From Hatuey to Fidel: the indigenous world and its political uses in Cuban animation

Abstract

This article is interested in the cinematographic representations of the Amerindian world in Cuban revolutionary animated films. After situating the corpus in the historical film production of the island, the text seeks to show that the films analysed propose the same vision, which mixes revolutionary ethos and nationalism, and which only approaches the indigenous world in terms of the political use that can be made of it in the context of communist Cuba in the second half of the twentieth century. In this perspective, the discourse propagated by revolutionary animated cinema only perpetuates a tradition that has its roots in the 19^th century, in which the figure of the indigenous, even when celebrated, is only of interest as a utilitarian icon, at the service of contemporary political projects, fundamentally alien to the extinct Amerindian world.