Beyond Revolution as Romance: On the Enduring Relevance of Humberto Solás’ Lucía

The 2020s have seen a renaissance of radical politics from its neoliberal slumber. In a survey by the right-wing Cato Institute, 62% of American adults under 30 hold a “favourable view” of socialism and 34% support communism.¹ Starting the decade, the mass movement Black Lives Matter firmly rejected the post-racial narrative slowly crystallizing after Obama’s presidency. Soon after, students would lead waves of protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestine. Organizers combatted Fukuyama’s end of history thesis by mobilizing millions of bodies onto the streets and declaring that Palestine would not be another victim of the West’s ruthlessness. Beyond social movements, the Left across the world has been struggling for freedom. The Western Sahel, Madagascar, Nepal, and Bangladesh have all waged popular revolutions. 

Despite these promising developments, the messianic revolution, the one that would overturn capitalism and emancipate labour, feels more distant than ever. For example, Boots O’Riley’s 2026 I Love Boosters sees a group of fashion thieves, the Velvet Gang, collaborate with workers in Chinese sweatshops to sabotage an oppressive corporation and introduce organized labour representation. The film touches on themes of intersectionality, class consciousness, sabotage, international worker solidarity, and dialectical materialism. However, despite the centrality of dialectical materialism, there is no signification of a political “revolution.” The film ends with a montage of workers across the world raising their voices, yet it lacks any vision of how these voices coalesce into an alternative system. O’Riley’s film demonstrates what Anton Jäger refers to as “hyperpolitics,” in which the political, amid the social dissolution of organized institutions, simply becomes a scattered, perpetual revolt.² 

David Scott’s 2004 Conscripts of Modernity offers a framework to evaluate the nature of revolutions in the 21st century. Scott turns to C.L.R. James’ 1938 magnum opus, The Black Jacobins. Drawing on Quentin Skinner, Scott understands texts as arising from distinct “problem spaces.”³ Great authors write texts with particular problems in their minds from their historical circumstances. Scott identifies James’ problem space related to colonial slavery, leading to James framing the evils of colonialism in a language of negation – dehumanization limiting the capacities of Black people to self-rule. The structure of the problem would lead to the purported solution: anticolonial revolt that would result in a form of Black self-rule that would overturn the preceding oppressive structures.⁴

To counter the colonial mythology of black people’s dehumanization, James would recover in the archives a brazen figure – Touissant L’ouverture. His remarkable struggle for Haitian independence would rival the American, French, and Russian revolutions in world-historical significance. Romantically, James describes how Louverture, as the great men of history do, came to embody the Haitian people’s desires for freedom, ruling them with a justifiably firm hand to secure self-determination. The romantic problem space sees the Haitian revolution as overcoming the limitations of the oppressive past, paving the way for the upcoming Pan-African revolution that would finally lead into a utopian future.

In Scott’s postcolonial present, he looks at the romantic vision of early James, one in which a world revolution would fully overcome the negation of capitalism, as a “future past.”⁵ The present Scott inhabited, one that we do as well, clearly displays the disjuncture between itself and the future that anticolonial thinkers had in mind. Scott asks, rather than continually deferring the revolutionary problematic (i.e., that was not the real revolution, the anti-neocolonial revolution awaits us), if our postcolonial present poses a different set of questions. In the 1950s, James was wary of the newly postcolonial governments in the West Indies. In Jamaica, Norman Manley turned against Marxists. In James’ own Trinidad, Eric Williams, who expelled James for his radical politics, would remove the nation from the West Indian Federation, a move James would see as reducing the region’s collective power. It is precisely in these conditions that James begins to reevaluate Touissant’s ending, seeing Touissant’s autocracy replicated in Eric Williams, Norman Manley, and even Kwame Nkrumah.⁶ Post-colonial modernizing development, for each of these figures, required the sacrifice of popular sovereignty.

The altered emplotment of events shifts the meaning. In the Romantic vision, revolution is a horizon beyond the constraints of the past, a future that has transcended humanity’s limits. However, his tragic move is more to reflect on the conditions governing the present’s possible actions. Scott understands power to not only be negative, that is inhibiting actions, but productive in conscripting the way we act. This tragic understanding that elucidates our productive conditions foregoes the utopian final future, leaving us with an imperfect present that can still improve.

In Eisenstein’s 1925 Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) and Stachka (Strike), he depicts workers organizing and romantically overcoming bourgeois management. In his essay “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” he links dialectical materialism to film theory: “In the realm of art this dialectical principle of dynamics is embodied in CONFLICT as the fundamental principle for the existence of every artwork and every art-form. For art is always conflict… According to its social mission because: It is art’s task to make manifest the contradictions of Being.”⁷ The fundamental conflict of reality is between “Nature” and “Industry,” passivity and activity. When sublimated, these two aspects become “Art.” The capitalist injustice at the beginning of Strike is reifying the passivity of nature into industry. Shots of the factory show technology dominating the frame, relegating workers to the status of static capital. Art became limited to the managers, with workers standing inert to their will. Dialectical materialism dictates that the workers’ own industry, their activity, will come against their inertial existence in the factory. Only revolution can fulfill this fundamental dialectical conflict. By organizing and striking, workers place nature and industry into their own hands.

Formally, Eisenstein connects Scott’s Romantic problem-space to the drama at the heart of the film. For early Eisenstein, fitting dramatic conflicts with dialectical materialism results in staging the proletariat’s highest activity as an overcoming of their fundamental antagonist, the bourgeoisie. In Strike and Potemkin, the sequences in which workers rise against their bosses are the most exciting and dynamic scenes in the films. In Potemkin, the ship’s captain orders sailors to shoot dissenting workers. Edmund Meisel’s blaring, aggressive score underlies workers neatly lining up to powerlessly witness the murder of their comrades. Eisenstein turns to the face of the hero, initially looking down at the ground, away from his comrades. Courageously, he lifts his head to see the bourgeoisie’s brutality and asks his brothers, “Who are you firing on?” Realizing class consciousness, that they are not passively at the whims of management, the workers’ resistance transforms the neat geometric, hierarchical order structuring the screen into complete madness. The proletariat’s activity is the ultimate dynamism, essentially making the moving picture come alive against the bourgeoisie’s attempt to freeze the workers. 

Class consciousness visible in Potemkin’s sailors going from freezing to revolt.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1967 Battle of Algiers similarly presents revolution in a romantic, exciting manner. From the beginning, he makes evident the dehumanization of the colonized. The film opens with French soldiers in a torture room gleefully looming over a broken-down human being who has forfeited his dignity. Soon after, the theme of dehumanization continues when we see young pieds-noirs tripping and beating our protagonist, Ali La Pointe, for their simple amusement. 

Pontecorvo’s Fanonian influence adds an additional component to Eisenstein’s connection of revolution with drama. Testing him, the FLN asks La Pointe to assassinate a police officer. Surprising an officer and directing his gun at him, the camera moves from presenting them both to zooming in on a grinning La Pointe, who says, “So you’re afraid now!” In the arbitrary hands of the colonizers in the previous scene, the gun allows La Pointe to realize his humanity through seeing the master as flesh and blood. Pontecorvo reveals the deeply theatrical element to Fanon’s argument. The colonized cannot simply be rehumanized in a vacuum; instead, they require a stage on which to enact their psychological liberation. 

“So you’re afraid now!” – Battle of Algiers.

Eisenstein and Pontecorvo both engage in a formal romanticization of revolution. They dramatize the proletariat or colonized overcoming their oppressors in an exciting, dramatic manner. Konstantinos Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969) points to the limits of their approach. The political thriller revolves around the investigation into a state-orchestrated assassination of an honest social democratic candidate. A protest sequence begins by showing two young journalists shooting photographs of the discontented masses. These cameras, disrupting the audience’s neutral, objective fantasy, are largely unconcerned with political content and more with discovering exciting action to sell papers. Costa-Gavras introduces how the camera’s reality participates in commodity fetishism, with the content of the product, resistance, partially defined by the will of the market. 

Still, albeit unintentionally, the press seems to have a helpful political role. At the end, the press popularizes the truth of the state’s false narrative, providing a crucial building block to the romantic, revolutionary ending. The state arrests corrupt political leaders for their role in the assassination. Matt, one of the key social democrats, says at the end, “They’ve all been charged, even the general. The magistrate didn’t back down. You see? It’s as if he were still alive. It’s a real revolution.” Right after this soliloquy, we learn that the military established a dictatorship and evaded any accountability. The narrative’s failure reveals the illusory alliance between the spectacle camera and Platonic truth. The film camera, just like the journalist’s camera, leaves essential political information outside of the frame, revealing a disconnect between the romantic revolution’s future and the actual future. 

No film better demonstrates the disconnect within the romantic revolution than Sidney Lumet’s 1976 Network. Lumet tracks the development of a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS). The news department turned to increasingly extreme measures to boost their ratings, centred around a psychotic man, Howard Beale, breaking the fourth wall to address the audience and vent about the desolate corporate world. One segment of the network was the “Mao Tse-Tung Hour,” featuring the Ecumenical Liberation Army (ECA) committing a new left-wing extremist act each week. The executives at UBS realize that the content is completely irrelevant; they do not care whether the ECA disseminates radical propaganda or Howard calls out the evils of their corporation. Diana Christensen, leading the news division, explained to her staff: “The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them… I don’t want conventional programming on this network. I want counterculture. I want anti-establishment.” Diana offers the excitement of a revolution without the difficulties of actualization, Eisenstein’s dramatic dialectics purely for its own sake. The romantic narrative has become a complete commodity. Revolution has become just one exciting future in a never-ending stream of futures that the subject watches on their television without ever moving. 

Network’s presentation of revolution as spectacle in the new age of screens, only compounded by the introduction of the smartphone, takes us into our present day. The “revolutionary politics” on display throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 One Battle After Another is more concerned with the spectacle than the movements themselves. Though Anderson alludes to the Weather Underground, Assata Shakur, and the Black Liberation Army, their connections are limited to vague, scattered leftist talking points to signify the commodity of exciting revolutionary action. The film opens with a thrilling heist of the fictional French 75 breaking people out of an immigration detention facility. When leaving from the raid, the main protagonist, revolutionary Bob Ferguson, tells a group of detained cops,

We are a political organization that is free from the eyes, the ears, and most importantly, the weapons of the imperialist state and this fascist regime. You are a political prisoner of the French 75 motherfuckers! You’ve been captured by the French 75! Fuck the police! ¡Viva la Revolución!

In the car, Bob continues to scream and celebrate until Perfidia, a black woman revolutionary, asks him if he “likes black girls” and proceeds to kiss him. She then directs Junglepussy, another activist, to shoot her gun into the air. The romantic revolution has descended to complete adventurism. There is no need for an object of revolution anymore, a world to overturn. Leftist language signifies nothingness. Anderson’s portrayal of revolution is indistinguishable from an exciting, hedonistic eroticism. 

Soon, Perfidia becomes pregnant. Sitting by a campfire, she laughingly says, “This pussy right here, what’s it for? War, bitch! The pussy ain’t for fun. This is the fun. The guns are the fucking fun. Pussy is the fucking weapon.” After her tirade, Bob tells fellow activist Deandra, “It’s like she doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant.” When the child comes, Perfidia develops postpartum depression and does not know what to do with her. Nonetheless, she would show equal signs of carelessness with her activism, shooting someone in a bank robbery and being arrested. Anderson’s indictment is clear. Revolutionary activists, like racist stereotypes of the licentious single black mother welfare queen, are more excited by the romanticism of sex or politics than its result. 

In contrast to the romanticism of the French 75, Anderson presents Sergio St. Carlos, a veteran activist teaching karate. Donning the appearance of a naïve instructor, Sergio plays a pivotal role in harbouring and protecting undocumented immigrants. Rather than breaking them out with guns, like his adventurist friend Bob, Sergio has covert systems akin to the Underground Railroad to keep them from being captured. When Sergio protects Bob from the police, the latter talks only about himself and his daughter, while the former is familiar with the entire community and checks in on people when he can. Anderson suggests that Sergio’s type of activism is counterposed to the spectacle; whereas Bob’s egoism and adventurism make for the compelling drama of revolution, Sergio’s stoic demeanour signals a true, authentic activism not to be televised. However, Anderson’s valorisation of Sergio forecloses the “revolution” from authentic activism. Sergio’s underground railroad structure does not offer creating a movement to genuinely confront the capitalist state, only to mitigate its harm. One Battle After Another, therefore, presents revolutionary activism as tragic. In contrast to Scott, romance and tragedy are not necessarily in opposition here. It sees the dramatic components of romance filled with internal contradictions that will lead to a tragic ending. Witnessing the failure of revolutionary activism, the film directs us to a type of non-performative activism opposed to the camera.

Even the more sympathetic treatment of militant organizing in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) tragically represents the romantic view of revolution. The film focuses on the Chairman of the Chicago Branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Fred Hampton. As the title indicates, King persistently presents Hampton to Christ, a noble saviour who is willing to do anything for his people. The Chicago BPP’s organizing revolves around Hampton’s messianic qualities; when meeting with other organizations to form the Rainbow Coalition, King focuses less on tactical acumen than on showcasing Hampton’s magnetism and breaking down barriers among other Chicagoan leaders.

As in Anderson’s depiction, the internal components of the revolutionary romance would lead to a tragic ending. Firstly, the BPP’s violent tactics do little more than invite heavy counter-resistance that would lead to the organization’s downfall. Violence is mostly shown either in torturing snitches, dramatized shootouts with police, or preparing for the grand revolution.

King’s presentation is not endemic to the subject matter. In Ivan Dixon’s 1973 The Spook Who Sat By the Door, a charismatic former CIA agent organizes a black nationalist movement in Chicago. The film also goes to great lengths to explain the practicality of their activism. When asked if this is really possible, Freeman responds: “In guerrilla warfare, winning is not losing. When you sleep on the floor, you can’t fall out of bed…  Fight whitey to a standstill. Force him to make a choice between the two things which he seems to dig most of all. There is no way that the United States can police the world and keep us on our ass too unless we cooperate. When we revolt, we reduce it to a simple choice. Whitey finds out he can’t make either.” In Judas, revolution is presented akin to a judgment day, whereas Dixon’s pragmatism makes political violence a tactic in tandem with other tactics.

Secondly, framing Hampton as Christ represents revolutionary activism as revolving around the leader’s charisma. The film does not frame the success of the Chicago BPP as building a revolutionary organization that is capable of surviving the death of any one member. Simply put, it is difficult to imagine the chapter without Hampton’s charisma. In Dixon’s film, Freeman plays the charismatic leader, but the film focuses significantly more on how he cultivates the revolutionaries around him to be independent of his leadership. Rather than sinful disciples, the members of Freeman’s organization are shown to be on equal standing. Furthermore, there are scenes where Freeman is wrong; in one exchange, a fairer-skinned comrade derides Freeman’s use of the term ‘white-passing’ as insinuating that he is less black. He proudly declares his race and genuinely shifts Freeman’s perspective. These scenes are irreducible to revolutionary spectacles, as they treat the subtler aspects of organizing and race in a thought-provoking light.

Returning to Judas, as in One Battle, the internal contradictions of the romantic narrative tragically unfold in both films. However, comparing King and Dixon elucidates how Hollywood’s representation of romantic revolutionary activism distorts the subtlety in those movements. Scott’s understanding of the tragic was not simply critiquing the romantic narrative around revolutions but offering a more fruitful hermeneutic framework to understand the past. The issue with Anderson’s and King’s historicism is that it mistakes the romantic narrative as the past itself, barring access to alternative readings of what revolutions can offer.

Though King and Anderson portray the ’60s as uncritically romantic, the era itself was far less reductive. After the failure of May ’68 in France, the influential magazine Cahiers du cinéma would become heavily politicized. Althusser’s writings significantly influenced the magazine’s understanding of film as a circulating commodity and an ideological object. However, the group recognized that film was a unique medium through which ideology could speak back to itself. Exemplary for the magazine was Jean Renoir’s French Communist Party’s 1936 documentary La vie est à nous (Life Belongs to Us).⁸ The film opens as a documentary, mundanely reading facts of France’s economy over neutral images of the countryside, farming, and mining. However, through introducing a Brechtian disruption of the viewer’s immersion, Renoir reveals that the neutral documentary was an ideologically loaded lecture by a schoolteacher. Stepping outside the classroom, the students discuss the documentary’s fundamental omission – the 200 French families oligarchically ruling the nation. 

Fiction and documentary continually blend into one another; the documentary parts are shown to be ideological, whereas the fictional parts, dramatizing workers’ suffering, are meant to show France’s actual reality. The film ends when the two are reconciled: a debased fictional worker steps into the Communist Party office and finds a new purpose by helping the organization film a propaganda message broadcasting its mission. Cahiers du cinéma argued that Renoir’s materialization of the revolution, rendering the hidden ideological and commodifying aspects of film ready for the viewer to see, is pivotal to the creation of militant, revolutionary cinema.

Another film blending documentary and fiction is Robert Kramer’s 1970 ICE.⁹ The film offers a fictional documentary of “The National Committee of Independent Revolutionary Organizations” (NCIRO). The film opens with title cards of the organization’s constitution. The NCIRO believes in engaging in political violence to encourage a broader violent revolution. What makes the film distinct is that the rest of it unfolds through the organization’s quotidian procedures. In one scene, a small assembly of cadres discusses the viability of a regional spring offensive. Despite its exciting, romantic content of revolutionary action, Kramer’s documentary form ideologically struggles against the spectacle. Members debate whether engaging in early direct actions will alienate certain groups from the local community, how it will link with other anti-imperialist struggles and the broader national struggle, etc. While in Anderson’s film the spectacle of revolution stands in opposition to alternative forms of activism, in revolutionary history, as more accurately represented in ICE, militant underground sections worked in tandem with others toward a shared goal. The dialogue lacks the charismatic allure we saw in Shaka King’s BPP; the members are frankly grating in their constant petty squabbles. Yet, it is precisely in these unglamorous procedural displays that the film paints revolutionary organizing in a sympathetic light. The film demonstrates that its fictional creation of reality, disenchanted through the documentary appearance, need not abide by the laws of the dramatic spectacle. ICE alters our view of revolutionary organizing as fated to romanticism by showing organizing as a substance irreducible to the logic of the spectacle.

While Life Belongs to Us and ICE offer important critiques of the revolutionary film as a commodity-spectacle, their critiques still contain a romantic object of revolution. Humberto Solás’ Lucía offers a novel understanding of the relationship between revolution and romance that addresses romanticization without resorting to the spectacle. The film is a triptych of three Cuban women, all named Lucía, living in three revolutions. Situated in the 1895-98 Cuban War of Independence, the first Lucía is an aristocratic Cuban criolla, in love with a Spaniard, Rafael. Film critic John Mraz argues that Cuban directors often employ “conflicting visual styles” to represent different people’s intersectional standpoints.¹⁰ Lucía and her aristocratic friends are mostly indifferent to the surrounding revolution, penned up in European style parlours. One of the objects of their gossip is Fernandina, a madwoman on the street. A woman in the parlour explains Fernandina’s backstory in a jovial tone, recounting how she was a nun blessing fallen soldiers. The Austenian playful scene of the pristine women gossiping is harshly cut with a horrific image of a shadow covering the nun’s face, who is staring up at three hanging bodies. The storyteller gleefully recounts how the soldiers brutally raped Fernandina and her fellow nuns, dirtying her white virginal robes into a muddy mess. 

However, the immaculate bourgeois spaces, seemingly outside the revolution, prove permeable.  Rafael is a Spanish secret agent who betrays Lucía’s love to gain access to her second home, where her brother helps organize Cuban guerrillas. Lucía’s clothes, with her interiority violated and debased, turn from white to black, sartorially transforming into Fernandina. The movie ends with her going completely mad and murdering Rafael with a knife on the dirty, lower-class streets. 

Throughout this chapter, revolution is antithetical to romance. The revolutionary fighting does not sublimate into an exciting action sequence but just involves men throwing themselves at each other and constant deception. There is no higher meaning to anyone’s actions in the bourgeois drama, only suffering at the end. 

Fernandina.

The second chapter shifts to a middle-class Lucía in Cuba’s 1935 revolution. Our first introduction to her is in a sweatshop rolling tobacco leaves, and we see her gazing into the open with a profound ennui. Her life is initially consumed by the repetition of either working or doing nothing at her mother’s home. Restless in bed, she looks through the crack of her door to see the excitement of revolutionaries against Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship, sneaking around at the dead of night. Lucía soon sneaks into a small cabin where she sees one of the revolutionaries, Aldo, resting; she sits on the side of the frame, listening to his stories, and is enamoured by his exciting world. Lucía joins the struggle, becoming empowered as she takes charge of a Machado protest with the women in her workplace. Though the direct action would end in repression, the Machado regime would eventually fall.

As the romantic excitement of the revolution dissipates into the monotonous life of the new bureaucratic regime hardly distinguishable from its predecessor, the earlier loneliness creeps back into her life. Now pregnant and her husband away in Havana, she becomes trapped in the prisons of the domestic. Her husband would soon die from a shooting, unable to leave behind revolutionary violence. In the final frame, we see a wide shot of Lucía caught between two paths, paralysed with nowhere to go. The section ends with her staring at us with tears in her eyes. 

The second Lucía’s narrative critiques the revolution as a spectacle. The seductive quality of revolutionary violence proves to be hollow. Similar to One Battle After Another, the revolutionaries offer little discussion of the society they were trying to build and the goals of their movements. Instead, revolution remains an escape from ennui, a drama to excite the monotonous life. The final shot returns our gaze, throwing into relief the romantic fantasy of revolution. Her gaze asks us to rethink what we desire through revolution and what we are trying to construct.

The second Lucía. 

What makes Lucía such a remarkable film is that this revolutionary tragedy is not the end. Whereas the previous two sections dramaturgically revolved around revolutionary violence, the final section takes place in 196-, after the militant revolution has ended. Set as a comedy, the scene shows women laughing and joking on their way to labour in the fields. The light-hearted Guantanamera plays, and there is an air of celebration in light of Fidel’s rise. The romantic revolution has come; now it is time to rejoice with our newlywed protagonists. However, trouble lurks in paradise. The new husband, Tomás, quickly turns abusive and keeps Lucía trapped in the house out of jealousy. In one domestic violence scene, Solás puts the horrific display to a comedic tune. Solás critiques the object of revolution as a sublime moment that will overturn the past. Instead, the third section asks what happens after the romance ends, after the marriage?

A bureaucrat from Havana teaching literacy in the countryside intervenes in the turbulent household. In the middle of his lessons, he argues that the revolution has happened, and no one can be enslaved anymore. A black couple, who are the town’s lead cadres, also use similar rhetoric to help Lucía escape the house. With the assistance of the local community, she finally leaves and rejoins the other working women. The last scene in the film sees her return to a dishevelled Tomás. A small girl with a goat and a balloon surreally stands and stares at them. What influence will Lucía leave to the next generation? She initially surrenders and confesses that she cannot live without him and that she is ready to accept him again if he stops the abuse. He gloats over the hold he has and grabs her. When she decides to resist, the girl laughs and runs away, and the film abruptly concludes.

Solás frames the final sequence as a tragicomedy; the mixture of tragedy and comedy, especially with its presuppositions of a happy ending, unsettles the romantic presuppositions of revolution. In one sense, there is Hegel’s tragic reading of Antigone, where he interprets the play as revealing a fundamental dilemma between the particular wills of the family and the state.¹¹ Though the Cuban revolution has liberated the state, this does not mean that Cuban society has fully relinquished its patriarchal underpinnings. By mixing the tragic with the comic, Solás refuses to lay claim to a happy future free from these fundamental contradictions. Solás’ dialectics, in contrast to Eisenstein’s, are more Hegelian in that the contradictions persist. Solás’ choice of women in this matter identifies that women are “the most vulnerable character, the one who is most transparently affected at any given moment by contradictions and changes.”¹² In the first episode, Rafael treats Lucía as completely expendable, using her and throwing her away at his whims. In the second episode, Aldo, the supposed revolutionary, is content with Lucía living a life locked up in the house. The third revolution sees the same happen even after the overcoming of bourgeois rule. By situating the revolution in the present in the third section, rather than in an abstract future, Solás avoids the romantic overcoming of these contradictions. Solás here materializes the revolution in a manner reminiscent of Life Belongs to Us and ICE by disenchanting its allure. However, Solás’ disenchantment does not discard the revolution as a whole. Instead, revolution practically provides the tools for self-rule and emancipation. Actualizing these tools requires a public effort that is far from perfect. As Peter Biskind reads the film, Solás reconciles the movement of History with human agency, particularly women’s.¹³

For the first time in the film, a group of women creates an autonomous body; in the preceding two sections, the women’s lives are defined solely by their love interests, but here there is a community of women who uphold one another. The women on the truck take pride in their labour, connecting their work in the fields to upholding the revolution. Solás’ representation of women differs from that in other Cuban films. Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba’s (1964) initial scene shows a woman thrust into sex work for the colonizers, degraded. Her horror, however, is mediated by her colonized lover, serving as a metaphor of the colonized (masculine) subject passively witnessing the rape of her mother nation. In the final scene, we see the colonizer’s bombs destroy a man’s home. Left with only his wife and children, the man realizes he must join the revolution to build a better world for his family. Kalatozov’s depiction objectifies women as the property of colonized men. Their experiences can only be told in relation to the man who owns them.

In contrast, Solás presents the patriarchal domination of the three women in relation to Hegel’s master slave dialectic.¹⁴ Despite their apparent superiority, the master needs the slave’s recognition to maintain their position. The slave, though, can be independent through work, to escape the game of dependence. What differentiates the third Lucía from the second one is the nature of their work. The second Lucía’s work is isolating, and capitalists still expropriate her labour. However, the labour after the revolution is for the people. Only under socialism can the worker realize their labour belongs to them and the community, that they can be independent from the capitalist. As Che Guevara explains in “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” the continuation of the revolution demands that workers be morally transformed, to build the revolution out of the spirit of community and self-development rather than the coercion of capitalist exploiters.¹⁵ The women’s participation in revolution, not through exciting, dramatized violence but through their arduous labour, contains the seeds of their self-liberation. 

Lucía’s revolution is ugly. People die and suffer. There is no happy ending. Yet, it is precisely in this ugliness that it counters the romanticization of revolution. Progress has never entailed the elimination of conflict. There is no perfect future where all injustices will magically disappear. There is, however, resistance from the people attempting to create new structures. These structures will be imperfect, but that is what makes them human. Whether the “revolution” is still possible in the current day and what form it could take is a massive question in itself. The limits of Solás’ film are that it does not delve deeply into the contradictions between Havana and the countryside. Nonetheless, beginning to answer the question requires confronting how we conceive of revolution and what we are aiming to do. Humberto Solás proves that film can play a significant role in these tasks.

Endnotes