Like many Cuban artists and intellectuals of the 1950s, he supported Castro's uprising against the Fulgencio Batista regime. In 1955, fresh from studies in Italy and filled with the theology of neorealism, he made a short film that was seized by Batista's police. After Castro came to power, he founded the Film Institute, and his first feature, "After the Revolution" (1960), told three short stories about the uprising. But his films since then have either avoided politics (like the comedy "The Twelve Chairs" in 1962) or taken a critical perspective, like "Memories of Underdevelopment" (1968), which portrayed the unease of Havana intellectuals in a newly revolutionary society.