Four women are seated comfortably around a low coffee table. The camera focuses on each in turn, panning around an animated flurry of speech and hands that has the feel of both a casual conversation and a sharp political debate. Their discussion of women’s autonomy, education, domestic labor, and social reproduction is taking place a decade after the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution. Even as they come to points of disagreement around balancing the demands of motherhood, how machismo is enabled, and an individual woman’s right to pursue intellectual and professional satisfaction, they listen to one another intently. As the conversation comes to a close but not to a resolution, one of them, a young Black woman with a thick fringe, summarizes the stakes of their open-ended exchange by saying, “There’s a contradiction there. But a contradiction that I do believe is being fought [over], and I believe we will find a solution.” With these words, Gladys Egües, a Cuban journalist now in her 70s, perfectly captured the spirit of the woman sitting across from her, Sara Gómez, the filmmaker behind this 1972 documentary, Mi aporte (My Contribution).

Gómez belonged to a small but significant cohort of Afro-Cuban filmmakers who participated in the creation of a revolutionary national cinema. A distinctive feature of their films was their dedication to illuminating the history that brought them to Cuba in the first place. The island had one of the largest and most enduring slave economies in the Caribbean, spanning nearly four centuries of Spanish colonial rule, as hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were taken to supply the booming sugar industry. Laboring under brutal conditions, their incorporation altered both the island’s economic prospects and cultural landscape. The influences of the languages, social systems, and religious and musical practices of West African ethnic groups such as the renamed Lucumís (Yoruba) and Congos (Bantu) resulted in a new cultural syncretism, which the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz referred to as the process of transculturation. Yet however significant they were to the island’s development, Afro-Cubans were relegated to the background when cinema was introduced, shortly after the U.S. occupation from 1898 to 1902. Over the next few decades preceding the revolution — as cinema evolved as a technology, an art form, and a global vector of mass culture — Afro-Cubans, their history and culture, and the violent economies that brought them together had only a sparse or cursory filmic presence, one that failed in particular to account for their acts of resistance, rebellions, and uprisings.

These norms changed radically after 1959. Afro-Cubans were able to seize the camera and put a wider lens on their history and present. They worked from a commitment to a collective program of transformation, whether viewing slavery through the framework of class struggle or depicting the revolution’s promise of socialist egalitarianism alongside the reality of continued racialized inequalities. Crucially, their films articulated a willingness to deal with and work through contradictions that were as inevitable in the newly socialist Cuba as they are in any current struggle to alter entrenched structures of power. Theirs is a cinematic inheritance worth returning to as the task of building solidarity across differences remains critical in the face of global capital, U.S. empire, and enduring anti-Blackness.

With the revolution came the creation of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), a nationalized film institute. By making it the first cultural initiative, the new government positioned cinema as a paramount vehicle in the state’s transformative agenda. Headed by the filmmaker Alfredo Guevara, the ICAIC built the infrastructure for a Cuban film industry: establishing systems for production, distribution, and exhibition; providing training and apprenticeship for filmmakers; centralizing technical facilities; and setting up mobile projector units to reach remote areas. From the start, it approached politics and aesthetics as indissoluble, merging its didactic mission with works spanning Santiago Álvarez’s blistering, experimental indictment of U.S. racism in the anarchic, music-driven newsreel-collage short Now (1965) and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 feature Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), which examines the altered post-revolutionary society through a sinuous, fragmentary narrative centered on an intellectual antihero. Cinema helped fashion a national culture that demystified and broke with the bourgeois, imperialist, and colonialist order and the overbearing influences of Europe and the United States.

The ICAIC’s output advanced a new conception of Cuban identity and nationhood by cultivating a revolutionary citizenry, consolidating historical consciousness, and providing political education. Cuban cinema took part in the anticolonial cultural class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and held an important place in Third Cinema, the transnational tradition of radical filmmaking in Latin America. It was directly opposed to the dominant capitalist production of Hollywood, which replicated the hyper-segregation of U.S. society and stymied the development of self-determined Black filmmaking. Similarly, before 1959, cinema made in or about Cuba largely integrated Afro-Cubans as either characters sketched from stereotypes and prejudices or enlisted as sources of cultural influence with very little representational control. Correcting this required some historical work. Broadly, cinema made through the ICAIC emphasized historical recovery, often in films classified as “cine rescate,” which paid particular attention to the 19th century’s many wars and changeovers of control. Making sense of the island’s trajectory through colonization, invasions, and power struggles was both essential for securing the state’s conception of a new national identity and also entailed greater recognition of Afro-Cubans and enabling their access to the means of representation.

The ICAIC came to reflect both the strengths and the shortcomings of the revolution, implementing significant changes in certain areas but letting other issues carry over. Restructuring the state leveled Cuba’s racialized economic stratification considerably, equalizing some chances at the institutional, social, and cultural levels. Yet the government’s declaration that racial and class inequalities had been eliminated simultaneously was preemptive; antiracist measures in particular were still needed. While Afro-Cuban filmmakers emerged through the ICAIC, the revolution’s colorblind mandate prevented recruiting to expand their small numbers and led to internal suppression of works that addressed current racial disparities, lest such efforts relegitimize divisions that were no longer supposed to exist.

Sara Gómez, fearless in orienting her cinema in the knotted reality of Afro-Cuban womanhood, confronted these contradictions onscreen. She stood out at the ICAIC for directly addressing not only race but also how it modified gendered inequalities, shown in how she tackled child care, maternity, and women in the workforce in her 1972 documentary shorts Atención prenatal, Año uno, and Mi aporte. Even though the Cuban state acknowledged gender disparities much more openly than racial discrimination, Gómez’s work was rare in seriously considering how the two were intertwined. Her bold refusal to uphold the state’s preferred race-blind perspective likely led to the suppression of her more renegade documentary shorts, which until very recently were largely unseen.

It is in part due to that censorship that her sole feature film, the hybrid 1974 documentary De cierta manera (One Way or Another), has overshadowed the fullness of her filmography — which is not to deny its monumental importance not just to Cuban cinema but also to global Black filmmaking and feminist film history. In De cierta manera, Gómez uses her kinetic lens — as adept at weaving through dancing crowds as it is approaching interview subjects with patient intimacy — for an expansive, complex investigation of intersecting forms of marginalization. Dynamic in form, the film blends everything from stark documentary footage of neighborhood demolitions to a sweet but fraught fictional story line about two lovers and a side performance of a boxer turned musician mournfully singing about his life. It brought critical attention to slums and urban poverty, and highlighted the enduring importance of the religious traditions of Abakuá and Santería to Afro-Cuban communities. Gómez excelled at incorporating the breadth and nuance of a cultural history in which Afro-derived spiritual practices and expressive forms were part of a lineage of resistance that had been marginalized and relegated to a folkloric past. At the core of social life, music was of central importance, as seen in her Y … tenemos sabor (1967), which shows how much African cultural influences infused the marrow of Cuban culture.

Gómez and her fellow Afro-Cuban filmmakers were not alone at the ICAIC in making works focused on their immense cultural contributions and specific history. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Cumbite (1964) and La última cena (1976) both demonstrate the role of social and cultural practices in insurgent Black self-organizing. Humberto Solás was a notable cinematic architect of Cuban history whose films reflect complex dynamics of race and gender. His epic narrative of Cuba’s history from the 1890s war of independence to the post-revolutionary period, Lucía (1968), depicts the racial plurality of the island; Simparelé (1974) conjoins Haitian dance and resistance; and Cecilia (1981) considers mixed identities in a racialized socioeconomic hierarchy.

Nonetheless, Afro-Cuban filmmakers were the primary authors of a critical rewriting of the island’s history that accounted for their place even when it was misaligned with the state’s narrative. They did so with greater attention to how form and content could replicate racialized disparities and deliberately countered the framing of slavery, the plantation system, and racial antagonisms as issues that belonged to the past, tackling what could be barbed points of tension. These filmmakers plotted a national imaginary that neither replicated the overgeneralizing qualities of raceless state rhetoric nor advocated for the segregation of the citizenry into essentialist racial categories; instead, many of them located what was particular to their experiences as part of the heterogeneous national whole. Their genealogy at the ICAIC spanned several generations, from Gómez and Sergio Giral, working mostly in Cuba, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, who was long in exile, and Rigoberto López, whose career took off somewhat later, to Gloria Rolando, the only member of this group still living.

Giral’s trilogy of El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco, 1975), Rancheador (Slave Hunter, 1979), and Maluala (1979) illustrates some of the commonalities in these filmmakers’ approaches to histories of slavery, cultural creolization, and rebellion. In a 1977 interview, Giral pointed out that the most hidden part of Cuba’s history was the period just before 1886, when slavery was formally abolished there, in the midst of wars of liberation from Spanish colonization. Resurfacing such obscured episodes and experiences was a vital task for Afro-Cuban filmmakers. El otro Francisco was a revisionist adaptation of a well-known 19th-century antislavery novel, Francisco by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, challenging the plantation melodrama’s bourgeois idealism and romanticism and paying significantly more attention to its material, economic, and historical conditions. While Rancheador follows the vicious activities of the titular slave hunter, it acts as a tribute to the figure of the maroon, who symbolizes a Black refusal of subordination and carceral capture. While he may appear pursued and pushed around for much of the narrative, the final scene of a two-person death match shows the runaway with a victorious machete raised overhead. Maluala focuses on a hidden community of cimarrones (runaway slaves) living in the palenques, depicting the processes around leadership and communal life, as well as the issue of land, in a gripping story about the legacy of autonomous organizing. Across his three films, Giral merged a critique of bourgeois historiography with a foregrounding of the experiences and insurgencies of Afro-Cubans, demonstrating religious and social practices, epistemologies, belief systems, music, and dance as forms of anticolonial resistance. As did Gómez, he used the experiences of African descendants as a way to bridge Cuba’s past and revolutionary present and reveal that what separated them was not a clean break but a porous process, an understanding that was essential to securing full equality for all Cubans.

Both mentored by Alea, Giral and Gómez walked a tightrope to avoid undermining the achievements of Cuba’s communist reorganization while refusing to concede the continued struggle for a true end to racialized discrimination. Crucially, they did not merely add Afro-Cubans as a quota onscreen but changed the terms of representation with a political intent that was bound to material gains. They contested the pre-revolutionary representational norms of inferiority and marginalization as well as mythic and homogenizing portrayals in order to restore the recognition of the plurality and mundane realities of Afro-Cubans. For example, in Guanabacoa: Crónicas de mi familia (1966), Gómez took an auto-ethnographic approach to her own extended family, which includes numerous musicians, while also centering two women of divergent class positions — her bourgeois godmother and her working-class cousin. She made a point of presenting previously unseen images of Afro-Cuban people, breaking with convention by attending to the meaningful banality of everyday life. The film also touched on the multifaceted role of elite Black social clubs, as did her earlier city tour Iré a Santiago (1964), likely the first documentation of an Afro-Cuban family home and domestic space, whose groundbreakingly intimate register includes the comical process of taking a family photograph and the touching simplicity of elders in rocking chairs.

Gloria Rolando, another rare Black woman at the ICAIC, also foregrounded Afro-Cubans and emphasized the importance of women to Cuba’s path toward self-governance and liberation in intimate works that often drew from her own family. While she never overlapped with Gómez, Rolando dedicated her 2001 film Raíces de mi corazón (Roots of My Heart), to its source of inspiration, Guanabacoa. The protagonist of Rolando’s short is Mercedes, an Afro-Cuban woman tracing the roots of her family history and how it collided with the 1912 uprising of the Black political party Partido Independiente de Color, which ended in the Cuban army’s massacre of its members and supporters. By resurfacing a historical episode that threatened the cohesive narrative of racial harmony after the gains of the revolution, Rolando contested the state’s official story.

As these Afro-Cuban filmographies show, the revolutionary project of nation-building could encompass ambivalent, antagonistic, and celebratory relationships to the island’s African-descended population and their political and cultural heritage. The ICAIC itself was not always aligned with state policies, and the history of Cuban cinema unavoidably contains inconsistencies and points of conflict. During the first decades of the film institute, when racial discrimination was meant to be eradicated, the term “Negrometrajes” was sometimes used pejoratively to categorize Cuban films with a Black focus. Afro-Cuban filmmakers not only made room for contradiction in their films but also changed their own positions over time. For example, Giral could all at once state plainly in 1977 that his “own life was a testimony to the fact that racism did exist in Cuba,” use his works to reconfigure how Afro-Cubans and their history were understood, and still stay committed to the state’s Marxist-Leninist line, situating the origins of racial discrimination in economic and mostly historical terms. Yet his return to the U.S. in 1991 — he spent the rest of his days in Miami, where he passed away in 2024 — changed his position, and by 2016 he was decrying the revolution’s misguided idealism and subsequent repression and censorship. Even without such a wholesale condemnation, the reality of censorship for Afro-Cuban filmmakers is undeniable, and works considered subversive ran the risk of being suppressed. As has been the case with many of Gómez’s short documentaries, the films of Guillén Landrián fell out of circulation because they ran afoul of the government line. Guillén Landrián had been commissioned to make the 1968 documentary Coffea arábiga as an educational and promotional work about Cuba’s agricultural production of coffee. When he instead delivered an irreverent, experimental deflation of the victorious narrative that pointed to the exploitation of Black labor and plantation slavery in the history of coffee and included a sequence brazenly yoking Fidel Castro to the Beatles song “The Fool on the Hill,” the film was swiftly censored.

Rolando concluded a 2001 interview by naming her purpose as a filmmaker: “I need to direct something that touches me and something that helps me understand black roots in Cuba and Cuban history.” As with the echo between Gladys Egües and Sara Gómez at the end of Mi aporte, Rolando’s words express a common stance, naming a through line in the history of Afro-Cuban filmmaking, which sought to consolidate and articulate the state’s vision for a new society without erasing the dissident political efforts, economic disparities, vast cultural practices, and complex historical trajectory of the African-descended population. While it had its faults, the ICAIC provided the terrain for much of this cinema to blossom. Like the revolution that created it, the film institute has not been immune to six decades of a vicious U.S. embargo, growing climate-related disasters in Cuba, and the entrenchment of global capital. Yet it still stands today and represents the kind of cultural institutions that are all the more dangerously imperiled even as they are more needed. Across their films, Gómez, Giral, Rolando, Guillén Landrián, and others repositioned the nation’s understandings of race and class, interwoven with gender, autonomy, and the role of cultural production — and in so doing, they refused to accept a closure of the revolutionary vision. They saw that obstacles did not represent a dead end, instead seeking an opening of that endpoint, a future still to be won. As Gómez modeled, Afro-Cuban cinema teaches us that the picture of transformation must be kept in motion.