|
Stone and Castro:
aging irrelevances
By Glenn Garvin, ggarvin@herald.com.
Posted on Wed, Apr. 14, 2004 in The
Miami Herald.
Having revived the Western with Deadwood
and the gangster genre with The Sopranos,
HBO is taking on science fiction/fantasy.
Looking For Fidel, Oliver Stone's latest
round of pattycake with Fidel Castro, resembles
nothing so much as one of those old the-land-that-time-forgot
movies, with a couple of lumbering stop-action
dinosaurs wrestling harmlessly in front
of a crowd of natives that's trying hard
not to look bored while it waits for evolution
to take its course.
Looking For Fidel came about after Castro
cracked down on dissidents last May, just
as an earlier Stone documentary, Comandante,
was about to debut on HBO. The network,
embarrassed to be screening a kissy-face
hagiography at the same time Castro was
carrying out assembly-line executions and
clapping his political opponents in prison
by the score, ordered Stone to go back to
Cuba and interview Castro about the crackdown.
The result is this collision of two aging
irrelevancies, an antiquarian dictator who
has already outlived his ideology and a
once-talented director whose face is as
puffy and dissolute as his films.
Stone occasionally prods Castro with an
uncomfortable question about free speech
or secret trials. But followups are non-existent,
and mostly Stone allows the dictator to
stage his own little set pieces for the
cameras. In one, Castro generously meets
with some accused hijackers, who with straight
faces say 30 years in prison would be a
generous sentence.
In another, he walks among adoring throngs
of Cubans, whose burbling praise for the
Revolution was so wildly delusional (they
claim, among other things, that Cuba is
the only country in the world where blacks
are permitted to own businesses) that I
had to wonder if they weren't a deliberate
attempt at sabotaging the documentary.
At times, it's hard to tell who is less
lucid, Stone or Castro.
Stone, halting and distracted, seems to
be reciting a list he learned 20 years ago
as he ticks off the Latin American countries
supposedly less democratic than Cuba --
including Brazil and Chile, both now governed
by socialists.
Castro, meanwhile, suffers through some
seriously senior moments. What are we to
make of this impromptu little speech? ''Today,
with a computer and a dozen compact disks,
you can hold all the literature ever written,''
he tells Stone. "So many things have
changed. I do not know why the world has
been making so much progress to end up in
this. I am so sorry for the younger generation.''
Other times, his meaning is all too clear.
If Cuba is poor, Castro insists, it's because
of the U.S. embargo. If people are so desperate
to leave Cuba that they'll fling themselves
into the ocean on inner tubes, it's because
the United States encourages them. If any
Cubans oppose him, it's because they're
on the CIA payroll. Anything and everything
that's wrong in Cuba can be traced back
to a policy made in Washington, never in
Havana.
If it were otherwise, Castro swears, he
would quit at once: ''If you can prove to
me that under the current circumstances
in Cuba, that would be the best thing for
the country and the most useful thing for
this country, I would be willing to step
aside.'' Yes, comandante, we have a word
for that in English. We call it elections.
|
