A Short Film produced and directed by Hothouse Director Marguerite Horberg coming in Fall 2024

Guantánamo has featured in the world imagination as the most notorious sites of detention and incarceration on earth. The abundant contradictions embedded in this imperial occupation of Cuba by the US forms the nexus of the numerous subtextual and insinuated overlapping points of reflection central to this film.

“El Otro Guantánamo” relocates and re-contextualizes (the province and town) Guantánamo as a crucible of African culture that has maintained and furthered Afro-centric traditions for over the centuries in spite of proximity to, and being overshadowed by “ Gitmo”.

Here we present key musicians who primarily perform in the Changüi, Nengón and Kiribá musical styles that were part of the culture of the coffee and sugar cane harvests, melding evolving integrations with other Caribbean peoples who settled in Oriente especially after the Haitian Revolution.

Additionally we feature interviews with cultural organizers from the region who create festivals and ongoing events to maintain and perpetuate the historic relevance of their heritage.

The impact of the project will be to interrupt the isolative imposition the legacy of the slave trade has had on people unable to access their own land or fish in their own ocean. It is a meditation upon the hopeful and collective ways people have found to subtlety occupy spaces of abolition and resistance even when adjacent to a form of subjugating pessimism including a long economic blockade that perpetuates underdevelopment and servitude.

An important reflection upon the cultural structures advanced in the Cuban revolutionary tradition, ultimately, this is a joyful and musically uplifting tale –full of characters – the artists and activists of Guantánamo, who through dedication to their own traditions have led exemplary practices of self-reliance far from the bright lights of Havana.

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