Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Stone does insert a couple of winking contradictions in the editing room. After Castro declares that there is "no more discrimination" against gays, Stone cuts to a shot of a rather flouncy-looking Cuban sitting solo in a restaurant's "Area de Flores," the gay-segregated seats. This is hardly the worst of Cuba's long history of oppressing and arresting gays -- in the past, those discovered to be HIV-positive through Cuba's mandatory testing programs, for instance, were incarcerated and quarantined in "AIDS camps" -- but at least it's a critique.
Likewise, Stone tells Castro that a member of his production team, Carlos Marcovich, witnessed the government's practice of having an informant on every block.
"That was his imagination," Castro says, and Marcovich rolls his eyes at the camera. But Stone's follow-up question is preposterously naive. "Can't you simplify the system so these guys don't get rewarded?" he asks Castro of the informants. From the question, Stone seems to think that the informants are just an unfortunate cottage industry that needs to end, rather than an organized part of the Castro's governing style.
Since Stone surrendered his critical eye, what does he give us instead? To his unctuous interlocutors at Sundance, he played up sex. "I tried to make a little bit of a romantic triangle between Che [Guevara] and Fidel and Evita Perón, believe it or not," he said. "It's in the movie because they all in some way or another were devoted to the people's cause. And that's what's beautiful about the movie. And Fidel still maintains that after 50 years, he's still doing it."
That Eva Perón was "devoted to the people's cause" is surely subject to some debate; her charitable activities aside, detractors considered her a fancy propaganda tool for her fascist husband, and together they ruled Argentina vindictively, shutting down newspapers that disagreed with them. But that doesn't stop Stone from inserting fatuous "Evita" references in "Comandante"; throughout the film violin strains from the Broadway score of "Evita" swell up behind images of Che and Perón and then, ultimately, Castro.
Making Castro sexy becomes a preoccupation in the film. He jokes about smuggling some Viagra in for the 76-year-old tyrant.
"So you want to kill the enemy with a heart attack," Castro jokes. "You will get the medals you didn't get in Vietnam."
Castro is corrected; Stone, in fact, was awarded two medals in Vietnam, he is told. It is intended as a moment of pathos: Castro's face grows grave, and Stone looks sheepish and a bit disturbed, as if his Nam demons have come back to haunt him.
Castro -- who sent soldiers to Vietnam to help the Viet Cong -- then praises his fellow soldier. "It gives you the courage to do what you're doing now," Castro says.
It's a completely self-congratulatory scene, and it tells us about a quarter as much about Castro as it does about the gap-toothed filmmaker standing before him, who seems beholden to a childlike redemptive faith that even despots like Castro, who pledged to help kill American soldiers -- including Stone -- can be good people too, if only we let them share their feelings.
