The Cuban Never-Never Land in Juan Carlos Tabio’s film Lista de espera/Waiting List (2000): Post-communism as Shared Experience

Abstract

Juan Carlos Tabio’s film Lista de espera (2000) is a retrospect of the mixed sentiments of the Cubans about their experience after the collapse of the so-called ‘real socialism’ in Eastern Europe. The need to survive without the heavy subsidies from its former allies has plunged Cuba on the road to economic change, thus restructuring the shape of its socialist society. As a result of a prolonged transition to limited market reforms and alternated periods of liberalisation and tightening of the State control Cuba was caught up in limbo, suspended in what Lydia Chávez calls ‘Never-Never land’ – in flux of neither pure socialism, nor capitalism. I argue that, paradoxically, Lista is at once an emphatic criticism of bureaucratic socialism anda pleading to its compatriots to retain the positive aspects of the Cuban socialist ‘collective dream’. The film demonstrates that despite all predictions socialist ideas are not quite ‘dead’ yet. I posit that Lista is in a way a prophetic film, foretelling Latin America’s current disillusionment with neo-liberalism and its countries’ recent return to more populist social policies. I claim that these political ‘mood swings’ are comparable to certain events in Russia and Eastern Europe and were provoked by discontent with the effects of globalisation.