Educational Media Reviews Online

An Australian filmmaker travels to Cuba to film and be the eyes of a friend who cannot travel due to age. This friend has supported revolutions all of his life, so to see the Cuban situation and feel what life there is like is the motivation of the much younger documentarian. From the very beginning, we see all forms of transport, none of them complementary. From diesel-spewing motorbikes with 3 people on them, to a donkey-cart with only 1 rubber-tired wheel, clearly this filmmaker is not seeking the positive side of life to portray. We see old people lining up for water from a truck in the street, and an old couple hauling pails to their third floor apartment, and another man using a wheelbarrow to carry his cargo home.

Our Australian cameraman is showing us true poverty, from broken refrigerators to lack of comfortable transportation. Yet, the commentary states that people will not often speak against the Revolution. Many ordinary Cubans have the microphone thrust in front of them by our filmmaker, but almost none will speak out negatively about their life. In fact, quite a few say that they are better off than before 1959, when Castro and his rebel band threw the dictator, Batista out of the country. Today’s Cubans will say that they are not starving or homeless or sick as they were before Castro took over. The education system is also free, right through university, but the filmmaker does not bother to interview professionals or talk about the ratio of university grads in the general population, or the infant mortality rate, which is the lowest in Latin America.

In the eyes of the filmmaker, the Revolution has gone sour. Criticism of the situation by Cubans may result in a jail sentence. While the work of the CIA to undermine the Castro government, through assassination attempts or other subterfuge like bioterrorism are mentioned, the filmmaker seems to make light of the fear of crops being poisoned and other espionage tricks when a farmer reacts quite vociferously when they trespass his field. The writer, producer and director of the film, David Bradbury is seeing Cuba through the eyes of a Western person living in a developed country where spare parts to repair cars, plumbing or equipment are taken for granted. The embargo by the U.S. against Cuba, in place since 1962, has resulted in grocery shelves and pharmacies being empty. Yet the filmmaker understates the impact that such a freeze on sales can have on a small country which has waged this David and Goliath battle far longer than anyone would have predicted.

Rather than seeing the resourcefulness of a people struggling to do the best with very little, Bradbury sees the worst and criticizes it. Tourism is certainly the source of most foreign dollars, yet the filmmaker is sarcastic about the luxuries that the tourists receive while the ordinary Cuban can hardly scrape by. A genuine empathy for those who are socialists and for whom materialistic goods are not their prime motivation does not seem to be this documentary’s approach.

Cuba has accomplished much since 1959. It is unfortunate this Australian writer chose to see the side of life that is a struggle, rather than celebrate the accomplishments. This is not a travelogue, for it is not complimentary to Cuba. While this reviewer does not agree with the bias of this program, it is still recommended for academic programs of Latin American Studies.

Other documentaries produced recently include: Cuba at a Crossroads; Cuba Va: the Challenge of the next Generation, (Video Librarian, July 1995, v. 10 no. 4); Worlds Together: Cuba (Video Librarian, January 2002, v. 17 no. 1); and Luchando! Cuba’s Struggle to Survive (Media Sleuth 1995).