by Humberto Fontova
Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie The Lost City. He blew
it with the mainstream critics that is. Almost unanimously, they're
ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a
middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana's last days,
in which he both directs and stars, Garcia insisted on depicting
some historical truth about Cuba a grotesque and unforgivable
blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price.
Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin
American countries refuse to show it. The film's offenses are many
and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing
people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just
where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray
such things? The man obviously doesn't know his place.
And just where did Garcia get this preposterous notion of pre-Castro
Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically troubled place, they
ask? All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class? Where in his
movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving peasants that carried
Fidel and Che into Havana on it's crest, they ask? Where's all those
diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my professors, Dan
Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the critics?
Garcia that cinematic bomb-thrower has seriously jolted the
Mainstream Media's fantasies and hallucinations of pre-Castro Cuba,
of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general. In consequence, the
critics are unnerved and disoriented. Their annoyance and scorn is
spewing forth in review after review.
Garcia blew it. If only his characters had spoken with accents like
John Belushi's as a Saturday Night Live Killer Bee! If only they'd
dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they'd behaved like Cheech
and Chong! If only they'd mimicked the mannerisms and gait of
Freddie Prinze in Chico and the Man! If only the women had piled a
roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen Miranda in Road to
Rio! If only the cast had looked like the little guy who handles my
luggage when I visit Cancun! Or the guys who do my lawn! Everybody
knows that's what Hispanics look like!
If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in salt mines like
Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad or getting lashed by a
vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a living like
Ratso Rizzo!
"In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of
the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly
fought,"sniffs Peter Reiner in The Christian Science Monitor. The
Lost City misses historical complexity."
Actually what's missing is Mr. Reiner's historical knowledge. Andy
Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante knew full well
that "the working poor" had no role in the stage of the Cuban
Revolution shown in the movie. The Anti-Batista rebellion was led
and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba's middle and especially, upper
class. To wit: in August of 1957 Castro's rebel movement called for
a "National Strike" against the Batista dictatorship and
threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The "National
Strike" was completely ignored.
Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a
loud and collective raspberry at their "liberators," reporting to
work en masse.
"Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few,"
harrumphs Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice. "Poor people are
absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that
peasant revolutions happen for no particular reasonor at least no
reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about."
What's "absolutely absent" is Mr Atkinson's knowledge about the Cuba
Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that "moneyed 1 per
cent," and especially his "peasant revolution" epitomize the clichéd
idiocies still parroted by the chattering classes about Cuba.
"The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a
liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips," snorts
Stephen Holden in The New York Times. "Political dialogue in the
film is strictly of the junior high school variety."
It's Holden's education on the Cuban Revolution that's of
the "junior high school variety." Actually it's Harvard Graduate
School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba are heard in Ivy
league classrooms than in any rural junior high school.
"It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit
the fires of revolution," complains Rex Reed in the New York
Observer.
You're better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth
Society but nonetheless I'll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-
Castro Cuba still cherished by America's most prestigious academics
and its most learned film critics. I'll even stay away from
those "crackpots" and "hotheads" in Miami. In place of those
insufferable "revanchists" and "hard-liners" I'll use a source
generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types, the United Nations.
Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957 : "One feature of the Cuban
social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers
are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S.
workers. The average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba in 1957 is
higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany.
Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the
U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per
cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a higher
percentage then in the U.S."
In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan.
Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages in the world. In
the 1950's Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their
counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established
an 8 hour work-day in 1933 five years before FDR's New Dealers got
around to it. Add to this: one months paid vacation. The much-lauded
(by liberals) Social-Democracies of Western Europe didn't manage
this till 30 years later.
And get this Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchel, Diane
Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies Cuban women
got three months paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the
1930's. Cuba, a country 71 per cent white in 1957, was completely
desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that
Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college
graduates per capita than the U.S.
The Anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) was staffed and led
overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed
lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself.) Here's the
makeup of the "peasant revolution's" first cabinet, drawn from the
leaders in the Anti-Batista fight: 7 lawyers, 2 University
professors, 3 University students, 1 doctor, 1 engineer, 1
architect, 1 former city mayor and Colonel who defected from the
Batista Army. A notoriously "bourgeois" bunch as Che himself might
have put it.
By 1961 however, workers and campesinos (country folk)-made up the
overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the
guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. And boy, would THAT rebellion
make for an action-packed and gut-wrenching movie! If by some
miracle it ever got made you can bet these learned critics would pan
it too. Who ever heard of poor country-folk fighting against their
benefactors Fidel and Che?
The New York Times' Stephen Holden also sneers at Garcia's
implication that " life sure was peachy before Fidel Castro came to
town and ruined everything. "
In fact, Mr Holden, before Castro "came to town," Cuba took in more
immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population
than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the
U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums
for oil, and styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black
market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious
liberation while fighting off Hammerheads and Tiger Sharks .
The learned Mr Holden is also annoyed by "buffoonish parodies of
sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders." Apparently, Communist
apparatchiks should be properly depicted as somewhat misguided
social workers, or as slightly overzealous Howard Dean campaign
staffers.
It's no "parody," Mr Holden, that the "apparatchiks" Garcia depicts
in his movie incarcerated and executed a higher percentage of their
countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his
apparatchiks jailed and executed in their first three years. As well
complain that the guards and police in Schinldler's List, Julia or
The Diary of Anne Frank come across as hackneyed caricatures.
Instead let's portray them with more "complexity," as misguided
idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working
class from it's subserviance to snooty barons, who eradicated
Germany's unemployment and who ended Germany's national humiliation
at the hands of Europe's premier Imperialist powers.
Andy Garcia shows it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a
rebellion not a revolution. Cubans expected political change not a
socio-economic cataclysm and catastrophe. But I fully realize such
distinctions are much too "complex" for a film critic to grasp. They
prefer boneheaded clichés. Garcia might have followed the laudable
examples of "historical complexity" and "accuracy" shown in previous
movies on Cuba. Take two that these critics compare (favorably) to
The Lost City, Havana and Godfather II.
In Havana, the brilliant director Sydney Pollack casts Fulgencio
Batista with blond hair and blue eyes. In fact Batista was a Black.
In Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola, to show Havana streets on New
Years Eve 1958, casts more people than marched in Los Angeles last
week and depicts them in a battle scene right out of Braveheart. In
fact Havana streets were deathly quiet that night.
I don't presume to the exalted position of a film critic. So I don't
comment on the dramatic and cinematic criticisms made by these
august critics. I'm not saying, or even implying, that The Lost City
is a better movie than the Godfather II. I'm simply criticizing the
critics on their criticism of The Lost City's historical accuracy.
In these reviews we see in all it's classic splendor the
Mainstream Media's thundering and apparently incurable stupidity on
matters Cuban.
May 2, 2006
Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood's
Favorite Tyrant, described as "absolutely devastating. An
enlightening read you'll never forget." By David Limbaugh.
Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, "Humberto Fontova has done a
great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the
only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere."
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
Humberto
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