Cubaverdad

Shoot Down Over Cuba

A bold new documentary calls Castro to task for senseless murders

Michael C. Moynihan | January 29, 2008

In June 2000, this magazine published a cover story on Hollywood's"missing movies." These were not, alas, films that had been neglected byinattentive archivists or spurned by Ted Turner's guardians of classicfilm. The target of this search-and-rescue operation, wrote criticKenneth Lloyd Billingsley, were those tales of injustice, those triumphsof the spirit that Hollywood had little interest in producing. Longunder the spell of radical writers such as Dalton Trumbo and CliffordOdets, Hollywood was "a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of theSandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet orEastern European dissident."

Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the entertainmentindustry is still sensitive to charges of Cold War jingoism, though thespread of hipster Buddhism has necessitated the occasional dramatizationof China's occupation of Tibet. A spate of recent films—none of themproduced in Hollywood—is also providing a more nuanced picture of theCold War, one that eschews simple moral equivalence in favor of thedystopian reality of the Eastern Bloc.

This past year saw the release of The Singing Revolution, a rivetingdocumentary detailing the little-known story of Estonia's non-violentresistance to Soviet occupation; the German political drama The Lives ofOthers, a deeply affecting portrait of the Zamyatinian nightmare thatwas East Germany; and Katyn, a dramatic recapitulation of the massmurder of 20,000 Polish officers shortly after the country's partitionunder conditions set by the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. (Eightyears ago, Billingsley wondered presciently why the story of the Katynmassacre never made it to the big screen.)

Even Hollywood's strange love affair with the Cuban revolution, recentlyevidenced by Oliver Stone's Comandante and Walter Salles' saccharinesalute to Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, is at long last showingsigns of abating. A few years ago, New York painter/director JulianSchnabel memorably upbraided Castro in his film Before Night Falls, aportrait of the gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, imprisoned by the communistgovernment for both his aberrant politics and sexuality.

Now, from first-time director Cristina Khuly, comes Shoot Down, abrilliantly rendered and scrupulously even-handed documentary revisitingthe 1996 Cuban downing of two civilian planes over international waters,both piloted by Miami-based exiles from the group Brothers to theRescue. Khuly, a 37-year-old sculptor, is the niece of shoot-down victimArmando Alejandre Jr.

An event soon overshadowed by the saga of Elian Gonzales, the attack onthe unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes is now largely forgottenoutside Miami. And despite the smokescreen of misinformation presentedby Castro and his foreign enablers, the facts of the story are ratherstraightforward and grimly characteristic of a totalitarian regime.

As three Brothers to the Rescue planes approached Cuban territory, thelead plane, piloted by the group's founder Jose Basulto, brieflybreached Cuban airspace. While the planes were searching for refugees inthe water, officials in Havana, tipped off by a mole in the Brothersleadership, scrambled Soviet-made MiG fighter planes to knock the planesout of the sky. Basulto's plane managed to escape. When the other twowere vaporized by Cuban missiles, both were flying over internationalwaters.

The mole, former Cuban Air Force MiG pilot Juan Pablo Roque, is achilling reminder of the Stasi-like tactics of the Cuban secret police.Roque infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue by insinuating himself into theexile community—going so far as to write a book for the Cuban AmericanNational Foundation detailing his escape from the island—and marrying alocal woman as cover. The day before the deadly flight, Roque declinedan invitation to participate in the mission and informed his wife thathe would be away on business. A day later, he reappeared on Cuban statetelevision to denounce the Brothers as "terrorists" of the empire.

It is perhaps unintentional, but Shoot Down reasserts the controversyand complexity of the Clinton years, often obscured in hindsight by thesalaciousness of the Lewinsky scandal and the failures of the Bushpresidency. From our vantage point, it's easy to forget that Clintonsanctioned the liberal use of heavily militarized federal agents at RubyRidge, Waco, and during the seizure of Elian Gonzales from a Floridaresidence. He also reversed a 30-year old American policy treating thosefleeing Cuba as political refugees.

It was this change, we learn, that precipitated Brothers to the Rescue'sshift from search-and-rescue operations in the Florida Straits to directconfrontation with the Castro regime. (Prior to the shoot down, Brothersdropped pro-democracy leaflets from within Cuban airspace, to be carriedby the wind to shore.) Under pressure from Castro, the Clintonadministration revised the 1966 Cuban Adjustment act, reclassifyingthose fleeing Cuba from political refugees to illegal immigrants worthyof repatriation—unless they managed to reach American shores. This wasthe birth of the "wet foot-dry foot" policy, under which individualswould be returned to Cuba if picked up at sea. This was also the deathof Brothers to the Rescue's previously cordial relationship with U.S.authorities.

The Clinton administration's response to the shoot-down crisis, hotlyargued by the documentary's on-screen surrogates, is found by all to bedeficient. That leaves viewer wondering what, short of sending F-16s onsorties over Havana, the appropriate response to such hostile actsshould have been. It is clear, though, that, as Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart(R-Fla.) argues in the film, had such an event been perpetrated by theapartheid government of South Africa or Pinochet's Chile, the level ofpublic outrage surely would have been greater.

But arguments like those of Diaz-Balart aren't offered in isolation.Shoot Down strives not to be seen as a "Miami exile" film, leading Khulyto explore—and subtly reject—the Castroite perspective. The strenuousattempt at balance is, at times, irksome. One wonders if the inclusionof Castro hagiographer Saul Landau, who signed a recent editorial on theCuban revolution with the exclamation "Viva Fidel!," adds anything tothe story, other than to act as another layer of insulation againstcharges of bias.

But this is a minor quibble. Unctuous fellow-travelers such as Landau(who sheepishly confesses to the camera that Cuba's judicial system is"less than perfect") will convince no one that destroying civilianplanes was necessary for the revolution's survival.

Almost a decade ago in reason, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley rightlybemoaned the film industry's lack of interest in arguably the 20thcentury's greatest tragedy: the stubborn adherence of politicians,artists, and intellectuals to the dogma of Marxism-Leninism. The recentcrop of films promises, however belatedly, to begin the process ofcorrection.

Currently in limited release, Shoot Down by itself will not redraw theimage of Castro-as-beneficent-leader—Michael Moore's paean to Cubanhealth care was just nominated for an Oscar, after all. But every littlebit helps.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

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