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Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories (2000)

Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories (2000)

Documentary

4K Restoration! This documentary film highlights the experience of Black Cuban American family, revealing that the Cuban-American experience is more diverse, racially and ideologically, than we are often led to believe.

Release Date: 2000, January 1
Directors: Pam Sporn
Countries: Cuba, United States of America
Production: Third World Newsreel, Third World Newsreel
Cast: Pablo Elliot Foster

Overview:

This documentary traces the tangled paths and multifaceted identity of a black Cuban family in the Bronx. The subjects of this film experienced firsthand some of the great historical events of the 20th century – they saw Castro’s arrival in Havana and had their neighborhood bombed in the Bay of Pigs invasion; one son fought in Vietnam and a daughter marched against it. Both working-class and professional, black and Latino, foreign and native, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, the family is shown in the constant process of negotiating its identity. On their arrival in Miami, the family immediately encountered racial segregation, and as children in a mixed Puerto Rican/African-American neighborhood in the Bronx, they were forced by their playmates to choose their identity: “Are you black or Spanish?” Even the family’s roots in Cuba are complex - the grandfather was the son of Jamaican immigrants to Cuba – and their relation to the Cuban Revolution is ambiguous.