakers’ story lines.

“A larger number of the scripts this year were romantic in theme,” observed Alva Alma, 27, a UCLA graduate and one of two U.S. students admitted to the program. “If you look closely, you’ll see a pattern. The nun falling in love, a man in artistic crisis, and more. It really does determine the content of our scripts. There’s a lot of scenery around here that’s good for romance stories.”

In other ways as well, woes of the times--this “special period” of cutbacks as Cuba attempts to retool its economy--are beginning to encroach on the mission for the school, which is supported in large part by donations from the worldwide movie-making community.

Original plans for Escuela Internacional envisioned a four-year academy. The program has since been severed to two years.

The campus that Castro’s crews built was to house 300 to 400 students. About 110 were admitted in 1987, the school’s first year. By 1990, the year Rios and Alma entered the program, the number of new students dipped to 65. This academic year, only 25 incoming students are enrolled because of a lack of funds, said Patricia Martin, the school’s director of international relations.

“The economy has been difficult for all of Latin America,” Martin said, noting that Brazil’s film board, Embrafilm, was disbanded earlier this year.

When Rios, who was admitted to the school because of her Latin heritage, decided to attend, she dreaded what she might find. Her family told her she’d “be crazy to go to Cuba,” she said.

“I came here with the least expectations. I said, ‘Mom, I’m not going to have toilet paper. There’s going to be a lack of things.’ I grew up in a rural place in Mexico where I didn’t even see cornflakes or sour cream--then I went to the U.S. with my family where I discovered these things,” she said.

“We did, for a long time, have toilet paper here.”

Largely a product of Castro’s backing of progressive Latin American filmmaking, the Escuela Internacional has also become a symbol of global support: France and the former Soviet Union have donated cameras and film; Spain has given equipment and spare parts; Mexican, Peruvian and Colombian universities have contributed instructors.

Even the United States, despite Washington’s long-standing trade embargo against Cuba, has managed to send brigades of Hollywood’s elite to San Antonio de los Banos.

Over the years, Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah has flown in teachers, and Redford, George Lucas, Frances Ford Coppola, Sydney Pollack and others have spoken or taught workshops at the school.

“I’m sorry to hear they’re having difficulties,” Redford said in a telephone interview. “This is an issue I think Hollywood should be concerned about--because it’s got to do with film and translation of culture.”

Another prominent Hollywood filmmaker who was conducting a workshop at the school agreed. “Art should transcend politics,” the director said, noting that the volatility of Cuban-U.S. relations makes that ideal more of a goal than a reality. “The more we know about the Latin American culture, the more we can understand our differences and similarities. It’s healthy to have that exchange.” But the director asked to remain anonymous.

Part of the seduction of Escuela Internacional is the draw of its main backer, Garcia Marquez, long ago a film critic and more recently the author of the worldwide bestsellers “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

“Gabo Nobel,” as he is affectionately known around campus, has been a pillar of the school’s celebrity workshops--he comes twice a year to teach a script-writing session, “How to Tell a Story.” In 1992, however, he was recovering from a lung cancer operation and was forced to cancel.

Since the school’s inception, Garcia Marquez has kept it afloat with his fund-raising efforts, including a 1988 dinner party sponsored by Redford at his Malibu home that brought in $25,000.

And although it does receive subsidies from the Cuban government, officials insist the school is run independently from Castro’s regime. The students here, they say, enjoy a measure of freedom of expression not seen elsewhere on the island, where a number of dissident voices in the arts have been squelched in the past two years.

Indeed, the students seem to have escaped the brand of harsh censorship that has afflicted native Cuban artists.

Nearly two years ago, in what was perhaps the most notorious example of the crackdown, poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela was attacked by a mob of Castro’s enforcers who dragged her by the hair from her home and literally forced her to eat her dissident writings.

Minimalist graffiti scrawled in the hallway of the film school attests to a level of commentary that might not be tolerated today throughout the rest of Cuba:

“No hay verdad, ni orden, ni belleza, ni mal, no hay nada.” There is no truth, no order, no beauty, no evil. There is nothing.

And although imposed mileage restrictions might also be seen as a way to limit student access to the hardships most evident in Havana, “each student expresses themselves here freely,” said Raul Fidel Caporte, who runs the school’s cultural extension program. “There are no restrictions.”

Students at the film school, for instance, have produced a documentary in which they asked residents to speculate on the future of the country after Castro dies, a sensitive and generally taboo topic here.

Another student documentary made before the mileage restriction airs the feelings of the people of Belen, thought to be Havana’s roughest barrio. In a rare sequence of open criticism, an elderly man complains on camera that the policia are racist, saying, “We black people are always asked for our IDs, as if we were criminals. This must change.”

Cuban cinema off-campus, which blossomed during most of Castro’s rule, has not fared as well of late. Since his isolation after the collapse of communism elsewhere, Castro has shown less tolerance for the outspokenness which emerged in Cuba in an atmosphere of near- glasnost in 1990.

A film that won an award at the Berlin Film Festival, “Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas,” a variation on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” that satirized life in a rural town, was pulled from Havana theaters and denounced as counter-revolutionary after four days of packed showings a year ago.

In the movie, people survive mostly on eggs, use old documents for toilet paper and queue up for hours to buy consumer products. Fair-weather friends abandon their neighbors when there’s trouble with the authorities.

Censorship of the movie nearly jeopardized the reputation of December’s annual Latin American film festival in Havana, usually a big event in which Cuba proudly shows off its cinematic product--including some of the students’ films.

Whatever the outlook for Cuban cinema on the whole, the possibility that resources will continue to diminish for Escuela Internacional is provoking concern among its supporters.

Redford, for one, said he is not surprised at the school’s downturn of fortune. “I guess I expected that as soon as the political winds shifted against Cuba, and with Castro going into trouble, that the school would go into trouble, too,” he said.

And although he was the subject of a CIA investigation in 1989 for possible violations of the longstanding U.S. embargo against Cuba, he still believes U.S. filmmakers should care about what happens in San Antonio de Los Banos.

“If you talk about the mysticism that exists in Latin American culture, it’s very difficult to translate that into film,” said Redford, star of the 1990 film “Havana,” which because of the embargo was actually filmed in the Dominican Republic. “Students of the school receive training to do just that.”

Said Rios, “This school is now suffering along with the rest of Cuba. You’d have to be blind not to see the hardship out there. For what I’ve seen, it hasn’t been easy for me. I feel sad for the Cubans.

“But at the same time, I’ve met so many intelligent people here from so many different countries,” she said. “It’s got to be the richest experience I’ve ever had in my life.”