This will always be Alfredo Guevara's Festival. His imprint not only marked the birth and consolidation of the event but endowed it with a critical, emancipatory, and profoundly Latin American spirit that still distinguishes it today.

To speak of Alfredo Guevara is to speak of a man who understood cinema as a tool for social transformation and as a territory for ideas. His leadership at the helm of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema turned Havana into the epicenter of a movement that sought to renew languages, topple dogmas, and open spaces for new voices in the region.

Alfredo Guevara (Havana, December 31, 1925 – Havana, April 19, 2013) was a revolutionary. That was his creed and his practice: to transform the social fabric through a creative exercise that had criticism as its pillar.

From a very young age, he participated in university film club groups, the seed of an audiovisual consciousness that would later lead to the creation of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) in 1959, of which he was a founder and its most emblematic president.

For him, the Revolution also had to be a "Revolution of Culture," and cinema was a privileged language for that purpose.

Alfredo Guevara did not like euphemisms. That frankness placed him at the center of several of the Revolution's cultural controversies, necessary debates for the definition of a modern and plural cultural project. Many artists and writers considered him the great cultural ideologist of the process, a demanding and challenging interlocutor, capable of sustaining discussions of high conceptual rigor without abandoning dialogue.

His vision of the role of art led him to defend, vehemently, that "there is no culture without ideas," and that critical thinking is indispensable for any true work of art.

A man of cinema, his main contributions were not specifically in filmmaking, but in the institutional architecture that would allow for the flourishing of new cinema. He understood that an industry was needed—not just equipment and resources—but a climate of respect and promotion of creative freedom, an environment where Latin American filmmakers could meet, debate, and project their aesthetics.

The International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, founded in 1979 and presided over by him in several stages, was the realization of that vision: a space for exchange, criticism, and the defense of a cinema committed to the peoples of the continent.

Alfredo Guevara received in life the highest honors of his country. He sowed and saw the fruits of his sowing, but he never reveled in complacency. Until his last day, he was animated by the spirit of his youth and an unwavering vocation to found, to open paths, to challenge limits.

The Festival that carries his breath continues to be—and will continue to be—a celebration of cinema as an act of emancipation and thought, a living legacy of one who understood culture as a fundamental territory of the Revolution.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff