wrote:
>
> Having lived in south florida for 13 years and having
> gone to graduate school with many second generation
> Cubans who fled Fidel's revolution and having
> professors who taught in cuba before and after the
> revolution I have learned quite a bit about Che and
> Fidel and their revolution. I am in full agreement
> with Mr. Fontova. Fidel ruined that country.
Peter, do you think that most Americans -- other than Cuban-
Americans -- have the wrong impression about Cuba and Castro? That
is, that it is some sort of socialist paradise?
>
> --- shempmcgurk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia's The Lost City
> > 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
> > reason�or 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 clich�d
> > 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
> >
> === message truncated ===
>
>
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