Saturday, October 24, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-U.S.: Movie Paints Admiring Portrait of Cuba’s Castro
Gabriel Packard
- There’s more to Fidel Castro than cigars, green military fatigues and the 1962 U.S.-Soviet missile crisis.
For one thing, he is revered by Nelson Mandela and many of the people of southern Africa, where his intervention in the Angolan civil war helped to hasten the end of South African apartheid. For another, he gave up the cigars in 1985 for health reasons..
Estella Bravo’s documentary film, Fidel, which opened in New York last month, is full of this type of insight into the career of Castro, who remains in power after 42 years, despite continuous U.S. trade sanctions, assassination attempts and a full-scale military invasion.
The film contains interviews with former CIA agents, Castro’s close friend and Nobel-Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marques (who says that Castro edits his novels), Castro’s former schoolteachers, and men who commanded in the Cuban revolution. Much of the footage is from the Cuban State Archive, and is given its first airing in this film.
Castro is shown with Mohammed Ali, Richard Nixon and former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who says, "I don’t know if Fidel is a Communist. What I do know is that I’m a Fidelist!".
He meets Hollywood actors Jack Nicholson and Jack Lemon, the board members of The New York Times, the president of Namibia – who greets Castro with the words, "Welcome to Namibia: the country which you helped to liberate" – and Nelson Mandela, who calls him, "my brother".
Castro’s role in Africa stands out as the most important element in this biographical collage. "I didn’t realize how important Cuba was in Africa," says the film’s director, Estella Bravo. "I spent time with Nelson Mandela before he’d met with Fidel, and he really exalted the figure of Fidel Castro to us."
One of the most remarkable scenes in Fidel is when Mandela meets Castro in Cuba. After greeting Castro as a brother and insisting he visit South Africa, Mandela refers to "our friend Cuba, which helped us in training our people, gave us resources to get on with our struggle, trained our people as doctors and so on".
The main reason why Nelson Mandela is now, in the words of the film, "one of the greatest friends that Cuba has”, is Castro’s role in the Angolan civil war.
While the CIA backed the army of apartheid South Africa, which was aiding right-wing rebels in Angola, Castro, at the request of the Angolan president, in 1975 sent 36,000 troops. "When regular South African troops invaded Angola," says Castro, "we couldn’t stand by. When the MPLA called, we offered them help”.
Over 14 years at least 300,000 Cubans, including doctors, teachers and engineers, were sent to Angola. Some 2,000 of them died. But, as the film’s narrator tells us, the defeat of the South African army in Angola "drove a large nail into the coffin of apartheid".
It was a victory not only for southern Africans, but also for the black people of Cuba. "For many Cubans whose ancestors were African slaves," says the narrator, "the war in Angola was a way to repay a debt to history”.
Bravo recalls speaking to "one of the most important Cuban generals, a black man, who was one of the first people to go to Angola". She says, "he told me, ‘I think if my ancestors could see me now, how proud they’d be of me going back to Africa to help them’."
The film, which is currently playing in New York and will open in California later this month, is undeniably informative on Cuba’s role in Africa. But as an objective study of Castro’s rule, it is much less balanced.
Among the huge number of voices in Fidel, almost none has anything bad to say about Castro. The two exceptions are U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, who is a long-standing opponent of Fidel’s government, and CBS newsman Mike Wallace.
But even the Wallace incident reflects well on Castro. During a brief meeting, Wallace asks Castro, "so, what ever happened to democracy and free elections?" Castro replies that Cuba has found "an alternative way" for the people of Cuba to access democracy.
In light of the recent demonstration of the flaws in America’s democratic system, this is a fair point to make. But the film doesn’t probe objections to Castro’s political policies any further.
In fact, there is a gaping hole in this film – information about the Cuban government’s human rights practices, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, "generally arbitrary and repressive”.
"Cuban courts continue to try and imprison human rights activists, independent journalists, economists, doctors, and others for the peaceful expression of their views, subjecting them to the Cuban prison system’s extremely poor conditions," says HRW.
A similarly repressive judicial system in South Africa allowed Nelson Mandela to be imprisoned there for over 20 years for his political opinions.
Although Fidel ignores Cuba’s human rights record, it makes plenty of room to emphasise Cuba’s high-quality health and education systems.
And although the film includes a short scene showing some Cubans leaving the country on a flimsy-looking raft, it avoids any discussion of why so many Cubans try to leave the country. Last year at least 3,000 Cubans risked drowning and exposure in the Straits of Florida.
In response to criticism that Fidel is unbalanced, Bravo said, "I tried to keep the film as objective as possible”.
She described Fidel as "an honest film", and said that she cut out parts that she thought glorified Castro ”too much", such as footage shot in South Africa where there was "too much cheering and singing”.
"Every documentary has a point of view, and this is my point of view based on what I’ve seen, heard and felt," said Bravo. "People said terrible things about Gandhi when he was alive. Now he’s a saint."
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/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-U.S.: Movie Paints Admiring Portrait of Cuba’s Castro
Gabriel Packard
- There’s more to Fidel Castro than cigars, green military fatigues and the 1962 U.S.-Soviet missile crisis.
(more…)
Print
|
/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-U.S.: Movie Paints Admiring Portrait of Cuba’s Castro
Gabriel Packard
- There’s more to Fidel Castro than cigars, green military fatigues and the 1962 U.S.-Soviet missile crisis.
(more…)
Print
|
