One Way or Another

The ostensible subject of this remarkable film is the jive-talking, toe-tapping, good-for-nothing class of slum-dwelling lumpens known as 'marginals': 'a worldwide economic stratum of very defined characteristics - principally unemployment.' But the actual subject turns out to be a rather different delinquency: the misogyny and anti-social codes of Cuban machismo. Back in '74, the year of her tragic death (left unfinished, the film was completed by Tomás Alea and Julio García Espinosa), Sara Gomez Yera was already combining documentary, fiction, samba music and droll voice-over lectures to examine the transformations wrought by revolution on a generation of Cuban men. As the title indicates, contradiction is the name of the game, and the film brilliantly counterposes macho cruelties and loyalties, socialist change and intractable traditions, revolutionary fervour and political authoritarianism.