“As an artist, are you really happy with this shallow and demonizing takeaway from a movie you have obviously put so much effort an passion into?” I wanted to ask Leon Ichaso the question, but honestly, I was so enraged by the Q&A session following a screening of “Paraíso” that I would have ended in a loud and pointless tit for tat with the audience of elderly Cubans filling out the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Besides, it became obvious that he was playing it up for the audience, too happy to endorse their paranoid fantasy of newly arrived balseros as hustlers aiming for their wallets or even their lives.
Ichaso has claimed he didn’t mean to generalize, but after seeing the movie and listening to his comments it’s hard to imagine he made much of an effort. There’s no redemption for newly arrived Cubans, no good characters other than the big-hearted exiles who open their fancy waterfront homes to them -because, you know, we are all very successful- regale them with feasts at Versailles and gift them with clothes and motorcycles. I have a few friends who would dispute this mythical generosity, but never mind. In Ichaso’s world the nice Cubans exist solely on this side of the Straits and the only balsero with an ounce of decency is murdered at sea. Apparently Yemayá saves only jineteros, thiefs and crack addicts from the waves and sharks, so that they can terrorize Miami later.
Prompted by the shaken viejitos in the audience who loudly wondered from what country those amoral marijuana growers and Medicare monsters come from, so different than their own pure and perfect generations -I guess they have never heard of Jose Miguel Battle, Humberto Hernandez or the De Cespedes brothers just to mention a few- Ichaso referred to newly arrived Cubans as Frankenstein monsters, men and women made of mismatched moral parts who grew in a Petri dish of a country without traditions or a patria. These circumstances would make them the real victims but this somehow escapes him, just as much as it escapes him the fact that the immense majority of new arrivals do not dedicate their lives to crime but to honest work, doing the same menial jobs that those who came in the 60s had to do in order to come ahead. This despite his admitting that the actors and crew were those same new arrivals!
The real Frankenstein monster is Ichaso’s movie, a patchwork of barely elaborated scenarios (what disruption is El Flaco causing at the hotel?) and a half-witted script (any of the radio monologues by Remigio), shot with a meandering and shaky camera prone to fast zooms and atrociously edited with dizzying intercuts and slow motion sequences trying to cloak the soap-opera level storytelling with an indie mantle. (Take your pick of any of these preposterous scenes: Ivan and Tamara arguing in a parking lot next to a gleaming Harley, Ivan being discovered as a model photo shoot where he was working as an assistant and wanders in front of the camera, Ivan confronting his old friend El Flaco, Ivan’s hysterical breakdown with Alina, etc.) Two redeeming qualities: it does screen much larger than its $30,000 budget, mostly because of the beautiful cinematography, and Miguel Gutierrez shows why he is possibly the best Cuban actor. The rest is all on-the-nose pretentiousness and ludicrous treacle.
It’s a pity, because the haunting, nuanced theme of the dissonance between the exiles that have lived most of their lives in a foreign country, admirably clinging to their traditions but also fantasizing nostalgically about the country they lost and doesn’t exist anymore, and their compatriots who have grown in communist Cuba, which is a great source of conflict and will be even more in the future, deserves a much more honest treatment than what Ichaso has delivered. It was particularly disappointing for me, because I thought the equally melodramatic and flawed “Bitter Sugar” had nonetheless managed to capture the stark reality of life in the island and the psyche of a desperate people. A realistic look could have made “Paraíso” our “The Lives of Others”, but instead becomes another piece of the paranoid tableau of exile which is currently obsessed with the new arrivals who travel to Cuba as soon as they can, shun Radio Mambí and cheered Juanes. (For more, see this political pamphlet disguised as academic research). Fear of the Other has affected each consecutive wave of migrants from Cuba. The Marielitos were scum and criminals, the balseros from 94 were apathetic cowards who didn’t stay and fight and if you want to know what to think about those aliens sullying Miami nowadays, well, just watch “Paraíso”.
