Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is widely regarded as the best film-maker in the Cuban film industry. Without overlooking the collective nature of film production in Cuba, as well as the extraordinary contributions of other talented directors, the national and international success of Gutiérrez Alea's films has increased his reputation within Cuba and abroad. Gutiérrez Alea was one of the founders of ICAIC, director of the first cinematographic production of the revolution (the documentary Esta tierra es nuestra, 1959) and co-ordinator of one of three Grupos de Creación launched by ICAIC in 1988 to support young Cuban writers and film-makers. In 1993 he directed Fresa y chocolate, a film that certainly brought to light, both within Cuba and abroad, the repressive and homophobic policies implemented during the Fidel Castro regime.

Gutiérrez Alea was one of those intellectuals who decided to stay in Cuba and contribute to the development of the revolutionary project from within the country, as the result of an endless negotiation with the politicians who controlled cultural institutions in Cuba. Gutiérrez Alea's work can therefore be taken as an indication of the relationship between politics and part of the film industry under the Cuban regime. ICAIC supported Gutiérrez Alea's projects, which shows his commitment to the politics of the regime. Nevertheless, his declarations in the El País during the promotion of Fresa y chocolate demonstrate his frustration and his lack of hope for the present – as it was then – and the future of Cuba (Salas and García 1994).

In spite of his success abroad, Gutiérrez Alea was not unsympathetic to the effects that the collapse of socialism in Europe and the so-called Periodo Especial were having on the Cuban population during the first years of the 1990s. Writing to Mirta Ibarra's son in October 1991, for instance, Gutiérrez Alea referred to the impossibility of human beings sorting out their problems in clear terms when ‘la sociedad en la que vives no funciona bien’ (Ibarra 2008: 206): ‘En medio de tanta injusticia, de tantos sinsabores, de tanto sufrimiento, de tanta tristeza’, he concludes, ‘siempre llega un momento en que uno se pregunta qué sentido tiene la vida’ (Ibarra 2008: 206).