Shooting Fidel from different angles
www.globeandmail.com By MICHAEL POSNER Friday, January 31, 2003 – Page R4
Estela Bravo's Castro lovefest is one of a series of new looks at El Presidente, writes MICHAEL POSNER
At some point, some filmmaker ought to undertake the definitive documentary of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. Depending on your politics, the charismatic El Presidente, architect of the Cuban revolution and its leader for more than 40 years, is either a towering hero or a demonic spoke in George W. Bush's axis of evil. In the former role, he successfully defies a crippling, four-decade-long American economic blockade, survives repeated assassination attempts organized by the CIA, and establishes enviable standards of national health and education.
In the latter, he's an old-style dictator, addicted to power, who jails dissidents, represses free speech, and restricts the right of association.
The real Castro no doubt lies somewhere between these polarities, but he's unlikely to be found in any of the three recent films about him.
These include Dear Fidel: Marita's Story,a bizarre but fascinating personal account of a young woman's love affair with Castro in 1959 in the weeks after he took power and her subsequent recruitment and training by the CIA as an assasin; it was released last year.
Then there's Commandante,a new film (and first documentary) by Oliver Stone, based on dozens of hours of conversations between the largely worshipful filmmaker and Fidel; it was screened at the Sundance Film Festival last week and is scheduled to be aired on HBO later this year.
And finally, Fidel, The Untold Story,by Estela Bravo, a New York-born documentarian who has lived in Havana since 1963. Originally made for Britain's Channel 4 a couple of years ago, it's been refashioned with some new material for its current theatrical release (it opens in Toronto today, in Vancouver next month and elsewhere in March).
Bravo, who turns 70 this year, has made 30 other documentaries (she started at age 47), almost exclusively about Latin America. For this project, a decade in the making, she managed to win access to Cuba's national film archives -- and lucky she did.
These clips provides Fidel with most of its best moments, including the symbolic dove that alights on Fidel's shoulder during his victory-celebration speech to tens of thousands of Cubans on Jan. 1, 1959.
Asked by Steven Spielberg last year how he felt about this, Castro said "not too good," because the bird had deposited an unwanted memento down the back of his military tunic.
There's also footage of El Presidente, spurning the advice of his generals, and leading the troops to the front during Washington's abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Essentially, however, Fidel is a gallery of adoring, uncritical talking heads. All the reliable lefties are trotted out -- Angela Davis, U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel, Nelson Mandela, former U.S. attorney general Ramsay Clark -- all singing variations on a theme.
The theme, accurate as far as it goes, is Castro's almost miraculous ability to endure Washington's (and the Cuban émigré community's) unrelenting, four-decade campaign to topple him and his socialist cadres, including something like a dozen assassination attempts. Washington's implicit goal: to return Cuba to what it was before Castro overthrew General Fulgencio Batista in 1959: a de facto colony, by day a looting ground for Big Sugar and Big Liquor, by night a Mafia-run casino and nightclub playground for American sybarites.
In the intervening decades, the United States has successfully deployed similar weapons to repel virtually any attempt at socialist-style reform anywhere in Latin America -- in Allende's Chile, in Bishop's Grenada, and in Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua. The current target is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
Only Castro, so far, has been able to withstand the pressure, though it must be obvious that if he constituted a more significant threat to American economic or political interests, Washington would not hesitate to orchestrate his removal.
In other words, he owes his survival, in part, to his relative irrelevance -- but remains (especially since the collapse of the former Soviet Union) all the more useful for propaganda purposes: the Communist bogeyman only 90 miles from Miami. In turn, the American embargo, porous though it is, can be used by Castro to rationalize all sorts of domestic shortcomings.
None of this fairly obvious analysis, however, makes it into the film. Nor is there more than a token suggestion that Castro's Cuba is anything but a sweet socialist paradise.
Bravo makes no apology for the film's lack of even-handedness.
"What have you seen here about Cuba?, she asked during a recent interview. "Everything negative. This is the other side."
Originally, she said, she started the film with a segment that introduced claim and counterclaim about Castro.
"But it didn't really work," she added. "And then I thought, 'Well, what do I think? Why do I have to be so-called objective? Why don't I say what I think is the truth? What is a documentary? It's a point of view.' Well, this is mine."
Thus Bravo, daughter of a New York union organizer and married for more than 40 years to a professor of bioethics teaching at the University of Havana, glosses over issues and events that might challenge the authenticity of the island paradise, such as the 100,000 Cubans who voted with their feet during the Mariel boat lift of the early 1980s, and Castro's own illegitimate daughter, Alina Fernandez (one of a rumoured eight children he has fathered by various wives and consorts), who went into exile in Spain.
Indeed, Bravo is now trying to finish Operation Peter Pan,a documentary about some 14,000 Cuban children sent to the United States by their parents to escape the Cuban revolution. That airlift, organized by the Catholic Church and the U.S. State Department, became part of the campaign to undermine Castro's regime.
To be fair, Fidel is not completely one-sided: There is a brief clip of CBS newsman Mike Wallace interrogating Castro on human rights. But it makes no pretense to being a paradigm of balance. The Cuban émigrés who appear talk about the Castro they knew growing up -- yet never address the question of why they left the country.
Bravo insists, however, that it is not a piece of Cuban propaganda, but an English film (made for less than half-a-million dollars, U.S.), initiated by British film producer Uri Fruchtman. In fact, when she first asked permission to access the national films archives, Castro sent back the reply, "Why don't you do it after I'm not here any more?" Later, he changed his mind.
After Operation Peter Pan, Bravo plans to turn to The Found Children of Argentina,a sequel to a documentary she made about children lost during the so-called Dirty War of the 1970s.
"They've found 51 so far -- and there are some incredible stories."