By now, we’ve all heard a variation on the saying “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Or the famous quote: “We are all villains in someone else’s story,” by Thanos Antoniou.
But what if we turn that around? What if we say the villains in our story are the heroes in someone else’s?
The intriguing new documentary, “Castro’s Spies” is miraculously able to take a child of the Cold War (and a military brat to boot) and convincingly show me the story of the Cuban Five through the looking glass.
I never knew that there were what would be considered terroristic attacks on the country of Cuba in the 60s and 70s. Mainly by Cuban exile groups based in Miami and strong suggestions of CIA knowledge, if not outright complicity.
Cuban guys around my age – those whose parents were poor and didn’t resist the Revolution (indeed, may have welcomed it) felt a strong sense of nationalism. One of the most popular TV shows of the time was about Cuban intelligence officers fighting against their own “villains.” Yep, we Americans were the bad guys to them, just as they were the bad guys to us.
The film introduces us in the present day to the guys who made up the elite group of Cuban spies sent undercover to the US in the 1990s. Despite the film’s title, Castro is only seen briefly in newsreel clips – this is the story of how young ideologues went through long and intensive training, before eventually making their way onto American soil. One of the guys, a pilot, steals a small plane from an airport to fly from Cuba to the Keys in a particularly harrowing part of the story.
All of the guys are charismatic, articulate and obviously were perfect for the jobs of pretending to be someone else, keeping their secrets from even their spouses and children. As I say, it’s interesting to hear the story told from their side of the fence- their mission, in their minds was to protect their homeland.
Directors Ollie Aslin and Gary Lennon make use of never seen before footage from the Cuban Film Institute’s archive to augment the first-hand accounts of the former spies.
All things considered, the doc goes fairly light on the politics, but offers context of how Havana went from a place of poker and prostitutes run by the American mob, to the ramshackle policies of a Communist dictator.
Most of us know the historical heroes and villains, but few of us have ever given much though to the ordinary citizens of the island country. Some risked their lives to escape, some died trying, but others grew up and watched TV spy shows, just like us.
And some of those were the heroes in their home countries, even as they were villains in ours.
Castro’s Spies is now in limited theatrical release and also available to stream On Demand.
