The analysis of Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas focuses on the use of satire and absurdity as discursive strategies to question bureaucratic logic and the mechanisms of power that permeate everyday life. Through a film language marked by irony, exaggeration, and repetition, the film stages the normalization of authoritarianism, surveillance, and the emptying of meaning within institutional discourse, while simultaneously revealing the tensions between the individual and the system. From this perspective, the film is part of a critical tradition in Cuban cinema that uses humor as a tool for symbolic resistance and social reflection.
Analysis of Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Synthetic Reading)
Summary of gender-related elements
In Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas, the female experience becomes a central critical lens. Although the film was not conceived as an explicitly feminist work, Alicia’s journey exposes the symbolic violence and patriarchal control embedded in late socialist Cuban society. Surveillance, paternalism, and the systematic disqualification of women’s voices shape her everyday interactions. Alicia’s resistance does not take the form of heroic action, but rather of observation, irony, and questioning, positioning her as a figure of critical consciousness within an authoritarian system.
The film also reveals how patriarchal power is reproduced through both male authority figures and women who enforce institutional norms. The female body is constantly regulated, observed, or medicalized, while Alicia’s dissent is dismissed as emotional instability or insolence. Her final escape, achieved only by disguising herself as a man, underscores the paradox at the heart of the narrative: in Maravillas, female freedom is possible only through concealment. Gender thus becomes a metaphor for the broader mechanisms of control and exclusion at work in Cuban society during the Special Period.
Summary of discourse analysis elements
Language operates as the core vehicle of critique in the film. Bureaucratic, political, and religious discourses appear as hollow rhetorical systems built on slogans, euphemisms, and formulaic expressions that replace lived reality with verbal simulation. In Maravillas, language no longer communicates meaning; it disciplines, reassures, and intimidates. Institutional announcements and moral sermons create a constant verbal noise that erases individual experience.
Against this degraded discourse, the film deploys irony, parody, and absurdity. Symbolic names, distorted slogans, and grotesque situations expose the gap between official language and material conditions. Alicia’s reflective and questioning speech represents an alternative use of language—one grounded in lucidity rather than authority. The film ultimately suggests that ideological collapse is inseparable from linguistic decay: when words lose their connection to reality, discourse itself becomes a tool of symbolic domination.
Summary of sociolinguistic analysis elements
From a sociolinguistic perspective, Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas offers a vivid portrayal of Cuban Spanish during the Special Period. The script juxtaposes popular speech—rich in humor, colloquial expressions, and bodily imagery—with the rigid and impersonal language of institutions. This coexistence of registers reflects not only linguistic diversity, but also a deep ideological divide between lived experience and official rhetoric.
Colloquialisms, insults, diminutives, and vulgar expressions restore vitality and truth to speech, functioning as forms of everyday resistance. By contrast, institutional terms such as comrade, duty, or merit are emptied of meaning through mechanical repetition. Language emerges as the film’s true protagonist: a contested space where obedience and dissent collide, and where popular speech preserves a sense of authenticity denied by the discourse of power.
The following section presents a detailed analysis of the film. This examination allows for an observation of how the different thematic and discursive axes are progressively articulated, while accounting for narrative variations and the transformations that unfold throughout the work as a whole.
