For many of the 400,000 Cuban Americans, their Caribbean homeland is a lost limb. Resentment, nostalgia and sadness fill the void of what has become a phantom island they haven’t seen in decades. Since the revolution in 1959, more than 10 percent of the island’s population has moved to the United States. Many exiles are former revolutionaries who fought alongside Fidel Castro, but were betrayed by his brutal consolidation of power. Palisadian Megan Williams visited Cuba in the spring of 2000 to try and understand more about this tiny island, just 90 miles off the coast of the United States, whose 300-year history has been so consistently drenched in blood. As a documentary filmmaker, Williams perceives the world around her through the lens of a camera. She has produced documentaries on a variety of topics and events, including most recently ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ about homelessness in Los Angeles. ‘On my first trip, I wanted to see if I could film what was going on in Cuba,’ says Williams, who was accompanied by a friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Cuba. ‘It felt like I was on an expedition to a remote foreign land, shrouded in mystery. What I saw behind the exquisite beauty and charming population was a country isolated, locked in time, stuck.’ Williams soon realized that the overarching theme in Cuba was antipathy for the United States. ‘There is no free media, and what there exists is seen through the lens of Cuba’s hate for the U.S,’ she says. She found bookstores bereft, cultural development arrested and the political oppression palpable. While it would have been easy to make a pointedly propagandist film, Williams wanted instead to explore the complex and deeply sad stalemate that exists between Cuba and the United States, especially how the isolation has affected both the millions of Cubans on one side and the Cuban Americans on the other. The result is ‘Tell Me Cuba,’ which will debut at the 2007 Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival on Sunday, October 14 at 1:15 p.m. at the ArcLight Hollywood, 6360 Hollywood Blvd. For most Americans living anywhere but South Florida, Cuba conjures cigars, the Buena Vista Social Club and tropical beaches. To deepen understanding of the island’s history, Williams includes a 15-minute historical introduction. The story begins with the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors, equipped with a zeal for conversions and domination that results in decimating the native population. Tracing the recurrent theme of control through ideology, the film takes the viewer through Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain, which is ultimately gained through the intervention of the United States, but at a cost. The newborn constitution is compromised by a U.S. amendment that insists on discretionary intervention and establishes a permanent military base at Guant’namo Bay. The filmmakers use a variety of visuals in telling the story, including academic paintings, film clips from the Spanish-American War, and television archives from the 1970s and ’80s to illustrate the politics in South Florida–where most Cuban Americans live. ‘The story came to me through Cuba, even though it ended up telling me what’s going on in my country,’ says Williams, who started her research by buying all the travel books on Cuba she could find, reading history and watching films. ‘I didn’t see any films that really tackled our same subject.’ Williams made several trips to Cuba, the last two, in 2003 and 2004, with producer Deborah Irmas. As the women recall, each trip became progressively more difficult. ‘On our last trip, after the U.S. presidential election, it took one week for us to get our press credentials,’ Irmas says. The Cuban government was once again tightening American access in response to further American restrictions on any intercourse with Cuba. Through key interviews, representing all views on the Cuban question, Williams achieves the melancholic tone that best describes the intractable stalemate. Two of the most powerful moments in the film arise out of interviews with former Cuban revolutionaries Orlando Bosch and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, who fought with Castro, then fought against him. For Bosch, retaliation coalesced around one fixed idea: ‘We prefer a destroyed Cuba to a Communist Cuba.’ The former pediatrician was responsible for a series of anti-Castro terrorist acts in the 1970s, including bombings in Miami and New York, and the 1976 mid-air bombing of a commercial Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, 57 of them Cuban and most of them high school students. ‘I’ll never forget the small stucco house in Miami,’ Williams says, recalling the interview with Bosch. ‘It was a hot, tight setting as I sat across from him, his lip swollen from cancer, as he proudly told me that he had smoked 124,000 cigars in his life. His M.O. was to be coy, and evade questions; it was like interviewing a terrorist with ADD. We used a hand-held camera to capture this man who is so internal, so physical. It was terrifying to be looking into the eyes of a man who is so awful.’ In contract, Eloy is a confirmed pacifist, who despite being imprisoned by Castro for 22 years believes that his country is being destroyed from the inside and the outside. He moved back to Cuba from Miami to work on establishing an opposition to Castro’s one-party regime. ‘When I met Eloy, I thought that this must be like meeting Nelson Mandela,’ Irmas says. ‘He clearly understands our action in the world and wants to make a difference in the world. His tone reveals a great human being.’ With the avengers on one side and those who promote dialogue on the other, the third point to the Cuban triangle is the influence Cuban Americans have on American politics. ‘Florida is an important state that is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans,’ explains Alfredo Duran, one of the exiles who sees dialogue between Cuba and the United States as the only sensible path forward. ‘The Cuban exiles form a powerful bloc that can determine election outcomes, including that of the U.S. president.’ Indeed, the exile hatred and violence has been transformed into political power. Williams illustrates this alliance between the Cuban-American bloc and the Republican Party, whose South Miami congressional representatives give voice to the anti-Communism commitment. In the end, there are no heroes in this drama, Williams admits. ‘The good guys are the Cuban people, the American farmers who cannot trade with Cuba, and the children, who are the ones who suffer most from the deprivations caused by Cuba’s paralysis.’ (Tickets for the 88-minute film are $10 for general admission. For more information visit www.arclightcinemas.com)
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