Memories Of Underdevelopment Summary

[Mariam Obregon]

Theword "subdesarrollo" or underdevelopment plagues everyone who lives in South America. It may mean a colonized economy or insufficient industrial development, or it just may come to mean that foreign is better. The Cuban film MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT directed by Toms Gutirrez Alea, deals with this topic of underdevelopment in a number of ways. Primarily the film concerns itself with the life and thoughts of a bourgeois intellectual, Sergio, who has literally stayed behind the revolution. He stays in Cuba when his wife and parents go to the United States because he wants to observe what is going to continue to happen in Cuba. He thinks of himself as Europeanized; to him, underdevelopment means that the Cuban mind is underdeveloped. Sergio criticizes people, especially women, for forgetting and not being consistent, but in his own case, remembering everything just paralyzes him.

The original novel from which the film was made, published in English as INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES, was written by Edmundo Desnos, a Cuban intellectual who spent many years in the United States, which influenced his writing, returned to Cuba after the revolution to an active position in the publishing house Casa de las Americas, and then went back to the United States to live his later years in New York City. Desnos seems to have put a lot of himself into INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES' first person narrator, giving that protagonist many insights and sympathetic qualities. But in the novel, he also puts this alter ego up to criticism. Within the formal structure of an autobiography, an unnamed protagonist is writing a diary to maintain his sanity and personal identity, to gain a kind of control over his own life. He also writes a first-person narration of lived experience since he feels himself to be a frustrated author who cannot create. In a circular fashion he sees the world as so complex that he has nothing to say. In Alea's film this intellectual, named Sergio, stands as a "memory of underdevelopment," a bourgeois who immerses himself in his own mental acuity but who cannot break out of angst to enter into commitment.

Both novel and the film are complex. In the novel the protagonist criticizes his friend Eddy (Desnos) for writing a story with flat characterization about an alienated intellectual who is saved by committing himself to the revolution. That reference indicates the vigor and with which Cuban artists and intellectuals have long battled socialist realism, and this film stands as one of the best indications of Cuban artists' independence and efforts to create whole new forms for political art. Significantly, MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT is thoroughly urban; neither author Desnos nor director Alea have unearth native or folkloric strains to write about, although this path is an esteemed one for Cuban artists. (An example of the native type of literature is the poetry of Nicholas Guillen, who captures afro-cuban rhythms in his poetry, or the novels of Alejo Carpentier, who celebrates a "primal" Cuba in such works as THE LOST STEPS.) The novel and the film look directly at European and American cultural influences and are not afraid to use mainstream Western contemporary modes of expression--in both novel and film--even while criticizing European and U.S. influences on Cuban life.

The film MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT contains two stories, one explicit and one implicit, which Alea uses to comment on each other. In the background the film presents the story of Cuban society, which moves with the force of the revolution and history. The fact that political history provides the film's framework is established by three principle documentary sequences. First, the film's opening sequence shows a public dance at which a political leader is assassinated. Later, a central documentary sequence, seemingly unrelated to the narrative, depicts and analyzes moments from the trial of the counterrevolutionary officers captured at Playa Giron. And a final series of sequences on the missile crisis combine both documentary shots and narrative material to conclude the film.

In terms of film style, Alea is commenting in two ways on the topic of underdevelopment. He develops a psychological narrative in the style of European films about Sergio's existential alienation. At the same time he holds that alienation up to criticism by means of documentary footage which shows us the revolution which Sergio will not join. For example, in a complex way, the film mixes cinematic styles and modes of spoken discourse, moving back and forth in time, frequently according to Sergio's memories. The shots of the Cuban people on the street during the film and particularly at the dance at the beginning of the film establish a sense of race, against which background we can see that Sergio, a tall fair man who looks like a gringo, is deliberately shown as very white -- something a Latin audience would pick up on since skin color is often an index of class. In the middle of the film Alea repeats the opening sequence of dark-skinned Cubans dancing and the sudden shooting of one of the men there, but this time we see Sergio among the crowd, and his whiteness stands out. It seems that Alea uses such a fair protagonist to emphasize in visual terms this middle class intellectual's alienation from the people.

Alea, the director of the film, commented himself on the transformation from novel to film. In the film as in the novel, Sergio's "perceptions of reality, sometimes deformed, and always subjective," also become the object of our critical attitude:

"... The confrontation between his world with the 'documentary' world that we show (our subjective world) can have some rich overtones... We developed more than what was included in the novel, that line which shows 'objective' reality that surrounds the character and that little by little closes in on him and suffocates him at the end. That line alternates with the protagonist's own and is basically built with documents, that is, with current testimonies."

The documentary elements in the narrative sections of the film also generally work very well, as in the depiction of a round table discussion which Sergio attends. The forum's topic is Literature and Underdevelopment, and the panelists include the real Edmundo Desnos and Jack Gelber, the North American playwright who wrote the introduction to the English translation of INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES. In this filmed panel Desnos speaks about his long stay in the United States, where he says he was just another "spic," and he especially criticizes the U.S. "great white dream." Another speaker says that underdevelopment and development are sick words, a linguistic and ideological alibi, and that Cuba needs instead the words capitalism and socialism. Jack Gelber then demands humorously, "Why use an impotent form like a round table discussion after the revolution?" But the fact that he uses English to assert this just protest against academic bullshit in English reveals cultural imperialism one more time.

In political terms I see one major problem in the effect some of the details in the film are supposed to have on a Cuban audience. Alea shows Sergio living untroubled and alone in luxury, well after the revolution, in an apartment that could have housed a family or two. The audience is supposed to criticize and not envy this way of life. In particular, the kitchen and plumbing are shown in splendid working order, as is Sergio's tape recorder, in spite of the fact that imported fixtures have long since stopped coming in. The film itself raises the point that automobile parts and motor oil are scarce. For many Cubans, when Havana's big department store El Encanto burned down, that signaled the end of imported luxuries. Buildings have deteriorated in Havana since the government has emphasized rural development, but Alea shows Sergio's Havana apartment as being kept up perfectly.

In one sequence in the film, block captains come to inventory the apartment. During this time we learn that Sergio's income comes from monthly state payments for a building of his which had been confiscated, payments he will receive for another thirteen years. All of these details in the film paint a picture of Cuba as being fair to those bourgeois who have stayed, letting them, like Sergio, just fade away of their own accord and not stripping comforts from them. Yet what "message" does this apartment in the movie have for a Cuban audience? It seems to say, "You are superior for you are working for the revolution, while a character such as Sergio has all these fine possessions but is empty inside." But maybe the audience looks on that nice plumbing with envy or thinks it should go to someone more deserving. Specifically, the film does not analyze the relation between Sergio's living in material comfort and the theme of underdevelopment as a whole.

The character Sergio, acted in Mastroianni style by Sergio Corrieri, elicits a certain sympathy. Yet the film presents this character in a static emotional and social state. If the audience approves of the direction the Cuban revolutionary "background" is going, Sergio's paralysis stands as a critique of those who cannot join the revolution.

Sergio prides himself on his urbanity, on his being Europeanized. He is both obsessed with and condescending about Cuba and the Cubans' underdevelopment. In particular, he thinks of Cuban women as intellectually and culturally underdeveloped, although he uses sex to escape from his alienation from Cuban society and his paralysis as a writer. In the course of the film we see Sergio's egotism in his sexual relations. He has an affair with a young woman, Elena, whom he picks up on the street and whom he tries to educate by taking to bookstores and museums. At one point he reflects, "I discovered Elena didn't think as much as I did. I try to live as a European and she makes me feel the underdevelopment at every step."

Sergio has an acute intellect. He sees much that is true about Cuba and especially is very aware about himself. To criticize Sergio as bourgeois is easy. Yet he himself rejects most of the Cubans of his class, his wife Laura and his friend Pablo especially, as superficial, greedy, and self-deceiving. But he will also not use his intellect to serve the revolution. The film shows that Sergio's refusal to join with others to build a new Cuban society depends both on his class position and on his temperament. The film depicts the cost to him personally of staying apart as an observer. Sergio is not one who flees to the United States, and his reasons for staying in Cuba go beyond the fact that his marriage has gone stale. As he says, he has a great curiosity to see what will happen in Cuba next. A key prop in the film is a high powered telescope installed on the porch of his apartment. Early in the film Sergio looks through it at a couple making love. At the end of the film he looks down on the mobilization for the missile crisis, in which the whole of Havana is unified in the face of impending destruction. Looking through the telescope means more than idle curiosity. It also symbolizes passivity and internalized hopelessness. At the end of the film, Sergio looking through the telescope is a Sergio trapped in his own introspection.

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