Cuba film series | American Rebels

Event Start Date: March 10, 2026 6:00 PM
Event End Date: March 10, 2026 8:00 PM
Recurs Every Never until July 14, 2025 4:08 PM

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Film series | Envisioning Cuban Freedom: History & its Legacies 
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Smathers Room 100 | 6:00 - 8:00 pm

This program offers students, faculty and community members the opportunity to engage Cuba’s complex history and its contemporary relevance to current events through three documentary film screenings and in-person discussions with their directors.

The film showings and public discussions will be moderated by Lillian Guerra, UF Professor of Cuban and Caribbean History. In addition to the films, the program will feature the presentation of an original lecture by Dr. Michael Bustamante, the Bacardí Chair of Cuban & Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami, on the intense transnationality that defines Cuban identity and popular political culture in South Florida and the island, despite US-Cuba hostility and official divides. 

Importantly, all three films in the series were produced and directed by filmmakers with vast, decades-long experience making documentaries on-site in Cuba for American and international audiences. Each of the chosen films for presentation at UF resonate with each other and with the focus of Dr. Bustamante’s latest research in highlighting the equal role played by Cuba’s transnational diaspora and island citizens in crafting alternative visions and pathways to freedom in a society dominated by Communist Party rule for the last sixty-five years.

Film series dates:

• Wednesday, October 22 | 6:00 pm | Smathers Room 100
  Letters from Eloísa (2021) dir. Adriana Bosch
  Guest speaker: Adriana Bosch
  This film focuses on the life, legacies and personally painful journey of Lezama Lima, the only internationally acclaimed “Boom Writer” of post-1959 Cuba; his homosexuality, critical view of the Communist state and literary brilliance made him a constant threat for the government, which relegated him to obscurity on the island and virtual house arrest. Exchanging letters with his sister, Eloísa, who lived in Miami, serves as both refuge and witness to history. Watch trailer on PBS here.
  
  
• Wednesday, January 28 | 6:00 pm | Smathers Room 100
  Walking the Cuban Tightrope (2024) dir. Margaux Ouimet
  Guest speaker: Margaux Ouimet 
  Analyzing the relationship between Cuba’s anti-racist national promise and its betrayal by successive revolutionary struggles since the 19th Century to the present, this film examines the activism, myth and living legacies of José Martí in contemporary Cuba. The struggle of everyday Cubans, rap musicians, artists and human rights activists culminate in on-screen depictions of the unprecedented 11 July 2021 national mass street protests as well as their aftermath and their uncertain future legacy in Cuba’s quest for freedom. Watch trailer and read reviews here.
  
  
• Wednesday, February 18 | 6:00 pm | Smathers Room 100
  Guest speaker: Dr. Michael Bustamante (University of Miami)
  Dr. Bustamante is the Director of the public and academic programs for the Cuban Heritage Collection at UM, the largest archive and depository of Cuban materials in the world outside of Cuba. Read more about him here.
  
  
• Tuesday, March 10 | 6:00 pm | Smathers Room 100
  American Rebels (2019) dir. Glenn Gebhard
  Guest speaker: Glenn Gebhard
  Using archival materials deposited at the University of Florida and original footage shot by Gebhard, this film was the result of intense collaboration among UF librarians, Professor Guerra and Nancy Macaulay, the widow of former UF Professor of Latin American History, Neill Macaulay. The film unearths the largely forgotten and unknown history of Nancy and Neill’s participation and experiences fighting the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista for Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, the triumph of the latter in 1959 and then the subsequent collapse of the Cuban dream of democratic freedom during and after Fidel Castro’s adoption of communism. Told entirely through the voices of Neill and Nancy (with no additional narration), the film is deeply personal and moving. Watch the trailer and read reviews here.