The film, I Am Cuba (1964),
consists of four vignettes that depict what Cuba was in its pre-revolutionary
day beyond the wealthy gloss of the American-owned casinos. Sugarcane is sweet,
but it is also of tears. Furthermore,
the film explains the revolutionary ground-swell in the individual lives of Cubans
whom the American tourists didn’t see from their luxurious perches near the
beaches. The film proffers a glimpse of the extreme poverty and oppression so
raw that it could (and did) foment a revolutionary change of regime through
amassed violence against the police-state. The abstract message ripe for
political theory is that once regime-change is on the front burner at the
macro, or societal level, strong interpersonally-directed emotions that stem
from particular cases of injustice will have had a lot of time to build up. Indeed,
the latter is the trigger for the former. Abstract political principles on
governance and macroeconomic policy on the distribution and redistribution of
wealth, and even principles of distributive justice are not divorced from the
interpersonal level, especially as between citizens and individual police or
military employees of the state. Indeed, those philosophical abstractions gain
traction in a revolutionary context through the sweat and tears of individual
people.
The full essay is at "I Am Cuba."
