{ "id": "ep7j9w66yw", "slug": "memories-of-underdevelopment", "title": "Memories of Underdevelopment", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1960s", "label": "Drama films 1960s", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1960s" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1960s.yr-1966-1969", "label": "Released 1966 to 1969", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1960s.yr-1966-1969" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Latin America and the Caribbean · 1946 to 2000: Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "path": [ { "id": "geo.latam", "label": "Latin America and the Caribbean", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946", "label": "Latin America and the Caribbean · 1946 to 2000", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical" } ] } ], "excerpt": "Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 Cuban film, adapted from Edmundo Desnoes' novel, about bourgeois intellectual Sergio who stays in Havana after the Bay of Pigs; a landmark of ICAIC-era cinema.", "snippet": "Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo) is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 Cuban film, adapted from Edmundo Desnoes' novel, about bourgeois intellectual Sergio who stays in Havana after the Bay of Pigs; a landmark of ICAIC-era cinema.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1960s.yr-1966-1969", "markdown": "# Memories of Underdevelopment\n\n**Memories of Underdevelopment** (*Memorias del subdesarrollo*) is a 1968 Cuban black-and-white drama directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, following a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who stays in Havana after the [Bay of Pigs](https://www.edgepedia.org/bay-of-pigs) invasion while his wife and family leave for Miami[1](https://www.janusfilms.com/films/1864). Adapted from Edmundo Desnoes' novel *Inconsolable Memories*, it is widely regarded as a landmark of Cuban cinema and was the first great international success of Cuban film[2](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/leaflet/export/pdf/?product_id=167).\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Director / year | Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1968[1](https://www.janusfilms.com/films/1864) |\n| Source | Adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' novel *Inconsolable Memories*[2](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/leaflet/export/pdf/?product_id=167) |\n| Setting | Havana, 1961–62, between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis[3](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/filmhistoria/article/download/12371/15145/22384) |\n| Lead | Sergio Corrieri as Sergio Carmona Mendoyo, with Daysi Granados as Elena[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/memories_of_underdevelopment) |\n| Format | Black and white, 1.66:1, about 97–98 minutes[1](https://www.janusfilms.com/films/1864) • [5](https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2016/films/memories-of-underdevelopment/) |\n| US release | 1973, the first Cuban film released in the United States after the start of the embargo[6](https://www.4columns.org/haslett-tobi/memories-of-underdevelopment) |\n| Recognition | Special prize from the National Society of Film Critics (1974); ranked =169 in the 2022 BFI critics' poll of greatest films[7](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/janus_promo_packages/95-/PressNotes_MemoriesOfUnderdevelopment_r4_original.pdf) • [8](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/6bb5b3dc-3a99-5d91-ac9e-9cf52c4995ca/memories-of-underdevelopment) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Story and setting\n\nThe film is set in the early 1960s, in the period between the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the [Cuban Missile Crisis](https://www.edgepedia.org/cuban-missile-crisis) of 1962[3](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/filmhistoria/article/download/12371/15145/22384). Sergio, a wealthy aspiring writer and property owner, remains in Havana when his wife, family, and friends, like much of the middle class, leave for Miami[8](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/6bb5b3dc-3a99-5d91-ac9e-9cf52c4995ca/memories-of-underdevelopment). He is caught between the bourgeois life he is tired of and a revolution he does not understand; he can watch the era's upheavals only on his television screen or from his apartment balcony[2](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/leaflet/export/pdf/?product_id=167).\n\nHis days pass in idle wandering and amorous entanglements, chiefly with Elena, a young woman whose family later accuses him of rape, an episode that nearly ruins him[1](https://www.janusfilms.com/films/1864) • [4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/memories_of_underdevelopment). The title's \"underdevelopment\" works as a pun describing both the nation's economic condition and Sergio's own personal and spiritual stunting; as one of his voice-over monologues puts it, a sign of underdevelopment is \"an inability to establish links, to gather experience and grow\"[7](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/janus_promo_packages/95-/PressNotes_MemoriesOfUnderdevelopment_r4_original.pdf) • [9](https://www.timeout.com/movies/memories-of-underdevelopment).\n\n## Style and narrative technique\n\nGutiérrez Alea built the film as a collage. It combines a fragmented narrative, real documentary footage of protests and political events, still photographs, and spontaneously shot street scenes, held together by Sergio's narration[8](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/6bb5b3dc-3a99-5d91-ac9e-9cf52c4995ca/memories-of-underdevelopment) • [10](https://lrc.dllc.udel.edu/lrc-video/memories-of-underdevelopment/). The story unfolds through a highly subjective point of view that resembles the way memory works, and the narration is deliberately unreliable, presenting history as it would be understood in the moment and recalled afterward[10](https://lrc.dllc.udel.edu/lrc-video/memories-of-underdevelopment/) • [4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/memories_of_underdevelopment).\n\nThe documentary material does more than supply background. Real footage of the Bay of Pigs, the trials of the Miami counter-revolutionaries, and [Fidel Castro](https://www.edgepedia.org/fidel-castro)'s television speech as the missile crisis approaches is played against Sergio's monologues, so that the film repeatedly steps back from its protagonist and offers a perspective on him independent of his own point of view[11](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/jun/27/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic7) • [12](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/filmhistoria/article/download/32072/32179/75830). In sequences where Desnoes and Gutiérrez Alea themselves appear, the film also becomes self-critical[12](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/filmhistoria/article/download/32072/32179/75830).\n\n## Production context\n\nThe film was made under the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), the national film institute founded in 1959, months after the revolution took power, to make cinema a cultural priority of the new government[13](https://remezcla.com/film/cuban-classic-memories-underdevelopment-theater/). Gutiérrez Alea had been among the founders of the institute in 1959, and his 1968 film was his fifth feature[14](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/memories-of-underdevelopment/) • [9](https://www.timeout.com/movies/memories-of-underdevelopment).\n\nMany critics at the time were surprised by the strain of self-criticism in a film produced by what was effectively a government ministry in a Marxist country[9](https://www.timeout.com/movies/memories-of-underdevelopment). Gutiérrez Alea himself remained loyal to the revolution, arguing in a 1988 article for the Cuban paper *Juventud Rebelde* that \"we must support the necessity of criticism for the survival of the Revolution\"[11](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/jun/27/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic7).\n\n## Reception in the United States\n\nThe film's path to American audiences was shaped by politics. It was initially barred as part of the US trade quarantine of Cuba, and when finally shown, five years after its original release, American critics responded enthusiastically[2](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/leaflet/export/pdf/?product_id=167). Vincent Canby ranked it among the finest films of the year, and following its showing at New Directors/New Films, authorities from the Treasury Department confiscated it during a festival of Cuban cinema that an anti-Castro stink bomb attack had already disrupted[15](https://www.screenslate.com/articles/memories-underdevelopment).\n\nThe National Society of Film Critics gave the film a special prize at its 1974 awards ceremony, where critic Andrew Sarris called it a \"very personal and very courageous confrontation of the artist's doubts and ambivalences regarding the Cuban revolution\"; the US State Department refused Gutiérrez Alea a visa to attend[7](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/janus_promo_packages/95-/PressNotes_MemoriesOfUnderdevelopment_r4_original.pdf). Reception abroad was complicated by the film's politics: some [First World](https://www.edgepedia.org/first-world) viewers read it as a break with the Castro regime, while the director noted that different audiences understand the content in diverse ways according to their prevailing ideology[6](https://www.4columns.org/haslett-tobi/memories-of-underdevelopment).\n\n## Legacy\n\nThe film stands as one of the early classics of the New Latin American Cinema that emerged in the 1960s[16](https://drs.ess.gov.et/bitstreams/ac14950e-5ad3-4c78-b7a0-1518771ed630/download). On its fiftieth anniversary it returned to theaters in a 4K restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, financed by [The Film Foundation](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-film-foundation)'s World Cinema Project[5](https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2016/films/memories-of-underdevelopment/). In the 2022 [Sight and Sound](https://www.edgepedia.org/sight-and-sound) critics' poll it was ranked =169 among the greatest films of all time[8](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/6bb5b3dc-3a99-5d91-ac9e-9cf52c4995ca/memories-of-underdevelopment). Its critical gaze has remained a reference point for later Cuban filmmakers; Miguel Coyula's *Memories of Overdevelopment* (2010) took Desnoes' character as a starting point for a successor story[17](https://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2011/02/22/cuba-sous-le-scalpel-du-jeune-cinema_5991024_3222.html).\n\n## References\n\n1. [Memories of Underdevelopment, Janus Films](https://www.janusfilms.com/films/1864)\n2. [Michael Chanan, Memories of Underdevelopment, Rutgers University Press (1990)](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/leaflet/export/pdf/?product_id=167)\n3. [The Revolution is History: Filming, Film-Historia](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/filmhistoria/article/download/12371/15145/22384)\n4. [Memories of Underdevelopment, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/memories_of_underdevelopment)\n5. [Memories of Underdevelopment, NYFF54, Film at Lincoln Center](https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2016/films/memories-of-underdevelopment/)\n6. [Tobi Haslett, Memories of Underdevelopment, 4Columns (2018)](https://www.4columns.org/haslett-tobi/memories-of-underdevelopment)\n7. [Press notes, Memories of Underdevelopment, Criterion Collection](https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/janus_promo_packages/95-/PressNotes_MemoriesOfUnderdevelopment_r4_original.pdf)\n8. [Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/6bb5b3dc-3a99-5d91-ac9e-9cf52c4995ca/memories-of-underdevelopment)\n9. [Memories of Underdevelopment, Time Out](https://www.timeout.com/movies/memories-of-underdevelopment)\n10. [Memories of Underdevelopment, University of Delaware Language Resource Center](https://lrc.dllc.udel.edu/lrc-video/memories-of-underdevelopment/)\n11. [The reality behind the revolution, The Guardian (2008)](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/jun/27/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic7)\n12. [Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance, Film-Historia Online Vol. 30 (2020)](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/filmhistoria/article/download/32072/32179/75830)\n13. [Cuban Classic 'Memories of Underdevelopment' Returns to Theaters, Remezcla](https://remezcla.com/film/cuban-classic-memories-underdevelopment-theater/)\n14. [Memories of Underdevelopment, Cinémathèque québécoise](https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/memories-of-underdevelopment/)\n15. [Memories of Underdevelopment, Screen Slate](https://www.screenslate.com/articles/memories-underdevelopment)\n16. [When Was Latin America Modern? (Cuban Cinema chapter)](https://drs.ess.gov.et/bitstreams/ac14950e-5ad3-4c78-b7a0-1518771ed630/download)\n17. [Cuba sous le scalpel du jeune cinéma, Le Monde (2011)](https://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2011/02/22/cuba-sous-le-scalpel-du-jeune-cinema_5991024_3222.html)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1966 to 1969*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"Memories of Underdevelopment\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[Memories of Underdevelopment](https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment](https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"Memories of Underdevelopment\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/memories-of-underdevelopment. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "Memories of Underdevelopment is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 Cuban film, adapted from Edmundo Desnoes' novel, about bourgeois intellectual Sergio who stays in Havana after the Bay of Pigs; a landmark of ICAIC-era cinema." }