As a young man, Santiago Alvarez studied in the USA and worked there at menial jobs. After his return to Cuba in the mid-1940s, he worked as a music archivist in a TV station and participated in the activities of the Cuban communist party and "Nuestro Tiempo," a political-cultural society.With no formal training as a filmmaker, Alvarez made his first documentaries at the age of 40, in the wake of the Revolution. He was a founding member of ICAIC, the Cuban film institute established in 1959.Though he has directed one fiction feature and headed ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel division,
