Tomas Gutierrez Alea; Cuban Film Director

Tomas Gutierrez Alea, a major Latin American film director whose comedy about intolerance, “Strawberry and Chocolate,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1995, died Tuesday. He was 67.

Gutierrez Alea, whose nickname was “Titon,” died of cancer in his native Havana, the Cuban news service Prensa Latina announced.

Regarded internationally as Cuba’s premier director, Gutierrez Alea almost single-handedly established Cuba as a world cinematic force with his “Memories of Underdevelopment” in 1968.

Despite what Americans perceive as the restrictive Communist regime of Fidel Castro, the director and his colleagues have defended the post-revolutionary state film organization, Instituto Cubano de Arte y Industria Cinematograficos.

“Censorship is not organized in a bureaucratic sense; you have discussions and agreements,” Gutierrez Alea told Times film critic Kenneth Turan at the Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in late 1995. “In these 35 years that’s the way it’s been with me. No one has ever said, ‘Do that.’ I have made the films I wanted to make.

“When I went to Hollywood when ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’ was nominated for an Oscar,” Gutierrez Alea added, “I said I would be happy to make films in America because they are seen everywhere, but I was afraid of the price I would have to pay. I am not sure I’d have the freedom I have in Cuba. That’s the paradox.”

The son of a patent attorney, Gutierrez Alea was reared in comfort, but as a teenager embraced Marxism and later became a Castro supporter. On graduation from the University of Havana law school, he went to Rome and studied for two years at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia film school.

Under Castro, he started making documentaries and created the new regime’s first official feature-length film, “Stories of the Revolution.” He made a Cuban version of the comedy “The Twelve Chairs” in 1962 and directed his first internationally noted film, “Death of a Bureaucrat,” which ridiculed certain aspects of Communist Cuba, in 1966.

Often considered his masterpiece, “Memories of Underdevelopment” was a stronger critique, a fictional film incorporating newsreel and documentary footage, which earned Gutierrez Alea a special niche in international filmmaking history.

In 1974, when the National Society of Critics honored him, the citation praised the film as “the very personal and very courageous confrontation of the artist’s doubts and ambivalences regarding the Cuban Revolution.”

“Strawberry and Chocolate,” which dealt humorously with Cuba’s repressive measures against homosexuals, attracted huge audiences in Havana and won awards at the Berlin and Toronto film festivals before its American premiere at the New York Film Festival in late 1994. The movie about an unlikely friendship between an idealistic Marxist student and the gay man who tries to seduce him escaped Cuban censorship, Gutierrez Alea told The Times, because “most of them realized that this was not a film about homosexuality but about intolerance and incomprehension of those who are different.”

His most recent film, released last year and, like “Strawberry,” co-directed by Juan Carlos Tabio, was “Guantanamera,” a comedy about the effort of moving a coffin from one end of Cuba to the other despite gasoline shortages and other problems.

The director’s earlier films include “A Cuban Struggle Against the Demons,” “The Last Supper,” “Survivors” and “Letters From the Park.”