Her career as a director spans more than 35 years at the Cuban national film institute ICAIC, and she also heads Imágenes del Caribe, an independent film-making group.
[1] Her documentaries take as their subject matter the history of the African diaspora in the Caribbean, using filmmaking as a way to preserve culture and spiritual values.
[5] Her first documentary, Oggun: An Eternal Presence (1991), which paid homage to those who have preserved the African Yoruba religion in Cuba, won the Premio de la Popularidad at the Festival de Video Mujer e Imagen in Ecuador in 1994, and Rolando went on to make more than a dozen other documentaries, winning several other awards.
"[7] Among her best known works are Cuba, My Footsteps in Baraguá (1996), a history of the West Indian community in eastern Cuba, Eyes of The Rainbow (1997), a film about Assata Shakur, and a three-part series on the 1912 massacre of members of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Color), entitled Breaking the Silence (2010).
[6] They are currently producing a documentary on the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first Black Catholic religious order in the United States.