Product Review
Narrated in three segments, each focused on a woman named Lucia, the film outlines the history of modern Cuba. The 1895 segment transpires in Havana's aristocracy against the backdrop of the Spanish-American war where Lucia (Raquel Revuelta) compromises her family's support for Cuban independence when she falls in love with a Spanish gentleman. In the 1930s, an educated middle-class Lucia (Eslinda Nunez - Memories of Underdevelopment) works in a factory while secretly engaged in a romance with an underground freedom fighter opposing the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. In the 1960s, set in Castro's Cuba, an illiterate peasant girl named Lucia (Adela Legra) participates in the literacy drive aimed to spread education among the rural poor. Her self-emancipation is thwarted by her husband who, despite the revolution, remains bound by outdated notions of machismo.
Seeking what he describes as 'a coherent, lucid, and dignified appreciation of our national past', Humberto Solas created a new genre of historical melodramas in Cuban cinema. LucÃa was his greatest success, beloved in Cuba and acknowledged as a powerful achievement internationally, gaining a Gold Medal at the Moscow Film Festival of 1969.
