Elizabeth S. Gunn

Rolando is a trailblazer in a Cuban discipline that has seen but a handful of women filmmakers. Rolando often cites the well-known Sara Gomez as her predecessor, though the latter died shortly before Rolando entered the ICAIC. According Afro-Cuban scholars such as Catherine Benamou, there continues to exist a dilemma, one deeply rooted in racist, colonial history, that continues to face post-revolutionary Cuban cinema: “issues of difference along lines of gender, race, and sexual preference (in addition to class) have [not] been adequately addressed within the established institutional channels . . . there is a pressing need to create more autonomous spaces within which divergent subjectivities and identities can be represented ‘on their own terms’” (emphasis in original).[6]

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Gomez was not Rolando’s only predecessor or contemporary, however. Women filmmakers began to emerge from the ICAIC in the 1980s. These artists made mostly documentaries and are referred to as a “third generation” of documentarians “who were given the ‘director’s chair’ as a part of an attempt to bring new creative blood into the ICAIC.”[7] According to Benamou, “the new harvest of women’s documentaries in the eighties brought the exploration of personal, subjective experience to new prominence without abandoning the relationship . . . of the individual to the broader collectivity.”[8] Commonly cited names from this generation of filmmakers include Marisol Trujillo, Mariam Talavera, Rebecca Chávez and Mayra Vilásis. These documentarians “were able to loosen and even break the ‘necessary’ synecdoche character-collectivity/woman-nation and offer . . . a more pluralistic vision . . . this allowed for broader definition of social identity, one that would accommodate signs of racial and ethnic difference.”[9] It is in this moment and on the cusp of this generation of filmmakers that Rolando is perfecting her craft. Rolando reaches beyond the debates that Benamou addresses, and forces the viewer (the subject, the nation) to question the notion of the process of identification and subjectification. Since she holds the camera and the information, she produces – both literally and figuratively—a new notion of breaking the silence. Looking at the historical moment in which Rolando begins her career, Benamou offers important research on the role of women in Cuban film. In her article titled “Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gender,” she argues that access to production and distribution of mass media, for women, has been inextricably linked to the direction taken by the revolution. Benamou holds:

not only were there few women technicians and no women film directors prior to 1959, but the possibility of altering
public image of women—away from the passive, stereotypical constructions in the form of mother, seductress, domestic
servant—had to await the emancipatory changes in the status for the majority of women that accompanied large-scale, socioeconomic transformations in the postrevolutionary era.(emphasis in original)[10]

She continues to argue that, throughout the 1960s, women’s initiatives were helping replace those aforementioned stereotypes, and that by the 1980s the Federation of Cuban Women brought issues of housework, childcare and equal participation in the labor force into the national debate. Additionally, “many of the taboos surrounding women’s mastery and control over communications technology had lifted.”[11] Similarly, women’s issues shifted in film, and at first, not surprisingly, those shifting images and concerns were written and directed by men, namely Humberto Sola and Octavio Cortázar. Benamou goes on to suggest that while seemingly sympathetic male directors were portraying women as protagonists in Cuban films, “the immediate context for change was often the nuclear family as productive/reproductive unit (even when the change implied divorce), whereas the ultimate referent for change was the national collectivity.”[12]

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While Rolando wrestles with the notion of national collectivity in 1912: Breaking the Silence, she is not bound to this kind of domesticity of will. Rather, she makes the decisions about who she interviews, how she mixes the sound, and even what the title of her work will be. And perhaps most importantly, she is the writer and director in her own rescuing and writing of the lost history of the PIC. Often, who is behind the camera—in this case Rolando—can upend what Benamou describes as “a source of sexual/politically debility or ‘lack,’ to be developed or assisted in accordance with the male-driven and, occasionally, male-focused narrative agenda.”[13]

Rolando’s first documentary, Forever Present: Oggún, premiered in 1991. This film “features the life and talent of Cuban singer and founder of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, Lázaro Ros.”[14] This documentary celebrates Yoruba song and dance by “inserting scenes representing the patakines” which are Yoruba legends.[15] Rolando speaks about contextualizing her own films within a strong nationalistic culture that officially shuns racism while simultaneously silencing Cuba’s African ancestry:

For that reason my first documentary, Oggun: The Eternal Present (1992), features Lazaro Ros, who is one of the most
important singers in Cuba. He is like the African griot in Cuba . . . Now of course his African heritage is recognized in
Cuba, but I decided to make this documentary, Oggun, because, thanks to the residstence efforts and the way they love
and protect the ancestors, they were able to maintain this culture until the present.”[16]

Rolando’s second documentary, My Footsteps in Baraguá, appeared in 1996. The documentarian interviewed “members of a Cuban West Indian community composed of people from Jamaica, with scenes of worship in which participants pray in English, as well as scenes of them playing cricket and celebrating the Maypole dance.”[17] In this film, the style and content are intentionally joined to recuperate a story through deliberate cinematic style:

In the style of the documentary are merged family memories in a process very familiar to other Caribbean people:
for example the trip from Jamaica, Barbados, and other islands to Panama and subsequently to Cuba which started
the heady development of the sugar industry in the early years of this century. Direct testimony does not preclude
the poetry present in the charm of the environment of the old sugar barracks, the re-creation of the traditional music
and dance such as the Maypole, and the use of old photos that allow us an imaginary approach to that past.[18]

It is well known that the Caribbean’s new inhabitants brought English, Spanish, and African cultures, and this film serves as an anthem to the underrepresented influences of African heritages by profiling three public intellectuals whose contributions shaped knowledge about African legacies in the island nations: Nicolas Guillen from Cuba, George Lamming from Barbados, and Rex Nettleford from Jamaica. In this way, Rolando recovers a lost stories, honors those who have come before, and, as a filmmaker, inserts herself and her work into this legacy.

Her third documentary, The Eyes of the Rainbow, was released in 1997 and is “dedicated to all women who wish for a better world [and] portrays the life of Black Panther Assata Shakur from her childhood to her political involvement in the United States to her exile in Cuba.”[19] More than a decade ahead of what would emerge from the United Nations as the International Year for People of African Descent, Rolando, “through Shakur’s testimony . . . makes her own views known about her country and culture. The mechanism of allowing one African diaspora woman to speak for the other implies a collective experience for women of African descent across national boundaries.”[20]