Che: Part One

2008 Director Steven Soderbergh

This is Soderbergh's epic account of the legendary Argentine revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Filmed in two parts this portion deals with the Cuban episode.

The first part opens with Che meeting Fidel in Mexico City in 1955 and joining the small invasion party that established a base in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. It ends in January 1959 when the 30-year-old Che, cautioning against triumphalism and forbidding his men to indulge in looting, heads towards Havana to begin what he considers the really important part of the revolution, creating a new kind of society.

It's an intelligent, fast-moving, well-researched film, based in part on Che's posthumously published Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, offering both a convincing account of the bitter, hard-fought struggle and a portrait of a great and complex revolutionary. He was first valued for his medical skills, but soon became such an essential adviser that Fidel tried to keep him out of harm's way. Benicio Del Toro gives a masterful performance of Che establishing him as an actor of considerable skills.

I Am Cuba

1964 Director Mikhail Kalatozov

This is an unabashed exercise in cinema stylistics. I Am Cuba is communist rhetoric dressed up in the finest clothes. The film's four dramatic stories take place in the final days of the Batista regime. The first two illustrate the ills that led to the revolution, the last two the call to arms which cut across the social and economic lines.

A lovely young woman in a nightclub frequented by crass American businessmen takes a customer to her modest shack for a night of pleasure for pay, only to be found out by her street vendor suitor. A tenant farmer is told that his crop has been sold to United Fruit and in frustration burns his fields. A middle-class student rallies his pals and workers in a street demonstration against the regime with dire consequences. A peasant eking out a living in the mountains quickly converts to the cause when Batista bombers strafe his land in search of rebel fighters.

Mikhail Kalazatov turned his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, loose and the result is a procession of dazzling black-and-white images, shot with a camera that is almost always moving and soaring over the sugar fields, swooping in and out of urban buildings, following characters down narrow streets.  The long tracking shots at time defy possibility as the camera moves from track to hand to hand to pulley to dolly so smoothly that one wonders how the shot was accomplished

Having given Kalatozov free reign in making the film the Soviet regime immediately shelved it as being too controversial. Finally in 1995, through the auspices of filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese I Am Cuba got a belated release and has proved to be both a time capsule of a fading political movement and a timeless work of cinematic art.