‘Lucía’, directed by Humberto Solás, is a Cuban drama from 1968. The film contains three stories: the first set in the 1860s, the second set in the 1930s and the third set in the then present day of the 1960s. Each focuses on a woman called Lucía, played by a different woman each time, and follows her as she experiences the fractious events that are occuring around her: the Cuban war of independance, the activism of the 1930s and the post-Castro revolution period of the 1960s. What ties them together is how each woman experiences the events as a combination of national struggles and smaller, more intimate conflicts between the masculine world and the feminine concerns of the central characters. Solás’s film is, at times, rough and gives the appearance of having been made in adversarial conditions, but the three episodes in the film are surprisingly distinct and rich, from the rich melodrama of the first, through the epic and brutal fight scenes of the second, to the contemporary and raw social drama of the third. Solás’s film covers all the bases of Cuba’s national identity and history, an acheivement similar to that of Theodoros Angelopoulos’ ‘The Travelling Players‘, a Greek film that I would say shares a significant amount of DNA with this film.

Whilst it is alien in terms of its social significance and dated in terms of its historical details, I’d watch ‘Lucía’ alongside other Cuban classics such as the great ‘I Am Cuba‘ and ‘Memories of Underdevelopment‘ (also from 1968) to really understand the country.