A Cuban Export With a Universal Message

When Cuban writer Senal Paz won the 1990 Juan Rulfo Prize for “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” (“The Wolf, the Woods and the New Man”), Cuba was entering its “Special Period,” the official euphemism for life after Soviet subsidies.

With the economic crisis resonating from the dinner table to the movie screen, the Cuban film industry that had been financing 30 to 40 films annually only four years ago now struggles to make three or four. So the odds would seem to be against a feature adaptation of Paz’s critical tale of Cuban intolerance and government repression of homosexuals.

“Fresa y Chocolate” (“Strawberry and Chocolate”) was not only made, it swept all the top awards at the 1993 New Latin American Film Festival in Havana, won critical and popular acclaim at festivals from Berlin to Telluride and opens in Los Angeles on Friday.

“This film, like the story, is not about sexuality as much as it is about intolerance,” Paz explains in the garden of Havana’s Hotel Nacional as the international filmmakers check out, the festival having ended the day before. “I’m satisfied the film has introduced a deep, clear, decent way to discuss homosexuality. Homophobia, like other forms of prejudice and intolerance, affects all society.”

Paz and director Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Juan Carlos Tabio directed for a period in which Alea, who has been ailing, was hospitalized and shares co-director credit) insist theirs is not a “gay film” or critical of Cuban revolutionary ideals. On the contrary, its message of tolerance and inclusion reflect a “clarified” party line on homosexuality.

Taking place in 1979, before the Mariel boat lift, the movie charts the unlikely friendship of Diego, a flamboyant gay artist, and David, a rigid political science student and Communist Party stalwart. Diego wants sex. David wants to be a good revolutionary and uses the friendship to spy on the evidently subversive and “anti-social” gay man. When he realizes how profoundly Diego is committed to Cuba and its culture, hard-line dogma and personal prejudices melt in the film’s climactic embrace.

Jorge Perugorria’s initially campy turn as Diego grows more complex as he’s forced to choose between who he is and the country he loves. Vladimir Cruz’s David stands in for the Cuban Everyman yet reveals the humanity behind the Communist companero. Both actors have been highly praised by critics.

Cuba’s legacy of forced labor camps for homosexuals (known as UMAPs) and official persecution of gays as “human scum” was exposed internationally in Nestor Almendros’ 1983 documentary “Improper Conduct.” Ten years later, “Fresa y Chocolate” is being praised as a historic breakthrough. Many Cubans, however, condemn the film as cynical propaganda.

“ ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ has caught the interest and provoked admiration among those who do not know or who wish to ignore the rules for survival of the average Cuban in Cuba,” wrote Sergio Giral, former director of the Cuban Film Institute, in the Miami Herald. Having defected in 1992, Giral, who is openly gay, condemns the film as “too little too late for those of us who know the truth and are still waiting for our ‘UMAPs List.’ ”

With Cuba more reliant than ever on international goodwill and hard currency, Diego and David’s platonic hug is seen by those who have suffered for their sexual identity as an attempt to give the Revolution a gentler face. In a country where gay and lesbian Cubans can still lose their jobs and be thrown out of the Party, the film doesn’t reflect any substantive change as much as a political PR coup.

How truthful is this film, they argue, when most young gay and lesbian Cubans are shocked to learn that Castro himself spoke in March, 1994, in the pages of Vanity Fair, about “rectification,” allowing that the Revolution perhaps went too far in the treatment of homosexuals?

Paz, Alea and Tabio have all come under fire since the film’s release as apologists for the regime that created or encouraged the intolerance the film attacks.

Paz dismisses the criticism as coming from those whose vision of Cuba, revolution and the power of film are as unyielding and limiting as the policies and prejudices his film examines. “Cuba’s spiritual and mental conditions make this the right moment for change. We are ready to change. The irony is we have more liberty and greater maturity as a society than ever before, but also fewer resources to take advantage of the opportunity.”

He looks across the grounds of the Hotel Nacional in the direction of El Morro, the infamous prison dominating Havana’s harbor, where homosexual writer Reinaldo Arenas was once confined. “There will always be people who are against any relationship between Cuba and the United States, between heterosexuals and homosexuals or even between homosexuals themselves because they don’t believe in tolerance, love and peace.

“For the others, hopefully, this film will help strengthen the right of people to communicate and conduct loving, tolerant relationships.”*