Gutierrez Alea s Authorship Of A Runaway Slav - 893 Words

Gutià ©rrez Alea’s Authorship In the same period The Last Supper was produced, Esteban Mojeto published the Autobiography of a Runaway Slav in 1968, Fernandez Retamar’s Todo Caliban in 1971, and Sergio Giral’s film El Otro Fransisco (â€Å"The Other Francisco†) released in 1975, all of which compared the African slave history with the Cuban policies of the time, showing a genuine desire to indirectly criticize Fidel Castro’s policies. In reaction, in 1971, the government shut down a number of university departments, including the Department of Philosophy at the University of Havana, and censured the criticisms for its policies coming from the country’s intellectual academia. This censorship, which came to be known as the â€Å"Padilla affair†. It was further enhanced by the banning of films, such as Humberto Solas’s Un dia de Noviembre (â€Å"A Day in November†). This period in Cuban history was one of gloom and fear, and inevitably, came to be known as the â€Å"quinquenio Gris†, meaning the â€Å"five year grey period† (Schroeder 2002, 70). Furthermore, in January 1976, the year The Last Supper was released in cinemas, Cuba sent a record 200,000 soldiers to fight the Portuguese rulers of Angola. The scale of this involvement served to focus the attention of Cuban people on its own African slave history and the riots that followed the banning of the Independent Party of Colour in 1912. For Gutià ©rrez Alea, the need to for the Revolution to examine itself from within, if it had to resist the