The ‘Youngest Soldier in Cuba’ Recollects Her Family Trauma
in the documentary ‘Seguridad’
Tamara Segura presented in Canada the film in which she reveals how the regime ended up destroying the life of her father and his relatives
HAVANA TIMES — When she was born on December 2, the anniversary of the arrival in Cuba of the yacht “Granma” on which Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara and others traveled to initiate the Revolution, Tamara Segura was named by the Cuban authorities as a soldier of the Revolution, which made her the youngest soldier in the country. Segura, who defined herself in an interview with EFE as a girl who was always very shy and “who didn’t want that kind of attention,” experienced the “honor” as a heavy burden.
Now, turned into a filmmaker based in Canada, Segura presented in Hot Docs – the most important documentary festival in North America and among the most prominent in the world – “Seguridad” (“Security”), a film in which she tells the story of her family and reveals how the regime destroyed it.
Her father’s alcoholism and violence caused her parents to divorce, and Segura distanced herself from him. When she moved to Canada in 2010, the rupture was total.
Four years later, the filmmaker tried to reconnect with her father and went to Cuba However, her father passed away a few days after her arrival in 2014, exactly 10 years ago, without them being able to speak.
Among his belongings was a box with old family photographs that showed him as a young, cheerful man, with no trace of the alcoholism and violence that would mark his life.
In the film, Segura discovers a secret that she had not known until that moment. Through conversations with her mother and her paternal grandmother, as well as documents, and plunged her father into the alcoholism that would end up destroying him.
“My first instinct to make the movie was right after my father’s death, when I discovered that heritage of photos. And in those photos there is clearly a family story that was a blow to the gut,” Segura explained.
“The process took a long time, and I finally realized that it was something I wanted to do because it was a story that was going to haunt me for life if I didn’t tell it,” she added.
“You look back and it explains absolutely everything. That was something I couldn’t ignore,” she said. It was at that moment that she decided she had to make a documentary.
“I had no intention of talking about the economy, politics, ideological or sociocultural reality. I really wanted to talk about internal life and what that violence does to you psychologically,” she explained.
The filmmaker adds that knowing the role that the regime played in the destruction of her father was “like a reaffirmation of something that is already intuitively abstract. But of course it is very different to see it in its own flesh.”
“I had a lot of emotions, a lot of anger, a lot of pain, a lot of regret of having ended the relationship with him, without an apology, without really understanding who he was and without being able to say the things I wanted to say. Making the film has been a way to correct those mistakes,” she concluded.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba