Lucía

 Tonight for the Criterion Cinema Chat group, we will be discussion the 1968 Cuban film Lucía, directed by Humberto Solás.

Some ideas I hope can spark discussion: 

• How do the three segments work together, not just as separate stories? The struggle for freedom across 100 years, continuity in the name, a progression in female protagonism.
• Foundational fiction/national romance as a structuring trope of 19th century Latin American literature. Difference from 20th century novels where 3 women represent 3 different choices for the male subject because here we see the issue of women as (potential) protagonists. women are objects of struggle, the terrain of struggle but also becoming actors in the struggle, if still enmeshed in love/marriage plot.
• the scenes of violence and woman's action
•  first Lucia: rape/betrayal/revenge, warfare, ends with madwoman. Lucía is from the creole plantation-owning class, her lover is  the spy-betrayer. At stake are the categories of "Spaniard" vs "Cuban." She is not directly involved in the political struggle, although she has sympathy for the fate of the woman who is raped. The man she loves claims to be both Cuban and Spaniard and also to be outside politics, turns out to be already married and a spy who uses her, manipulating her spinster desire, to get to the hide-out of her brother and the mambises. Her revenge is to kill him in the town square. The interactions with the raped nun/betrayed novia: a split female subject.
  
• second Lucia: machine gun battles in the city, strike, ends with her pregnant, maybe suicidal. This Lucía is from a bourgeois family, with her frivolous bitter mother in the country home, choices of the conventional family vs. love; she leaves her class and family to be with the revolutionary. Goes to work in tobacco factory, takes part in the strike. Aldo and his friend represent the two options after Machado is thrown out. Aldo chooses to continue the struggle, as would many Cubans, against Batista (orgy). Alone and pregnant, whither the future? Here the woman is a participant although still not making the choices (with the machine guns), but will she survive? jump in the water?
  
• third Lucia:  national change linked to woman as citizen-worker. After the revolution, this Lucía is the peasant worker. Love and marriage consummated but now the man keeps her a prisoner, is like an anti-revolutionary gusano, interferes with the literacy campaign. The reading scene where she is encouraged to leave him. She refuses to obey, writes "I am not a slave," goes to work, fights back. All the women unite to prevent the husband from attacking her. The futile struggle at the end.
• child at the end, a revolutionary consciousness from the future? also hokey, jarring.