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In the 1964 documentary Iré a Santiago (I'm Going to Santiago), Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez celebrated Santiago de Cuba's black history. She employed wide shots of the eastern city's colonial streets, cathedral, and university while explaining to her audience that "the first blacks [in Cuba] were brought to Santiago and General Antonio Maceo was born here." In doing so, she emphasized the city's rich past and Afro-Cuban contributions to the nation. But in 1964, Gómez was not only aware of Santiago's past; she also had a stake in its future—a future marked by the dynamic social changes of the 1959 revolution, including both an antidiscrimination campaign and a movement to integrate women into the workforce. In fact, the documentary's narrator claimed that "history is beginning again in Santiago [with the revolution]," as images of Afro-Cuban women outfitted with batons, drums, and marching band uniforms moved across the screen. As the only woman and one of three black directors working at the National Cuban Film Institute (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, or ICAIC) in the 1960s, Gómez routinely stood out by producing documentaries that showcased the daily experiences of blacks and mulatos in revolutionary Cuba—she showed blacks in neighborhoods, factories, and rural areas participating in and questioning the new government's policies. This work sat in stark contrast to the contradictory images proliferating revolutionary visual culture that simultaneously welcomed blacks into the new nation and portrayed Afro-Cubans as in need of salvation and reform to be ideal citizens.1 It also challenged recent moves by state cultural institutions, ICAIC included, to position blackness in the past, as folklore.2
Gómez's claim that history was beginning again in Santiago mirrored statements made by revolutionary leaders who imagined 1959 as a new start for the island; however, the young filmmaker saw Cuba's renewal, its revolution, in the lives of Afro-Cuban men and women in Santiago, Guanabacoa, and other sites far removed from the accepted centers of white, male power.
Like other Cubans, blacks and mulatos negotiated the changing landscape of revolutionary Cuba throughout the 1960s. New legislation like the Agrarian and Urban Reform Laws, coupled with moves to reduce telephone and electricity rates and provide educational scholarships and health care to working-class and rural Cubans, meant...