Cuba Isn't Club Carib, but a Political Prison Island!

Pajamas: "Forever Fighting Fidel: In Praise of Andy Garcia", by Roger L. Simon

Not all Hollywood stars are knee-jerk “limousine liberals,” “Cadillac communists” or “Penthouse Bolsheviks” (to use a term coined in the Thirties to describe the excessive admiration many chic New Yorkers had for Stalin). And one of those exceptions is Andrés Arturo Garcia Menéndez, known to the world as Andy Garcia.

Of course, Andy – who has been a friend of mine for about ten years – had good reason to wander off the Hollywood liberal reservation. He was born in Cuba in 1956, just before the revolution, to a family opposed to Fidel Castro. They left the country when Andy was five and he has been fighting for his people against the Comandante/Caudillo’s totalitarian rule practically ever since.

When I first met Andy, I was a lefty myself, so we didn’t discuss politics much. We came together over a screenplay I had written called The Gardener, about an illegal alien living in LA, that Garcia wanted to star in. We never found the money, but remained friends, staying in touch often in an attempt to revive the movie that never got made. I also had an interest in things Cuban, having gone to see the seemingly-heroic, at least at the time, Castro speak in Central Park when I was thirteen-years old. Later (1979), I was a delegate to the first festival of the “New” Latin American Cinema in Havana. It was one of my first brushes with communism from the inside and some of my early disaffection with the left (yes, it took a long time for me to divorce myself) must stem from that trip. Cuba was like an island-sized jail to me then and, despite its beauty, I couldn’t have been more eager to leave.

But I maintained my interest in the subject and when I read last week that a demonstration was planned – led by Andy Garcia – in LA’s Echo Park in honor of Cuba’s Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White who fight for the freedom of family members incarcerated by the Castro regime), I phoned Andy to tell him I would like to come for PJTV. Not that it would have mattered. When the cameraman and I arrived at Echo Park on Sunday, we were surrounded by Cuban-Americans eager to tell their stories.

You can see that all on PJTV, but I would like to underscore how politically aware the Cubans at this demonstration were. And how sick they were of Hollywood, especially the love affair many of my colleagues have with Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. That love affair is reminiscent of the attraction those “Penthouse Bolsheviks” referred to in my opening graph had for Stalin, as in Steven Soderbergh’s endless encomium to Che and Oliver Stone’s semi-sexualized crush on Castro, not to mention on Hugo Chavez.

But those are only obvious examples. This twisted love for totalitarians permeates much of the Hollywood culture. A director friend of mine told me with amusement that while on one of those Eighties cultural exchanges to Cuba, his wife couldn’t resist planting a big kiss on Castro’s cheek when the dictator made a surprise appearance at a reception they were attending. Such stories are typical.

I doubt Soderbergh or Stone or certainly the director’s wife ever spoke with Huber Matos, perhaps the most moving speaker at the Echo Park demonstration. In his nineties now, Matos was one of Fidel’s original comrades in the fight against Batista. (...) Read it all >>>

Footage of the rally in LA against the Castro Bros' island prison >>>

Andy Garcia on IMDb
Garcia's film "The Lost City" (2005)

Related

AOL News: "US slave ship replica sails into Old Havana harbor"

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fidel Castro hails Obamacare (powerlineblog.com)
• The staying power of Andy Garcia (thestar.com)
• Photographer Alberto Korda's shots of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to be sold (telegraph.co.uk)

Flick Review: "Che"

PJM: "Will the Real Che Guevara Please Stand Up?", by Henry Gomez

In the movie Che, Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro plays an Argentine thrill seeker-cum-murderer who helped turn Cuba into a Stalinist state. That Argentine was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, better known as “Che.” The movie is actually two films that total just under four and a half hours. Yet despite those 263 minutes of celluloid, important aspects of Guevara’s personality and deeds are omitted. Things like, you know, the truth.

There’s a bit of poetic justice when a man who indiscriminately killed others in order to impose a system devoid of capitalism is now the world’s greatest t-shirt salesman.

Unfortunately, Guevara is also venerated in Hollywood, thus explaining the reported $60 million cost to make Steven Soderbergh’s bore fest of a hagiography. The cop-out used by Soderbergh and del Toro to justify this marathon of an abomination is that it’s the story of a “complex” historical figure living in “complex” times; his desired ends justified what are normally unjustifiable means. Yet since the film’s opening on December 12, 2008, to date it has recovered a measly $922,347 in the U.S. As such, the movie Che bears one important similarity to the real Che; it’s highly celebrated by some even though it’s a complete failure.

Despite the considerable mythology built up around his image, the real Guevara was a bumbler who never accomplished anything except as Fidel Castro’s wing man and executioner during the Cuban insurrection of the late 50s. Even there, the Castro propaganda machine embellished his greatest “victory.”

Guevara’s lackluster record began as a young man when he enrolled in medical school. Historians can find no concrete evidence of him ever obtaining a degree and he certainly never practiced medicine. One of Guevara’s fellow rebels who fought alongside him told me Guevara only had a cursory knowledge of medicine. When Castro came to power in 1959, Guevara made a fool of himself as Cuba’s “economics minister.” Later, Guevara failed dismally in his attempts to launch insurrections in the Congo and Bolivia, where he ultimately met his demise in 1967. Guevara was also, by all accounts, a lousy husband and father.

Read it all >>>

See the flick's slideshow

Cuba Has No Jailed Dissidents

Art Daily: "¡CUBA! - A Voyage through This Island's Art and History, from 1868 to Today"

Organized and presented by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from January 31 to June 8, 2008, ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today, which brings together some 400 works of art, will be the first exhibition to showcase the art of this Caribbean island, which Christopher Columbus described as “the most beautiful land eyes have ever seen.”

Thanks to the involvement of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Fototeca de Cuba, and the collaboration of many collectors and museums in the United States, including the MoMA, this exhibition will draw a broad panorama of Cuban art and history.(...) >>>