[Source: Reuters]

Hundreds of fans gathered outside the Yara cinema in Cuba’s capital on Friday evening for a screening of the first TV adaptation of one of Latin America’s most beloved novels, a mammoth challenge taken on by streaming giant Netflix (NFLX.O), opens new tab.

The first two chapters of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” – a 16-episode series in two parts – were presented at the Havana film festival on the Caribbean island nation where residents are blocked from accessing Netflix among other U.S. websites.

“As Cubans do not have access to Netflix, this is an opportunity to see an important part of Latin American culture,” spectator Ruth Guerra told Reuters, as a big, largely local crowd waited for the public screening.

“(Writer) Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Latin American icon and we Cubans feel very connected to him.”

“I never thought it would be brought to the cinema,” said Cuban actress and cast member Jacqueline Arenal. “It was and I have the opportunity to be a part of it. I can’t express the emotion that means.”

The show adapts Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 classic that chronicles seven generations of the Buendia family – many of whose members share the same names – in the fictional town of Macondo.

It is considered one of the most important works of magical realism – a style pioneered in Latin America blending realism with the fantastic – and a key product of the experimental and political literary movement known as the Latin American Boom.

Director Alex Garcia Lopez, who co-helmed Part 1 alongside Laura Mora, told Reuters that when he read the novel in his 20s he was blown away by its ability to simultaneously tell the story of a country, a continent and the human race.

For him, at the heart of the story is whether human beings can “beat our destiny, or if we are programmed to keep making the same mistakes generation after generation.”