Can the New Man Speak? by Bruno Bosteels

To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man. - Ernesto "Che" Guevara, "Socialism and Man in Cuba"

The watershed year of 1968 is also the year that saw the premiere of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's movie Memorias del subdesarrollo (usually translated as Memories of Underdevelopment, but sometimes as Memoirs of Underdevelopment) during the opening night of the IV Pesaro Film Festival in Rome, alongside a documentary by Joris Ivens on Vietnam. Now considered a classic both nationally and internationally as well as a precursor and founding example of so-called Third Cinema, the movie repeatedly makes the top of the list of best movies of all time as selected by film critics worldwide. In Cuba, for example, the Asociación Cubana de la Prensa Cinematográfica recently voted the movie the number one feature film for the period between 1959 and 2008 in the category of "Top Ten Most Significant Cuban Films. "1 Given the director's central role in the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficas (ICAIC), which he co-founded in 1959 in one of the first acts of cultural politics in the revolutionary process in Cuba just three months after the victory of Fidel Castro's troops, this official recognition should not come as a surprise. Far more surprising is the uninterrupted international acclaim bestowed on the film since its first showings. Indeed, while initially the US government refused Gutiérrez Alea a visa to accept the 1973 National Society of Film Critics award and banned Memorias del subdesarrollo as part of its embargo against Castro's regime, the movie has been a remarkable success outside of Cuba with both experts and general audiences alike, including in the United States. Considering the nature of its story-the self-reflective broodings of a bourgeois intellectual who, after the departure of his wife and family, decides to remain on the island in spite of his repugnance for its continued state of underdevelopment-this success begs the obvious question as to how and why both sides of the ideological spectrum could reach such fertile common ground in the appreciation of this particular movie by Gutiérrez Alea, perhaps matched only by the success of Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) twenty-five years later. In this chapter I will try to address this question anew by turning to two subtexts, or paratexts, of the movie: not, as is usually done, by comparing the filmic version to the novel from which it is loosely derived, Edmundo Desnoes's Memorias del subdesarrollo (translated into English under the title Inconsolable Memories), but rather by having a closer look at León Rozitchner's Moral burguesa y revolución (Bourgeois Morality and Revolution)-a book from 1963 purchased by the protagonist Sergio in a local bookstore in Havana early in the movie, and read by him in long sequences of voice-over-together with Gutiérrez Alea's own treatise on film theory, published in 1982 under the title Dialéctica del espectador (The Viewer's Dialectic).