All That is Solid Melts Into Rust: The Material Decay of The Sugar Industry in Post-Soviet Cuba

Abstract

The disintegration of the Cuban sugar industry after the Soviet Union’s demise, as depicted in the film Melaza (dir. Carlos Lechuga, 2012 ), serves as a point of departure for a more general analysis of the materiality of Cuba’s post-sugar afterlife. Against the backdrop of sugar mills shuttered as a result of the 2002 “restructuring”, I analyse the film’s aesthetic rendering of the multilayered archaeology of loss: from the dissolution of the utopian dreams to the daily precarity of common livelihoods.