Quid Es Veritas?

Pontius Pilate's famous query to Jesus of Nazareth -- Quid Es Veritas? -- What is Truth? was a prelude to the revelation that Jesus had come to witness the truth and, through it, proclaim the Gospel. Seeking the truth is hard, but now and then, I see how literature and film can help me think about what is true. These thoughts came to me as I studied a 1973 film, "De Cierta Manera," by Cuban artist Sara Gómez, that was part of my Spanish Film & Literature class at George Mason University.

Triangulating the Revolution: Where Consciousness Becomes Reality

We are exploring the revolutionary film genre in Latin America during the 1970s in my Spanish Film & Literature class. This is an area that I have never focused on before, and I am surprised by the insights it provides.  For example, a 1973 film by Sara Gomez in Cuba, "De Cierta Manera," highlighted how a mix of fiction and documentary techniques triangulate to create a consciousness of the Cuban revolution that reflects on a personal and professional level the reality of its failures.  

Gomez toed the line in this state-sponsored film with dialogue such as "... without the revolution, we would not be here." She also includes documentary-style clips of urban renewal projects and community efforts to revitalize Havana.  But when you parse the different scenes and bring them together, you see the depth of the problems ordinary people face in Cuba.

The scenes that captured my attention were of Lázaro, the boy in Yolanda's class who was a problem and failing at school.  She tries to disciple him and meets with his mother, who explains that she goes to work at five o'clock in the morning, tries to get home at night on an unreliable bus system, has eleven children, and has no husband.  She also describes how Lázaro has been taken over by the street -- "la calle." 

In a second scene, Yolanda speaks directly to the camera, explaining her concern that the community and the school are failing Lázaro. She conveys a sense of desperation. In a third scene, community and school representatives criticize Yolanda and advise her to change her approach to helping Lázaro.

In the end, the different parties come together to help Lázaro after he is arrested for petty theft, but reaching that point takes the viewer through a litany of problems Cuban families and their children face. These are not the types of commentary one would expect in a state-sponsored film about revolutionary Cuba. I was intrigued by why the Castro regime allowed the film to include these criticisms of life there.

A paper on dialectics accompanied the film assignment, Julia Lesage's "One Way or Another: Dialectical, Revolutionary, Feminist." 

The paper can be found at https://pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/OneWayOrAnother.html. 

In the paper, the author highlights how our needs and personal interactions bring us to a relative truth: "The truth of ideas is proven by their adequacy in practice. Lenin wrote, 'Consciousness not only reflects the external world but creates it.' Dialectical thinking assumes both the thinker's historicity and the possibility of arriving at a relative truth. It assumes that intellectual functioning is purposeful and arises from people's needs, which change and will continue to change historically."

Using fictional and documentary-style scenes, De Cierta Manera revealed the relative truth about the Cuban Revolution's failures to address the people's social and economic needs. I am still confused as to why the Castro regime would allow the film to be distributed. "De Cierta Manera is art at its best in how it reveals truth. All great art somehow takes us to the truth, reflecting what is real.

The graphic below is my attempt to describe the three scenes and how they led to a general consciousness that, according to Lenin, created the world we witness in Cuba.