Memory in Contemporary Cuban Film and Digital Media

How Cuba’s contemporary mediascape is challenging official histories, recovering memories, and redefining identities

This volume shows how Cuban filmmakers, journalists, and activists use film and other digital media to create competing notions of memory and history that challenge official narratives about Cuban society. In the wake of the economic and ideological crises of Cuba’s Special Period, suppressed political differences and personal experiences have resurfaced in the contemporary mediascape, which has become a principal political arena for Cubans both inside and outside the island.

In this volume, contributors examine topics including how filmmakers use audio to subvert official histories, media representations of sanatoriums and other settings at the margins of the Revolution, and a COVID-era digital archive that preserves personal memories outside government oversight. By tracing the interplay of film, digital technologies, and the internet, contributors reveal how alternative archives and online platforms resist state-sanctioned stories, circulate new materials, and broaden ideas of citizenship, time, and identity. Together, these essays offer fresh perspectives on the complexities of Cuba’s late-socialist context.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dunja Fehimović, senior lecturer in Hispanic studies at Newcastle University, is the author of National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema: Screening the Repeating Island.

Reynaldo Lastre, visiting assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross, is coeditor of Isla diseminada: Ensayos sobre Cuba.

Nils Longueira Borrego is assistant professor in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton.

Isdanny Morales Sosa is a PhD student in Latin American studies at Tulane University.

Contributors: Walfrido Dorta Laura-Zoë Humphreys Jacqueline Loss Lauren Peña Ángel Pérez Celia Rodríguez Tejuca Darien Sánchez Nicolás Zaira Zarza Dean Luis Reyes