Movie stars in Cuba blinded by their own glow 

Alejandro Rios, The Miami Herald 

The scenario is repeated: A red carpet is rolled out for a delegation of "good Americans'' from the world of cinema. The director of Traffic and one of the film's protagonists arrive in Havana with pomp and circumstance, preceded by their flattering opinions of Cuba's revolutionary film industry, a guaranteed visa to the country of "social achievements.'' I confess that when I rented and watched the movie, stripped of its hype, I thought: Here is fodder for comment in the Granma newspaper -- the Communist Party's daily. And my prophecy was fulfilled to a "T,'' with all the attendant ceremony.

The glow of Hollywood stars is one of the few forces able to blind the most anti-imperialistic revolution on the planet.

Americans arrive in casual dress, preferably linen for the tropics, almost always redolent of cream, perfume or soap. They are condescending to the natives, who go out of their way to indulge their slightest whims. It is said that when Robert De Niro visited the island, he wanted to wrangle a local mulata, and an actress who tends to disrobe with a certain ease on the national screen was ushered into his hotel room.

Spike Lee was not as lucky. He was mistaken for a local hustler, a kind of jinetero, and was asked to produce a Cuban identification card when he tried to return to the hotel where he was staying.

Oliver Stone was tormented by a visit to a hospital for convalescing guerrillas, veterans of the war in El Salvador, at some undisclosed Havana location.

The late Jack Lemmon and his wife wound up fleeced by the "managers'' of La Maison, who sold them all kinds of exclusive fashions and Afro-Cuban bijouterie.

Director Randa Haines was so impressed that, years after her first visit to the island, she Cubanized Chayanne, a Puerto Rican pop singer, and had him dancing salsa in a lamentable tale of "Latin'' stereotypes. One of the best remembered visits, noted for its record-setting ostentation, featured Robert Redford, who flew in on his own plane, was tightlipped with the press and prodigal in his praise for his friend Gabriel García Márquez. I remember feeling embarassed for the revered Colombian writer, who was going to great lengths -- like a colonial servant -- looking after the blond and wrinkled actor who is as emblematic of the United States as the imperial eagle.

Robert Redford was tightlipped with the press.

Recently an actor in the fine Mexican film Amores perros told a journalist that he didn't mind working in Hollywood as long as it wasn't in something like Traffic, where his compatriots again were denigrated as members of an evil race from south of the border.

Granma reporters had no time for such beauts in their overblown praise of the "valiant'' movie able to put the decadence of the capitalist system in its place. "Soderbergh stands firm,'' wrote one, resorting to the cliché of contaminating Spanish with the macho rhetoric of "cultured'' revolutionaries. The newspaper's senior reviewer once advised colleagues not to select Out of Africa as one of the 10 best movies shown in Cuba because "the Comandante doesn't favor it'' due to the discriminatory view of African blacks in the Sydney Pollack film.

But Granma didn't notice the racism that permeates much of Traffic. The film's white maiden, for example, plunges into the depths of addiction and is ruthlessly ravished by a drug trafficker who is as dark as the night. Other details were similarly overlooked in a subtle effort to please the condescending visitors, who had risked defying the blockade and other "cruel measures'' that strain the lives of Cubans and divide the cultures of the two countries. There's no mention that Benicio del Toro plays a Mexican policeman who speaks like a Colombian mafioso, or that the abject henchman for one of the warring cartels turns out to be a flaming homosexual, another stain in his sinful life. No mention that the U.S. drug czar wouldn't be rattled by a two-bit junkie; or that a housewife, unaware of her husband's double life as successful businessman and mass importer of drugs, can become the most cunning criminal as soon as the good life is threatened. Traffic abounds in the worst excesses of the worst American movies, but not enough so as to spoil the visit of eventual friends. Del Toro suggested a school of cinematography like Cuba's for his native Puerto Rico, and Steven Soderbergh promised to return. It all rests on whether the famed director colludes with some of the exiled actors in his movie, like the great Tomás Milián and Steven Bauer (who picketed in Little Havana against the return of Elián González), or be imprudent enough to start a project like that of another famous visitor, Julián Schnabel [who directed Before Night Falls about Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas's life as an exile in his own country because of his homosexuality]. If so, Soderbergh might end up branded persona non grata in the estate of the comandante-in-chief, where every breach of confidence has its forceful response. Alejandro Ríos directs the Cuban cinema series at Miami-Dade Community College.

Top ^