What was it like to grow up in Fidel Castro’s Cuba? Filmmaker Camila Guzmán Urzúa brought together her former classmates to look again at the sugar-coated world of their school years. As “pioneers” they were part of the Revolution, and they could become anything they wanted to be. The state provided for every Cuban’s basic needs: housing, health care, education and work. Little wonder, then, that the filmmaker’s contemporaries recall an extremely happy childhood on the isolated island. As one of them says, “We lived in the clouds.”
We see archive footage and class photos, interviews with friends and family that swing from nostalgia to disappointment, and visits to the old school and the summer camps. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, shattering the Communist dream. And while the Revolution hadn’t brought salvation, this great shift didn’t bring great benefits, either. Nearly all of her former classmates moved abroad, as did Guzmán Urzúa herself.
