An Ever-Changing ‘Cuba’ : Filmmakers Race to Finish Documentary as Country Totters

It’s what every documentary filmmaker both prays for and dreads: a volatile, ever-changing and newsworthy subject.

For director Chris Hume, it was Cuba. Almost finished with his documentary when the latest refugee crisis hit the headlines, Hume was spurred into the editing room to quickly assemble the film before it is rendered obsolete by political events out of his control.

Hume first intended “This Is Cuba” as a tongue-in-cheek travelogue about a country he describes as “a grotesque time capsule,” but the filmmaker had his eye on the clock from the beginning.

“Everything I had heard made me realize that Cuba as it was couldn’t last,” Hume says on a break from a frantic session in his apartment-turned-editing studio. “It was unnatural, it couldn’t last any longer without disintegrating.”

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Hume’s options if communist Cuba was to topple before the film is finished: re-recording the narration and re-cutting the footage in the hopes that a network, public broadcasting or cable station will pick up the finished product.

Or, in the worst-case scenario, scrapping the film altogether, leaving Hume to parcel out footage to news outlets eager for images to fill out their broadcasts.

It’s a classic race against time. Footage shot in Florida, for instance, of Cuban refugees arriving at a transition house is “already history,” he says, because of President Clinton’s recent decision to detain Cuban refugees at Guantanamo Bay.

On the other hand, the sooner he gets a reel together, the sooner Hume can take advantage of Cuba’s newsworthiness. “This Is Cuba” is the second documentary for the 29-year-old Hume, who received a B.A. in filmmaking in 1987 from Bard College. In 1991, he won the Grand Jury Prize in the film documentary category at the Hamburg Film Festival in Germany for his “House Without a Home,” which follows the journey of a house relocated from Beverly Hills to South-Central Los Angeles.

Hume made three trips to Cuba--first in March, then in May and again in July--with just a Hi-8 camera and a few addresses in his pocket given to him by Cuban expatriates living in Los Angeles.

“This Is Cuba” was always intended to be a bilingual production aimed at both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking youth cultures, with Hume acting as a guide through the island in the same irreverent manner as Michael Moore guided filmgoers through Flint, Mich., in his “Roger & Me.”

Traveling on a tourist visa and never alerting the Cuban government to his presence by filing for special filming permits, Hume gained access to people and places he otherwise would have been restricted from. Hume interviewed schoolchildren, prostitutes and rock ‘n’ roll musicians in their homes, on the street and in dark alleys, trying to capture a sense of what the Cuban people face day-to-day.

Often filming as Cuban police and soldiers “cruised right by,” Hume was never caught, nor did he have to disguise his Hi-8 tapes as music cassettes as he had originally planned.

“It’s a country with shortages of everything except irony,” Hume says. Indeed, when he and co-producer Ron Moler made one of the trips together, Moler golfed at a country club where two golf balls cost the same amount of money as a Cuban doctor earns in a month.

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Almost as soon as he returned from Cuba, Hume found himself locked away in his Los Angeles apartment, editing on rented equipment, trying to assemble a rough cut to meet a deadline three weeks sooner than his original mid-September date.

“It’s a hot subject right now.” says Gabriel Reyes, who heads creative affairs at Tropix, a division of HBO Productions aimed at Latino markets in the United States and Latin America.

“But I don’t mean that it’s a popular subject,” Reyes adds, “it’s a hot subject (because) no one wants to touch it . . . no one knows exactly what’s going to happen down there.”

Co-producer Florence Figueroa is still trying to lasso Latin personalities such as Daisy Fuentes or Esai Morales to appear at the end of the film to offer their opinions on the situation in Cuba.

This appeal to both the Spanish- and English-speaking worlds, along with Hume’s humorous approach, may save the film, says Reyes. “I would hurry up and wrap it,” Reyes advises. “It’s to their benefit that it’s bilingual, and if it’s a black comedy it might have a better shot than if it’s just a straight documentary.”

But for now, as Hume struggles to finish and Figueroa struggles to gain attention for their work, she says, “We’ll be pleased with whatever we get.”