Roads to Emancipation

Abstract

Recent Hispanic-Caribbean cinema shows a keen interest in exploring reality from the decentralized and contradictory position of the child as subject.¹ In the case of Cuba, films like Life Is to Whistle (Fernando Pérez 1998), Havana Suite (Fernando Pérez 2003), The Silly Age (Pavel Giroud 2006), or Habanastation (Ian Padrón 2011) feature a child—at times as a supporting character and at other times as a protagonist—as a dramatic resource to make conjectures about the political and sociocultural manifestations of the country, allocating to this young age a complex allegorical weight.² This resorting to child characters on the silver screen offers an unconventional vision—and, at times, a transgressive one—to the filmic narrative by producing alternative readings centering on the notions of identity, nation, diaspora, and self-knowledge in times of crisis.

We know nothing of childhood, and with our mistaken notions the further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child without considering what he is before he becomes a man

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile

Education will always have to be a compromise between indoctrination and freedom.

—Ala Alryyes, Original Subjects

When do people grow up?

—Malú, Viva Cuba