Manuel Herrera Writes Screenplay for Film about Carlos Manuel de Céspedes

February 8, 2024

Veteran Cuban filmmaker Manuel Herrera is engaged in writing a screenplay about the life of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who initiated in 1868 the cycle of wars for Cuba's independence.

At 84 years old and director of films such as Capablanca, No hay sábado sin sol and Zafiros, locura azul —the latter one of the most box office successful films of the seventh art on the island—, Herrera (Santa Cara, 1948) commented that it is a project that is both new and old at the same time.

"I have always greatly admired the figure of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the Father of the Nation, and the first work of fiction that I submitted to the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industries (Icaic) when I was 20 years old was a screenplay about the death of this hero," he revealed exclusively to Prensa Latina (PL) news agency.

The film that Herrera intends to make focuses on the three months that Céspedes spends in the Sierra Maestra as a rural schoolteacher, without escort, waiting for a passport that will never arrive, after being removed by the Chamber as President of the Republic in Arms.

That period spans from December 1873 to February 1874, the date when he dies after throwing himself, already wounded, into a ravine so as not to be captured by Spanish forces.

"There are retrospectives to many things, among them Guáimaro (the insurgent assembly that names Céspedes president of the Republic in Arms) and his loves, because Céspedes had four great loves and could say, as the fellow Cuban patriot José Martí said, that 'in all places a woman's soul came to bring calm to my tormented life'," the filmmaker of documentaries such as Hombres de mar and La sexta parte del mundo advanced.

Likewise, the film will delve into the vast Céspedes lineage and the betrayals and political conflicts that the independence fighter faced, among them his disagreements with another of the champions of the war, Major General Ignacio Agramonte.

The strategic visions about military conflict, his leadership and the construction of the future republic confronted both figures in a conflict that was later reproduced in all of the island's emancipatory projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Many members of the Chamber of Representatives attributed to Céspedes an undemocratic attitude and, like the supporters of Miguel Aldama, general agent of the Republic in Arms in the United States, became his enemies and wove intrigues around him.

"I have been guided a lot by Eusebio's work," Herrera told PL, "and I spoke a lot with him about this project and really that is what I would want, to have a true dimension of what Céspedes was beyond the portrait, beyond the Father of the Nation."

In 2018, during the life of the celebrated historian of La Habana, a new corrected and expanded edition of the Diario Perdido was published.

"As for me, I am a shadow that wanders sorrowfully in the darkness. For me, not a single day of sun!". Thus ends the notation from Monday, January 12, 1874 in the diary, in whose 2018 edition are inserted a chronology of Céspedes's life, texts resulting from studies about the main sites and personalities named in the diary and a glossary of the idioms, Latin and foreign phrases that he used.

In Cuban cinema after 1959, a historicist current was established with films, some of them authentic classics, that looked toward the nineteenth century. Among them should be mentioned La primera carga al machete, by Manuel Octavio Gómez (1967); La odisea del general José (1968), by Jorge Fraga; El otro Francisco (1974) by Sergio Giral; and Baraguá (1985), by José Massip.

More recently, films such as José Martí: el ojo del canario (2010), under the direction of Fernando Pérez; and El Mayor (2018), directed by Rigoberto López, have been made.