Paper short abstract:

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: Mapping of the rise of the slave consciousness in Cuba from the time of the historic sugar plantations to the Great Sugar Harvest of Cuba in 1970 in his film The last Supper (1976)

Paper long abstract:

Praised for its aesthetics of colour and framing as well as its treatment of the ontological slave presence in Cuban society, Tomas Gutierrez Alea's film The Last Supper (1976) explores the politics of the relationship between the slave owners and the slaves in the era of the sugar plantations. Playing on the deeper cultural and religious archetypes that are revealed by Leonardo da Vinci's revisionist painting of the same name, Alea creates his own surrealist reading of the Holy Week and through subtle comedy and intentional subversions brings out the instrumentality of Christianity on the slave plantation where the Count of the film decides to 'play' Christ and chooses twelve of his slaves to act as the apostles - slaves who read in the Bible not only a tool for consolidating their esclavitud but also one that privileges the outcasts, the enslaved ones. By meticulously reproducing the events of the Holy Week and the last supper, Alea crafts the irony of this farce and the contradictions it throws up into an argument for the evolution of the slave consciousness at the time of the Great Sugar Harvest of 1970 when Cuba was once again perceived by many Cubans, to be subjecting itself to slavery to the Soviet Union for the sake of, ironically, maintaining itself as a free country.