Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

Speaking from Little Havana, President Donald Trump drew criticism in 2017 when he reinstated previous sanctions that reversed former president Barack Obama and then Cuban president Raúl Castro’s previous attempts to ease restrictions and restore Cuban-US relations. The speech recalled many to previous Cold War policies and limited ways of seeing Cuba. In Hollywood in Havana, Megan Feeney goes beyond the narrow scope of Fidel Castro, retracing Hollywood’s impact on revolutionary Cuban nationalism “through broad sociopolitical trends and film business practices” (7). The book provides a comprehensive approach to pre–Cuban Revolution relations between Cuba and the United States as seen through economic, political, and cultural encounters with film. The book identifies the film industry’s imperialist practices and presents how Cubans understood Hollywood and the US, showing that films promoting “Americanization” often had inverse effects, some of which were partly responsible for instilling a desire for pro-democracy revolutionary heroes in Cuba.

Feeney explores the intimate relationship of Cuba’s pre-1959 engagement with cinema when cinemas were cultural “contact zones” with the US. She repeatedly uses the term “looking up,” referring to Castro’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial—echoing an iconic scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—to present Cubans as David, who use cinema to see the failures of the US, the Goliath to the north, who often look down on them. Her book returns to when Havana was one of Hollywood’s most important international markets, a vibrant business community referred to as the giro, with film offices, theaters, politically involved film critics, and audiences who cheered for what they liked and loudly disapproved—or even boycotted—what they did not. Feeney recovers the influential role that Hollywood had on Cuban audiences who appropriated the “armed men of action” (10) they saw on the silver screen into their context to show they would not be bridled by foreign hegemony, of which the US was the primary offender.

Hollywood in Havana provides a clear chronological trajectory from Cuban independence to its revolution, focusing more on Cubans’ response to their representation in cinema than providing specific film criticism. The text’s position is sympathetic to Cuba as it views the Cuban Revolution as an organic response to US imperialism. It analyzes the impact of intellectual and politically motivated critics—such as Alejo Carpentier, José Manuel Valdés-Rodríguez, Mirta Aguirre, Mario Rodríguez Alemán, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante—who recognized the effect US films had on audiences and intervened to appropriate them for the benefit of revolutionary Cuban nationalism. Feeney excels at showing how Cuban film criticism served as a platform from which critics cultivated audiences that would recognize injustices [End Page 167] on-screen and use them to speak out and mobilize. She presents World War II as a period when Cuban-US relations were strong, as Hollywood took a stance against dictatorships, producing films that resonated with Cubans’ anti fascist and pro-democratic beliefs, such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Finally, she introduces film noir as the embodiment of postwar disillusionment that Hollywood leftists and Cubans felt at the onset of the Cold War, breaking the bond that wartime cinema created and reinforcing negative beliefs Cubans held toward the United States. Hollywood in Havana explains that film noir and other social-problem films were a hit with Cuban critics who saw them as accurate representations of the real US and used them to denounce its hegemonic practices.

The study stands out through its presentation of politics, economics, and international relations through cinema—how it is produced, distributed, screened, and received—which heavily influenced how many Cubans saw their exploitation by foreign powers. The book is particularly important for readers wanting to better understand prerevolution Cuba, as it contrasts cinematic movements with key historical moments and figures, such as Cuban independence...