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Editorial posted on Thu, Feb. 20, 2003 in
The Miami Herald.
Movie director Oliver Stone must be quite gullible. The filmmaker who
brought the ultimate Kennedy assassination-conspiracy theory to the big screen
now says that his new documentary on Fidel Castro presents a more ''balanced''
view of the dictator he calls ''charming.'' This after spending only three days
in Havana with the totalitarian tyrant.
At the Berlin film festival last week, Mr. Stone was quite the expert. Mr.
Stone noted that Castro had denied that his regime used torture and avoided
sticky issues such as the repression of homosexuals.
Pity that Mr. Stone didn't talk to Nilo Jeréz, a former Cuban
political prisoner who recently testified about his three months of electroshock
torture at Havana's infamous Mazorra psychiatric facility; or to relatives of
human-rights activist Sebastián Arcos Bergnes, who died in 1997 of cancer
that was deliberately left untreated while he sat in a Cuban prison; or to the
survivors of a tugboat sunk by Cuban fireboats that killed 41 men, women and
children trying to flee the island in 1994.
Mr. Stone ignores the 20,000 summary executions, the hundreds of thousands
imprisoned for their beliefs, countless others subjected to ''acts of
repudiation'' and families divided by Castro's hand over 44 years. In ''trying
to plumb the depth of [Castro's] humanity,'' Mr. Stone struck out. There's
nothing human in a despot who violates 11 million people, except a superinflated
ego. | 
