Cuba: Castro vs the World
BBC2/iPlayer
****
GEOGRAPHY can be destiny. Take Cuba. A population twice the size of Scotland's, spread over 110,000 square kilometres. Had it been anywhere else such an island nation would have amounted to a mere squiggle on a map, a geopolitical nobody.
But Cuba was 90 miles from the coast of the USA, and when there was a falling out with the Mr Big in the neighbourhood it almost led to the end of the world.
Momentous as it was, the siting of Soviet missiles on the island, leading to the crisis of October 1962, formed only a small segment of this two part documentary which began last night.
With Norma Percy (The Death of Yugoslavia; Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil) as series producer, Castro vs the World had so much more to offer. Why waste time on an already well-trodden patch of history when you can explore fresh angles?
The tale began in 1959 with Batista fleeing to the USA and the “bearded men from the mountains” taking over in Havana. One of Castro’s first acts was to go to Washington DC to talk friendship. Eisenhower would not receive him, so he made do with a meeting with the Vice-President, one Richard Nixon, who pronounced himself unimpressed by the commie rebel.
It was the first in a series of intriguing “if onlys” the film set up. If only Castro had met someone else on that first visit as leader. If only a later approach from Henry Kissinger had paid off. If only Fidel had not been Fidel. As Ricardo Alarcon, a veteran diplomat for the regime, said: “Fidel has only one defect – that he doesn’t know how to do anything by half measures.”
But Fidel was Fidel, and his Cuba was determined to go its own way, even if the USSR had to pay its bills. If you had a liberation struggle and Cuba could help, it would. You could see why Castro was considered such a threat to the established world order (and why there were so many CIA attempts to bump him off – close to 700 at the last count, including a poisoned diving suit).
As in Inside Europe, the film had its box office draws, Bill Clinton among them, but this was history told by not so famous figures. From Soviet officials to White House advisers, these were some of the guys, and it was mostly guys, who were in the rooms when history happened.
Time was given over to anecdotes that might have seemed insignificant at first pass, but turned out to say so much about the nature of Castro and his regime. There was the time Castro kept a visiting Algerian rebel leader waiting for a week, only to turn up to his hotel room at 1am and talk for two hours. Or the day the he told two American journalists that Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, was “a great example of capitalism” because the Amity Island mayor kept the beach open to make money. (Wonder if he ever saw the film?) There was a fair bit of familiar archive, with one shot of khaki-clad fighters walking through a jungle much like another, as well as the odd tired line (the world holding its breath during the missile crisis, etc). But any faults were minor and fleeting.
Castro was the deeply flawed leader of a small nation but he had a certain lion-hearted greatness about him, which this superb film conveyed.
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