“The other truth of Cuba": Independent cinema as an act of political resistance an interview with Eliecer Jiménez Almeida

Abstract

The sixth edition of the International Film Festival for Democracy screened *Persona*, a 2014 short film that, through the story of five individuals, explores the universality of the human condition in the Cuban socio-political context. The protagonists are a prostrate old man, an absent son, a Catholic gravedigger and ex-convict rejected by society, a mother who suffers the disappearance of her son at sea while trying to reach the United States, and a writer who decides to go into exile as a form of cultural resistance, feeling that his uniqueness is being suffocated. On an ordinary day, these characters, stripped of any official voice, reveal their struggles and their most intimate experiences, portraying pain, hope and the struggle for survival.