Educational Media Reviews Online

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and nowhere may this be true more than in Cuba. There are drastic shortages of just about everything, so Cubans have become incredibly resourceful in creating makeshift products to meet their needs. The environmentalist credo of reuse and recycle reaches its apex here.

The United States has had a trade embargo against Cuba since 1962. The Soviet Union became Cuba’s chief patron, but the collapse of Communism there meant the end of subsidies to the island, a loss of $6 billion per year.

By 1992, electrical blackouts were lasting for eight hours at a time. Fuel deliveries were reduced by 80%. Cuban leader Fidel Castro called this time “the special period.” The video Sin Embargo says it was commonly referred to as “Armageddon.”

But the Cuban people didn’t adopt a fatalistic end-of-the-world attitude, and the stories they tell in Sin Embargo (translated as Never the Less) become a testament to their amazing inventiveness and will to survive.

In Cuba, the pulp of a grapefruit becomes steak, shoe polish becomes mascara, and toothpaste becomes deodorant. A telephone dial becomes a doorbell (dialing number 1 produces a short ring, dialing 9 the longest). A primitive motorcycle is made by attaching a two-horsepower motor to a Chinese bicycle. Buses are created from three cars joined together. Nothing is ever thrown away when it breaks. It’s either repaired or recycled.

The shortages have an interesting effect on the work of artists and performers. A sculptor refuses to stop working when traditional materials for sculpting are not available. He creates pieces out of whatever is at hand. A choreographer creates a dance without music when her cassette player cannot operate because of a blackout. And a female impersonator creates wigs out of vegetable fibers and nails from plastic bags as part of a stage costume.

At the end of the video, a man says, “Sacrifice develops the intellect. It develops humanity and culture.” And a woman comments, “In Cuba, we don’t have money. We have time,” and adds she believes having time is more important. If the U.S. embargo against Cuba is lifted, it will be interesting to see how Cubans deal with a flood of new goods after so many years without them. Perhaps the Sin Embargo filmmakers could return to Cuba to capture this moment and provide a worthy sequel to this fascinating video.

One caveat about the format, the DVD version is actually a DVD-R. It has a bluish tint on the underside of the disc rather than the silver of a conventional DVD. Some older DVD players are unable to read DVD-Rs. A 1999 Philips Magnavox model could not play this disc, for example.

Awards:

• Best Documentary, Festival de Cine de Granada
• Award for Excellence, American Anthropological Association, Society for Visual Anthropology