Television: The makers of 'Our House in Havana' captured the conflicting feelings behind an emigre's homecoming.
By Dana Calvo, Times Staff Writer. Los Angeles Times. Tuesday, July 18, 2000
Penetrating the tough exterior of a provocative, if not bristly, protagonist is a documentarian's dream. Filmmaker Stephen Olsson says it came true for him in "Our House in Havana," his P.O.V. production premiering on public television Wednesday night.
Olsson and co-producer Carolyn Zaff followed Cuban exile Silvia Morini Heath back to her homeland two years ago. For 40 years, Heath had remembered Cuba as a country of exquisitely dressed young women and dashing men.
But the poverty the sugar baron's daughter could ignore during her privileged youth confronts her throughout the hourlong program. Her interactions with Cuba's people lay bare stark depictions of the class structure that existed before the Communist revolution.
In Havana with her adult son, whom she took to the United States when he was 9, Heath went to the house where she was born. The wedding-cake palace with half-moon balconies and generous grounds is now a bank.
Heath was kept out by a guard at the gate who said the bureaucrat with the authority to let her in wouldn't be around for two days. Heath, who spent her youth at the Havana Yacht Club with the likes of Winston Churchill, was insulted.
"Our assumption was that a person like Silvia, who was openhearted and met people face to face, would come away changed from the experience. She agreed to let us accompany her," Olsson said from his home in the Bay Area. "We're focusing on a character who's emotionally kind
of explosive. She was very expressive."
At the Yacht Club, which her son remembered as "strangely like heaven," Heath was overwhelmed with memories. The once exclusively white club is now a state-owned beach for all Cubans. She barked at Nestor Barbeito, a security guard-cum-tour guide who once was a ball boy at the
club's tennis courts.
Pointing to a dead potted plant near the entrance to the ballroom, Heath said with irritation to Barbeito: "Look, it's dying. Can't you give it a little water?"
Moments later, after Barbeito gave a bit of the club's history, she interrupted him:
"This club was once the pride of the world. . . . In my time, the plants weren't all dead and everything else neglected. They don't care because all of this was just given to them. When you get something for free, without working for it, you don't care about it. That's the reality of
life."
Reached at her home in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, Heath insisted that even now, two years after the trip, she's still upset about the yacht club's deterioration.
Olsson, 47, won a national Emmy Award for best director for his 1992 BBC documentary "Last Images of War" and an Alfred I. du Dupont-Columbia University award for excellence in broadcast journalism in 1993 for "School Colors," about race issues in a California public
school.
"House in Havana" has also been well-received, selling out for three nights at the Lincoln Center's Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York earlier this month. Yet for this experienced filmmaker, this documentary didn't jell until six months after his return.
"She'd had an interesting trip, but there wasn't any observable change or transformation, and one could come away from that first cut and say, 'Yeah, so what?' " he said.
"I kept calling, and she finally admitted that she'd been seeing a psychiatrist for depression caused by the trip. . . . This was gold for the filmmaker, something that penetrates the emotional and psychological layers of the protagonist. In this case, I didn't agree with her, but I
thought she was fascinating, and I wanted to go deeper."
Olsson went to Washington to film Heath, who had become an outspoken opponent of the decades-long trade embargo against the island. The woman who picketed in front of the Russian Embassy and the White House years ago in support of the embargo now says she has nagging doubts about the U.S.
policy against Cuban President Fidel Castro.
"We have to change our policy," she said earlier this month, describing phone calls she made to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. "If you're trying to strangle Fidel, it's not working. El Comandante lives like everything's fantastic, and the people have nothing."
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"Our House in Havana" will air on KCET-TV on Wednesday at 10 p.m.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times |