Published Monday, April 16, 2001 in the
Miami Herald
Jiang gives Castro gift of words
HAVANA -- President Jiang Zemin of China wrote a poem he gave to his Cuban
counterpart Fidel Castro before departing from Cuba for Venezuela on Sunday.
"It is the best gift I've ever received,'' Castro said.
Cuban television provided a translation of the poem, which was written in
Chinese calligraphy on a large page of folded paper and given to Castro on
Friday:
"I bade farewell at dawn to the beloved fatherland
"Flying
between red clouds
"A tour of 10 days of Latin America
"Covering
10,000 kilometers of distance
"Defying the loud wind and the storm
"From the opposite shore rise up pines
"With the pride and
strength of the mountain.''
Cuba-China talks focus on trade
Published Saturday, April 14, 2001.
HAVANA -- (AP) -- Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Cuban leader Fidel
Castro held formal talks Friday on increasing trade between their communist
countries after a state dinner in which the Chinese leader entertained guests
with songs in Spanish and Chinese.
No public mention has been made of Beijing's diplomatic flap with Washington
over a U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet.
Instead, talks have focused on the relationship between Beijing and Havana,
with the vice ministers signing agreements Friday for China to provide about
$400 million in credits and aid to Cuba.
The visit has been friendly since it began Thursday afternoon.
Castro greeted Jiang at the airport, then accompanied him to a greeting
ceremony.
Before their meeting late Friday morning, the Chinese president wished
Castro buenos días -- good morning in Spanish.
Costner, Castro analyze movie on 1962 nuclear-missile crisis
Kevin Costner, above, says his film 'Thirteen Days' deserves to be seen
in Havana.
By Mark Fineman . Los Angeles Times Service. Published
Saturday, April 14, 2001.
HAVANA -- Kevin Costner had just spent a dozen hours with Fidel Castro --
dinner and a late-night movie at the Palace of the Revolution, then an intense
afternoon round table with the aging Cuban leader and his top historians and
intellectuals. The talking point: Costner's Thirteen Days and the Cuban missile
crisis the film portrays.
It was time for a little fresh air, a dose of Cuban street reality, a
spontaneous stroll up Old Havana's Obispo Street through the presumed anonymity
of the capital of a U.S.-embargoed nation where none of Costner's films had been
officially released until this week.
But within seconds, Costner was mobbed. Women smeared his cheeks with
lipstick. Men begged autographs with borrowed pens. Street children who had seen
the pirated films shouted in Spanish: "Hey, Bull Durham!'' "It's the
baseball guy!'' "It's the dancer with those wolves!''
Confident yet almost certainly overwhelmed, Costner, 46, signed untold
scraps of paper, posed for a dozen snapshots and basked just a bit in the
unexpected warmth lavished upon him behind enemy lines. Then he quickly boarded
a bus and sped away.
"I don't want my visit to be about a gimmick,'' Costner said as he
waded through the street crowd with his small entourage. "I'm not here to
represent commerce. I'm here to represent myself.
"I don't make movies just for Americans. I make movies I hope will
travel around the world. And this movie deserves to play here.''
LOW PROFILE
Save for a brief news conference Wednesday evening before Thirteen Days was
screened to a selective yet adoring audience at Havana's Charlie Chaplin
Theater, Costner avoided photo ops and Havana's small media corps.
Costner and his entourage of co-producers, partners and agents sought to put
a balance on the first-ever visit to Cuba of this decidedly apolitical yet
powerful actor. That's a tricky balance in a nation that his most recent film,
by historic necessity, casts as one of America's most consistent foes.
As he walked Obispo Street, Costner spoke passionately about the hundreds of
thousands of Cuban exiles in the United States who haven't been home in 40
years. But he did the same about the vitality and acumen of Castro, the durable
Communist whose 1959 revolution drove many of those Cubans away.
And, in the process, Costner's group tried to navigate what the native
Southern Californian acknowledged is "a really sensitive and highly charged
thing.''
"I'm not capable of dealing with that,'' Costner said of the explosive
politics built into U.S.-Cuban relations. "I won't engage in it. I'm not a
person who suddenly got religion.''
Still, Costner was moved almost to tears Wednesday night when a gallery full
of aging Cuban cinematographers applauded him for what they called his
consistent "courage and talent.''
"Everyone should be able to feel what I feel right now,'' Costner told
the group. "Those are the kinds of things a son wants a father to say to
him.''
TRIP BLESSED BY U.S.
The mission of this week's four-day visit, which was licensed by the U.S.
Treasury Department as a cultural exchange and officially approved by the Cuban
government only a week before, was an unusual one for a Hollywood establishment
traditionally far more concerned with promotion and profit than fostering
political dialogue and bridging ideological divides.
Costner said the trip, which couldn't possibly earn him a dime, was merely
meant to share his critically acclaimed film, which reconstructs through the
eyes of the Kennedy White House the two weeks in 1962 when the United States and
Russia came to the brink of nuclear war.
POOR RETURNS
The film cost more than $70 million to make and grossed just half that in
the United States -- although it will probably break even worldwide. Yet it's
one of those rare mass-audience crossovers that, like Schindler's List, has
become centerpieces of intellectual debate far beyond the theaters.
In the case of Thirteen Days, co-producers Costner, Beacon Pictures
Chairman Armyan Bernstein and Peter Almond have stayed with the film months
after its opening, personally screening it for key players in the real missile
crisis, for President Bush -- the first movie he watched in the White House --
and finally this week for Castro and Cuba.
Robert McNamara, President Kennedy's defense secretary during those 13 days,
cried when Almond screened it for him in January.
McNamara also attended a Wednesday screening sponsored by the Carnegie
Foundation in Moscow, where the film will open to the Russian public in May.
But nowhere has the movie's -- or Costner's -- provocative power been more
topical than in Havana, where the 74-year-old Castro, who played the pivotal
role in the crisis 39 years ago, insisted on a private screening at the palace
and then the three-hour unplanned debate on its central issues the following
day.
INTERCHANGE
Throughout Monday's midnight palace debut, Castro sat a few feet from
Costner, frequently passing historic footnotes, anecdotes, corrections and
reactions to the actor through a translator seated between them.
"It was an awesome, surreal thing,'' Costner said, "because there
was a guy three or four feet away from me who had lived through it all and was
living the whole thing all over again.''
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 