How to Document a Cuba

What Our Mr. Lee calls the Greatest Magazine on the Planet has the goods on a real documentary about Cuba:

In June 2000, this magazine published a cover story on Hollywood’s “missing movies.” These were not, alas, films that had been neglected by inattentive archivists or spurned by Ted Turner’s guardians of classic film. The target of this search-and-rescue operation, wrote critic Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, were those tales of injustice, those triumphs of the spirit that Hollywood had little interest in producing. Long under the spell of radical writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets, Hollywood was “a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident.”

Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the entertainment industry is still sensitive to charges of Cold War jingoism, though the spread of hipster Buddhism has necessitated the occasional dramatization of China’s occupation of Tibet. A spate of recent films—none of them produced in Hollywood—is also providing a more nuanced picture of the Cold War, one that eschews simple moral equivalence in favor of the dystopian reality of the Eastern Bloc.

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Even Hollywood’s strange love affair with the Cuban revolution, recently evidenced by Oliver Stone’s Comandante and Walter Salles’ saccharine salute to Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, is at long last showing signs of abating. A few years ago, New York painter/director Julian Schnabel memorably upbraided Castro in his film Before Night Falls, a portrait of the gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, imprisoned by the communist government for both his aberrant politics and sexuality.

Now, from first-time director Cristina Khuly, comes Shoot Down, a brilliantly rendered and scrupulously even-handed documentary revisiting the 1996 Cuban downing of two civilian planes over international waters, both piloted by Miami-based exiles from the group Brothers to the Rescue. Khuly, a 37-year-old sculptor, is the niece of shoot-down victim Armando Alejandre Jr.

An event soon overshadowed by the saga of Elian Gonzales, the attack on the unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes is now largely forgotten outside Miami. And despite the smokescreen of misinformation presented by Castro and his foreign enablers, the facts of the story are rather straightforward and grimly characteristic of a totalitarian regime.

As three Brothers to the Rescue planes approached Cuban territory, the lead plane, piloted by the group’s founder Jose Basulto, briefly breached Cuban airspace. While the planes were searching for refugees in the water, officials in Havana, tipped off by a mole in the Brothers leadership, scrambled Soviet-made MiG fighter planes to knock the planes out of the sky. Basulto’s plane managed to escape. When the other two were vaporized by Cuban missiles, both were flying over international waters.

The mole, former Cuban Air Force MiG pilot Juan Pablo Roque, is a chilling reminder of the Stasi-like tactics of the Cuban secret police. Roque infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue by insinuating himself into the exile community—going so far as to write a book for the Cuban American National Foundation detailing his escape from the island—and marrying a local woman as cover. The day before the deadly flight, Roque declined an invitation to participate in the mission and informed his wife that he would be away on business. A day later, he reappeared on Cuban state television to denounce the Brothers as “terrorists” of the empire.

I don’t expect MIchael Moore to make do an expose of Cuban society in a film about healthcare. I do expect that he might mention, maybe in passing, that Cuba is something less than a socialist paradise.

The first post I wrote on my own blog that got any attention was on Hollywood’s refusal to take either communism or Islamism. Nice to know that not everyone is afraid.