This Soviet-Cuban production, which started filming only 3 years after the Cuban Revolution is a masterclass in visual poetry, besides being also a careful and detailed look to live during the last days of Fulgencio Batista’s regime.

First of all, as it has been firstly mentioned, absolute praise has to be given to the direction of Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematography from Sergey Urusevsky. Through it you can perceive any sort of camera technique possible, from tilted shots, wide shots to close-ups, long-tracking shots (many of which will leave you at awe, wondering how they accomplished them) to fast-cut ones (element to which the editing obviously comes to fruition), to also frenetic against calmed and delicate movement… It is especially thanks to such skill on this area of the movie that you really especially get a true feeling of the emotions that the characters are going through.

And, precisely characters are not a few the ones we have, as the film is carefully divided in four different stories that we could connect to four different pillars of the Revolution. The first initial minutes could be consider as a sort of preface, with us, the spectator getting into the country from the shore (just as Columbus while it is reminded to us by the narrator), and then we get to the proper chapters which depict: the class distinction between the abusive rich Americans and the hardships of the Cubans, through the story of a young girl who lives in an impoverished neighbourhoods at the outskirts of the city that earns a living as a prostitute in a fancy hotel at the centre of the Havana; the struggle in the rural areas between the hard-working peasantry and the heartless landowners, through the tale of a humble widower peasant who prays for the day that he will be able to relief his son and daughter from their misery; next we go back to the urban area to observe the clash between the revolting students and the regime’s police, through the tale of a an actively engaged student with the revolution that has the inner debate of recurring to his more intuitive urges of violence to enact the revolution or wait patiently for it to take its due progress; and finally we get immersed on the battlefield in the mountains, where a family that tries to live as peacefully as possible disconnected to the conflict get completely impacted by it.

It is also highly worth-mentioning the use of sound all throughout the movie, from the score of Carlos Fariñas that so well enhance the feel of each scene and moment, to the environmental sound that either in the city, the forests or wherever so well engulfs you into the scenery, as well as the silences which magically enough are attention grabbing since they draw your absolute and complete focus onto what’s going on the screen and the imagery, isolating such aspects from any other sort of “contamination”. All those aspects are complemented by the narration of a female voice that starts each intervention by saying “Soy Cuba” (“I am Cuba) appearing some times at the beginning, some at the end of each story, which can be interpreted as embodying the will and soul of the country, telling in verse a kind of short moral.

All in all, an incredible achievement that becomes a filmmaking school on itself, with a great control of the craft, and interesting stories making it, regardless to your political inclinations an absolute must for any cinema enthusiast.