[1] The acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise-en-scène prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the film in the early 1990s.

The movie consists of four distinct short stories about the suffering of the Cuban people and their reactions, varying from passive amazement in the first, to a guerrilla march in the last.

The first story (centered on the character Maria) shows the destitute Cuban masses contrasted with the splendor in the American-run gambling casinos.

He is unaware that she leads an unhappy double-life as "Betty", a bar prostitute at one of the Havana casinos catering to rich Americans.

The third story describes the suppression of rebellious students led by a character named Enrique at Havana University (featuring one of the longest camera shots).

The final part shows Mariano, a typical farmer, who rejects the requests of a revolutionary soldier to join the ongoing war.

He then joins the rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, ultimately leading to a triumphal march into Havana to proclaim the revolution.

An assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator's vest to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops.

[citation needed] Despite its dazzling technical and formal achievements receiving excellent support, and the participation of the renowned team of Soviet cinematographers Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky (winners of the 1958 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or for The Cranes are Flying, another virtuosistic art film, and also in the midst of the Cold War), the movie was given a rather cold reaction by audiences.

In Havana it was criticized for showing a stereotypical view of Cubans, and in Moscow it was considered naïve, not sufficiently revolutionary, even too sympathetic to the lives of the bourgeois, pre-Castro classes.

"[6] The movie never reached Western countries during its original release, being a communist production in the midst of the Cold War era during the United States embargo against Cuba.

This changed when Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola[7] subsequently began to promote the film after it came to their attention.

Milestone screened a slightly blurry, unsubtitled VHS tape of the film and then went about acquiring the distribution rights from Mosfilm in Russia.

For the tenth anniversary of the film release, Milestone debuted a new 35 mm restoration of I Am Cuba without the Russian overdubbing in September 2005.

[9] It became available later that year on Milestone films' Vimeo powered streaming service, with original Spanish audio but at 1080p HD.

On 9 March 2020, Mosfilm publicly released the entire film in 4K with hardcoded Russian overdubbing on their YouTube channel.

to Mosfilm's previous 4K release due to its hardcoded English subtitles, watermarking, Russian overdubbing, and 16:9 pillarboxing.