Original subtitles

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Hello, and welcome to the new Global Eye show

from the BBC World Service, coming to you this week from Havana.

In the next half hour, we will showcase the best

of our global investigative journalism and reportage.

I'm Will Grant, the BBC's correspondent here in Cuba.

The island is famous for its iconic cigars and classic cars -

and, of course, its Communist revolution -

but today's Cuba is in the grip of its worst economic crisis

since the Cold War.

And later, we'll bring you an extraordinary investigation

from the BBC Eye team into the mysterious disappearance

of a prominent cleric, Musa al-Sadr, in 1970s Libya.

This spawned endless conspiracy theories,

and some believe it even changed the fate of the Middle East...

..and we'll meet the crew of a hero ship,

fixing Africa's undersea cables and stopping internet blackouts.

You get heroes that save lives.

I'm a hero. I save communication.

I've spent almost 20 years reporting from Cuba for the BBC,

and lived here for the best part of a decade.

In that time, I've seen the island experience

some of the most acute highs and lows of its modern history.

From hopefulness during a historic thaw with Washington

under President Obama

to desperation amid rolling blackouts and food shortages.

The country's Communist-run government

has survived decades of punishing economic sanctions

imposed by one of Cuba's nearest neighbours, the United States.

Originally intended to topple the father of the Cuban Revolution,

Fidel Castro,

in 2018, the United Nations estimated the total cost

of the economic sanction on the Cuban economy

at more than $130 billion.

In 2014, a thaw between the two countries

under the Obama administration

meant that US citizens could travel to Cuba more freely,

helping to attract some 5 million visitors a year.

However, the policy was later reversed

by his successors, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

THEY SPEAK SPANISH

On this trip, I've caught up with the tourism minister,

who accepts tighter sanctions are hurting the island.

The Covid pandemic also hit the island hard,

especially businesses which rely on a steady stream

of tourists to survive.

Now, this brand-new five-star hotel behind me,

known locally as the Torre K,

has just been completed and is now the tallest building in Cuba -

yet it's also the source of much anger among Cubans,

who see it, lying virtually empty,

as an expensive symbol of the revolution's economic mismanagement.

While the US embargo has caused serious harm to the Cuban economy,

so, too, have years of mismanagement by the island's authorities.

Decades of underinvestment,

particularly in crumbling Soviet-era energy infrastructure,

have led to nationwide power blackouts.

Amid rising inflation and a devalued peso,

Cubans are struggling to meet their basic needs,

facing severe shortages in petrol and food.

CROWD CHANTS

In July 2021, anger at the worsening situation here boiled over.

Spontaneous demonstrations erupted across the island -

a very rare thing in Cuba.

Police cracked down hard, arresting hundreds of young Cubans,

many of whom received long prison sentences.

There have since been some lower level street demonstrations,

particularly over the blackouts,

but dissidents to the Communist-run system are still not tolerated,

with tight restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly,

and most independent journalists in prison or forced into exile.

Tourism is one of the island's main sources

of foreign currency earnings,

along with dollars and euros sent to relatives

by Cubans working abroad.

Those without access to this must rely on a rapidly devaluing

local peso currency,

which, along with rising inflation,

has led to an acute cost of living crisis.

That's all led to an exodus.

Around one in ten people have left the island,

particularly younger Cubans,

leading to fears of a brain drain

among doctors, engineers and teachers.

Viva!

The former president, Raul Castro, Fidel's younger brother

and one of the original generation of revolutionaries,

chose the current leader, Miguel Diaz-Canel,

to be his successor.

From day one, president Diaz-Canel has preached a message of continuity

in the island's socialist politics and economy -

but he is facing an even more hostile administration

across the Florida Straits,

especially with one of the US's biggest anti-Castro voices

as Secretary of State, in Marco Rubio.

They're going to have a choice to make,

those that are in charge there. Do they open up to the world?

Do they allow the individual Cuban to have control

over their economic and political destiny,

even though it threatens the security

and stability of the regime,

or do they triple down and just say,

"We'd rather be the owners and controllers

"of a fourth world country that's falling apart"?

With pressure growing on the leadership both at home and abroad,

people here are wondering what the future will hold

for the Cuban Revolution.

Will the state eventually ease its stranglehold

over the economy to allow greater private enterprise,

or will President Diaz-Canel's continuity

succeed in keeping this decades-old revolution alive?

In 1978, a prominent Shia cleric, Musa al-Sadr, vanished in Libya.

For many of his supporters, solving the mystery of his fate

is as significant as that of the killing of John F Kennedy.

Now, after months of investigative work,

the Eye team, led by reporter Moe Shreif,

has found that a body in a secret mortuary may hold vital clues,

bringing a decades-old mystery back into focus.

For years, I've been investigating the case

of the former leader of Lebanon's Shia community, Imam Musa al-Sadr.

In 1978, he mysteriously disappeared.

In 2011, my colleague was tipped off about a secret morgue in Libya.

There he found a body with features that resembled the imam.

Could this be the face of Musa al-Sadr?

Has dramatic new evidence solved a decades-long mystery?

It's a story so sensitive that our BBC team was imprisoned

and interrogated for six days when filming in Libya.

Imam Musa al-Sadr rose to fame in the 1960s

as the leader of Lebanon's Shia community.

Musa al-Sadr spoke out on behalf of the poor,

no matter what their religion...

..but Sadr's campaign upset members of the powerful Shia elite,

as well as leftist hardliners.

He made a fateful journey to Libya in August 1978,

a trip from which he never returned.

I'm meeting Kassem Hamade, a Beirut based journalist.

He was in Libya during the uprising against Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

The Minister of Justice told Kassem

the Libyan authorities had concocted a story

that Sadr had left Libya and gone on to Italy.

Then the Minister of Justice delivered a bombshell.

Libya's former Justice Minister was saying Sadr had been murdered

on Gaddafi's orders -

but Kassem then tells me something equally astonishing.

An attendant showed Kassem the morgue.

Kassem filmed their conversation.

Sadr was unusually tall.

One of the bodies seemed to match.

Kassem took a photo.

It was an extraordinary story, but I was sceptical.

This photo was all we had to go on.

A team at Bradford University has been developing a unique algorithm.

It's called deep face recognition,

and it identifies complex similarities between photographs.

It's been tested on millions of images,

and has proven to be extremely reliable,

and has been used in various international investigations.

How are you?

The algorithm is designed to identify people

from imperfect images,

like the one Kassem had taken in the morgue.

The algorithm assesses two photographs

to see if they're images of the same person.

Professor Ugail is going to compare the image from the morgue

with four genuine photos of Sadr.

The higher the number on the scale,

the more likely it's the same person, or a family member.

According to Professor Ugail, if it's below 50,

they're probably not related.

Between 60 and 70 means either the same person or a close relative.

70 or more is a direct match.

The way a computer looks at the faces,

it looks at the colour, the texture,

also various shapes of the face.

So, you've got the eyes, the nose, the forehead and so on,

and these proportions,

and it will actually create a number of what we call features,

or these are numerical values,

so it can create, like, thousands of these numbers,

and what it's doing is it's comparing these thousands of numbers

from one face to the other.

So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run this image

against everything else that we know is him.

So, what we are getting here are...

..58... It's in the 60s.

So, these are actually - given the image, these are not bad numbers.

A number of facial features are missing in the morgue photo,

so it's not ideal.

Even so, it scores highly against all four images of Musa al-Sadr.

60s, they are either siblings, close relatives,

you know, that kind of thing.

So, there is a high probability that this could be him. Wow.

To test this conclusion, the professor compares our photo

with images of 100 Middle Eastern men.

None are related to Sadr, but they all resemble him in some way.

Then he compares the morgue photo

with pictures of Sadr's family members.

The family photos score

much higher than the 100 random faces,

but the best results are when our photo

is compared with pictures of Musa al-Sadr himself.

Back in 2011, when Kassem was in Libya,

he found a country in chaos,

as the footage he shot clearly shows.

If he really had discovered Sadr's body, we too had to go to Libya.

People close to Sadr had warned him not

to accept Colonel Gaddafi's invitation.

Nevertheless, on 25th August 1978,

he flew to Tripoli, together with his chief of staff,

Sheikh Mohammed Yaacoub and a journalist, Abbas Badreddine.

Witnesses say Sadr was treated rudely when he arrived.

At his hotel, he was prevented from making international calls.

His frustration mounted

as Gaddafi repeatedly delayed their meeting.

At 1:30pm on the 31st of August, after six days of waiting,

Sadr was seen being driven away from the hotel in a government car.

All confirmed reports of him

and his companions end at this point...

..until now,

because Kassem discovered that Sadr had later encountered

the colonel at a mosque in Tripoli.

Back in 2011, Kassem had tracked down two people

who had been in the mosque that day.

Both had seen Sadr and Gaddafi

arguing over a verse in the Koran.

It's time to look for the morgue where Kassem had found the body.

It's somewhere here in central Tripoli.

But our trip is about to run into difficulties.

We knew we had been under surveillance

since we arrived in Libya, and were being followed everywhere.

It's the right building, but it's no longer a morgue.

This was the last thing we were able to film.

Shortly after, we were

told our filming permits had been revoked.

The next day, we were seized and taken to a secret prison,

held in solitary confinement and accused of spying.

We were blindfolded, repeatedly interrogated,

and told no-one could help us.

Our captors said we'd be there for decades.

We spent a traumatic six days in detention.

After pressure from the BBC and diplomatic intervention,

we were released and deported from Libya.

A year later,

the core team reconvenes in London.

Myself...

..Kassem, the cameraman, Namak Khoshnaw,

and the director, Tom Roberts.

We share our experiences of imprisonment and interrogation.

An artist is recreating the faces of our jailers.

During the six days, all...in each interrogation,

they asked me, "Who were your sources in Libya?"

The last day, they put me in a car alone with the driver.

He tried to be nice to me.

He asked me, "You have been to Libya before?"

I said, "Yes, yes, I have been to Libya before.

"Many times. I covered the revolution here."

He said, "Oh, we don't say revolution,

"you know, because we were on the other side,

"were against the revolution."

I said, "Aha. So you belong to the, uh, to the old regime."

He said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah.

"We belong to the... We are...we are back."

Our interrogators had told us they knew about the secret morgue.

They said the employees Kassem met were now dead.

Perhaps they also know where the body is.

We had paid a heavy price for this investigation.

It was disturbing to feel we'd become part of the story.

Had we come too close to the truth?

This is the annual rally held by Amal,

the organisation Sadr founded in the '70s.

Today, it's a powerful party of the Lebanese Shia.

And every year, its leaders call for the Imam's return.

They refuse to accept he might be dead,

even though there has never been any evidence he's still alive.

If he were, he'd now be 97 years old.

Nabih Berri, Amal's leader

and speaker of Lebanon's parliament, presents his party's line.

Amal say there is no material proof that Sadr was killed,

even though Kassem gave them evidence that may be compelling.

Back in 2011, he had managed to take

a sample containing DNA from the corpse in the secret morgue.

A match with a member of the Sadr family would prove beyond doubt

whether the body was that of Musa al-Sadr.

Kassem gave the sample and a file of evidence to senior officials

in Speaker Berri's office, but they never got back to him.

Later, Amal told the BBC the sample had been lost.

In Lebanon, the BBC showed the results of

the photo analysis to Musa al-Sadr's eldest son,

an investigating judge and a senior figure from Amal.

They were not convinced.

The Amal official went on to question the veracity of the

analysis, as well as the BBC's motivation

for undertaking its investigation.

Despite the obstacles,

we now know a great deal more about what happened to Imam Musa al-Sadr.

We know he was almost certainly murdered

and we may even have found his body.

But until the current Libyan authorities

and the Amal leadership have the will to examine the facts,

neither this mystery

nor this remarkable man can be laid to rest.

Now here's some of the best World Service content

you can enjoy from the last few days.

BBC Eye Investigations exposes

the growing problem of Russia's teenagers using

a synthetic drug known as meow, or the poor man's cocaine.

We follow the drug chain from production labs to

the darknet to couriers to find out more

about lives destroyed by addiction.

And John Simpson speaks to the BBC's expert correspondents

on Unspun World to review the week's global news stories.

You can catch up on the significance of those crucial elections

in Moldova that we investigated on this programme two weeks ago.

Watch both of these now on iPlayer.

Last year, millions of businesses and citizens across Africa,

from Lagos to Nairobi,

saw messaging apps crash and bank transactions fail

as a result of accidental damage to internet cables buried

deep beneath the seabed.

That damage was fixed by a ship the size of a football field

that cruises hundreds of miles a year to keep the continent online.

Reporter Daniel Dadzie went aboard

to meet the crew keeping Africa linked to the world.

Every time you send a message or browse the internet,

you rely on a vast hidden network, one that relies on certain cables.

But these cables laid across the ocean floor are fragile.

When they break, entire countries can go offline.

Unlike other continents

that have extensive networks of internet infrastructure onshore,

Africa's internet mainly

depends on undersea fibre optic cables.

They link Africa to data service that allow people on

the continent to get connected to the internet.

Since some African countries

only have one undersea cable serving them,

when there is damage to it, the entire country could go offline.

This ship, the Leon Thevenin, is one of the few

in the world that repairs those undersea cables.

So this is the main deck, or the working deck, of the

Leon Thevenin, which the crew describe

as the heart of the operation.

Now, the cable we'll be fixing over the next few days

looks a lot like this.

It has hair-thin fibreglass core,

which is where your text messages,

your streaming travels through across

the ocean, and it's protected by different levels

of material, some plastic, some metal, some copper.

And over the next few days,

the crew will be making sure that a cable,

which is on the floor of the ocean bed,

will be replaced by a piece of cable that looks just like this.

The work starts by finding the damaged parts of the cable.

The crew does this

by sending electrical pulses through the cable,

looking for the points where the signal is lost.

Once they have a location,

the remotely operated vehicle - or ROV - is deployed.

A signal is sent from the station on the cable,

and then the signal travels along the cable,

and then the ship tracks the signal and where we lose the signal,

we know the fault is there.

The ROV moves in for a closer look.

It scans for anchor damage, fishing nets scars

or natural breaks caused by strong ocean currents.

Typically, cables break because of humans.

Most of the time it's due to anchors,

fishing, trawlers. So, typically,

you would see scarring, scars from trawling.

OK, they're going to pick up.

Once the ROV pinpoints the fault,

it cuts the cable and it is brought to the surface.

OK. ROV off the surface.

This is a delicate operation.

The cable weighs several tonnes and must be pulled up carefully

to avoid further damage.

Now the jointers take over, to fix

the cables together through a process called splicing.

Each fibre strand,

thinner than a human hair, must be perfectly aligned.

If they get it wrong, entire networks will remain offline.

I call this the heart of the operation.

This is where we fix the cable.

This is where we have two parts and we make the impossible possible.

After hours of cable repair, and numerous tests to

ensure it works the way it should, it's time to return the cable to

the bottom of the ocean bed.

Tuesday morning here on the Leon Thevenin.

It's been about six days since we arrived at the spot

for the repair, off the coast of Accra.

And as you can see behind me,

the cable is finally being returned to the ocean floor.

It was a long, tedious process

for the Leon Thevenin's crew, and all of the crew members,

you can see, have on their faces a sense of satisfaction

and relief after the successful operation.

We're very fortunate to be part of delivering such

an important product to Africa and to the rest of the world, really.

We just... We're the link between Africa

and the world, and the world to Africa.

Because of me,

countries stay connected. Because of me,

IT people at their home, they have work. You understand?

Because I bring the main feed in.

You get heroes that save lives. I'm a hero.

I save communication for countries, for people.

You know, for bloggers. HE LAUGHS

I save them.

HE LAUGHS

Thanks for joining me in Havana.

Global Eye will be back again next week. Goodbye.