review for Historias del Subdesarrollo on AllMovie

Unlike I Am Cuba, the other great 1960s film to be produced in Castro-controlled Cuba, Memories of Underdevelopment is decidedly ambivalent about the effects of the Revolution on the island. Its main character, Sergio, is no political animal, though he derides his parents and wife and friends' desertion of their homeland for the bourgeois values of the United States. Placing himself above the masses (literally, he lives in a high-rise apartment from whose telescope-equipped balcony he watches over the city), whom he sees as blindly following Castro's policies as if they were only the latest fad in clothing or soft drinks, Sergio fashions himself a philosopher. In fact, he is a lothario first and a thinker second, his wanderings through the city having less to do with reflection than mounting a somewhat desperate quest for ladies to seduce. Sergio's memories of past loves, especially a German woman he almost married, occupy more of his time, especially after a near-disastrous conquest of a young innocent, and by the end of the film, we sense that he's slipping off into a Peter Pan world of denial on many levels. Filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea offers a thoughtful and often witty minority report on the state of Cuban thinking at a time, between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Cubans might be expected to pull together in the face of threats from the United States.