A Cuban intellectual who is from the bourgeois class, though educated and perceptive enough not to fall hook line and sinker for whatever bourgeois mentality may prevail, watches as nearly everyone who can, abandons Cuba in the wake of Castro's triumphant overthrow of Batista. Why he doesn't join them is one of the film's burning questions. Utilizing newsreel footage, the film superimposes the main character into or onto the setting of revolutionary Cuba in a very successful way, capturing the drama of those times and his own dilemmas. That the Revolution itself was started by and led by the disaffected sons and daughters of the upper class, the question to stay and try to transform the country, also meant getting on their wagon, while leaving had its own implications. Caught in the middle, and abandoned by his wife, who left for Miami, he becomes infatuated with his housekeeper, a Baptist convert, giving the film an interesting erotic spirituality, in one beautiful scene imagining her baptism, and later picking up on a young woman and having a relationship that nearly lands him in jail, discovering underdevelopment and social conservatism in relation to his own loose morality. In the end, he's tolerated by the Revolution, probably much to the dislike of the anti-Castro crowd.
Review of Memories of Underdevelopment
