Original subtitles

Havana - December, 1960

Led by cheerleaders, a procession roamed the city

proclaiming its detachment from everything American.

It was last year, in Havana.

We were preparing to celebrate, in order:

The 1st of January, which is the 1st of January.

The 2nd of January, anniversary of the Revolution

and the Epiphany (Day of Kings), which is Christmas, the true Christmas,

a day of gifts, when children are given...

puppies, which will grow,

baby rabbits, which will grow,

parakeets, bears and dolls...

and baby machine-guns, which will also grow.

In the window of a department store, Magi took orders by telephone.

A large bearded man who can be asked anything, part of Cuban folklore.

Teresita, what would you ask from the Kings?

A doll

and a lottery game.

That's all?

That's all.

Do you study hard, Teresita?

Oh, yes.

And what grade are you?

Kindergarten.

And how old are you?

Five years old.

And is your family here?

Yes.

And what's your name?

Jorge.

How old are you?

Seven... eight years old.

And what class?

Sixth.

And what would you ask from the Kings?

A train.

What else?

A rifle...

A machine gun.

A doll dressed as a ballerina.

A bicycle and two dolls.

An aircraft carrier.

A machine gun.

A rifle.

A doll.

An aircraft carrier...

But adults also had their kings,

Magi on the television...

Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Juan Almeida

gave the people the three gifts of the revolution:

Industrialization

Agrarian Reform

and Literacy.

Out of six million Cubans, a quarter could not read or write.

1961 is the year of education.

Every educated Cuban became responsible for every illiterate Cuban.

The Catholic Church tried to co-opt This new notion of responsibility.

"Will this child be a believer or atheist? It depends on you."

The Revolution responded:

"Will this child be a patriot or traitor? It depends on you."

This happened in Havana, this American city,

where American concentrate grafted onto Cuban skin like a vaccine.

Havana, where the casino hotels have no thirteenth floor

remembering a not-distant time when games were the main industry,

with prostitution and a variety of public underground cinema.

But in this New York setting, there's now a Cuban style of regulation.

There is a Cuban way of looking at things:

to be curious, to be flirtatious, to be patriotic.

It was the day of the year, the week of kings, the year of education, the festival...

It was also the time of bombs.

A department store had burned down.

The crowd assembled, commented, interpreted.

Signs appeared to turn the traitors in,

not to pardon them, but to put them up against the wall.

However, the melting pot of passion was still baseball.

Fidel Castro himself led the Barbudas team to victory.

Alongside the revolutionary slogans,

tourism posters reminded that America was an hour's flight away.

But this crowd was under threat, and they knew it.

From inside, from outside.

There were bombs, the counter-revolutionary underground.

Planes of unknown nationality, having flown less than an hour,

appeared, struck, disappeared.

Who would defend this crowd in case of attack?

Itself?

The militants on their way to the parade at dawn on January 2nd were not soldiers.

They were baseball spectators, celebrating the Epiphany.

Fidel Castro was going to tell them

things you don't usually hear on days of military parades.

"We do not like parades.

"We do not like war.

"We live in a world where we must defend ourselves.

"But we'd rather switch from guns and skip ahead to the gymnasts."

The parade at Civic Square.

The great popular demonstrations of Havana

have been called "Red Square on Broadway".

But in the heart of the crowd, images become more precise.

Everything was Cuban in this celebration: the noise, beautiful girls,

and a Cuban way of peeling oranges, a machine that adds coils to the party.

Students, volunteers for the literary campaign, exist in three forms:

Spanish,

Black,

and Mulatto, beautiful as an eclipse.

The Cuban way of drinking fresh water, or nationalized Coca-Cola.

The songs of January 2 told a true story, or close enough.

Two years.

Two years of history,

and beyond, a prehistory which seemed somewhat legendary.

Strangers appeared, generally bearded:

El Che, Raul, Camilo,

and a young lawyer who became leader of the guerrillas,

somewhat uncomfortable on camera,

named Fidel Castro.

Twelve men at first, survivors of a risky landing.

Then other men, other women joined them.

An underground is organized in the Sierra Maestra.

They must communicate, survive, arm themselves...

Villagers help the guerrillas.

The population knows their newspapers and leaflets.

Between clashes, contact is made with the peasants, the poorest of the island,

who contribute to the struggle,

first to bring down a dictatorship,

then to build a new society.

And if everyone's in agreement on the first goal,

the second is fraught with problems for the future.

In winter 1958, on a television they presented to themselves,

Sierran fighters saw the disintegration of enemy defences.

The dictator Batista, to make his exit,

prepared a government of transition, which would rule forever.

The last throes of the regime,

as corrupt Cuban history mingles with sports news.

Major upheavals are close.

But for the rest of the world, especially Americans,

it is easier to resurrect myths:

that Fidel Castro is Robin Hood.

Perhaps he is Robin Hood,

but to take from the rich and give to the poor, in our century,

it's not necessary to attack the stagecoach.

And when Robin Hood was reading Marx in the mountains,

while preparing the laws and reforms of the future republic,

part of the world began to painfully realize, belatedly,

that he was also a Robin Hood.

Thus do legends die.

The Robin Hood myth is shattered.

In its place: a revolution.

Work for all, land for farming,

housing for those who live there,

and houses for those who don't.

What could be more obvious?

The Revolution is only making obvious things come true,

not those which the best minds strove to overcome.

One example: it took the Revolution,

on an island with 3,500 km of coastline,

to create the first popular beaches here.

The Revolution is also finding new resources, new industries.

For example, that of the bullfrog,

which Gatti did not invent (this is the only thing he has not invented),

which will be the crocodile of the poor.

But the Revolution is primarily for education.

From the alphabet to poetry,

there is a huge effort to make the culture belong

to those who build it.

Abroad, of course, cultural aspects of the revolution

are not well understood or presented.

Yet in the USA, even among shouts of terror and scandal,

men raise their voices to invite their countrymen

into a serious examination of conscience.

But information has its own demands:

Front page for executions, a snippet or nothing for reforms.

Everyone has seen the televised death of one of Batista's captains,

but the prison system overhaul, with its parole vacations,

and these strange competitions between prisoners and guards,

restoring sporting equality in the world of punishment,

nobody speaks of this.

"Castro has betrayed the revolution," said the State Dept.

And we know how the State Dept.

jealously protects the purity of the revolution.

We hesitate to believe this is the main concern

of the USA's avatars of democracy in Cuba.

There must be something else.

The church also takes a position.

For her, Castro is a dictator. That says it all.

But even on this point, the situation may not be so simple.

Apart from what I can see personally,

I think the Cuban Revolution brings to the country a new nation,

a new homeland, new social structures.

Agrarian reform, urban reform,

and socialization of national and foreign companies

are the pillars of the revolution,

and these structures will change the face of the nation,

bringing prosperity and industrialization,

especially giving economic independence,

without which there is no political independence.

Ultimately it is trying to solve Cuban social problems:

housing, unemployment, health and education problems.

And this is done not at the expense of human dignity,

but by doing some violence to the happy life of debauchery that existed here.

This is wise and beneficial.

The immense benefits of the revolution are much closer

to a true Christian social structure than anything we had before!

Before: that is to say under Batista

and his entourage of gangsters, local or imported.

This time the young lawyer Castro was released from prison

after a resounding plea linked to the Revolution's future goals and spirit.

But who is Castro?

Between the rebel without a cause and the leader of the partisans,

between the son of large landowners and the pupil of the Jesuits,

founder of the first socialist republic in America, how has he managed this metamorphosis?

Everyone has his own ideas on Castro, everyone has their own label.

But since everyone is able to respond on their own, perhaps, himself ...

FIDEL: I think it's a tough question ..

I think I was a kid, like all children ...

It's very difficult to consider which factors

make you into a revolutionary.

A little professional politics, first ... But it's also a question of character...

a little rebellious character, a natural tendency towards justice,

an innate opposition to what you feel is unjust or immoral ...

It's all part of the vocation.

But in fact, neither revolution nor revolutionaries

are dependent on themselves...

The Revolution... is dependent on the climate,

a climate of injustice, the conditions

that enable one to really speak.

There cannot be a revolution at the wrong time.

How many Marats, how many Dantons, how many Robespierres

have been born in France since France has existed -

and yet only Marat, Danton, Robespierre

became revolutionaries!

It was necessary that the feudal monarchy and its decadence

brought her to the edge of disappearance.

It was necessary that French society bore these conditions

to form a new society, a new world ...

Thus the factors that made me a revolutionary,

that made revolutionaries out of my companions,

that made the people revolutionary, these factors

are born inside the society in which we live.

The society in which they lived...

the revolutionaries lived in the bush,

there they opened the first peasant schools.

It was necessary to leave these false American cities

to discover the real Cuba,

that under-developed country of which statistics say:

a million illiterate,

500,000 unemployed,

30 % of land in the hands of 1 %.

The conditions of life,

housing, sanitation, unsatisfactory beyond description.

The other pole of this society is this:

the palaces, the endless gardens where billionaires

live in splendour like that of the Borgias.

If only knowledge of human nature could explain to us

why they were so crazy, so selfish, cynical, indifferent or blind.

But there is one thing that is always hard to understand:

that they were Christians.

Here, between the crosses, nymphs and satyrs,

crossed with a little black magic, is where they came to settle:

the kings of tobacco, the emperors of sugar cane.

Here nothing disturbed their dreams. Nothing happened.

Elsewhere, things were happening. Burials, for example.

Of those victims of the dictatorship.

20,000 in six years.

Massacred, tortured, sometimes castrated by the police.

It was Batista who was to declare after the events of April 1961:

"I wish for Cuba a regime founded on the principles

of Christianity and justice that were given to the people in 1940 ... "

Organized resistance resumed under the tradition of popular anger

that Cuba had known since 1933, then under another dictatorship.

So betrayed by corrupt governments, the will of Resistance

has, after failure after failure, forged the reasons for victory.

The underground press informed, educated,

and denounced the crimes, naming the criminals.

In turn, the Resistance struck.

It barred the names on the list. And there above,

in the Sierra Maestra, they were forging the Revolution.

But in the enchanted gardens, nothing was happening.

There was luxury, calm, sometimes pleasure.

Then came the summer of 58...

A tragic race, in which Fangio did not participate,

kidnapped by the bearded ones

who sought to speak with the government.

Six months later, they were seeking no more.

On January 1st 1959, Batista fled.

He left for Camp Columbia, inside the Forbidden City,

the nursery he had built for his children, and we found,

two years later, these ruins.

The dictator sought and obtained asylum in the United States,

where he retired with a fortune estimated at 300 million dollars.

The only thing left standing

in this garden was a statue... that of a baby-Napoleon.

All around, the militia stood guard.

For the first time in five centuries, Cuba belonged to Cubans.

End of First Part

Second Part

Liberty!

Fidel: It's not that we are disinterested in power after the war.

We stress that we were not moved in this struggle by personal ambitions.

What mattered was that a certain program be applied.

We confess that at one point we believed this was possible.

This means that at some point we were a little ...utopian.

I confess that for the first time since the triumph of the revolution,

of the war after the war, we were almost completely without government.

We had absolutely nothing left of the Council of Ministers,

and we expected, as it was the most logical thing in the world,

that those who held the main responsibility

for the basic measures that people needed

would take action, and that seemed, to us ... the ABC's of any revolution.

As the weeks passed, however,

not a single one of these measures was taken.

Even if we had wanted us to stay away,

even if we had not intended to govern,

even if we had wanted to stay away, we could not ...

The country was theirs to govern overnight,

this island of the West Indies, where Columbus landed

on October 27, 1492, persuaded it was India.

They wanted to assure him that he had discovered America

but the cry was "India yes, Yankee No!" and no one budged.

At the arrival of the Spaniards, Cuba was inhabited by Siboney Indians.

By the time they departed, there were none left.

This despite the efforts of Father de Las Casas

and several other religious protectors of the Indians.

It was noticed that the work of a negro was worth that of four Indians,

which favoured the importation of African slaves.

But Cuba was a Spanish possession.

It would not be until the beginning of this century,

as the Universal Dictionary of M. Bouillet warned us, that

"this possession is bound to follow the fate of other Spanish colonies

and be absorbed by the United States, which has long coveted it."

This lust, the sun of our liberal century,

would become an influence and also a monopoly.

When the United States suspended exports,

we quickly came to see that life in Cuba was dependent,

technically and commercially.

The consequence: once the playground and property in 1958,

Cuba became the bastion of anti-Americanism in 1960.

Sugar cane is the best and worst thing.

On the one hand, it is expansive.

When it is cut, it grows up to twenty times.

To ensure the harvest earlier this year, we saw the whole government,

including the President of the Dorticos Republic and the Minister of

Foreign Affairs Raul Roa, giving an example of civil mobilization.

It included a healthy rivalry with urban citizens,

but there was ultimately a shortcoming of technique.

But sugar cane is also a trap for Cuba.

In this fabulously rich land, where almost anything can grow,

foreign influence has distorted and proliferated

the culture of cane.

Instead of responding to the diversity of its needs

through the diversity of its products,

Cuba was suffering from the cancer of sugar.

Moreover, the quota system has absorbed

all production into a single market,

that of the United States.

This amounted to putting the Cuban economy

in the absolute dependence of a foreign economy.

When it became obvious that Cuba wanted to avoid this dependence,

the U.S. retaliated with the economic blockade and suppression of the quota.

So Castro undertook to sell its sugar to Eastern Europe.

Then he was accused of having sold himself to the Russians.

It was one of two basic charges.

The other was the absence of elections.

One could indeed be surprised that Castro

did not sanction this form of popular expression.

We asked the question.

Fidel: "It would seem difficult to understand

in some countries,

unless you understand that our country has been plagued for 60 years

by a species of farce called elections.

That is to say a semi-democracy,

a false democracy well known in Latin American countries

for a century and a half without ever solving anything,

without doing anything but bring to power a variety of mediocre,

and ambitious thieves and servants of vested interests.

The time will come when the Revolution

is a dynamic process, a process

which destroys the old and builds the new, it will be institutionalized.

We are not eternal and the life of the Revolution is not eternal.

That is to say that the time will come when the new order

created by Revolution acquires an institutional quality,

where this vital and real democracy will also begin to create new forms.

First, a society that is born,

and then, this society will take an institutional form.

And then the French should be the first to understand us:

the French have an election almost...

annually, municipal, national ... for a president, for a member...

that is to say that perhaps no other country in the world

has experienced during these six decades, more elections than France.

And still the French are not happy.

They can fully understand that political factions, electioneering,

has not resolved any fundamental problems in France.

Sometimes it happens that the ruling classes get tired of elections

and then go to fascism.

To fascism!

But in Cuba, this is a Revolution that moves towards socialism,

and this revolution will gives birth

to a regime and a new social form of life,

a good which in turn is institutionalized and so forth.

We won't admit defeat!

In the meantime, we have an election here every month.

But this is an election in the public square.

We have a kind of Athenian democracy.

Spring 1960. Symbolic Burial of Monopolies.

But the Revolution, it was not only crowds.

In the Valley of the Two Sisters, near Vinales

on a wall was a striated illustration by Jules Verne...

Who was this mountaineer harnessed, helmeted and jumping?

He was painting.

One day a painter had decided that the mountainside

would make a nice surface for a fresco for the people.

He was told "This is a mountain."

It's not too busy for such an experiment.

Since then, climbers have painted his mountain.

We were not expecting Baudelaire

in the middle of the Cuban Revolution.

But because everything is possible in Cuba,

we have seen a farmer in Pinar del Rio,

harnessed and helmeted as for an assault,

rising before our eyes like a young giant.

It was a vacation day.

Unlike the painted mountains or the tourist centre on stilts,

the Revolution was obviously less... hectic than the cooperatives

or the offices of the Institute of Cinema.

This was a moment for reflection,

an auspicious day to discover something crazy:

that happiness is happiness, life is life ...

The smell of the pines of Gaira,

the voices of girls

among wooden stairs

and cabins that sleep standing on four legs like waders,

it was the stuff of memories, times that we are afraid to forget:

here on the eve of war, the last day of vacation.

The return was at hand. And war was not far.

Alerts. Attacks. Fields of burning cane.

All this indication of another, more serious threat.

For the second anniversary of the Revolution,

Fidel Castro proclaimed the mobilization of the militias.

On the coast, among the old Spanish cannons,

began a long evening of sleeplessness.

It is a full mobilization in a tense and vigilant atmosphere,

a moment which has given us a key to understand Cuba.

We were at a crossroads.

The passage of a children's orchestra we wanted to film.

The morning was rather heavy.

The previous night, a violent aerial incident had disturbed everyone.

People around us did not look particularly Dionysian.

At the first change of pace, we didn't notice anything

except a few spectators practicing voodoo.

At the second change of pace,

something lightened around us. Suddenly...

This was Havana in 1961:

machine guns on roofs and conga on the street.

In the rest of the world, life went on as normal.

What has this moment said about the state of the world at this time?

Of people, countries, fabulous animals,

of Algeria,

of France,

of America,

of space,

of time,

about Congo,

or Laos,

or Africa,

and what forms this has taken in the second half of this century,

those of violence and prayer.

Once we also wrote of the Apocalypse,

the costliest book in the world.

Now we began to talk about the world and, also, Cuba.

When the radio, on April 17, announced that

an attack had been launched against Cuba,

our minds returned to those first memories of Havana,

repeating ad nauseam that last walk.

So, the slogans were no longer empty words:

they were oracles hand drawn on the walls.

In East Havana, the shambles of Pastorita,

which give shelter to 4000 families ...

The housing fund is powered by a lottery.

Before, the proceeds from the lottery went into the pockets of Batista.

From one lottery to another,

not only from fraud to honesty, also from one world to another.

Two worlds where money does not play the same role, that's all.

And this is something for the Americans who landed that day

to go about buying land in Cuba... this transition is irreversible.

But we, from 8000 miles away,

we have both memory and confidence

to confront that false news...

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION SEEMS TO PREVAIL

A GREAT CITY RALLIES THE ENEMIES OF CASTRO

A BATTLE INSIDE HAVANA

FIDEL AT BAY

HAVANA BOMBED

Radio Voice:

" ... announced a beachhead had been established

in the province of Las Villas, Cuba..."

Las Villas province, Zapata Swamp,

Playa Giron, Tresor lagoon... It's here that the landing occurred.

On 20 April 1961, the world learned

that the attack against Cuba had failed.

The world learned at the same time that the Cuban people

adhered to their revolution, they were ready to defend it.

We would have been pleased to announce this news to the world,

if they had asked.

But it seems the world only believes the witnesses that were slaughtered.

And when necessary, to keep believing it is ready to slaughter more.