Photo: AFP / Adalberto Roque
By Rhiannon Stevens, ABC News
When the living dead invade Havana, the wiry protagonist of Cuban zombie spoof Juan of the Dead declares: "I'm a survivor. I survived Mariel, I survived Angola, I survived the special period and this thing that came after."
The 2011 film's satirical conceit was that decades of communist rule and economic hardship was indistinguishable from a zombie apocalypse.
Juan mentions defining moments in Cuba's recent history: the 1980 Mariel boatlift where tens of thousands of disaffected Cubans left; the traumas inflicted on Cuban soldiers sent to fight in the Angolan civil war; and the economic crisis known as the "special period" which followed the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
But "this thing that came after"? It's hard to know what the film's protagonist would make of Cuba in 2026.
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