RSS FeedCUBA: A PERSONAL JOURNEY
Sunday, August 12th, 1984Cuba: A Personal Journey Press Review
Exile Returns to Cuba in ‘A Personal Journey’
LOS ANGELES TIMES, August 4, 1984
by Lee Margulies
The most interesting thing about “Cuba - A Personal Journey,” a documentary airing at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28, is that it’s not more interesting.
In other words, the way this film got made says much about Cuba today as anything in the film. That it’s somewhat dry and features a decidedly pro-Castro cast of interview subjects is a reflection of the controls the government placed on producer-director Hector Galán.
The program is a chronicle of a 15-day trip to Cuba last year by exile Antonio Guernica, who had not been back since he and his parents fled the Castro regime for the United States in 1961. Now 32 and a writer and broadcaster, he narrates the film and is seen visiting his hometown, Santiago de Cuba, where he encounters a cousin and looks in on his old school. Later he interviews government officials in Havana.
As part of the broadcast, Guernica reports that it took nearly a year to get approval for a film crew to accompany him on his trip, and then only with the provision that he be accompanied at every step by government representatives to monitor what was being filmed and select who could be interviewed.
Only once, Guernica says, did they venture out without their Cuban hosts - to pay a call on an old friend of his father’s. And then a “neighborhood watch” group called the police to report their “suspicious” activity. Guernica said he was told there is such a group on every block.
“Cuba - A Personal Journey” is neither overly dramatic nor compellingly eloquent, but in its own quiet way it makes very clear why Guernica says he came away with “a new understanding of what it means to be free.”
The documentary was produced for public television by La Raza Production Center Inc., a Washington-based subsidiary of the National Council of La Raza. It is the first of a series of programs about Latinos that the organization plans to produce under the umbrella title “Hispanus.”
