FAB Radio

Fidel covers 40 years of the Cuban revolution and is unprecedented in providing its viewers with an understanding of Cuba and its leader. Ms. Bravo uses exclusive archival footage and a remarkable mix of interviews with Fidel. She includes such luminaries as Harry Belafonte, Aleida Guevera (Che’s daughter), Alice Walker, Ramsey Clark, Sydney Pollack, Angela Davis and longtime friend of Castro, Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

We hear from journalists, both in Miami and Cuba, guerrillas who fought in the revolution, politicians, writers, musicians, scientists, old teachers, family and friends. There are priceless and touching exchanges between Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. Alice Walker, as only Alice Walker can, talks about her great admiration for the man then breaks off, puzzling over the fact that she’s heard he can’t dance.

Philip Agee, former CIA agent, lends credence to the often summarily dismissed assassination stories. They began, according to Agee, with the most renowned of those attempts, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in which President John F. Kennedy sent 1,400 Cuban expatriates onto Cuba’s shores. When Castro squelched the attack within 72 hours, what had been an overt war against the country became a covert war against Fidel.

Castro himself seems to take it all in stride. In response to a reporter’s question about the rumored bulletproof vest he always wears, Fidel unbuttoned his shirt to show nothing but a bare chest underneath. “I have a moral vest,” he proclaimed. “It is that which protects me.”

Corruption, prostitution, and racism flourished. Large American corporations grew rich off Cuba’s resources, as did Batista himself, while the majority of Cubans remained in abject poverty.

The Castro-led attack on the Moncada Garrison in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953 was the beginning of a six-year armed struggle against Batista. By the time Fidel and his troops marched victorious into a wildly cheering Havana in January of 1959, Batista and his cohorts had already fled the coop.

The first priority of the revolution became the redistribution of land under the Agrarian Reform Act. Not far behind were universal health care, education, housing, and road building, all of which were against the interests of big U.S. companies. The final straw, as far as the United States was concerned, occurred when Cuba ordered foreign refineries to refine Soviet crude oil.

When the United States refused to do so, the Cuban government nationalized the refineries. When the United States retaliated by cutting off the Cuban sugar quota, Cuba retaliated by nationalizing all U.S. properties in Cuba. In October 1960, the United States imposed the now 41-year-old embargo. Tit for tat would seem to be an understatement.

The beauty of Estela Bravo’s film is the simplicity in which the history and politics of Cuba are laid out, despite Bravo’s insistence that Fidel is the story of the man, not of his political beliefs. But it is impossible to talk about Castro without engaging in a discussion of politics. He has devoted his life to politics. That is his story.