Cuban Cinema: Crisis or Transition

2013 was a sanguine year for Cuba’s film industry. 4 years after the institution’s 50th anniversary in 2009, a year in which the number of films produced reached its highest level since 1990, Cuban national cinema finds itself in a very difficult period of change and uncertainty about its future, that some critics have called a crisis and others a transition. As Cuban writer and film critic Juan Antonio García Borrero (2013:16) points out, the filmmakers stated that the ICAIC should no longer be the sole arbiter and representative of Cuban cinema in a changing world. How does Cuba now negotiate the cultural tightrope that is the logic of cultural domination in a changing audiovisual landscape of digital production and flash drive distribution?