Castro's casting couch: in Hollywood's love affair with Fidel, who's using whom?

Washington Monthly, April, 2003 by Damien Cave

WHEN I ARRIVED LAST NOVEMBER, Cuba felt like a private paradise. Thanks to a steep decline in tourism, empty white-sand beaches were easy to find. My favorite Havana restaurant--a seven-table outdoor cafe with cheap beer and the best picadillo in town--contained only Cubans. I could even walk the Malecon, a wide seaside avenue that rings Havana, without hearing anything but Spanish, salsa music, and the heavy growl of old American cars. Everything slick, new, consumer-friendly, and advertised--everything from home, in short--seemed to be not just miles but also decades away. I thought I'd finally found the perfect escape, a true island apart.

Then someone asked me if I had arrived with Steven Spielberg. A few days later, during the Latin American Festival, a friend pointed to an old man shuffling across the marble tiles of Havana's Hotel Nacional and said, "That's Grandpa Munster." (It was, indeed, actor and Green Party gubernatorial candidate Al Lewis.) Later that week, I listened to Harry Belafonte rail against a lack of press freedom in the United States--but not Cuba--and then found myself in the odd position of fighting with Matt Dillon for a taxi. By the time Danny Glover and Julie Taymor crossed my path, I thought I'd seen it all, until I discovered that Oliver Stone had spent three days with Fidel Castro a few months before I arrived.

Stone, unlike most of the glitterati, came to Cuba to make a film. The resulting effort is a frustrating caramelo Castro portrait that should have been titled From Cuba With Love instead of Comandante. For me, the film simply confirmed what I'd already suspected--that Stone is still more audacious, or maybe more shameless, than anyone else in Hollywood. Who but the director of JFK would quote Castro saying that he never believed Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman? Who but the director of Salvador, a preachy indictment of U.S. policy in Central America, would take Castro at his word when he says "we have never practiced torture," a statement that Human Rights Watch contradicts pretty much annually?

You can see Stone's handiwork for yourself in May on HBO. But even before I subjected myself to his worshipful effort, at a private screening held recently at the cable channel's offices, I began to wonder about the relationship between Hollywood and Cuba's ultimate jefe. Stone may occupy the outer ring of idiocy, but as I later discovered, Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Chevy Chase, Ted Turner, and several other big shots have all visited and publicly praised Castro in the past few years alone. Today, as George W. Bush makes the case for a new American empire in the Middle East, Hollywood is rushing to an island that the United States once ran as a de facto colony, and rallying around a man who threw "American imperialists" out of his country in 1959.

There's clearly a mix of personal and political motivations at play. Castro and American celebrities seem to be playing a powerful, fascinating game of seduction. The question is, who's the Don Juan and who's the dupe?

Fidel Fidelity

When Spielberg told reporters at a film conference in Havana that he would love to make a film in Cuba, it merely confirmed the fact that for many filmmakers, the island isn't just a rediscovered paradise, it's a modern Atlantis, a 1950s pastel poster set to the music of Buena Vista Social Club, an island of retro, re-issued dreams. Cuba is "beautiful, exotic, musical, sexy, and still not far from the past alluded to in The Godfather Part II," says David Thomson, author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Everyone who visits Cuba regularly, of course, has a soft spot for the island, myself included. It's difficult for any Western tourist to see past the restored hotels and lush physical splendor to the decrepit homes and sputtering economy--and it's even harder for actors, directors, and other celebrities to do so. Like Matt Dillon, who I last saw speeding

off to a popular nightclub, they're whisked from one hot spot to another by guides who always give the country a rave review. More often than not, the humiliating no es facil struggle that ordinary Cubans face is glimpsed only through taxicab windows, a shallow, quick blur of color and noise.

Then, too, there is the colossal persona of Fidel, a charismatic man whose harshest critics still call him brave and brilliant. American film culture, moreover--with its love of the underdog, its happy-ending romanticism, and its inclination to resolve moral ambiguity into categorical good and evil--is fertile territory for Castro canonization. For those willing to look past the harshness of everyday Cuban life, Castro is the ultimate visionary, a Robin Hood who understood long before anyone else that battling the United States "will be my true destiny," as he wrote in a 1958 letter to Celia Sanchez, his longtime lover and confidant. Castro, who's outlived nine U.S. presidential administrations, embodies more than just pragmatic perseverance. His life is an epic. Here's a man who courted death, humiliated John F. Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, and is rumored to have slept with thousands of women. Simply put, says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, "for character, this guy is hard to beat." He hasn't just lived the traditional Hollywood script--man faces conflict, overcomes difficulties, and wins big. He's done it on the world stage, before an audience of billions. No wonder Spielberg described his night with Castro as "the most important eight hours of my life"; no wonder Stone seems wholly unconcerned with Cuba's lack of free speech. The romanticized version of Fidel's story--which ignores the fact that he grew up rich, among other things--is difficult to resist. For those living in a town that lionizes larger-than-life figures, Castro isn't just a star. He's an archetype.