The timing was good for her, but a bit awkward for Mr. Ichaso. He had started to work on a movie about an older Cuban exile in a nursing home who revives the spirits of people from his younger years. It was a movie about the heartbreaking finality of exile, something that had haunted the generation that left Cuba in the 1960s.

The policy shift threw all that into question.

“I just thought a lot of this stuff was not going to be relevant to anyone,” Mr. Ichaso, 66, said. “Cuban exile stories, at this point, even Cuban exiles are not that interested in them. I stopped production after four days.”

“Azúcar Amarga” held a special place in his heart. Mr. Ichaso was born in Cuba and moved to the United States as a teenager, embracing film and avoiding politics. But in the mid-1990s, he grew uncomfortable seeing Hollywood celebrities reveling in Havana while Cuba’s residents were reeling from the economic — and sometimes moral — collapse caused by the demise of Cuba’s patron, the Soviet Union.

“Cuba was like Studio 54, and everybody was talking about how much fun it was,” he said. “It was painful to see Jack Nicholson and others partying in Havana. So I threw myself into ‘Azúcar Amarga.’ I had to do something.”

“Azúcar Amarga” was a story of love betrayed, not just of a man and a woman, but a man and the revolution that had raised him. It was a critique of a failed system that ended with the leading man trying to kill Fidel Castro. Mr. Ichaso was proud of the film, even though he suspects that it earned him criticism in some circles that held a romantic view of Cuba.

“It didn’t play in some theaters I would have wanted in New York,” he said. “I think the West Side lefties weren’t ready for that.”

He holds no such nostalgia. He has no desire to return to Cuba to weep in front of his old school. Nor does he want to fetishize the ruins that many neighborhoods have become.