Cuba Va: The Challenge Of the Next Generation; Miami-Havana

Forget the cigar-chewing graybeard in military fatigues. If you want real insights into Cuba's future, look instead to the political and social discussions and debates taking place daily in parks, student apartments, and outdoor discotecas among Cuba's next generation. Cuba Va provides a fascinating and balanced look at the hearts and minds of Cuba's post revolutionary baby boomers, a generation that seems to reflect in equal parts both continuing zeal for and growing disillusionment with Castro's socialist revolution. Shot in bright, cleanly edited video, Cuba Va lets us eavesdrop on a passionate and surprisingly erudite discourse regarding the social and political impact of the revolution; the state of human rights; the worsening, embargo-based economic crisis; and imperatives for Cuba's future. El Jefe Supremo himself also comes under scrutiny, with opinions ranging from the reverent to a kind of guarded, heretical disdain. Regardless of the ideological stand, however, we get the overriding sense that this is a generation which in many fundamental ways bears only a passing resemblance to that of its parents. It's a culture raised as much on rock and roll as on Marxist rhetoric; one that, in the words of one student, dresses, dances, and debates differently than a generation earlier. A nifty video. Highly recommended for any library collecting materials on present-day Cuba.Current events often conspire to give new cogency to a film or video. Such is the case with Miami-Havana. Bill Clinton's reversal of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act in August 1994 basically shut the door which had previously been left widely opened to Cuban refugees since the early days of the Castro regime. Clinton's actions were ostensibly a reaction to Castro's lifting sanctions against asylum seekers leaving Cuba by boat--a desire to staunch a new mass influx of refugees into Miami. The nightly news has been full of sight-bites showing refugees being rounded up and sent to holding camps in Guantanamo. What the headlines do not show of this affair, however, are the individual lives caught in the insidious undertow of international politics. Miami-Havana focuses on the lives of an earlier wave of Cuban refugees. Between 1959 and the end of the massive sealift of refugees from the port of Mariel in 1980, nearly 900,000 Cubans fled the country. In 1992, one out of every 10 native Cubans resided in the United States, the majority of these in Miami. This is a video about families and dreams torn apart in the wake of that exodus, and frozen in the big 30-year chill between the U.S. and Cuba. Miami-Havana reveals both the hopes and disillusionments of those leaving and those staying behind. It provides a superb view of a politically and culturally volatile and complex community attempting to at once reinvent itself and retain ties to the past in a strange land. This is a simply shot and understated documentary which manages to pack a great deal of often heart-wrenching emotion into an hour's viewing. An extremely useful video for putting human faces on current affairs. Highly recommended. (G. Handman)