IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 101

Art and Identity

SARA: The
spontaneity of a deep
voice
Leonardo Calvo
Historian and Political Scientist
Havana, Cuba

U

sually, the most genuine and
profound Cuban cultural and
social reality is neither reflected
nor clearly represented in the
communicative products offered to the
public. Often these artistic and cultural
expressions are contaminated by certain
schematic patterns, sometimes for
redecorating,
sometimes
for
manipulating. They persist in excluding
the Afro-descendants, the peasants, the
poor or the homosexuals from the
images that should shape the social
perception and the aesthetic and
conceptual imaginary of what we are as
a nation.
The always-excluded, who work
whenever it comes to create wealth,
who fight and shed their blood
whenever war is waged, rarely are the
leading presence on screen or stage.
Only a few creators, each one from a
particular poetic perspective, as

Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, Sergio
Giral, Carlos Celdrán or Juan Carlos
Cremata, have tried to reflect the life
and feelings of those below. However,
as a mysterious angel of light, Sara
Gómez Yera (1942-1974) passed and
left a solid and enduring mark on Cuban
cinema that withstands the test of time,
silence and censorship for being
installed as a paradigm and unavoidable
reference in the cultural landscape.
Sara transcends our borders with a
personality and a work that grows in
stature at the pace of the socioexistential traumas that characterized
the last two decades of our national
history. With a relatively brief but
monumental work, she finally gave the
voice and body that the alwaysforgotten and always-excluded needed
to become a significant presence in
cultural and media spaces.

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