SNEAKING INTO CUBA

Interview with Filmmaker Glenn Gebhard.

By: Eric Jensen

Well I did a lot of things. I started off with television. I was an editor and I did some reality shows. It wasn’t really ‘reality’ in those days, it was more like, kinda, “news shows.” I wrote screenplays for low-budget features. I worked for Warren Miller and did ski films. I edited ski films for a number of years. I did one horror film in Mexico, Blood Screams. I did two other feature films. One was called One Last Run, the other was Desert Steel. But I mainly did non-fiction films. That’s what I’ve mainly done throughout my career. A lot of different types of documentaries, but I’d say many have been Cuba

Gebhard is an award-winning producer/director and a Professor of Film and Television production at Loyola Marymount University. Since the early 1990s he has made over a dozen trips to Cuba, resulting in over 10 documentaries centered around the country. Only two films were made with the knowledge or permission from the Cuban government. His latest film, Cuba: A Forgotten Revolution, tells the largely forgotten stories of Frank Pais and Jose Antonio Echeverria, two young men instrumental in breaking the Batista regime’s hold on Cuba in the 1950s and in paving the way for Fidel Castro to gain power. Over his career he has made both feature and documentary films, and edited ski films and television specials.

you directed a lot of horror and “speed” films. What was that like?

related since the early ‘90s. I mean, I’d say half of them have been Cuba related.

I lived in Mexico so I had an affinity for Latin America. I had lived in Mexico for one or two years, because back when I was first starting I edited a Mexican feature. That’s where I got the idea to do Blood Screams. But I always wanted to visit a socialist country, and just when I was getting ready to go to the Soviet Union, it wasn’t a socialist country anymore. That was 1989. So this friend of mine, he was an emergency room physician, he and I went to Cuba in 1994. And we

Q. What was the impetus behind turning your attention towards Cuba?

snuck in. You’re not supposed to go to Cuba, right? I mean it’s illegal to go to Cuba. So we went in through Mexico, and we were all scared; we didn’t know what it was going to be like, we were doing something illegal. But it was great, and I had a little camera with me, and I shot a bunch of stuff. I didn’t know I was making a film, and I came back to Los Angeles and I edited

All the films except for two of them were done illegally.

it, and it actually got distribution in the educational film market. It became the first of a series called Cuba at a Crossroads, which was a four part series that I shot in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2000. So that kind of started the process, and I made a PBS film in 1997 called Crossing Borders: A Cuban Returns. And I did an Outdoor Life Network show [in Cuba], it was kind of a collegetype show, that I started around 2007, 2008. The film that I’m just finishing — it’s taking years to finish — is kind of a deconstruction of the Cuban revolution.

about what I wanted to do, and just sort of went after it. And we shot another thing for PBS where we just brought a camera and did it. Because of those films, I got hired by the New York Times to do a film called Dreaming a New Cuba. And, you know, they hired me because they didn’t have a permit to shoot it. So I went down with a camera person, and she and I shot, but I was the producer, and they (the New York Times) said, “If you get caught, we don’t know you.” It was kinda like the CIA. Of course, in those days we were shooting tape, so I’d come back to my little room and clone the tapes, and hide the tapes. It was a wild shoot. I had all these hundred dollar bills stuffed in my clothes, because that’s the money they gave me. At the very end of the shoot, I did get caught, and I got dragged into the office of the Interior Ministry Police. But I had gotten all the tapes out, because I had a premonition, and I met a guy about a day before and said, “Can you take these tapes out?” And I gave him some money. So he took them out and the film got aired.

it so important to get not only an accurate portrayal, but an authentic portrayal of the revolution?

That’s an interesting question, because I’ve thought about it a lot. You know when you read history — or when you write history, I should say — when one writes history or makes a documentary,

Q. As you alluded to, it’s a process for Americans to even be allowed to go to Cuba in the first place. What was the most difficult part of shooting a documentary in a socialist state?

Well, that’s a whole other thing. The first series I made back in the 1990s, Cuba at a Crossroads, I just brought a camera and shot a whole bunch of stuff. I had ideas

All the films except for two of them were done illegally, from the Cuban point of view. Just sneaking around. And the only way you can do that is just to use small cameras, and you don’t have big crews, and you just sort of go down there and do it. And if anybody catches you, you’re just a tourist shooting shots.

Q. You gave a lecture in Germany a few years back where you talked about “visualizing history as memory,” and asking “what is history, through the people who actually fought in the revolution?” Why was

I think you have to consider the fact that history is not just information. History is information, which is the mega story, you know the big story. But it’s also the little stories. It’s the emotions. Emotions are history too. It’s how people felt, what people did on the streets, et cetera. Primary information. So what I wanted to do with this new film is give you a little bit of both. A contextualization of history: an idea of what it was like on the ground for the people who were dealing with this, which was the people that participated in this history. I think about this a lot. For instance, you can say, “George Washington went across the Delaware River.”

But what was it like for one of the guys he was with? What’s his story? How did he feel about it? So I think history is a combination of the big story and the little story, of information and emotion.

And I think these other two guys are almost disregarded, but they were just as important in winning the war. They just both happened to die, so they couldn’t really write their own place in history. So I think the film speaks to how history is written, and how it’s related to us. The facts are: Castro

by the student movement. There came a point when Batista just disintegrated, and that’s when Fidel came down and took over. So I guess the biggest misconception is that the revolution was won by one group of guys, that it was a “Sierra-centric” revolution. It’s part of the truth, they were there, but they were considered a symbolic army to a lot of people. Nobody ever thought they were going to beat Batista militarily, that’s inconceivable. That’s how history paints it, but it’s not really the truth. The whole truth is something else.

Q. Your earlier Cuba documentaries focused largely on the post-USSR situation and on the disconnect between modern pro-Castro and anti-Castro perspectives. Why turn your attention towards the revolution’s history for Cuba: A Forgotten Revolution?

I knew they had been watching me.

landed in a boat, he fought Batista and went off into the mountains. But there’s a lot of truth too, and that has to be interpreted, you know, what that means.

It was just a different film. Previously I was focusing on the extant reality on the ground. I was dealing with history in a sense, but more how history affects the present day. But in the new film — the film ends in 1959. It ends when Castro comes into Cuba. So it’s about who really formed the revolution. I think the film speaks a lot more than just to Castro and the Cuban Revolution, I think it speaks to who’s writing history. And again, what is history? Facts and truth. For instance, the fact is that the American tbroops invaded Normandy, right? The truth is, from our point of view, they were liberating Europe, and the Nazis were really bad, and if they didn’t do this the world would’ve gone back to the dark ages. That’s our truth. But what if the Nazis had won the war? Eisenhower would be demonized, Roosevelt too, et cetera, et cetera. That would’ve been the truth. If you look at Cuba, if Castro would’ve lost, if Batista would’ve won, Castro would have been abandoned. But instead he became a hero, mainly because the history was written after 1959.

Q. In the same film you juxtapose clips from old U.S. news reels with pictures and memories from the private collections of those who fought. What, in your opinion, is the biggest misconception most Americans have about Cuba and the situation there?

Q. The student involvement in the Cuban revolution shown in the film reminded me somewhat of what would happen in the U.S. a decade later. You lived through a lot of that, did you see any parallels while you were making the film?

Well the biggest misconception is that the revolution was won by Castro and Che Guevara and a small group of guys with beards up in the mountains who originally landed [in Cuba] with only 82 guys. As the story goes, they landed, and then after a week there were only 20 of them left, and two years later they marched into Havana and took over. They beat Batista, who had an army, by the way, of 30,000 men.

The thing about the 1960s is a lot of it had to do with the Vietnam War and the draft. The war was one thing, but the Vietnam War in combination with the draft was what caused the upheaval in the 1960s. And I believe it was mostly middle-class guys, including me, who just didn’t want to go into the army, and didn’t want to fight in a war. And so what’s the alternative? If you don’t want to fight in the war, you fight against the war.

But in Cuba, it was really fought by guys [in their early 20s and younger]. That’s who was fighting the revolution. It wasn’t people like me, it was people 17 to 25. Castro himself was only 33; he was a [relatively] old guy when he came to power. Frank Pais, one of my characters, was killed when he was 22, and he was the head

Castro’s forces never had more than 300. How does a group of 300 guys beat an army of 30,000 to 40,000? It doesn’t happen. What really happened is that Batista’s authority was eroded in the cities, in the plains, by the underground,

of the whole underground in the whole country. I think that there was a different feeling, because number one, Batista was genuinely, genuinely hated, as were regimes that were before him. They were just sick of it, and people were fed up, and there was a lot of support for a revolution. And that’s one of the reasons why they won, not because of a bunch of guys up in the mountains.

that time I thought, “I better get rid of all the evidence,” you know, about the New York Times. So I took out my wallet and took out the phone numbers, business cards and everything and started eating them. I didn’t have any water, so I’m chewing on these business cards trying to get rid of the evidence. So eventually they called me back in. I had to sign a paper saying I had been bad and I wouldn’t do it again and all that. They drove me back home. And I used to live in Mexico, and in Mexico you get used to paying guys off. So I gave one of the guys a hundred dollar bill, and he just shook his head. You don’t pay off Interior Police guys. They took the tapes but I had gotten the cloned tapes out, so the show aired and I was happy about it.

I better get rid of all the evidence.

Q. Lastly, any crazy stories you can share from your time in Cuba? Sounds like getting arrested could be one.

Can you take these tapes out?

I got taken into the Interior Ministry. I didn’t know what to do, so I had to go in. And remember I had been cloning tapes at night and hiding them. They took me to a room, three guys. You know good cop, bad cop, and a translator. I speak pretty good Spanish but I feigned not speaking any. They asked, “Who am I? Where had I been? What was I doing?” I couldn’t mention anything about the New York Times, [who were funding the documentary].

So I said, “I’m a professor.” And they said, “So where have you been?” I said, “I’ve been here, here, here, here, and here.” They said, “Well, you’ve also been here,” so I knew they had been watching me. But anyway, they had me wait out in this courtyard for a bit. It was December but it was really hot. I waited for about an hour, and in