El Pinero
El Pinero is a narrative short film — approximately 20 minutes — set on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud, formerly known as the Isle of Pines. It is a bilingual film, spoken in English and Spanish, shot on location on the island.
The Story
When Cole Smith’s father dies, he leaves behind a single request: find the grave of Cole’s grandfather on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud — an island Cole has never visited and knows almost nothing about.
What begins as an act of grief becomes something harder to name. Moving through cemeteries, records offices, and the quiet roads of an island that doesn’t give up its history easily, Cole discovers that the story he inherited about his family may not be the whole story. The island has its own version — and it has been waiting.
El Pinero is a film about what we carry from people we’ve lost, and what we find when we go looking.
The History
About forty miles off Cuba’s southwest coast lies an island most people have never heard of. It goes by a few names. The Spanish called it Isla de Pinos — the Isle of Pines. Fidel Castro renamed it Isla de la Juventud — the Isle of Youth — in 1978. Cuban writers had another name for it: La Isla Olvidada. The forgotten island. The name fits.
For most of its history the island was sparsely populated and easy to overlook. Spain used it, at various points, as a place to send criminals and political prisoners — which gave it an early reputation as a penal colony and pirate haven that stifled serious development for generations. Even José Martí, Cuba’s national hero, was exiled there. The island was peripheral, isolated, a footnote.
That began to change after the Spanish-American War of 1898. In the ambiguous years that followed, the island’s political status was left deliberately unresolved. A treaty signed in 1904 recognized Cuban sovereignty, but the United States Senate declined to ratify it — leaving the island in a kind of diplomatic limbo for more than two decades. Into that limbo came Americans.
Land companies advertised the Isle of Pines in newspapers across the United States — in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida — as a tropical paradise ready to be farmed. They sold the climate, the soil, the citrus groves, and the proximity to American markets. Thousands of settlers came. At the peak of the American presence, around the 1910s, perhaps as many as two thousand U.S. citizens lived on the island. By some estimates, Americans had purchased close to ninety percent of the island’s arable land. They founded roughly a dozen towns, built farms and groves, established churches, schools, and social clubs. An English-language newspaper operated for years. A private school — the American Central School — offered instruction from grade school through high school, drawing students from across the island, many of them Cuban families who wanted their children to learn English.
Life was harder than the land companies had promised. Clearing land, planting groves, and building in a tropical climate proved more expensive and more exhausting than most settlers had anticipated. Many businesses failed. Hurricanes damaged or destroyed what settlers had built. Most who came eventually left, disillusioned. But some stayed — and those who stayed long enough often developed a deep attachment to the island, its landscape, and its people.
In 1925, the United States finally ratified Cuban sovereignty over the island. The annexationist dream was over. The American community gradually contracted. When the Cuban Revolution came in 1959, the remaining settlers left quickly. Properties were nationalized. The school closed. The newspaper folded. What had been a sixty-year presence compressed, almost overnight, into absence.
What remained was a cemetery. Founded in 1907 in the settlement of Columbia — the first town established by American arrivals — the American Cemetery holds the graves of roughly two hundred U.S. citizens who lived and died on the island. There is no sign at the entrance, no monument, no historical marker. The headstones are weathered. Many are cracked or faded. The wooden fence posts that once marked the boundary have mostly rotted away. It is, in the words of one historian, a largely forgotten place.
El Pinero begins, in a sense, at that cemetery.
The Origin
My name is Robert Potter. I’m a writer, producer, and filmmaker based in the United States. Over the past year I’ve made multiple trips to Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud — drawn first by curiosity, then by something harder to shake. The island holds a history most Americans don’t know exists. I found myself wanting to tell it.
El Pinero is my second film made on the island, produced in close collaboration with Meilín Quilez Durañona, a Cuban filmmaker who was born and raised there. Her roots on the island — her relationships, her knowledge of the place, her trust within the community — are central to everything this film is trying to do. This story could not be told without her.
I wrote the script and will be producing the film.
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Production
Currently in development. Script on its seventh draft. Principal photography planned for 2026 on location on the Isla de la Juventud.
Support the Film
El Pinero is independently funded. Every contribution goes directly toward making this film.