Not Afraid to search for a Critical Space: Discovering the Postmodern in Cuban Cinema. The Case of ¡Plaff! (o demasiado miedo a la vida)

The end of the 1980s saw Cuba in crisis as the collapse of the USSR removed the island's economic lifeline. But this crisis had been building for a number of years and many of the 'certainties' of the past were being fundamentally questioned. This questioning produced a particular brand of Cuban postmodernism, in which a certain rejection of the linear trajectory of history was being articulated in a country with a still-developing sense of its past but with a crisis that would undoubtedly alter that perception. This article intends to explore this ideological break with the past via analysis of the film ¡Plaff! (o demasiado miedo a la vida) (Juan Carlos Tabío, 1988). The film stands on the threshold of important change in Cuban cinema, coming as it did only a year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall on 11–12 November 1989 and the subsequent collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The article will demonstrate how the film deconstructs old values and creates new ones via a recycling process of pastiche and parody, managing a difficult balancing act between the questioning of the authority of state institutions and support of the Revolution as a valid national project.