For the first time in 35 years I did not attend a single time the Havana Latin American Film Festival. And I don’t regret it. I was set free. I freed myself from investing time and effort waiting for transport on crowded buses, spending money on taxis that empty my pockets and being on lines for films that perhaps would disappoint me.

All that “profit” was provided to me by the organisers of the festival and the city government. The first, because they have limited the programming to a few movie theatres in El Vedado, and the second, because it provided that possibility when letting one of the greatest cultural riches of the capital, the movie theatres, die.

This year the Payret and the Alameda, movie theatres that had survived previous cuts, were crossed out from the circuit. The number of film lovers moved by the emblematic theatre on Prado or the numerous population of Diez de Octobre, where only the Santa Catalina theatre remains, did not matter. Deficient audio system? Obsolete technology? Perhaps that was the warning sign of an uncertain fate for both movie theatres that perhaps are already on the list of condemned. A long and painful list.

Because it is painful to contemplate the corpses of movie theatres that have been piling up in all the city’s municipalities, a great deal of them unknown by those born in the last three decades: Capri, Campoamor, Capitolio, Verdún, Negrete, Apolo, San Francisco, Majestic, Ideal, Rialto, Martha, Irene, Gran Cinema, Mónaco, Continental…are some of the names that joined oblivion. Their loss en masse wounded our memories, the part that stores nostalgia.

How painful it is to see the ruins of the Rex-Duplex on San Rafael “boulevard”, the cinema space with the most glamour in the 1950s, where a record attendance was set in the following decade, when for months the Czech musical film Waltz for a Million was screened and people would happily come to see a film that would make them disconnect from the avalanche of Russian war movies that fell on them.  

Shortly afterwards, another film, La vida sigue igual (Life goes on), also attracted crowds to several theatres. The reason for its success was similar: the desire of audiences to join an entertaining story decorated with music in order to be connected to earth.

More than 40 years later, people still need to go to the movies but they already almost don’t exist. Very few survivors remain. Without noticing it, just like when we start to lose our hair, we have been left without movie theatres in the barrios: their spaces disappeared or are being used for other purposes. Is it that someone, with power, decided that movie theatres were not important and that with a few small ones in El Vedado it would suffice?

Ever since this art became established in the popular taste, last century, the movie halls have been one of the biggest spaces for socialising and continue being so, but their gradual disappearance is depriving a considerable amount of audiences of their consumption.

For the residents in areas far away from the few surviving halls, enjoying cinema on the big screen has become part of the list of difficult things. And that situation, mentioned before, in the same way that it doesn’t mean the same thing for everybody, is not the same for everybody.

Cinema lovers who are already senior citizens and now see how they are deprived from going to the movies, are not in a situation similar to that of young persons, who belong to a time of changes in the consumption of audiovisual products.

The new technologies have been changing the patterns in the consumption of the audiovisual and, though on the island everything goes through limitations, a growing underground market of audiovisual products is moving, unstoppable, through the city, carrying series, soap operas, music, games, reviews, sports…films in diverse quality copies downloaded from the Internet, but films in the end, including recent premiers. That pirate market – the so-called packages – is filling, among other things, the void left by the absence of movie theatres.

But the magic of the big screen is not replaced by a DVD; the movie can be the same, but the state of mind is different because it is connected to the energy that circulates during the function. A terror movie, with a full house, is an injection of adrenaline unthinkable in the stillness of the home.

The bad news is that the surviving movie theatres have their days numbered if the state does not make a strong investment in them that renews their technology, seats, the installations in general. As things stand, for the next festival the working movie theatres could be fewer.

Private management already demonstrated – during the brief time that the 3D halls experiment lasted – that it can be an option for the enjoyment of films. Though it was only a midsummer night’s dream, it could return if the state allows it. The best thing would be for both options to be open: a circuit of state-run halls with adequate technology, comfortable and at reasonable prices, and the small private halls in the barrios, in the places that the State will have a hard time recovering. The population deserves it. Cinema is not just any old thing. (2013)