It is the last thing you’d expect any filmmaker to say, but looking back on the making of “Havana Libre,” there was a three-week stretch when Corey McLean and his crew were stranded in Cuba without a dime to their name and the director considers it “probably the best thing that could’ve happened to us.”
“We had no way to really solve that when you realize you’ve got no access to your banks and no ability to really call anybody,” said McLean. “You’re basically sending out an e-mail and going to get internet once every three or four days and hope that your problem’s been solved. It’s a really good learning experience and when we had struggles to get a connection, it really put into perspective what it must be like living without that connection all the time.”
McLean had actually come to the country because of a disconnect, able to travel to the country after restrictions that had been imposed on Cuba for generations by the U.S. were finally starting to be loosened, yet exploring the implications that the embargo still had on those who wanted to pursue competitive surfing. As an island nation, it seems as it would be only natural for there to be a huge number eager to ride the waves, but when the ocean is monitored for potential defectors and surfing falls under illegal activity, the sport remains underground and has no recognition from the Cuban Institution of Sports (known as INDER) that would allow anyone from the country to compete internationally at tournaments. That has made it far more difficult for Frank Gonzales Guerra and Yaya Guerrero, the two surfers that McLean follows, to handle the twists and turns of eligibility as they look towards the Olympics where surfing is set to become an Olympic sport in 2020 than they are at choppy waters, though “Havana Libre” shows them navigating both with as much grace as they can muster.
Surfing may represent one kind of escape for Frank and Yaya, but their pursuit illuminates all the other outside forces that continue to govern their lives, from having limited electricity and access to the internet making public parks their only option to watch lo-res videos of surfers from other parts of the world to sneaking around to secret spots from Tortilla to Guantanamo Bay in search of decent waves without interference. It’s hardly the carefree life you imagine for most surfers, yet one that reveals their passion when they are undeterred from following their dreams and with the film’s lush cinematography and gentle spirit, McLean is able to convey the I allure. Following its recent premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, “Havana Libre” is now available to stream and the director spoke about the five-year journey to bring the story to the screen, having the film tell him what it wanted to be over time and making sure nothing was lost in translation.
How did this come about?
Yeah, I met the characters in Cuba in 2014 and became enamored with their passion for surfing and how they would create boards to get into the water. When the geopolitical landscape started to change, I started to talk to my friends and partners at Makewild and said that we needed to go down to just explore what there was to film and that planted the seeds for what then over time developed into this feature we put together.
Initially, [Frank and Yaya] were going to be the focus of a short film and then we started to expand to the greater community and we wanted it to be this anthem to all the surfers that make up the Cuban surf scene. As we went deeper in the film, it seemed like all the different surfers pointed back towards Frank and Yaya as the epicenter of this scene, so we ended up focusing everything back on them and we became really close friends. They’re like family to us now and as things kept changing in Cuba, we kept finding reasons to go back and check in with them and see how things were going. Each one of those trips, we just saw different things were happening in their lives and it just developed into this project where we got in so deep, we were like, “Wow, okay, so we’ve definitely shot more than fits in a short film. We don’t know how this is going to end. Is this a feature?” And one adventure led to the next and each development fed the next one and we just found ourselves down the rabbit hole.
At one point in the film, Frank says there’s only a couple days of good surf in Cuba. Does that make this easier or more difficult to figure out how to plan for?
Cuba for me has always been a really fascinating place. I grew up in Maine in the freezing cold, out in the woods, and Cuba, this tropical, off-limits island nation, seemed like the most opposite of what I grew up in, so when I went down there, I felt like I had just brushed the surface when I first met [the surfers]. When everything started changing, it just seemed like a place that we wanted to be for a long time, just as our own life experience and knowing how things were starting to unfold, we wanted to go there and film something that took place over this time of transformation. We didn’t really know what that would be, so we made sure we had the ability to stay there for as long as we could.
Our first shooting trip was three months and the goal was not to shoot a really big project, but to cover the spectrum of time. We didn’t really end up getting what we were looking to get necessarily [at first], but we ended up getting exposed to this story in a much more deep way that prompted more questions than answers when we left. It seemed like we left just as [the country] was opening up to us culturally and in so many ways, we felt like we were just getting this introduction as we were leaving, so we were really curious to go back for more trips.
That feeling of discovery really comes across in the camerawork where you’ll drift in and out of places, as if you’re on a skateboard yourself. How did you want to shoot this?
For better or for worse, we threw away a lot of our production plans when we met [our subjects] and we didn’t know exactly what the story was. It’s like when you show up at college for the first time and you’re all meeting each other fresh and you’re developing this deep bond really quickly. We come in from the outside and we have so many things that they’re interested in hearing about and we’re coming into this new place that we know so little about and we’re so thirsty for all the knowledge that they could give us, so for the first month, we had no idea what we were shooting. We just kept pointing the camera at pretty stuff and we kept staying up late and drinking rum with our characters and going out dancing and surfing, just living this exotic Cuban life and getting really close.
So a lot of our shooting, [one of the surfers would say to us] “We’re going out to do this cool thing,” and it’s like we’ll tag along and we’ll grab a camera, we’ll jump on skateboards, we’ll…we just went along for the ride. It wasn’t until much later, the following year when we started going back to do these strike missions to go pick up footage as we were filtering through everything we’d already shot, that we really started to know the story we were trying to tell.
Once you start looking at the footage you have, was there anything that changed your ideas of what this could be?
Yeah, there were a lot of challenges just with the language barrier. We went down there and we didn’t speak any Spanish whatsoever and they spoke barely any English, so we had a very primitive style of communication between us to begin with. It was nice that we were learning together — I was learning Spanish, they were learning English — but consequently, when we were conducting interviews, I would have these stiff questions because I wouldn’t know how to think on the fly and it wasn’t until later when we got all of this stuff translated and we’re reading through it, it’s like “Oh, we’re asking this question and we’re trying to point them in this direction, but then they say this thing that we don’t really know about.” We didn’t really know enough in the moment to ask them to elaborate, so obviously over time we learned the language and could actually have good conversations and that changed a lot as far as how the storytelling went.
Obviously you stayed and got to know them so well and there’s a year in between filming – was that a moment where you thought you may have had a movie and decided to go back or was there something telling you there was more there?
We weren’t really sure. The event we left off on before there’s this one year later moment, we had basically planned on finishing the film from there with what we had and figuring out what storylines we wanted to follow. We shot so many things, there were a lot of different directions we could’ve taken the film and it was hard to narrow down what the most important points were to really get across who our characters were to people, so we were just going to work with what we had. Then a bunch of things started happening as [the surfers] were able to connect with the outside world more that we just strapped in and were like let’s just see where this goes.
What’s it’s like getting this film out into the world?
It’s an interesting experience. This project has become such a huge part of our lives. We’ve been working on it for over five years now from the first day of filming until now, and it’s a little bit surreal preparing to release it to the world. But we’re just really excited. These are people that are truly exceptional and there are a lot of nuances to Cuba and a lot of things we had to be really careful with, so we had to work really closely with them, reviewing our cuts, making sure that we weren’t saying things that we couldn’t or shouldn’t say, but also being as truthful to their reality as possible. To be able to share their story and give them a voice when so much of Cuba is isolated really means a lot to us and it means a lot to them and we’re just so excited that people are taking interest and can’t wait for them to see it.
“Havana Libre” is now available to stream on Prime Video, AppleTV, Vimeo on Demand, and Vudu.