Best Cuban drama movies

Set in 1979, following a young Communist man's relationship with a gay Catholic writer, exploring tolerance, inclusion, homophobia and challenging its Cuban audience with great humour. Based on the short story by Cuban writer Senel Paz.

Meet Chala, an eleven year-old boy with a hard life and strong respect for Carmela, his sixth grade teacher. The pair develops a solid bond, but after Carmela suffers an accident, things get complicated…

When Spanish record producers express interest in Cuban musicians Ruy and Tito, the longtime friends are faced with the prospect of leaving their loved ones behind. After years of hoping and dreaming, they've finally earned the opportunity to bring their music to the rest of the world. But are the emotional trade-offs worth it in the end?

Traces episodes in the lives of three Cuban women, each named Lucía, from three different historical periods: the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1960s.

In 1991, the USSR is falling apart and Cuba enters its hardest economic crisis. Sergio, a professor of Marxism who can't provide for his family, and Sergei, a Soviet cosmonaut stranded in the Mir space station, share a common passion: amateur radio. Through this hobby, both men will be able to help each other in facing the dramatic changes of their countries.

In Miraflores, Cuba, the growing romance between Mario, a factory worker, and Yolanda, a schoolteacher, throws into relief the differences in their perspectives and values in Revolutionary Cuba.

A pious plantation owner attempts to teach Christianity to 12 of his slaves by inviting them to participate in a reenactment of the Last Supper.

A mother struggles to hold her family together after her son succumbs to a disease that leaves him disabled.

Directed mainly for kids, the film speaks of a Havana that reveals two distinct faces, from the everyday life of a couple of kids.

The story of a friendship in a city on the verge of substantial change. Miguel dreams of settling in New York while he waits for a visa that never seems to arrive, and Diego, a HIV-positive homosexual man, puts his dreams and cheerfulness to good use in his struggle to carry on enjoying every single day of his life from a rickety old bed in his small bedroom.

Josefa and Abelardo is an old couple wracked by monotony. She is quite authoritarian, and he is always trying to please her, only achieving herirritation. Sexual appetites have been decaying over the years, mostly in Josefa; whose only pleasure is the soap operas she follows with great attention. One night, with the arrival of Rebecca, Abelardo's young and desirable niece, the routine of the marriage changes drastically.

Javier is an actor with an affinity for writing. When he begins his love story with Luisita, he does not know where the truth begins and ends. Fifteen years later he has converted his story into literature that relates his tragic love story in a creative way.

At a rundown bus station in rural Cuba, the line of passengers waiting just keeps getting longer. The problem is that every bus that passes by is already full. Their only hope is to wait for the station's bus to be fixed. As the disparate group settles in, relationships start forming between the passengers: Emilio, a young engineer, becomes smitten with a beautiful young woman who is en route to meet her Spanish fiancé, a blind man gets support from the others to go to the head of the line. Frustration and disorder reign when the one bus brakes down and no one can leave. Resigned to working together, the group magically transforms the station into a beautiful place where no one wants to leave.

In a boarding school, Raidel is witness to the abuse suffered by his schoolmate Randy.

A masterclass in mood, the film plunges us into the darkness of the blackouts that ripple across Cuba. In the murk of shadow, the flickering of fire beckons stories from realms beyond the reach of light. Electricity cuts have revived a protest movement dormant since the revolution, one demanding that power be restored.

Based on the life of Benny Moré, the film concentrates on a period in the early 1950s when Moré leaves the orchestra of Duany and starts his own 'Banda Gigante'. In flashback we learn of his success in Mexico. Moré is caught in the events connected to Batista's coup in Cuba. Also, he tours Venezuela, where he suffers the machinations of a vengeful businessman. After collapsing and being hospitalised, Moré swears off alcohol. Some years later, he encounters his old band-mate Monchy, fallen on hard times.

Damaris and Alberto live in an isolated village in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba. Four months ago, their 12 year old son committed suicide.

The Castro revolution was just consolidating its power when, in 1961, over 100,000 students were sent from their schools into the countryside to teach the peasants there how to read. Coinciding with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in this docudrama, 15-year-old Mario (Salvador Wood) has come to a tiny village in the Zapata swamps and gradually wins the villagers over to his task. At the same time, he receives an education in the realities of rural life from the hard-working peasants.

The "edad de la peseta" or silly age is the term used in Cuba for the pre-adolescent period from the age of seven to the age of eleven. Set in 1958 in Havana, the year that culminates the Revolution, ten-year-old Samuel has just arrived in town with his recently divorced mother. They take up residence in the house of his eccentric grandmother Violeta, and Samuel is introduced to a new, mysterious world where Samuel finds himself an adult in comparison to his child-like mother.

Nicholas Quevedo, a Cuban-American rumba singer moves from Havana to New York with nothing else but his love for rumba and his unbreakable dream to make it in the Big Apple, but his journey would be confronted by unimaginable challenges.

Three characters in present-day Havana must choose between clinging to their self-restricting beliefs, or getting rid of them to live more freely. Ballerina Mariana has promised God celibacy if she gets the role of "Giselle"; Social-worker Julia always faints after hearing a certain word; and pot-smoking percussionist Elpidio was abandoned by his mother, coincidentally named Cuba, some time ago and has not yet gotten over the loss.

This historical drama, depicting different phases in the late childhood and youth of the so-called "Apostle of Cuba" José Martí, is most of the time a biopic full of commonplaces often found in this genre, directed by Fernando Pérez, one of the most respected names in Cuban cinema.

An unclaimed fortune, grown for centuries in a British bank account, becomes a potential windfall for Bernadito Castiñeiras and the residents of the tiny village of Yaragüey, Cuba. To receive his massive inheritance check, Bernadito must prove his lineage to the Castiñeiras nuns who first populated the region. In an isolated and impoverished town where many residents share the same surname, a feud breaks out between the "Castiñeiras" and "Castiñeyras" families.

In 1950s Havana, a romance blooms between two young revolutionaries whose clandestine printing press publishes pamphlets meant to stir up rebellion against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. As their popularity grows, so, too, does their revolutionary zeal and their desire to mobilize other urban guerilla units.

An intellectual leaves the Cuban revolution and 'underdevelopment' behind only to find himself at odds with the ambiguities of his new life in the 'developed' world. A portrait of alienation, of an outsider with no clear-cut politics or ideology. A stranger in a strange land struggling with old age, sexual desire and ultimately the impossibility for the individual to belong in any society. The film's narrative is a collage of flashbacks, daydreams, and hallucinations comprising live-action, animation, and newsreel footage assembled to suggest the way personal memory works, subjectively and emotionally.

Alex and Edith, a young couple in their 30s, live their relationship made up of small gestures and everyday life among the ruins of Cuban buildings. Milagros, an elderly woman now retired, tries to survive by selling peanuts and spends her days listening to the radio and reading old letters. Frank and Alain, two nine-year-old friends, go to school and dream of emigrating together to the United States to become Major League Baseball players. Against the backdrop of San Antonio De Los Baños, a town in inland Cuba where time seems to stand still, these three narratives and their respective worlds unfold. Over this mosaic of contemporaneity, however, brought to life through the characters' memories, hovers the specter of separation, the true great scourge of Cuban society.

Maya looks at the relationship between a fighting dog and her owner and trainer. At close quarters, we observe the three days leading up to a fight to the death.

Teresa is overwhelmed: with a husband, three young sons, a job as a crew leader in a textile factory, and volunteer commitments as cultural leader of her union. Her husband, Ramón, wants more of her attention; her feelings are mixed, wanting domestic peace, feeling responsibilities to the revolution, and wanting to control her own life beyond doing dirty dishes. They separate; he begins an affair. When he wants a reconciliation, she asks what his response would be if she'd had an affair too. "But men are different," is his reply. He's failed her test, and to hold on to independence and self-respect, she remains uncompromising and hard-edged.

Against the fascinating backdrop of an ever marvellous Havana, Vittorio Arditi De Bellis, an aging Italian orchestra conductor once celebrated for specialising in Rossini's compositions, has fallen on hard times. However, some remember he delivered some of the best renditions of the Rossini-Kyrie, and he soon finds himself reluctantly on the way to Havana, Cuba, to conduct the Children's Cuban National Choir. Starting on the wrong foot he quickly finds himself on the verge of losing everything. Rossini's Cuban style and the choir's children are also protagonists in this heart-warming and nostalgic tale of living, loving, growing old and being unexpectedly surprised when he meets the Son he never knew he fathered years ago - Vittorio's past adds new purpose to his present, allowing an otherwise quirky old man to feel his passion and taste the 'spice of life' once again.

Javi shows up for the last time at a queer club where he works as a dancer, but he must deal with Castillo, a regular customer who resists the fact that he will never see him again.

After languishing in a Barcelona prison for nearly a decade, a busted bank robber attempts to find the girl who made off with the cash in this suspenseful tale of revenge and betrayal starring Adriana Gil and Eduard Fernández. Ex-con Martin Losada is out of prison and on the hunt. When he and his band of anti-Franco bank robbers were busted after a botched heist ten years ago, the only member of their team never caught by police was his long-gone ex-girlfriend Julia. Now, on the eve of the 1958 revolution, the recently released ex-con sets his sights on Havana in a determined bid to find Julia, and stake his claim on his rightful share of the take.

It's the late 1980s in Cuba, and in an isolated ranch in a small town near Santa Clara, lives Vilma, a young nurse who dreams of a better place to raise her upcoming baby, along with her disabled husband Ivan. However, neither her skills as a nurse nor as a shooter will free Vilma from her harsh reality until a natural phenomena sweeps her away and Vilma wakes up in a place where it seems her dream will come true.

Celeste García, a 60-year-old former schoolteacher and current guide at the Havana Planetarium, is looking for a life change. When a group of aliens land in Cuba offering earthlings a chance to visit their planet, Celeste signs up for the journey hoping for a better and more fulfilling life.

Daniela – a single mother, whose boyfriend left for the US – believes wholeheartedly in Cuba's revolutionary new order. Meanwhile, in Florida, a plot is afoot. Under the command of an American officer, four Cubans ex-patriots and a Guatemalan land on the Cuban coast to prepare a US invasion of the island. Daniela's superior, the corrupt Cuban officer Palomino, is secretly helping the invaders and the young woman becomes entangled in the intrigue.

A painful true story of a revolutionary Andian warrior whose strength and devotion to his people influenced many in Latin America, Africa and the West.

Santiago de Cuba, January 19th, 1819. Coming from Lausanne, Enrique Faber, a Swiss doctor and surgeon, arrives on the island, a Spanish province, hoping to find his son, who has been kidnapped…

In a small Cuban fishing village, Joel, the oldest brother in a traditional family, is heartbroken when his fiancée marries someone her family prefers. He moves to Havana, hoping to find a new life. Gorgeously photogenic, Havana and the Cuban countryside are exquisitely captured in director Kosyrev-Nesterov's elegiac feature debut.

Mendizábal, a reputed hitman, is commissioned to eliminate Rodolfo Kulpe, a small-time criminal.

A biting satire about life in contemporary Cuba. Alicia, a young drama instructor, is sent to the small town of Maravillas de Noveras, which is itself an exaggerated, but very ingenious reflection of the real Cuba. Her adventures there are almost as surreal as the ones experienced by Lewis Carroll's character, reflecting patterns of indoctrination, coercion, absolutism, and many other everyday problems in Cuban society.

The 50-minute "Madagascar" has the resonance and eloquence of the best poetry, as it deftly turns an adolescent's search for identity into a metaphor for socialist Cuba. Laura is a professor at a shabby, stultifying college. Her daughter, Laurita, stops going to school, wishes to move to Madagascar and quickly races through several phases. One day, she looks like a heavy-metal fan, another like a bohemian who weeps at poetry and art. Slowly, she crosses the line from ordinary adolescent confusion to intense neurosis and beyond, finally becoming so obsessed with religion and good works that she brings 10 homeless children into the cramped house she shares with her mother and grandmother.

The story of students of a high school in Havana in the 60's, where love, politics, and moral contradictions appeared. A shy country boy gets caught between the peer pressure of his buddies and his love for an overweight, strong willed but likable girl.

Fredy is a teenager who lives in the countryside and denies his homosexual inclinations. When rumors start circulating in the village, he decides to go to Havana, where he meets a group of people who help him realize that it is best to accept himself.

Revolves around a love triangle that later evolves into a love square involving three Cubans and a Soviet soldier. Set in a fictitious rural village near a Soviet military base in central Cuba, their amorous adventures, or misadventures, unravel against the backdrop of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The first years of the Cuban Revolution characterized by social transformations and class struggles.

A superstitious middle-aged woman falls in love with a taxi driver, while trying to learn the identity of the unseen person tossing eggs at her.

The plot, set in Havana in the last period of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship, follows a young girl whose aspirations to obtain a scholarship in America, against the odds, are paralleled with her reading of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea".

Carla, a young postal worker in Havana, spends her days postmarking thousands of letters and dreaming of the day when she can be reunited with her parents, who moved to Miami when she was fifteen. To fulfill her longing for intimacy, she opens random letters and rewrites them into lyrical prose, believing she is helping her fellow Cubans understand one another better. Beautifully filmed in black and white accented by brilliant colours, Nada+ has a stunning visual composition. With its delightful mix of visual humour, theatrical characters, satire and a lighthearted love story, it has a distinctly Cuban flair.

Cuban peasants wield machetes in a violent uprising against Spanish authorities in the late 19th century.

In the manner of a well run Greek tragedy, leaving aside one of its components, dragging in its passing narrative certainty by the viewer that violent death is the hallmark of so much misfortune purifier, Los Dioses Rotos crowns the very successful arrival of Ernesto Daranas to the feature domains and with it, the team that accompanied him, including the actors.

A blind woman living alone in the country tells tales to a criminal holding her captive to keep him calm.

Tito is 23 years old with a mother who loves him and a car that allows him to earn an honest living. His neighbors see him as a formal and educated boy. Nobody knows that behind that façade hides someone with a nihilistic vision of life. And that involves committing terrible acts for which he may have to pay someday. But Tito does not care about the future. There is only the present.

When a young man is killed in Central Park in La Habana, a series of coincidences reveals that many of the night walkers that hang around the park are related to the crime.

A prestigious theater group in crisis prepares for the staging of a famous love tragedy. Mirtha, an actress marked by frustration, decides to leave the theater when a guest conductor offered a starring role. The incorporation of young actors, unscrupulous, and an inspector trigger a series of situations that will endanger the reputation and power of the actress who heads the group.

A woman working in a caribean Cabaret meets a man in the harbour that just went out of jail. They recognise in each other common feelings of rage and fury and then they fall in love in a story without words.

Walfrido Larduet, a lonely electrical inspector, dreams of the Red Woman, whose image persists and becomes an obsession. Something tells him she is near. Over the course of a day, Walfrido will follow her trail as he travels through the suburbs of an infested city.

Every weekend at an illegal drag show in the suburbs of Havana, Sebastián, a 17-year-old Cuban teenager, transforms into 'Mila Caos', his empowered, flamboyant alter-ego. When he returns to his daytime self, Sebastián suffers from his mother's indifference, dreaming that one day she will see him on stage for who he truly is.

Based on Ladislas Fodor's "Stranger on the Stairs". A loved triangle composed by a cynical entrepreneur, a loan manager, and a seductive secretary will lead to a criminal plot in Cuba.

In the middle of La Habana, three friends meet on the rooftop day after day to discuss their dreams and aspirations. Though they lack the proper resources, they decide to start their own business, a decision that pushes them towards maturity, although at an unforeseen cost.

Based on the novel Francisco by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, "The Other Francisco" is a socio-economic analysis of slavery and class struggle through the retelling of the original novel. The film contrasts the romantic conceptions of plantation life found in Suárez Romero's novel with a realistic expose of the actual historical conditions of slavery throughout the Americas. It offers a critical analysis of the novel, showing how the author's social background led to his use of particular dramatic structures to convey his liberal, humanitarian viewpoint.

A Haitian son returns from fifteen years in Cuba to find his home village afflicted with the double plague of drought and strife. A Cuban production from the director of Memories of Underdevelopment. In Spanish.

Javier Argüelles, an opportunistic young man from Cuban middle class, survives all kind of political changes in Havana, from 1932 to 1959, while his brother Darío is persecuted and killed because of his leftist ideas.

An elderly man with wings is blown off course during a tropical storm in this symbolic fantasy. The Old Man lands near a Caribbean island where a poor family gives him shelter in a chicken coop. Father Gonzaga is the skeptical priest who rushes to damn the creature. Soon the Old Man is the subject of curiosity seekers as Elisinda and Pelayo start charging admission. A traveling carnival of human oddities camps near the Old Man as people flock to see the show. The Old Man is reduced to being an unwanted pet, and after six years, he mends his wings and flies away. Nudity, simulated sex with a spider woman, and the ugliness of human exploitation definitely put this fantasy in a category not for children.

Gyula Kodar is a commissioner who investigates the murder of an American executive. Keep track of Macabí, an ex and former lover of Mary Laya, widow of the victim. With the help of Kelly, a prostitute who is his sometime lover, Gyula able to find Macabí ; then he discovers that love is superior to survival and freedom is stronger than betrayal.

Yolanda, a Cuban woman, goes from dancing her heart out at a house party to running against the clock to find her son and skip town once a video circulates from that gathering that seems to incriminate her.

Luis, a sterility physician, is in love with a young colleague and faces the dilemma of breaking his marriage or accepting the tranquility and security of domestic life.