A Day at the Gibara Low-Budget Film Festival

July 24, 2026

Publicity for the Gibara Low-Budget Film Festival

HAVANA TIMES – A friend doesn’t believe me when I tell him that I spent a day at the Low-Budget Film Festival in Gibara, Holguin and didn’t manage to see a single film. I arrived early, surprised that I had found quick transportation and that the fare wasn’t as expensive as I had imagined it would be in circumstances like these.

At around 9:30 in the morning, I headed to the movie theater. I asked if the screenings had already started. They told me they hadn’t. I asked for the program. They didn’t have it either. They were kind enough to tell me to go to the museum, just around the corner, where one of the films was going to be shown.

I went there and saw two men setting up the equipment. They suggested I come back a little later. So I decided to walk around this peaceful and friendly town. I sampled a shrimp and crab cocktail. I enjoyed the sea, which we would so love to have in the City of Holguín, about a 45-minute drive away. In the town square, you could hear that carnival music from the 1980s. I decided to have some coconut water and eat an apple, quite expensive at that.

Anything costing more than 250 pesos is already expensive in itself. Possibly even less than that. If we consider average monthly salaries of 4,000 to 5,000 pesos, you have to think more than twice about anything offered in the markets. This is a country that has produced very little for a long time, and the State wants to solve the problem by raising salaries. But that doesn’t work, because prices also rise—and by a lot—so everything stays the same as before, or gets worse.

Domestic beer (Mayabe, Cristal, Bucanero) cost between 460 to 500 pesos. Imported brands such as Estrella Galicia are more affordable (350 pesos). You couldn’t enter many of the local establishments to have lunch. They were reserved for participants with credentials. Someone like me, who wasn’t an invited guest with credentials, had to turn to privately owned businesses. At one place where I went with a friend, for example, you couldn’t buy a single cup of coffee; you had to buy the entire stove top coffeepot. That meant four cups, at a price of 900 pesos.

I think what I ended up doing was a kind of domestic gastronomic tourism. Although I asked again for the festival program, this time from a woman who told me she was a festival inspector, she didn’t have the program yet either. I sat down in the central park, facing the movie theater, and it turned out that no one was going in or coming out.

The days when there were more than three film venues, when you could arrive at 8:00 a.m. and leave at 5:00 p.m. after watching audiovisual works of all kinds, one after another, seem to me to be a thing of the past. Decline exists, just as defeats and disasters do, along with the need to start all over again.

And it’s no wonder. The crisis the country is facing in every sphere, and we don’t know which is the most serious reason we are experiencing so many gaps and so much disorder in almost everything. I didn’t insist any further. I decided to head back home immediately. I had planned, as much as possible, to spend most of the day there. Of course, I had based that plan on how I had experienced the festival in previous years.

I was lucky with transportation, though. The return trip was just as easy, and this time much cheaper than the ride that had brought me there. And I thought about how we have always talked, jokingly or seriously, about waiting for better times. But after this experience, much as I regret it, I find myself questioning that idea.

Still, there is no point in cultivating fatalism and thinking that things will always be this way. It is not good for the soul to extinguish every light of hope. Perhaps the substantial changes we are all waiting for will come, and circumstances will improve. Maybe next year we’ll have a better Low-Budget Film Festival.