www.thestar.com Jan. 31, 2003. 01:00 AM

Estela Bravo blazed way for Michael Moore Filmmaker's career full of historical figures

SUSAN WALKER ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

Fidel: The Untold Story is the film that Estela Bravo was destined to make. As much as the documentary sums up the Cuban leader's life so far, it reflects the life-long concerns of the 70-year-old documentarian.

Born in Brooklyn, Bravo was the youngest of three daughters whose parents were union organizers. Her mother died when she was 12, but she grew up instilled with father's internationalist politics. As a member of Students for a Peaceful World at Brooklyn College, she was sent to a 1953 student congress in Poland, where she met her husband, Ernesto Bravo. He was an Argentinean medical student who had been imprisoned and tortured on charges of organizing students against the government of Juan Perón. In 1956 they married in Argentina and remained there for the next eight years. After Ernesto was invited to Cuba to teach in the medical school, the family (they have three children) moved there. Bravo became a fierce Cuban patriot

Her conversation is peppered with the names of political activists and leaders she has known. She met Nelson Mandela through South African anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo; she knew Paul Robeson; she interviewed Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva long before he became president of Brazil. In terms of political documentary-making, she could be considered a godmother to Michael Moore.

She didn't make a film until she was 47. Since then, she's made 30 documentaries, including The Missing Children, about children who disappeared in Argentina, Children In Debt, about the effects of foreign debt on the Third World, and Cuba/South Africa: After the Battle.

Bravo staunchly defends her homage to the 76-year-old Cuban leader as the story of Cuba that Americans never hear. She had uncommon access to Castro, even though he initially refused permission to have a film made about him.

"The unguarded moments — that's what I really wanted in the film," she says. To put him in a historic context, she delved into a wealth of material in the Cuban state archives, including footage of what took place in Cuba during the abortive Bay of Pigs operation.

After 10 years work on Fidel, Bravo is ready to move on.

"At my age, you have to do in one year what you used to do in 10," says Bravo, who's hard at work on her next film, Operation Peter Pan, about the fates of some of the 14,000 children who were transported from Cuba to the U.S. by the Catholic Church right after the Cuban revolution.

Estella Bravo will introduce Fidel: The Untold Story in person at the 7 p.m. screening tonight at the Carlton.

www.granma.cu Havana. January 31,  2003

THE Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) recently refuted a claim that the Chávez government is donating oil to Cuba, a claim it qualified as a "gross lie by fascists and coup organizers" within the Venezuelan opposition, circulated by the privately owned media to confuse the public in that country.

These evil-intentioned persons, states a note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dated January 9 and reproduced in its entirety in Granma International (No.2), "are overlooking the hundreds of millions of dollars paid by Cuba to PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela), fully meeting its commitments month by month, cent by cent, not without some effort and sacrifice, as well as "the effects on our economy (of more than $200 million USD), "by their Olympian omission that no ‘present’ whatsoever exists and that the signed Cooperation Agreement is not one-sided but of two-way benefit."

The documents points out: "In contrast, what has Cuba’s attitude been? Has the island perchance caused some damage to Venezuela?" It moves on to quote various examples of the island’s cooperation with "that sister nation:

"A total of 748 Cuban doctors, nurses and health technicians have freely given their services in dangerous places and the remotest areas of Venezuelan territory where no such services existed." In the locations where they have worked, it points out, the infant mortality rate has been reduced from 19.5 to 3.9 per one thousand live births.

It notes that 380 young Venezuelans, "in their overwhelming majority from modest backgrounds," are studying, likewise free of charge, at the island’s Latin American School of Medical Science.

"A total of 3,042 Venezuelan patients, in their majority suffering from serious disorders and injuries, have been freely treated in Cuban health institutions. That treatment, including a large number of highly complex operations, would have cost the Venezuelan government tens of millions of dollars," adds the MINREX statement. It notes that "adding on the free services offered by Cuba, its value would rise to more than $100 million USD in barely two years¼ "

It likewise refers to the fact that "600 Cuban trainers and other sports technicians have been working in many cities and areas of Venezuela" to promote the development of physical education and sports among the population. "For this cooperation — which is not free of charge — Cuba has received an income far below the average amount charged in professional fees by specialists from other nations or from its own nation, if it had such private-sector professionals."

keysnews.com Citizen Staff Report ROB O'NEAL/The Citizen

Key West Cuba Heritage Institute president John Cabanas addresses a crowd of more than 100 participants in the celebration of Jose Marti's 150th birthday at Bayview Park Tuesday afternoon.

KEY WEST -- Jose Marti, whose birthday was 150 years ago Tuesday, was remembered during a ceremony at Bayview Park Tuesday with Cubans and Americans alike gathering at the corner of Virginia Street and Jose Marti Drive.

Born in Havana in 1853, Marti spent his life fighting for the freedom of Cubans and other Latin American countries as well. He was deported to Spain in 1871 for speaking out against the colonial rule of the Spanish and lived in New York City, Mexico City, and Venezuela before returning to Cuba for his final fight for Cuba's freedom.

Marti proclaimed the formation of the Partido Revolucinario Cubano from the balcony of the San Carlos in 1892, unifying the pro-independence factions in exile.

His vast experience and education served him well and his words, to this day, mean much to people on both sides of the Florida Straits. The Marti monument at Bayview park was built in Cuba and donated to the city of Key West in 1936 in honor of the nine times the political activist, poet, journalist and teacher visited Key West.

Cubans immigrating to Key West at the time brought with them their tobacco rolling skills, making Key West the richest city in the United States per capita. The money was used to fuel the revolution against Spain with Marti as a founding member of the Cuban Revolutionary Party.

One of Marti's most famous poems was put to music and given the name "Guantanamera," with the underlying theme being that of peace and beauty. Marti was killed by Spanish troops in Dos Rios in the province of Granma, Cuba, on May 19, 1895.

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."

www.granma.cu Havana. January 30,  2003

TODAY Thursday, January 30, sees the inauguration of Cuba and the world’s date with books, literature, at the San Carlos de la Cabaña Fortress, venue for the 12th International Book Fair. The event continues into to March in different parts of the country.

Some 1,000 titles, the majority newly published on the island, are the national book industry’s essential ingredient in reaffirming its will to contribute to the aims of achieving a general, integral culture.

This year’s forum is dedicated to the Andean community countries, represented by a comprehensive selection of its rich culture. The Fair also includes a strong literary and academic program plus a special tribute to Cuban poet, narrator and essayist Pablo Armando Fernández.

Outstanding writers from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and the United States are sharing 10 days of knowledge and culture-based exchanges with promoters, experts from various nations and Cuban authors.

This year, acknowledged Cuban publishers are displaying their wares alongside 15 publishing houses from the provinces and the Isle of Youth special municipality, thus reinforcing the fact that books are being produced all over the country.

The Book Fair officially opens its doors to the public tomorrow; experts and Cuban families have until February 9 to renew their acquaintance with books plus the best in literature for all ages.

From February 10 the fair moves out to the western provinces, then onto the center of the island until reaching eastern Cuba on March 2. It will close its doors in Santiago de Cuba, after bringing a cultural message to 30 of the country’s cities.