Polished Stone Requiem for The Beard Oliver Stone’s Comandante By Shara Johnston Our most common link is that we all inhabit this same earth, we all breathe the same air, and that we are all mortal. John F. Kennedy The marble of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington reflects whoever is reading the long list on names carved into it – confronting them not only with by the weight of collective loss, but with themselves, the survivors and arguably, beneficiaries of that loss. As a monument, it unites the public state of mourning, with the personal act of memorial, and the even more personal matter of response to the monument. What does a dead man’s name mean to me? What does he mean to the society of survivors that followed? Vietnam, of course, is the most studied and divisive of modern wars – the consensus between the public and the personal views of the value of that war are fragmented and distant from each other. Vietnam was the intimate war – a conflict imagined and remembered in art and culture (in America, that is) primarily for its shattering effects on the individual. Films and novels on Vietnam are deliberately subjective, personal, even monomaniacal. From the flatulence of Apocalypse Now to the coldness of Full Metal Jacket, the soldier’s eye view dominates – a ‘grand sweep’ view of the war – as we see in countless WW2 films – seems impossible to render out of cramped jungle conditions and objectives that, between the rise and fall of three presidents, seemed long obscured. The GI caught up in the events has achieved an iconic status due to these films – the ‘Russian roulette’ game of the Deer Hunter captured this sense of cruel fortune – sparing some, but taking others, leaving none innocent. Oliver Stone was one of those spared, emerging from the war with a Purple Heart and a conscience troubled over his nation’s behaviour. Most specifically through films such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth, he has repeatedly revisited this war, and in directly and more generally, he has examined its beginnings, in JFK, its tail end in Nixon, and in other films, such as Scarface, Natural Born Killers
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and Salvador looked at its more diffuse and long-lasting reverberations. His themes as an artist are also those of Vietnam – the media, the disconnection between appearance and reality, conspiracies of interest, military-industrial complexes, greed and the glorification of criminals. Also permeating his work is a particular phenomenon of those times, almost a ‘living theme’ a survivor, like Stone, of the gigantic US-Soviet chess game, Castro. Fidel is the last of the white, middle class males of his era of significant stature and influence still living. Hitherto, he has been a somewhat ghostly presence in the Stone Canon; a major player in JFK that never really appeared, he also lurked beneath the surface in Salvador and Nixon and inadvertently sent Tony Montana (Scarface) to wreak havoc in Miami. When Stone took to the European circuit in 2003 to promote his documentary on Castro, Comandante, there was arguably a feeling that this film had been long expected. Someone with an eye on Caribbean politics might have said that it was just in time – for how much longer can the great survivor continue? ‘’Don’t you get it? CIA and Mafia together. Trying to whack out The Beard. Mutual interests. They been doing it for years. There’s more to this than you DREAM.’ So Stone has Dave Ferrie say in JFK, referring to various covert plans by Miami-based Cuban exiles to dispose of Castro in the 60s. At a recent anti-free trade conference in Havana, Castro resurrected the spectre of a Washington-Miami plot to kill him, saying ‘I can die a natural death, or I can die a planned death, It really doesn’t matter to me how I die, but I will surely die fighting.’ In his election year, Bushwhacking Castro may be a boon to the current President, for whom Florida, the swing state, was so crucial last time. This, and Stone’s film, emphasise that while Castro’s youth has long gone, and his physical grandeur has diminished into mottle-skinned frailty, his relevance as a living relic of the turbulence of the cold war era is as strong as ever. The point that he is a living relic is also significant for him as a subject of Stone’s camera – JFK, Nixon,The Doors were all explorations of the lives and reputations of the dead. Here,
for the first time, Stone approaches the living – and he is perhaps, just a bit too respectful. Still-living, is perhaps more accurate. The hardening, electionfriendly line of the Bush administration has no doubt contributed to the difficulties experienced by Stone over Comandante; he has been unable to secure a release in the US for a film originally suggested by a Spanish television company, and potential distributor HBO has apparently received direct threats from the State Department. At the Edinburgh Film Festival last August, Stone himself linked this attitude to a mounting campaign by Bush to make Castro his target – and ticket – in 2004. Thus, the Castro we see in this film – indisputably master of his domain, ailing but still alert – is potentially already a thing of the past. The film itself is frustrating. If it illuminates Castro at all, it is more by virtue of showing the way he operates in remaining inscrutable. Fidel asked Stone as a condition that he agree to stop filming on request, then declined to use the veto at all, giving 30 hours of near continuous footage for the filmmakers to use. Much is made of this; but is it not more a demonstration of Castro’s guile than his openness – to threaten and then show mercy? Furthermore, the omissions and selections in this film are consequently, due to the filmmakers, not him, not his regime. Castro is ever the showman – sweeping, beard-first, through crowds of eager citizens at hospitals and schools, with Stone trying (and failing) to avoid being swept up in the fervour himself. Girls smile and tell of the wonderful education system in Cuba, including students from other Latin American countries (where Stone, astutely points out, they have had substantial American ‘help’ and live in greater poverty than the besieged Cubans) who have come to study here. Castro is particularly adept at answering questions – he remains the skilful orator and manipulator of words, funny, charming and when necessary, supremely evasive. He never makes the mistake of actually avoiding a question, and instead, goes on the attack; why is he condemned as a dictator while US Presidents take tea with other totalitarian patriarchs? Or, he revises history, particularly his record against blacks and homosexuals, or he contributes gleefully to the complexity to his own myth – his love for Brigitte Bardot, wearing trainers and his atheism. Castro looks terrible – surprisingly thin, his hands bony and curiously effeminate, his edificial beard scraggy and sparse – but he is in total command of himself and how he will permit Stone to portray him. ‘I am a dictator to myself and a slave to the people.’ We capture Stone’s own raised eyebrow and incredulity, yet Castro, always the centre of attention, has pulled off his stroke, nevertheless ‘I am a prisoner, and this is my cell’. Not that Stone’s questions are particularly strong – at times, he doesn’t so much whack, or even pull the beard as stroke it. His intention was to create a bonhomie that will remove the ‘fourth wall’ between subject and student in order to capture the ‘accidental’ – and revelatory – slips. The trouble is, the delivery of the questions is terrible, and those that
matter most – those about human rights and the cost of a totalitarian regime such as this – he seems ashamed of asking. The evercunning and loquacious Castro chews these up and neatly evades each. He denies there are informers on every street corner. He denies even that his decision to join the Soviet bloc was anything more than a necessary expediency. He isn’t wholly lying but he isn’t telling the full truth either. Yet Stone, a man who has constantly tread and retread the same artistic ground, when given the opportunity, directly, to press for the truth, in the end does not. In the film he does at least have the grace, with a nervous stroke of his moustache, to squirm. In a recent edition of the New Statesman, English PEN’s Joan Smith (who describes Castro as a Stalinist dinosaur) reminds us that in March 2003, as the rest of the world (and the left) was distracted by the Iraq war, Castro arrested and imprisoned 75 activists and dissidents, half of whom included writers, journalists and librarians. They were denounced as spies for the Bush administration and imprisoned for an aggregate 1,454 years in prison. They may, or may not have been spies – a librarian is as good a cover as any, and the history of Cuban espionage is full of surprising agent provocateurs, but Smith is probably right in saying that what these imprisonments amount to is a concerted attempt to deny the possibility of a peaceful, democratic opposition native to Cuba – and thus, the wrath of middle England is duly aroused, when ‘middle-class’ compadres are persecuted. Smith omits to mention evidence that suggests that certain of these unfortunates were linked to Florida-based anti-Castro cells and had been undertaking covert activities against the state. Then again, it is quite possible that Castro – who is, as this film deftly shows despite itself, an extremely cunning operator – deliberately mixed activists with real collaborators in his sweep, so that the whole takes on the American understanding of the ‘curate’s egg’ – good in parts a mere euphemism for thoroughly bad. This understanding of the term seems to be the touchstone for both anti and pro-Castro stances on the country: Activists may demand democracy, but this merely plays into the hands of the Whitehouse and their desire to see a branch of MacDonalds in Havana. Or Cuba may well have a first class healthcare system, excellent education and be far better off than other comparable countries – but when the cars cannot even be driven because there is no
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petrol, what good is that? And so on. Accounts from visitors to Cuba suggest a more ambivalent view from the average Cuban – often critical of the government, wishing sanctions would end, but far from the island of prisoners depicted by Adolfo Fernandez Sainz (one of the 75 imprisoned). For his part, whether a genuine democratic activist, or agent of more sinister ‘mutual interests’, he, like Castro is employing a calculated exaggeration. He hates the current master, but he has learned a lesson from him. Stone himself, dealing with the issue of Castro’s murkier elements in front of a packed audience at Edinburgh, twisted himself into knots of Gordian proportions (luckily, however, his next film is about Alexander the Great …). Stone, within a few breaths of criticising the lack of respect for law and human rights in America (and as the director of Salvador – a film, let’s remember, that documents a native attempt at liberation, brutally prevented by the CIA), stating that in countries such as Cuba, strong men such as Castro are more natural and beneficial to that country. ‘We should not judge them by our standards.’ It’s hard to let Stone get away with this – of course, we cannot judge everything according to Texan standards, as our own Beloved Leader does, but there is this matter of shared and common humanity, and the speciousness (and racism) of claiming that law-abiding, non-totalitarian regimes are limited to the western world. This may be due to clumsiness on his part, for perfecting the balance between sympathy across cultures for fellow human beings and an imperialistic imposition of values upon a country that isn’t ready, or hasn’t asked for them, is not as easy as one might expect. His reluctance to even gently tug the beard may reflect in a nagging question that must have bothered Stone as it has everyone in Cuba – maybe it would be nice not to be dominated by one man, but if he goes, what then? Will Cuba become a sugar bowl for America one more? If Stone fails as a reporter in Comandante, his skill as a filmmaker at his peak is confirmed. The quick juxtapositions, swift editing, mixing of archive and original footage most brilliantly realised in JFK are accomplished here with real panache through both on and offline editing. Archive footage from the revolution flashes up in between shaky camera close-ups of Fidel, semi-agitatedly rubbing his hands as he considers questions, and answers them via the seemingly psychic personal interpreter (a smiling woman in her late 30s who has been with him for many years and is a fervent follower – a true mouthpiece). Just as at the Vietnam monument, the public issue – of Cuba, its history, and what Castro and his cohorts shed blood to build – and the grizzled old man – is a powerful and unsettling experience. Drawn in by the unquestionable magnetism of the Man, we see in black and white reflection what he has affected and effected. We also see who Stone is, not a sycophant or a fool by any means, but a filmmaker trying to use his craft to understand. Stone’s first documentary is most educational as an insight into the difficulties of being a political artist – but in a wider sense, of
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reconciling the individual with those abstract phenomena – ideals, movements, causes, money, in a way that satisfies us. It is an easier thing to do when the subject is dead, rather than dying. That is probably why we could forgive Stone for being seduced by the very male, and cosy atmosphere of his weekend in Cuba. If he is at all gullible, at all credulous – if he fucks up – it is not while having pretended to be impartial. Even when not behind the camera he is an active participant in the mise en scène and is as opinionated as any of the players acting out the drama. This is not a film about Cuba, and certainly not a biopic, but of his feelings about Fidel, how he tries to reconcile the ‘big picture’ and the genial host, and in its quest for intimacy with the subject, markedly American. Crammed into the back of a car (Castro naturally, can get petrol) the director is virtually forced into putting a companionable arm around the dictator as he tried to fit his burly frame into the back seat. But Stone likes to get as close as he can. An atmosphere of confinement and claustrophobia is often employed throughout his oeuvre, where one suspects he is trying to communicate a mental state of being bequeathed by the late 60s, confused and desperate for answers. Many facts, many experiences, almost too much that has been seen – hence the shift from extreme close-ups to newsreel – from Castro’s long fingers to what he has touched. One suspects that Stone doesn’t have any answers for all the searching that he has done – or that if he does, they are strictly provisional. The director has voiced his intention to turn over the raw footage to scholars, showing the same disarming openness to his own partiality as he did in the film script of JFK – where every factoid, and piece of evidence was sourced, explained, and even refuted after it had been included in the film. None of this detracted from his marked success in communicating the one clear and unanswered question of the whole thing – how was this assassination as described in the official record of events possible, when so much common sense is against it (whatever Gavin Esler says)? Lacking a satisfactory answer, Stone offers his own confection – that is as creative as the Warren Report in parts, but at least offers an alternative to the nationally imposed silence. Just as his Vietnam films complicate the monolithic statement of remembrance at Washington. Just as Comandante breaks the silence on who Castro is, although it can’t give an answer. Stone may well offer up curates’ eggs, but he at least has the courage – or brass neck – to fully hand them over for examination. The most telling part of this film – although one which Stone perhaps, did not mean to be – takes place during an official visit Castro is making. Stone struggles through a chattering, noisy throng of Cubans as the dictator breezes through, shaking hands and effortlessly shifting his universe around
him despite the white noise. Stone can barely find his feet often enough to ask questions, but still he tries. What may be the memorial film for Castro’s Cuba, is, as a studium, summative of Stone’s many glorious failures in attempting to frame the truth of the complex historical period that is his own – and our – life.
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