FIDEL & OLIVER, CONT'D
The great Glenn Garvin, surely the only TV reviewer who's been detained by Castro's police (admittedly in another incarnation, as a foreign correspondent), takes on the Oliver & Fidel show with his usual combination of wit and telling detail:
Having revived the Western with Deadwood and the gangster genre with The Sopranos, HBO is taking on science fiction/fantasy. Looking For Fidel, Oliver Stone's latest round of pattycake with Fidel Castro, resembles nothing so much as one of those old the-land-that-time-forgot movies, with a couple of lumbering stop-action dinosaurs wrestling harmlessly in front of a crowd of natives that's trying hard not to look bored while it waits for evolution to take its course....
Stone occasionally prods Castro with an uncomfortable question about free speech or secret trials. But followups are non-existent, and mostly Stone allows the dictator to stage his own little set pieces for the cameras. In one, Castro generously meets with some accused hijackers, who with straight faces say 30 years in prison would be a generous sentence.
In another, he walks among adoring throngs of Cubans, whose burbling praise for the Revolution was so wildly delusional (they claim, among other things, that Cuba is the only country in the world where blacks are permitted to own businesses) that I had to wonder if they weren't a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the documentary.
At times, it's hard to tell who is less lucid, Stone or Castro.
Stone, halting and distracted, seems to be reciting a list he learned 20 years ago as he ticks off the Latin American countries supposedly less democratic than Cuba -- including Brazil and Chile, both now governed by socialists.
Castro, meanwhile, suffers through some seriously senior moments. What are we to make of this impromptu little speech? "Today, with a computer and a dozen compact disks, you can hold all the literature ever written," he tells Stone. "So many things have changed. I do not know why the world has been making so much progress to end up in this. I am so sorry for the younger generation."...
The Dallas Morning News, by contrast, has an article by the Cuba bureau's Tracey Eaton that is so puffy that I have to wonder whether the editors appear to have been too embarrassed to put it on the DMN website. The headline pretty much sums it up: "Stone puts tough questions to Castro for documentary." I guess articles like that are why the DMN gets to have a Cuba bureau.
Update: The DMN story is finally online.