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"Conducta impropia" is the catch-all justification for the persecution of "intellectuals, artists and faggots" in Castro's Cuba, nearly thirty exiles face the camera and remember. Footage of the 1966 defection of members of the National Ballet Company in Paris introduces an early crack in the image of the Revolution, which is variously described as indoctrination, medicine, catechism and internment, the prostitution of the body politic and a dolorous betrayal. From New York, Madrid and Paris, witnesses recall forced work camps, arrests over vague accusations of "extravagance," and "moral purges" which led to an exodus of ten percent of the population. (Refugees cram into embassies for protection and get heckled and spat on, the official story screens on Miami TV stations: "They're like wild animals! To think we'd see something like this in our country.") Reinaldo Arenas was a distinguished playwright elsewhere in the world and "a non-person" in his own land, Caracol the transvestite burlesque queen evokes a time when plucked eyebrows could land people in jail. Susan Sontag posits homosexuality as an affront to Fidel's macho façade and contemplates the Left's need to evolve, while Armando Valladares more bluntly laments "how much the Revolution has changed." Anger, disillusionment and the Cuban gift for wry mockery are amply evident, with Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal building to the image of the displaced poet at a children's puppet show, and the weary eloquence of one of the former associates: "Tengo memoria, pero no tengo odio." With Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Heberto Padilla, Juan Goytisolo, Ana María Simo, Carlos Franqui, Martha Frayde, and René Ariza.
--- Fernando F. Croce |