The Waiting List

In the opening scene of "The Waiting List," a handsome young engineer Emilio (Vladimir Cruz) enters a rundown bus terminal in Manzanilla province destined for Santiago. He, like all passengers in egalitarian but long-suffering Cuba, receives a place on a waiting list for the next bus. His prospects do not look good as the passengers all around him complain openly and bitterly about having been there for a number of days already.

When a bus finally arrives, it has room only for one passenger, who turns out to be a company employee regarded by the others as a beneficiary of favoritism. Demanding an explanation, they summon the manager of the station, who has been busy in a shed trying to repair the station's backup bus, a creaky relic from Soviet days.

In a scene that captures the strains on "existing socialism," he assures the angry mob that as soon as he completes the repairs, he will send them on to either Santiago or Havana. If the bus is fixed before midnight, it will be Santiago--after midnight Havana. When they demand to know when the job will be done, he shrugs his shoulders and says that he doesn't know. From where is he supposed to get the necessary part? The Soviet Union? The United States?

Despite their frustration and rivalries over getting a seat on the bus, they still have a social conscience bred by 30 years of living in a revolutionary society. When the blind Rolando (Jorge Perugorria) arrives at the station, nearly everybody agrees that he should go to the front of the waiting list. It is our duty to help the less fortunate comrades, they say. Reflecting the other side of Cuban realities, it turns out that Rolando is not really blind, but only pretends to be so in order to get to the head of Cuba's omnipresent lines.

With little else to do but wait for the repairs to be completed, the passengers introduce themselves to each other and start making friendships. Emilio is drawn to the beautiful young woman Jacqueline (Tahimi Alvarino), who is engaged to a Spaniard she hopes to join in Havana. Despite their obvious affinity, they find it all too easy to hurt each other's feelings in this stressful environment. When she discovers that he is giving up his engineering career in order to work on his father's private farm, she accuses him of lacking dedication to the revolution. His response is that at least he is not running off to Spain like she is.

The plot of "The Waiting List" is based on a time-tested formula. By forcing a bunch of characters drawn from a cross-section of society to relate to each other in an enclosed space (jail cell, lifeboat, stagecoach, etc.), you allow directors, writers and actors to focus on dialogue and character. Before the barbarian takeover of Hollywood, it used to make just such movies, including the 1958 classic "Bus Stop." Written by William Inge and starring Marilyn Monroe, it depicts passengers stuck in a terminal during a snowstorm. By appropriating such a vintage genre, director Juan Carlos Tabio shows that he is not above using something that is still serviceable, just like the 1958 American sedans that still ply Cuba's roads.

Of course what makes "The Waiting List" different from other films based on such a formula is that it is set in contemporary Cuba, a society that practically cries out for an honest portrayal. Although director Juan Carlos Tabio is committed to the Cuban revolution, he is not interested in whitewashing society. His last film "Strawberry and Chocolate," co-directed with the great Tomas Gutierrez Alea, dealt honestly with the problems of homosexuals in Cuba. Starring Vladimir Cruz as a rather pompous and dogmatic young Communist, it demonstrates his growing maturity through his friendship with a gay man played by Jorge Perugorria.

"The Waiting List" also includes another pompous and dogmatic Communist, a passenger who insists that an "unauthorized" project to repair the bus by the passengers themselves is tantamount to anarchy. This plan, which has been initiated by the engineer Emilio, gradually evolves into a project to make the bus station itself a kind of socialist utopia. As they divide into crews, work on the bus begins side-by-side with an all-out assault to make the station a livable place. They put a fresh coat of paint on the walls, grow food gardens and repair water fountains. The bureaucrat deems all this activity as practically counter-revolutionary and storms off to the next town to report the transgressors to the authorities.

This film exemplifies one of the aspects of the Cuban revolution that many people, including some leftists, find hard to comprehend. While it represents the thinking of the most powerful people in a state-owned industry, the message is profoundly anti-establishment. The film is used as a cudgel against timidity and conservatism, even--and especially--if it comes from within the ranks of the Communist Party. By analogy, just try to imagine Hollywood spending 200 million dollars on a sympathetic film biography of Mumia or Leonard Peltier.

"The Waiting List" is best understood as a weapon in the process called 'perfeccionamiento' (perfecting) that is reflected on all sorts of levels in Cuba, including electoral politics. It is a continual effort to make sure that the popular masses of Cuban society control their own lives and make government officials responsible. Although the forms of Cuban democracy do not resemble a parliamentary system, there is a constant effort to promote exactly the kind of grass roots participation that "The Waiting List" celebrates.

For example, in 1986 the Cubans established decentralized popular councils in the Province of Ciudad de La Habana. This provided an opportunity for municipal delegates to become local leaders in an area smaller than the municipality, while providing a process for closer links between the elected and the electors. At the time when the Cubans were already working on the problem of democratic accountability, Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. had already entered into crisis over the bureaucratic system.

Even though the Cubans had already taken measures to rectify the situation, this did not mean that they were immune to the winds of change blowing over the globe. Fidel Castro himself said in the 1991 party congress speech:

"Can we suppose that those facts [the crisis in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R] don't influence our country? Are we living on another planet or on the moon, that we don't live on earth? Has the revolution taken place inside a glass case, isolated from the rest of the world and its problems? Can we possibly think that way? It is very important that we know how these events have affected us directly, in material terms. But they also influenced us ideologically..."

(Arnold August, Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-1998 Elections)

In a way, the ties with the Soviet bloc that Cuba had established in the 30 year period leading up to Castro's speech were a double-edged sword. While it provided a lifeline that kept the revolution afloat, it also introduced bureaucratic modes of thinking that electoral reform and films like "Waiting List" are meant to rectify.

Ironically, the desperate situation depicted in "The Waiting List" and the solutions offered up by the passengers mark a return to the early days of the revolution when self-reliance and creativity appeared on every front.

This was the scene observed by Edward Boornstein at the end of 1960 ("The Economic Transformation of Cuba", MR Press, 1964), when he visited Cuba as part of an economists' delegation from the USA:

"When you walked through a Cuban factory, you didn't need to be told that it was under new management--you could see and feel it everywhere. In the Pheldrake plant for producing wire and cable, formerly owned by Dutch and American interests, the whole office of administration was filled by men in shirt-sleeves who were unmistakably workers; the engineers had gone and the workers had taken over. On the main floor, a group of them were struggling--using baling wire techniques--to repair one of the extrusion machines so that the wire required by the Cuban telephone industry could be kept coming. In a large tobacco factory, the administrator was black; in the metal-working plant formerly owned by the American Car and Foundry Company, the head of a department turning out chicken incubators was black. Black people had not held such positions before the Revolution."