Andrew Lang and His Sons of Cuba

by Andrew Lang | Published March 16, 2010

In 2005 and with no prior moviemaking experience, I embarked on my first documentary feature, which took me four years to complete. Sons of Cuba is one of the most intimate access films ever to be made in Cuba. The film is set in the legendary Havana Boxing Academy, a state-run boarding school that takes nine-year-old boys and turns them into the best boxers in the world.

The film made its world premiere as the opening night of the Full Frame Festival in April 2009, and had its European premiere at Rome Film Festival in October of that same year.

Back in 2005, I read an article in the U.K. Times about the prowess of Cuban boxers, who have dominated world amateur boxing for the last 40 years. When asked why they were so good, two-time Olympic boxing champion Mario Kindelán replied, “Cubans are fighters in all walks of life. Ours is a small country, but we live to fight.” I immediately had the idea of making a short film that looked at the struggle of Cuban society through the fight of one of its boxers.

I stayed in Havana and began to look for a boxer to follow. Initially, I thought about maybe a 17-year-old about to break into the national team, but then one day I found myself at 4 a.m. standing on a training ground as all around me 25 11-year-old boys shadowboxed whilst chanting, “Victory is our duty. Defeat has no justification.” It was a no-brainer: I would make a film about these kids.

At this stage I was still only planning on making a 10-minute short. I returned to England in January 2006 and edited my short. But even before I had finished cutting it, the idea of following the boys through an entire eight-month season was knocking on the door. Without any idea what I was letting myself in for, I decided to make a feature.

Getting Permission to Shoot in the Havana Boxing Academy
Throughout all of my time trying to raise money in the U.K., I had been in close contact with my Cuban producers. We had shot our three-day short semi-clandestinely, but the same would not be possible if we were going to be following the story over several months. We wanted to shoot observationally and freely in the boys boxing academy, but to our knowledge the state had never permitted observational shooting in one of its institutions. Reams of government approvals were needed, and it wasn’t until right at the start of the shoot that we were able to persuade them not to send a minder with us at all times. Central to the plan was to work with a completely Cuban crew. I would be the only foreigner, and would also gain residency in Cuba. These were a lot of hoops to jump through, but it was worth the effort. When Castro fell ill several months later, the country entered a state of heightened alert. We heard of two foreign documentary crews being expelled immediately. The reason our shoot was allowed to continue was quite simply that it was considered a Cuban production by the authorities, not a foreign one.

Finding the Main Protagonists
There were 23 11-year-old boys, all Afro-Cuban, all from similar backgrounds, all with dreams of one day becoming Olympic champions. How to choose three? For the first few weeks, my Cuban producer Dania Ilisástegui and I spent many hours at the Academy watching the boys, trying to work out their characters and trying to predict whose stories would become dramatic once the pressure of the competition season set in. When we started filming, we had a short list of 10. About three weeks later we ended up with five, each of whom I followed to the end of the season. In the edit we lost one immediately, and another one after the first round of rough cuts. This left us with the three who appear in the film.

Making a Distinct Story Structure Before Filming
I knew from the start that the climax of the film would be Cuba’s national boxing championship for Under 12s. I split up the film into three acts in my mind. Act one would set up the importance of sport within the Cuban Revolution, explore the role of the boxing academy in producing champions and provide an introduction to each of the three characters. Act two would feature a mixture of more constructed scenes, featuring the kids at home with their families, and purely observational scenes in the academy. One of the hard things was working out how what we referred to as “the Castro subplot” would fit in with our main plot of the boys and their dreams of becoming national champions. Castro fell ill and dramatically ceded power near the start of our shoot, and there are several scenes where we see the boys, and Cuba as a whole, reacting to life without him for the first time in 48 years. How to meld these scenes with the main plot was something we mainly discovered in the edit.