Eyes of the Rainbow: Film Screening

Please join us on Monday, Nov. 3, 5:45 pm, at the Easthampton Library Annex, 52 Main Street for the 2nd installment in our monthly film & discussion series, Cuba in the Valley. This month’s film is Eyes of the Rainbow, a documentary by noted Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando about the life of Assata Shakur, the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army leader, who escaped prison, proclaiming her innocence, and then spent the rest of her life in Cuba. She died in September 2025. The film takes place in 1997, when she had been in exile in Cuba for 15 years. Director Rolando says:  “In the struggle of the African American people, many women’s voices in the past and the present have always called for social justice, women who throughout the years have shown integrity and firmness in their principles.” This is the voice, she says, of Assata Shakur.  Who was Assata?  How did she come to be in Cuba?  Why did she choose Cuba?  And why did the United States place her as a focal point in their demands for normalizing relations with Cuba and punish Cuba for not surrendering her? How is it that Assata became such a legend, in the US and in Cuba? In Eyes of the Rainbow, the film interweaves Assata’s story with her spiritual connection to the Yoruba Orisha Oya, an Afro-Cuban goddess, underlining the importance of culture and religion as well as politics in the African Diaspora and liberation struggle. The film is primarily in English, subtitled when in Spanish, and still incredibly relevant to the U.S. and Cuba of today. 

Agustin Lao-Montes, professor in the W.E.B. DuBois African American Studies Department at UMass Amherst and noted activist and scholar in the Afrodescendent movements of the U.S., Cuba and the Caribbean will lead a post film discussion bringing these connections together.