The triumph of the Cuban Revolution led to the translation of the Cold War to the American continent and also established, as Pedro Martínez and Pablo Rubio explain, a new utopian paradigm of social change that in addition to disrupting the political equilibriums or status quo of the time, was projected as an alternative ideological framework to the rest of the Latin American countries. Departing from a review of some documentary works by filmmaker Santiago Álvarez as a pioneer figure of the new Cuban cinema, this article traces and reconstructs an archeology of a social imaginary of revolution that permeated the Latin American public sphere since the 1960s, to investigate its ideological content and reflect, in turn, on the traumatic dimension that structures all social imaginaries of revolution.
\nEl triunfo de la revolución cubana desembocó en la traslación de la Guerra Fría al continente americano y a su vez estableció, tal como explican Pedro Martínez y Pablo Rubio, un nuevo paradigma utópico de cambio social que además de trastocar los equilibrios políticos de la época, se proyectó como una alternativa ideológica al status quo en el resto de los países latinoamericanos. A partir de la revisión de la obra documental de Santiago Álvarez como figura pionera del entonces nuevo cine cubano, este artículo rastrea y reconstruye una arqueología de los imaginarios de revolución que abundaron en América Latina desde la década del sesenta, con el fin de indagar en su contenido ideológico y reflexionar, a su vez, sobre la dimensión traumática que estructura todos los imaginarios revolucionarios.
\n","language":"spa","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0","short_name":"CC BY-NC 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"Santiago Álvarez"},{"word":"ICAIC"},{"word":"Cuban Cinema"},{"word":"film-essay"},{"word":"Tomás Gutiérrez Alea"},{"word":"Memories of Underdevelopment"},{"word":"revolution"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2rx8g8tk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"María","middle_name":"","last_name":"Díaz Miranda","name_suffix":"","institution":"","department":""}],"date_submitted":"2026-01-23T19:51:17.782000-07:00","date_accepted":"2026-02-23T11:32:49.482987-07:00","date_published":"2026-02-23T07:33:00-07:00","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/lucero/article/61693/galley/47595/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/lucero/article/61693/galley/47595/download/"}]}