gone to graduate school with many second generation
Cubans who fled Fidel's revolution and having
professors who taught in cuba before and after the
revolution I have learned quite a bit about Che and
Fidel and their revolution. I am in full agreement
with Mr. Fontova. Fidel ruined that country.
--- shempmcgurk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia's The Lost City
> by Humberto Fontova
>
>
> Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie The Lost
> City. He blew
> it with the mainstream critics that is. Almost
> unanimously, they're
> ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this
> engaging drama of a
> middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free
> Havana's last days,
> in which he both directs and stars, Garcia insisted
> on depicting
> some historical truth about Cuba � a grotesque and
> unforgivable
> blunder in his industry. He's now paying the price.
>
> Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it.
> Now many Latin
> American countries refuse to show it. The film's
> offenses are many
> and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is
> shown killing
> people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such
> nonsense? And just
> where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the
> effrontery to portray
> such things? The man obviously doesn't know his
> place.
>
> And just where did Garcia get this preposterous
> notion of pre-Castro
> Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically
> troubled place, they
> ask? All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class?
> Where in his
> movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving
> peasants that carried
> Fidel and Che into Havana on it's crest, they ask?
> Where's all those
> diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my
> professors, Dan
> Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the
> critics?
>
> Garcia � that cinematic bomb-thrower � has
seriously
> jolted the
> Mainstream Media's fantasies and hallucinations of
> pre-Castro Cuba,
> of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general. In
> consequence, the
> critics are unnerved and disoriented. Their
> annoyance and scorn is
> spewing forth in review after review.
>
> Garcia blew it. If only his characters had spoken
> with accents like
> John Belushi's as a Saturday Night Live Killer Bee!
> If only they'd
> dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they'd
> behaved like Cheech
> and Chong! If only they'd mimicked the mannerisms
> and gait of
> Freddie Prinze in Chico and the Man! If only the
> women had piled a
> roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen
> Miranda in Road to
> Rio! If only the cast had looked like the little guy
> who handles my
> luggage when I visit Cancun! Or the guys who do my
> lawn! Everybody
> knows that's what Hispanics look like!
>
> If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in
> salt mines like
> Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad or getting
> lashed by a
> vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a
> living like
> Ratso Rizzo!
>
> "In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost
> never see any of
> the working poor for whom the revolution was
> supposedly
> fought,"sniffs Peter Reiner in The Christian Science
> Monitor. The
> Lost City misses historical complexity."
>
> Actually what's missing is Mr. Reiner's historical
> knowledge. Andy
> Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante
> knew full well
> that "the working poor" had no role in the stage of
> the Cuban
> Revolution shown in the movie. The Anti-Batista
> rebellion was led
> and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba's middle � and
> especially, upper �
> class. To wit: in August of 1957 Castro's rebel
> movement called for
> a "National Strike" against the Batista dictatorship
> � and
> threatened to shoot workers who reported to work.
> The "National
> Strike" was completely ignored.
>
> Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again
> Cuban workers blew a
> loud and collective raspberry at their "liberators,"
> reporting to
> work en masse.
>
> "Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a
> precious few,"
> harrumphs Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice.
> "Poor people are
> absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have
> thought that
> peasant revolutions happen for no particular
> reason�or at least no
> reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry
> about."
>
> What's "absolutely absent" is Mr Atkinson's
> knowledge about the Cuba
> Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that
> "moneyed 1 per
> cent," and especially his "peasant revolution"
> epitomize the clich�d
> idiocies still parroted by the chattering classes
> about Cuba.
>
> "The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced
> Castro as a
> liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white
> news clips," snorts
> Stephen Holden in The New York Times. "Political
> dialogue in the
> film is strictly of the junior high school variety."
>
>
> It's Holden's education on the Cuban Revolution
> that's of
> the "junior high school variety." Actually it's
> Harvard Graduate
> School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba
> are heard in Ivy
> league classrooms than in any rural junior high
> school.
>
> "It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers
> whose plight lit
> the fires of revolution," complains Rex Reed in the
> New York
> Observer.
>
> You're better off attempting rational discourse with
> the Flat-Earth
> Society but nonetheless I'll try to dispel the
> fantasies of pre-
> Castro Cuba still cherished by America's most
> prestigious academics
> and its most learned film critics. I'll even stay
> away from
> those "crackpots" and "hotheads" in Miami. In place
> of those
> insufferable "revanchists" and "hard-liners" I'll
> use a source
> generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types, the
> United Nations.
>
> Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
> Scientific and Cultural
> Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957 : "One
> feature of the Cuban
> social structure is a large middle class," it
> starts. "Cuban workers
> are more unionized (proportional to the population)
> than U.S.
> workers. The average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba
> in 1957 is
> higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France
> and Germany.
> Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national
> income. In the
> U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64
> per cent. 44 per
> cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a
> higher
> percentage then in the U.S."
>
> In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than
> Austria and Japan.
> Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages
> in the world. In
> the 1950's Cuban stevedores earned more per hour
> than their
> counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba
> had established
>
=== message truncated ===
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