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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
That same faith prompts Stone to ask his new friend, "Have you ever wanted to talk to a psychiatrist?"
"It has never crossed my mind," Castro replies. "And I have never been asked that question from day one, for whatever the reason."
These are the types of queries that intrigue Stone, and they do lead to some telling, if tritely sentimental, moments where, for instance, Castro expresses regret at not having spent more time with his son, Fidel Jr., and blanches at discussing past lovers. These are not uncommon moments in the life of any powerful man, and they do serve to remind the viewer that Castro is flesh and blood.
But the biggest miscue comes when Castro spins the Cuban missile crisis. Castro claims, with no apparent follow-up questions, that he didn't have anything to do with the nuclear warheads the Soviets shipped to his shore, ultimately bringing the world to the precipice of Armageddon.
"We did not like the idea of stationing Soviet missiles here," Castro says. And after the U.S. spy plane noticed the activity, "we thought we'd be obliterated."
"They put our interests aside," he says of the USSR, calling them an "erratic" ally. Of course, it's much easier now for Castro to criticize his Soviet patrons: They no longer exist.
Stone does have the gumption to ask Castro about his Oct. 26, 1962, letter to Nikita Khrushchev, in which Castro suggests that, if Cuba is invaded by the U.S., the USSR might do well to eliminate the United States forever, presumably with nuclear weapons.
In the letter, Castro wrote: "The dangers of their aggressive policy are so great that after such an invasion the Soviet Union must never allow circumstances in which the imperialists could carry out a nuclear first strike against it." Thus, such an invasion "would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other."
The point is very clear: Castro was asking the USSR to destroy the United States entirely if it attempted an invasion.
That's not clear at all in "Comandante." When Stone asks him about this letter, without going into much detail, Castro first points out that he was merely calling for the nuclear obliteration of the United States if Cuba was invaded. "I did not say attack," he says, but rather, attack if Cuba was attacked.
Then Castro places blame for the letter on a poor translation due to the inadequate Spanish of the Soviet ambassador to Cuba. It's nonsense, but Stone doesn't bring the viewer up to speed on which letter he was talking about, and he doesn't point out that the actual letter exists, as does its actual, terrifying translation.
Could the world stand a reexamination of Castro? Of course. The United States' 41-year economic boycott has been as successful in getting rid of Castro as was that JFK-era CIA plan to sneak exploding cigars into his humidor. Many conservatives now consider ending the boycott -- long a cause of the left -- to be not only practical but also somewhat less hypocritical in light of the United States engagement with perhaps equally oppressive communist China. (When Stone asks him if he's a dictator, Castro notes that he's "seen the United States government being friendly with some big dictators.")
But Stone falls into a dangerous trap of other political critics. They get so angry at U.S. leaders that they seem to instantly give the benefit of the doubt to anyone on the United States' enemies list.
Stone, of course, has never been one for nuance. There was the bad sergeant vs. good sergeant simplicity of "Platoon," and Charlie Sheen's interminable "Who am I?" soliloquy in "Wall Street." But this isn't fiction, not even the historical fiction of "JFK." This is an actual dictator, with a half-century of human rights abuses under his olive greens, and Stone treats him as if he were a Central American Jim Morrison, just another misunderstood artist. (Speaking of the Kennedy assassination, Castro, long theorized to have played a role in the killing himself, tells Stone that "I have never believed the theory of the lone gunman.")
It's unclear how well Stone will be able to defend this film. At Sundance, when a Latin-American reporter -- clearly slightly better versed on the topic than his American colleagues -- prodded him a bit on the sympathetic portrayal, Stone demurred.
"I would rather have the film speak for me," Stone said. "I'm not a scholar. I don't know everything he wrote. But I'm pretty tough on him on some questions."
Castro, apparently, isn't the only barbaric Third World superstar set to sweat under Stone's "tough questions." His documentary on Yasser Arafat, "Persona Non Grata," will be based on 80 hours of film that Stone recently shot in the West Bank, commissioned by French and Spanish TV. Until the film's release, we can only guess how Stone treats his subject. But in what was possibly a sneak preview, he recently told Variety he "understands why suicide bombers feel the way they do."
