Film explores Cuban-Americans’ complicated relationship with long-shrouded country 90 miles of the coast of Florida

Zuzelin Martin Lynch’s documentary, Craving Cuba, will be screened at the New Jersey Film Festival on Feb. 3.

'There is an inherent level of trauma and loss when one leaves their homeland under hostile conditions. This type of pain and loss crosses generations.'
 
– Zuzelin Martin Lynch

The announcement that would rock Zuzelin Martin Lynch’s world came on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in December 2014.

The president of the United States was there on her television screen, uttering words the Rutgers graduate never believed she’d hear in her lifetime.

After more than five decades, Barack Obama was saying, the United States was about to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba, the island nation her grandparents and parents fled five decades ago – a nation Martin Lynch says today is bound up in her own DNA.

“At that point, the national conversation started to change – and so did my life.”

One month later, on the cusp of her 40th birthday, the longtime marketing consultant and budding filmmaker took the first steps toward capturing three generations of pain and three generations of hope in her debut documentary, Craving Cuba.

The film went on to win the Audience Best Documentary Feature at the Gasparilla International Film Festival last year and was highlighted at a total of eight film festivals, including the San Francisco Latino Film Festival and the Tiburon International Film Festival.

It will be screened at the New Jersey Film Festival on Feb. 3.

The 65-minute production features on-screen interviews with more than two dozen Cuban-Americans, including broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien, exploring their complicated relationships with the long-shrouded country 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

More than 1,172,000 Cuban-Americans live in the United States, many of them political refugees who settled in Miami, Fla., or in Union City, N.J.

Their memories of human rights abuses, political repression and forced property takeovers after Fidel Castro took power remain indelible.

“I think all people who feel forced to leave their homeland share a similar collective experience,” says Martin Lynch, an Elizabeth native, who grew up savoring her abuela’s café con leche and sharing her abuelo’s love of Cuba’s lilting music.  

“There is an inherent level of trauma and loss when one leaves their homeland under hostile conditions,” she adds. “This type of pain and loss crosses generations.”

They came seeking political asylum against a brutal, totalitarian regime. They stayed to build new lives for themselves and their children, many vowing never to return until Cuba was truly free.

Now Zuzy Martin Lynch, who received her bachelor of arts in economics and Spanish from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 1998, is telling their stories, including those of her maternal and paternal grandparents, who figure prominently in Craving Cuba.

“I wanted to honor them because they are the reason I still feel Cuban, still feel connected to Cuba, even though I had never been there myself,” says the filmmaker who now calls the San Francisco Bay area home.

Starting out with $10,000 in seed money through an IndieGo campaign and a $30-a-day film-in-a-box kit, and then drawing on contacts she’d made as executive producer of a DVD series and blog called “Cooking for the Clueless,” Martin Lynch blundered her way through the first set of interviews, she admits, picking up steam and an award-winning cinematographer as she went along.

In the beginning, her parents – Zuzell and Ruben Martin, who both came to the United States as children in the 1960s – didn’t know what to make their daughter’s efforts. They were skeptical, to say the least.

Until, of course, they saw the world of their own fathers and mothers come to life under Zuzy’s practiced gaze.

“At the moment they saw it, they were blown away,” Lynch says. “It was very emotional for them.”

The film weaves archival black-and-white footage of pre-Castro Cuba with images of island life today: elegant but shabby government buildings, impossibly hued pastel houses, 1950s sedans, poverty-plagued neighborhoods.

But at its heart are the inner conflicts tormenting so many Cuban-Americans when they weigh the possibility of setting foot in the country that molded them – and, by extension, their children.

“My goal was to show the humanity behind why it’s complicated, as we look to the future ” Martin Lynch says.

“For my grandparents, it’s that they left their home country believing that they would go back shortly. That turned out to be a fantasy. For my parents’ generation, there’s the anguish of knowing they were stripped of their childhood.”

For her peers, it was not being there, not smelling the air, never having known the reality of being on the island.

Martin Lynch herself pondered mightily about whether to make the trip herself, leaving the big reveal until the final five minutes of Craving Cuba. (Spoiler: She went.)

It was July 2015, and the Cuban Consulate had just raised its flag in Washington D.C., she remembers. She was in Miami interviewing artists, musicians and family members for the film when she decided it would be silly to fly all the way back to California when she was so near to Cuba.

As for the next generation, 7-year-old Craig Maurice Lynch – “Mauricio” to his great grandparents --already adores café con leche and encounters with his Cuban family.

“What I want more than anything is for my son to know and understand the history that came before him, both his Cuban and Irish [dad’s] side,” Martin Lynch says. “I want him to recognize the passion, drive and work ethic that stem from the immigrant experience.”


For media inquiries, contact Carla Cantor at ccantor@ucm.rutgers.edu or 848-932-0555.