Posthumous Reconciliation: 21st century Cuban-Soviet-North American Filmic Collaboration

ABSTRACT While the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991 may have felt to Cubans as if they had been abandoned, in the filmic representation of the two countries and their citizens within two recent transnational films made during the short-lived Cuban-U.S. thaw, they are closer than ever, and Cuba is in the driver’s seat. The United States is but an afterthought. This article focuses specifically on Sergio & Sergei (2017), directed by Cuban Ernesto Daranas, and produced by the ICAIC, Spain’s Mediapro, Cuba’s RTV Comercial, and Wing and Prayer Productions (U.S. Actor/Ron Perlman’s Indie Finance and Production Company); and Un Traductor/A Translator, 2018, directed by Cuban/Canadian brothers Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso, and produced by Sebastián Barriuso and Canadian Lindsay Gossling. It argues that the films advance idealized versions of the Soviet male or Sovietized Cuban as well as ‘old-fashioned’ values of solidarity in the face of a more sinister present. Demonstrating that the reconciliation these films enact is hardly on the U.S.-Cuban axis, this article shows how the films clearly manage to project upon that axis a warm, friendly, and worldly Cuba – with secure, multi-lingual protagonists at the fore who seem proud of their country and open to the world, albeit cautiously.