Context

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (a.k.a. Titón) was born on December 11, 1928, to a family of bourgeois tastes and progressive politics. For seven years he formally studied music, and he became good enough at the piano to entertain his university friends with interpretations of, among others, Debussy's “La plus que lente” and Garcia Caturla's “Berceuse campesina”. ¹ An exemplary son, Alea agreed to his father's wishes that he study law. His interests during his studies (1948-1951), however, gravitated toward the political and the cultural. With another dozen students, among them Néstor Almendros and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alea founded Nuestro Tiempo, the legendary group that sought to link culture with progressive politics through manifestos, film screenings, and discussions. He also edited poetry and stories. Around 1950, for example, he published his own collection of poems, Reflejos, as well as Roberto Fernández Retamar's first publication, Elegía como un himno, using a printing press that his father kept in his house. ² These were also the years of the university reform movement, which began in Argentina and spread throughout Latin America like wildfire. Alea was not immune to this influence, as may be evidenced by his signature on a manifesto of November 1950 that included a plan for the reform of the university and concluded with calls for anti-imperialism, national liberation, and agrarian reform. After receiving his law degree from the University of Havana in 1951 Alea went to study film at the Centro Sperimentale della Cinematografía in Rome, where he met Julio García Espinosa. Upon their return to Cuba they joined forces to direct Cuba's first neorealist film, El Mégano (The Charcoal Worker, 1954).