I am Cuba

Six minutes from the beginning and remarkably only the fourth shot in the film, by far the most ambitious, director Mikhail Kalatozov’s first portrait of the decadent Havana lifestyle supplanted by Fidel Castro’s Soviet-supported revolution, in the long-ignored quasi-documentary I Am Cuba, 1964.

A vignette of Havana between director Mikhail Kalatozov’s meant-to-be damning illustrations of depraved Western lifestyles, another preposterous single shot from cinematographer Serger Urusevsky, we meet street vendor Rene (uncredited), from the Soviet-Cuban propaganda project I Am Cuba, 1964.