Alea's Cuba, as seen through his films, is a complex reality that does not fit easily within the neat binarisms of the cold war, or the Manicheanism that has plagued discussions about the Revolution. Rather, it is a collective project full of contradictions, a process that has been, successively, progressive and reactionary, machista and feminist, dogmatic and tolerant, heroic and tragic. To paraphrase Alea, it is a project whose truth does not lie in either one of the poles, but rather in their confrontation, and what that confrontation suggests within a context that includes the cold war, Latin America's tradition of revolutionary struggles for independence, and Cuba's own particular history."--Jacket.