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.
...
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.
Comments
Hallo daar,
Haal my asb. van julle webpage af. Ek is gatvol vir julle regter vleul kak.
Castro is nie ‘n engel nie, en ook nie Che nie. Ek hou nie van hulle nie, maar hulle is niks in vergelyking met julle geliefde dose Reagan, Nixon, Bush Sr. en Bush Jr. nie.
Ons is ook gatvol vir julle arrogante Amerikaanse houdings. Fok julle en verdwyn asb. van die aarde af.
The above is not German, Spanish, Russian or even European.
You may not give a rats arse about what it says, but please unsubscribe me from your site, I don’t want my name to come up on a google search and be associated with the likes of you.
Totsiens, dose.
We’ve got a reeeeeeeeeeeeally special one, here…
I say put the dickhead’s name prominently in various areas of the blog.
Or use his name as an adjective for pompous fuck face.
The above is not German, Spanish, Russian or even European.
No kak, Sherlock. It’s either Afrikaan, or possibly some other Dutch dialect. Either way, who cares?
What is this, some kind of challenge or game?
Like we’re supposed to guess?
Like anyone gives a kak?
And you’re really going to compare Che or Castro with Bush or Reagan? Are you fucking serious?
When was the last time Bush imprisoned a U.S. citizen for trying to leave the country?
When did Reagan ever murder droves of people for the crime of being gay?
Say, wasn’t it the Afrikaaners who violently oppressed native blacks for all those years?
Way to gain the moral high ground, Spanky.
Now take your ignorant droolings elsewhere, kak-for-brains.
well it looks like Afrikaans yes. Here we go!!! HOORAY for the internet!!
haal(did not translate) my asb.(pine tree?) of your webpage down . i am gatvol(upset) for your regter vleul(did not translate and could not find any reference) shit .
castro is not a angel not , and neither che not . i don’t like to they/them/their not , but they/them/their is nothing in comparison with your loved one dose reagan, nixon, bush sr. and bush jr. not .
our is also gatvol for your arrogante american attitudes . fok(no translation your and disappeared asb.(pine tree?) of the earth down .
Well I guess we get the gist of the message. Now who the F is he/she/it
Posted by artmonkey on 02/08/2008 at 09:36 AM (Link to this comment | )
“Say, wasn’t it the Afrikaaners who violently oppressed native blacks for all those years?”
It fits the pattern. People/s who think they’ve got a black mark tend to play the game of trying to show the US is ‘worse’ than ‘they’ are to feel better. It’s often a game and they’re the one’s being played.
regter vleul ...right wing (shit).. your attitude pisses us off..... soon you(r people)vanish from the face of the earth…
What else is new?
BTW, Afrikaans and Nederlands are totally verkakte languages.
I think his plan to show how superior he is to ignorant, non-passport-holding, one language speaking American buffoons backfired. I’m not surprised he wants to leave no trace of his experience here.
Why is it that people feel the need to come here, make a ridiculous, uninformed comment, and then vanish?
I just got back from Cuba a couple of days ago. It’s not a paradise in any means, but the one thing that struck me is how happy most people I met are there. It’s a really interesting place - all at once it seems really oppressive and really free. I’ve been having a tough time trying to find a way to describe it. One of the weird things is that there is absolutely NO advertising anywhere.
Maybe a better way to say it is that it is a socialist paradise, but socialist paradises suck in a 21st century world? hmm. I’ll try and come up with a better post about it where I can describe better what its like.
Is there anyone else at Moorewatch that has visited cuba?
I have yet to visit a Third World country where people aren’t “happy” and “carefree” whilst “oppressed” by the rich. If I want doom and gloom - not to mention petty jealousy - I can go to Berkeley or parts of Europe.
The poor have little to gain by following you around cussing you and your global warming, but if they tell you a good story or carry your bags perhaps you’ll givem em - ick - a dollar.
Also, the sanguine effect of the sameness of days in the (sub) tropics can’t be ignored.
I think a MUCH better way to say it is that Cuba is such a dictatorship that if they were to try and complain about how awful everything is, they’d get imprisoned or killed. So, they tough it out and try to scrape by with what they have.
Hurray for Socialist Paradise!
Also, the Uncle Beard show has been on since 1959. Most people literally can’t remember anything else, much.
Pkruta,
Thats what I was saying avtually - that is what I was expecting. But what suprised me is that people genuinely seemed to love him.
RSS (Subscribe)
I don’t expect the good people thinkers to ever get over their love for Che.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/248.html