All language subtitles for Global.Eye.S2025E05.1080p.iP.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-HiNGS_track3_[eng]

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.