Michael O’Pray Writing Prize

One must have blind faith in ideology

Ricardo Reverón Blanco on a Cuban filmmaker suppressed both at home and abroad

Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Coffea Arábiga, 1968

In the shadow of Cuba’s revolutionary regime, Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938–2003) became the first black Cuban filmmaker to pioneer experimental cinema as a daring language of dissent. Rejecting conventional storytelling, he exposed power, provoked thought and carved out a space for critique. Working in film across the 1960s and 1970s in Cuba, Landrián forged a visionary body of work that challenged authority and offered a radical vocabulary of artistic resistance for understanding that era’s politics of fear and control.

A key film here is Coffea Arábiga, 1968, which opens with someone uttering deadpan ‘Hay que tener fe ciega en la ideología’ (‘You have to have blind faith in the ideology’). The sentiment arrives like a command, but it quickly slips into parody – obedience and its unravelling appear in a single breath. Navigating the machinery of ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), an institute that emerged in 1959 after the Cuban Revolution that centralised all film production under socialist cultural policy, Landrián worked through irony and fragmentation not as gestures of cinematic style but as a form of survival. His experimental cinema whispers sabotage: montage folds in on itself, propaganda undoes its own premise, producing a poetics of interference against authoritarian power.

On the surface, Coffea Arábiga is a hymn to coffee production, documenting the 1968 Green Belt project (Cordón de la Habana), which used the city’s outskirts for agriculture to reduce reliance on overseas imports. Yet underneath this narrative, the filmic surface disintegrates. Jump cuts pull the ground from under the images, such as peasants planting the crop over which voice-overs drawn from official propaganda and commercial slogans intrusively drift in: ‘Drink More Coffee!’ They oscillate between earnest instruction and absurd repetition, turning pedagogy into parody. The juxtaposition of scientific imagery (macro shots of coffee beans, chemical formulas) with rhythmic Afro-Cuban drumming destabilises the rhetoric of technocratic progress, staging a subtle racial and industrial critique of the revolution’s imagery. Coffee, the film’s central motif, is itself a loaded colonial crop, historically tied to slavery, plantation labour and the black rural proletariat of Cuba’s past. In Landrián’s hands, the plant becomes a cipher for how black labour continues to be visually instrumentalised. Coffee becomes code. The plantation stands as a factory of ideology, beans as metaphors for the revolutionary subject.

The imagined Utopia demanded by the state appears in Landrián’s films as parody. Filmmakers such as Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá Cabrera Infante faced bans for works like P.M., 1961, and were officially condemned for providing a ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’. Charges were rarely precise, allowing the state to detain, censor or exile artists without transparent legal process. Landrián’s dissent carried severe personal cost, which ended with him dying in exile in Miami. He was accused of ‘ideological deviation’ and was sent to correction service on a poultry farm on the Isla de la Juventud, subjected to exhaustive labour, before being admitted to a military psychiatric hospital in Ciudad Libertad where he underwent electroshock therapy without trial. His films were suppressed, and he was barred from international travel – by the early 1970s he had been effectively expelled from Cuba’s state film system.

Landrián’s film Ociel del Toa is a portrait of a boatman that swiftly refuses the triumphant worker-hero imagery promoted by the ICAIC. The film follows rural life and the mundane labour of Ociel, a 13-year-old who navigated the river Toa in the region of Baracoa on his cayuca (canoe). The slowness and solitude of labour linger in the film; rowing, waiting, drifting, often punctuated by close-ups of Ociel’s unreadable expression, like he was about to ask a question, but never did or was somehow silenced. Reality needed to align with the state’s ideology. Well, what is more heroic than Ociel navigating dangerously with his cayuca across the river Toa? The state didn’t like that sort of heroism, the reality of poor Cubans who were destined to disappear from history. Landrián would turn the camera on to reality and would ask the question of what had to change.

Jagged edits, tonal shifts and fragmented framing destabilise conventional representations of power, showing that social and institutional systems are open to questioning and disruption. By embracing ambiguity and irony, grain and silence, his films refuse full legibility and create space for critical thinking and alternative ways of seeing. Instead of producing a model revolutionary subject, Landrián protects his opacity, denying the state’s desire to turn workers into heroic symbols to promote totalitarianism.

Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ hovers over Landrián’s practice, not as a direct equivalence but as a framework for thinking about what happens when a person is reduced to live only on the state’s terms, stripped of interiority and complexity. Landrián’s films precisely respond to this pressure for total ideological legibility. La Revolución demanded that citizens be transparent, unified and knowable, yet Landrián turned instead toward opacity, fragmentation as a form of coded ridicule. Propaganda and heroism necessitate mediated embellishment as the sorrowful truths of totalitarian and socialist rule when caught by the camera fall short. The films teach how to see otherwise, how to read between lines, how to maintain interior space under surveillance and to resist being fed a single narrative. To refuse clarity is not to retreat but a call to think against the grain.

Films withdrawn, career curtailed, Landrián surveilled. The burden of silence and the weight of erasure mark his trajectory. Jorge Luis Lanza Caride notes in his 2024 article ‘Nicolás Guillén Landrián: Irreverence and Exile’, that Landrián was punished not only for his cinematic deviations but also for his identity: his blackness, his refusal to conform. His films became the site of displacement, where exile was rehearsed long before departure. The irreverence was aesthetic but also existential. He declares he could not ‘fit in anywhere except in his own work’. His films perform that misfit quality, never resting in clarity, always at odds with institutional demands. Cuban cinema in this period was expected to serve the revolution by celebrating collectivism, progress and socialist optimism through clear, didactic narratives. Films had to educate and unify, not question or complicate. Politically favoured films, like Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo, 1968, affirmed revolutionary values, such as those of the selfless politically committed citizen having faith in progress and modernisation as a sign of revolutionary success, or having revolutionary virtue through sacrifice, discipline and optimism.

Miami-based scholar Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s reflection in an issue of Small Axe from 2020 that ‘all the blacks and all the whites and all the imaginable mixed raced’ is essential here. The revolutionary promise of racial harmony and socialist equality in Cuba carried silent structural racism, exclusion and marginality. Landrián’s films vibrate those silences. They are haunted by plantation economics, by negritude, by the afterlives of slavery. In Coffea Arábiga, the beans being harvested recall histories of forced labour, even as the soundtrack insists on progress. The film’s ironic use of Afro-Cuban drumming and dance rhythms deepens this critique. Rather than offering an ethnographic celebration of Afro-Cuban culture (as state films often did), Landrián syncs these rhythms with images of mechanised production, exposing how black cultural expression is appropriated to animate national productivity. The body’s sensuality becomes subsumed by the tempo of labour like a visual echo of how blackness is both fetishised and disciplined within the revolutionary frame. Landrián, himself a black Cuban filmmaker in a predominantly white institution (ICAIC), turns Coffea Arábiga into a cinematic self-portrait of racial displacement. The utopian surface cracks under the pressure of racial history. His filmic irony is not only formal but also political: a reminder that equality spoken is not equality lived.

The echoes of Frantz Fanon’s thinking are everywhere, so is Edward Glissant’s notion of opacity. For example, in Poetics of Relation, 1990, Glissant insists that cultures have the right not to be fully transparent to power: ‘The right to opacity … is a right to exist without being reduced to what can be known or understood by others.’ Landrián’s experimental cinema embodies this principle, using ambiguity and abstraction to evade ideological control and create a space of artistic and political resistance. The sudden insertions of unrelated images, the repetition of a single gesture until it becomes absurd and violent, the irreverent use of advertising jingles over revolutionary discourse, all refuse legibility. They create a protective thickness where meaning cannot be reduced to propaganda. This opacity is not refusal to communicate but the creation of another form of communication, one that the state cannot fully appropriate.

By 1989, Landrián had left Cuba with his partner and collaborator Gretel Alfonso. Exile was not relief but another form of fracture. In Miami, his past was both memory and wound. Wilfredo Cancio García in El Nuevo Herald observed how his exile amplified a feeling of ambivalence, Landrián’s refusal to reconcile with either the Cuban state or his new community’s own orthodoxies.

To watch Coffea Arábiga today is to see how Landrián’s strategies remain urgently relevant: fragmentation as resistance, irony as weapon, opacity as protection. His films are not relics but manuals for survival. They teach how to watch, doubt and refute. Blind faith in ideology was the order. Landrián made faith stumble; he would loop it, splice it, fracture it. In the cuts and ruptures, he carved out survival. His films insist that to see differently is to live differently.

The author thanks Gretel Acosta and María C Cumaná of Tulane University for generously sharing materials and insights essential to this research.

Ricardo Reverón Blanco is the winner of the Film and Video Umbrella and Art Monthly Michael O’Pray Prize 2025.

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative in partnership with Art Monthly.

2025 Selection Panel

• Ed Atkins, British contemporary artist, best known for his video art and poetry
• Belinda Zhawi, literary & sound artist, author of Small Inheritances (ignitionpress, 2018)
• Angelica Sule, director, Film and Video Umbrella
• Chris McCormack, associate editor, Art Monthly