During the first decades of the Cuban Revolution, different movies described the interest of the new State on education as a means of changing society. Feature films such as Lucía (Humberto Solás, 1868), El brigadista (Octavio Cortázar, 1977) or De cierta manera (Sara Gómez, 1974) had characters whose goal was not only teaching different groups but also converting them to the “revolutionary” ideology. In these films, teachers embodied a model individual, a “new man” representing and speaking on behalf of the Law. These official voices also legitimized an accent, and a lifestyle commonly related to the lettered white Habanero man. Peasants, women, and Afro-descendants comprised the group to be reformed. Their religious, culinary, sexual, and linguistic practices were associated with machismo, burglary, and violence. These movies aimed to instruct the audience as their teachers did in the plot, by offering a “revolutionary” model of behavior opposed to “deviated” ones.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.47725/RAV.028.01