When I started looking at the Global Exchange website to find a fully legal trip to Cuba, I first found their language courses, all very basic for me. I wrote and asked them if they perhaps offered courses in other subjects in Spanish (like art, literature, philosophy), or participation in regular courses at the University of Havana.

They didn't have anything like that, but they did point me to their other Cuba trips: Afrocuban drumming, bicycle tours, etc. Then I saw one I couldn't resist, the Latin American Film Festival in December.

Before I went, I saw a couple of important Cuban films:

I had seen this one before, when it first came out in the States. But this time I was able to understand many more of the cultural references, because I'd been reading Cuban lit since February.

In fact, one of the short stories I read was "Don't Tell Her You Love Her, Love Scene with Paul McCartney at the Window" by Semel Paz, which forms the basis for the opening sequence of the young man and woman in the hotel room.

Memories of Underdevelopment

Also directed by Gutiérrez Alea, and based on a work by another author I had read, Edmundo Desnoes. I had some trouble with the video rolling on the screen, but it is an interesting film with several memorable scenes that I still think about.

The Buena Vista Social Club

A fun Ry Cooder-Wim Wenders production. It gives you a nice, relaxed, Caribbean feeling, with lovely scenes of the incredible sea and sky and lots of interesting cinematography. Plus adorable, real-life characters and good music.

The Mambo Kings

I had read the book maybe a month before. Of course they differ, but in both the book and the film, the magic centers around the brothers' appearance on I Love Lucy. The film is also much more of a tearjerker.

As participants in the Film Festival, we were given badges for free access to any of the films, and to press conferences and formal activities like the opening banquet (I didn't do any of the latter two, myself).

Cubans can attend the films for one Cuban peso (about three cents U.S.), but participants are supposed to have first dibs when a crowd forms (that isn't always the case in practice). In fact, many people in Havana schedule their vacation to coincide with the Film Festival, and retirees see one film after another. I was amazed that Havana has so many cinemas, four of them within easy walking distance of our hotel.

I usually found one or more participants from our group to attend films with. Only one other person in our group was fluent enough in Spanish to understand a film, but one cinema provided simultaneous interpretation into English. Our participants also tried to figure out some dialog by seeing foreign films and trying to piece together the third language and the Spanish subtitles. And yes, there were American and Canadian films (including Mulholland Drive) shown in English with Spanish subtitles.

The first film I saw was with my roommate Josh the day after we arrived. It was a French film. I don't remember the original French title, but the Spanish title (and cognate) was ¡Al ataque! I guess the English would be "Charge!"

It was OK. When I asked Josh afterward whether it had been a film or a movie, he said "movie," but pointed out some interesting camera work and dissolves.

The movie is about two screenwriters working on their next project. They lounge around their house, in various day-to-day activities, talking about the characters and plot. We see each of the versions they talk about, until the end, when we see three alternate endings. This meta-movie quality is what makes it almost a film for me.

Maybe you could say the difference between American lowbrow and European lowbrow is that Bridget Jones's boyfriends drive on the left....

Miel para Oshún features the actor who starred as the gay Cuban in Strawberry and Chocolate. In the theater, he spoke briefly before the film began (my brush with fame for this trip). The film involves two major Cuban themes: Santería and exile (the effects of exile on families).

Santería is one of the three "syncretistic" Afrocuban religions. In Santería the African slaves managed to preserve their gods when they were forcibly baptized by associating each god with a Catholic saint. Thus Oshún, the Yoruba god of things like money and sensuality, became Our Lady of Charity, and slaves could worship him/her without retribution.

In the film, a young man who was taken to America by his father just after the revolution returns to Cuba to look for his mother. He finds his cousin, and they set off with a taxi driver on a road trip all along the island of Cuba seeking his mother. The auto breakdowns and contretemps along the road elicited uproarious, knowing laughter from the mostly Cuban audience.

They first visit a Santería priestess devoted to Oshún who tells them something about finding the mother where honey enters the water. Oshún also plays a role, no doubt, in the growing (but never quite consummated) attraction between the cousins (the one living in Cuba is female and about the same age as her former playmate visiting from exile).

The father had taken his son and fled Cuba, among other reasons, because the mother was of a "lower social class," and his family had never approved of her. Talking to the black participants in our group, they pointed out that there was also an element of racism in that classism, as the mother was of more African background than the father. And indeed, the seekers encounter key people of more and more African blood as they get closer and closer to the mother, who they eventually find where the river Miel ('honey') enters the sea.

It is an interesting film, and will probably show up over here sooner or later as it is an important Cuban film and a joint Cuban/Spanish production.

Then we went outside of the city for two nights at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión. We had two lectures from a film professor, made some stops along the way, slept over the last vestiges of jet lag and travel exhaustion, went swimming, and saw two films, Frida and Cecilia.

This was a 1984 Mexican biography of Frida Kahló by a French director living in Mexico (I've forgotten his name). I think they might have chosen it from all the (non-subtitled) films in the EICTV library because it had very little dialog and lots of it was in English, French, German, Russian anyway.

It was a good film and left me with a delightful artsy feeling about life. "Wasn't that a depressing film?" our Irish guide asked me. "No," I said. "It wasn't tragic. Bad things happened to her, as they happen to all of us, but she kept going. For her, art was the thing."

Because of the sparse dialog, the acting and the cinematography became very important to me, and made me look at each scene more like a painting. This French director whose name I forget had also worked with Buñuel, and it showed somehow.

The professor had mentioned this film in his lecture on Cuban cinema. It is a film version from the 80s of Cecilia Valdés, the 19th-Century Cuban novel that was one of the thick books I read in preparing for the trip. I had mentioned my reading to our group leader, and she used her influence to have Cecilia shown as our second film (thanks Karen, wherever you are!).

The film professor said the film had been controversial. The complaints had mostly been these:

• It diverged from the book.
• Old Havana was depicted as too dark and gloomy.
• It exaggerated the incestuous relationship between the boy and his mother.

I spent most of the film keeping track of the characters and plot and how they diverged from the book, so I was not able to appreciate the film so much as film (I would like to see it again to that end).

The problem with filming a book that every Cuban has read in school is that while it might free you to do something creative with the story, it also will inevitably raise complaints from those who want a literal, lineal presentation of the story they remember.

As far as the relationship between the boy and his mother, it was certainly Oedipally charged in the book. The film might have exaggerated it a bit, in one scene where the boy is lying on the mother's bed talking to her. That scene is in the book, and so is their excessively loving discourse. The only difference is that in the film, he puts his leg over hers while they are speaking (she is under the covers and he is out). I guess the book didn't specify the disposition of the leg. I don't think it's much exaggeration, but other members of our group thought it gratuitously crossed the line between Oedipal and incestuous.

For me, this was a depressing film, or at least a disturbing one. There is an exaggeration into a dream sequence of repression of slaves and slave revolt on the parents' plantation...the whippings, the rapes, the murders...I had to close my eyes during the castration scene (apparently part of the dream sequence and not in the book).

I was a little shell-shocked after that (I guess we all were), but the next morning on the bus we talked about the film and I explained some of the differences from the book. I was really pleased a few days later when one of the participants told me my explanation had been one of the highlights of the trip.

Back in Havana, I and some others from our group saw what turned out to be perhaps the best film I saw there, Y tu mamá también. It is one of those films that tempts you to walk out, but if you stay to the end, it becomes worthwhile.

Y tu mamá también is a recent Mexican production, the story of two young guys. It starts out with lots of shallow sex scenes and bathroom scenes as their girlfriends head off to Europe for the summer. The film often seemed like an x-rated version of MTV's Road Rules.

The story is held together by a third-person narrator, whose Spanish is also much easier to understand than the teenage Mexican slang of the two protagonists. The protagonists are middle- and upper-middle-class kids, unaware of much beyond themselves and their car, ignoring the poverty and repression all around them. One has a sister who participates in student demonstrations, but the guys consider demos mostly a traffic nuisance.

At a wedding, the two guys meet the Spanish model who is married to the cousin of one of them. Duly impressed with her looks, they invent a trip to the beach they say they are planning, and try to get her to join them. They make up a name for the imaginary beach, "Boca del Cielo."

She of course refuses, but a few days later (in one of the initially improbable incidents), she has just returned from a doctor's appointment when her husband calls her up and says he's met someone else. She calls up her young cousin-by-marriage and says she would like to take him up on the trip to Boca del Cielo.

"Shit dude, she means it!" So the three hit the road. On the road, she has sex with one of them, then the other. The sex scenes are complete (no fades). We watch them all the way from foreplay to orgasm. In that way (and with the bathroom scenes) the film pushes the envelope on what some members of the audience can take. (I didn't mind the sex myself ;) but I could do without watching these guys pee.)

The two guys of course become jealous of each other. Each in turn tells the other "I slept with your girlfriend before she went to Europe," and their jealousy and bad blood increases. The Spanish model is only able to reconcile them by jumping out of the car and threatening to leave if they don't follow certain ground rules.

Near the end of the trip, they drive all night and finally fall asleep when they can go no more. But when they awake in the morning, they find that they are at the edge of the beach. They set up camp, and while they are fishing a herd of pigs swarms the beach and tears up their camp.

I'm still working on what that biblical metaphor means here. Their bad blood has been cast into the herd of swine? In any case, they have no more petty jealousy and hatred when they move to a fisherman's little collection of rental cottages for the night. They drink a lot of tequila and start singing and laughing and saying more and more outrageous things. One guy says to the other, "I slept with your sister, and your mother too" (hence the title).

The three of them get a single room, the guys as drunk as skunks. Then it happens. While the Spanish model is performing an act upon the two of them, they look each other in the eyes and...kiss.

After the audience roar dies down, they wake up next to each other and shame is upon them. They quickly jump into their clothes and leave separately, making excuses and leaving the Spanish model behind.

Cut to a year later. The two meet on the street for the first time since and have a cup of coffee. The one who is related by marriage to the Spanish model says, "You know she died."

"Died?"

"There at Boca del Cielo. Apparently she had cancer and she died four months after we left."

Which kind of makes it all make sense. I have since seen the film again in Santa Cruz, and I now understand more of the political side and am able to see clearly how everything in it is pointing the way irrevocably to the twin "surprises" of the kiss and the death.