Korean-American filmmaker Joseph Juhn visited Cuba during the Obama White House lifting of US restrictions against the communist stronghold and was amazed that his first taxi driver was also Korean. This led to a meeting with the cabby's family and a revelation of the substantial Korean-Cuban population, descendants of Koreans who fled their homeland in 1905 following a brutal Japanese occupation. The refugees were lured to Hawaii and Mexico with promises of better lives, but in Cuba, they found an existence that evolved beyond glorified slave labor.
Out of this Korean diaspora rose the notable figure of Joseph Juhn's driver's father, Lim Eun Jo, AKA Jeronimo (pronounced with a soft 'J') Lim, who lived from 1926 to 2006. One of nine children, he broke barriers as a pioneering Korean college student in the west (studying law at Havana University), had a storybook romance with fellow Cuban-Korean Cristina, and rose to prominence in Fidel Castro's revolution against the Battista regime.
As a chief in the Revolutionary National Police and later in the Ministry of Industry, Jeronimo maintained close ties to Fidel and Che, but to his chagrin could not establish an agency on behalf of Korean Cubans (the North Korean comrades evidently disapproved and thwarted the effort). After the fall of Soviet communism and the "special period" of economic malaise, poor harvests, and deprivation that ensued, Jeronimo apparently lost his zeal for Marx and the Party...or did he?
Much of the latter part of the film is devoted to the late Jeronimo's surviving relatives and long-distance associates back in South Korea deciphering his statements and letters to prove that he either was a faithful revolutionary Leninist and atheist to the end or remained secretly a follower of the Korean Cheondogyo church or at least sought Jesus in one furtive form or another. These and other digressions (a discussion with a Jewish rabbi on the meaning of diaspora) tend to pad out the narrative; easily 15 minutes or so could have been trimmed.
But Juhn does a fine job personalizing the material, relating Jeronimo's saga with the search for identity and homeland that haunts Korean émigrés (said to number eight million worldwide) from the divided peninsula to this day. At the same time, the influence of Korean culture on the embattled island of Cuba remains a largely untold story, making this title fill a particular niche on shelves devoted to both Asian and Latin-American studies. Recommended. Aud: C, P