Cuba film institute founder looks back on 50 years

Fidel Castro was 32 and building his new government on the fly.

He nationalized Cuba's U.S.-run telephone company, tapped Che Guevara as head of the National Bank and claimed he was no communist to every interviewer — later maintaining he hid his true political convictions to keep from antagonizing Washington too soon.

And he created a state-run film industry, founding the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematography on March 24, 1959 — just 82 days after his bearded rebels' revolution.

As the institute celebrates its 50th anniversary during the Havana film festival beginning Dec. 3, its founder, Alfredo Guevara, a college friend of Castro's, provided written answers to questions from The Associated Press.

"Cinema was the great communicator and Fidel knew it. We were inspired protagonists and accomplices in the urgency of the revolution," said Guevara, who is not related to Che.

Guevara, 82, stepped down as institute head in 2000, but remains one of the government's behind-the-scenes power-brokers. He was a communist who went into exile in the 1940s but returned to Cuba in 1951 and became a public face of the party long before Castro did.

Castro grasped that movies, especially quality ones with mass appeal, could be his government's best public-relations weapon. He turned to Guevara, who had written screenplays but was more of an intellectual than movie buff, and was willing to defend the revolution at all cost — even when it meant advocating state censorship.

"I'm not a rebel, or at least not a professional rebel," Guevara said, "I'm a revolutionary."

But Guevara says the film institute is not in the propaganda business.

"We have a mission, an end we always work toward," he said. "It's not ideology, it's idealism."

The institute has produced more than 300 films, winning international acclaim and helping keep the Castro government hip in intellectual circles — despite its bans on free speech, expression, assembly and press.

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