As we left the theater and walked out to our car parked outside the Mall of the Americas in Miami Saturday night, I tried to gather the words that could somehow describe what I was thinking and feeling about the movie we had just seen, ”The Lost City,” Andy Garcia’s tribute to love, family and Cuba.
I felt as if I was about to burst, with sadness and anger over what happened to Cuba and its people more than 47 years ago, and praise for the brilliant way Garcia portrayed it all.
So as my eyes glistened with tears and my ears continued to ring with the applause that greeted the closing credits, I remained silent. The words that could somehow describe the experience of seeing on the screen your life story — or better put, the life story of your parents and grandparents — were escaping me.
Then, my wife, Marie, asked, “Well, what did you think?”
Quietly, almost in a whisper, I answered:
“Son-of-a-bitch, fucking communists.”
Marie then offered a more reasoned perspective.
If not for the events portrayed so powerfully in the film — the triumph of tyranny and the refusal of many Cubans to submit to it — my parents, who lived on opposite ends of the island, never would have come to America, they would not have met and I would not have been born. And the many good things that American freedom and opportunity have allowed my family never would have happened.
But still, “Son-of-a-bitch, fucking communists.”
Despite the strong emotions that the film evoked in me and the rest of the people sitting in the theater — if possible, you need to watch this movie in Miami so you can fully understand its importance to Cuban Americans — “The Lost City” is not a piece of agitprop that distorts the historical record or otherwise manipulates the audience. It is not just an anti-Castro or anti-communist screed.
Not that there would be anything wrong with that.
Garcia has an obvious point of view, but he does not spare the audience the cruelties of the Batista dictatorship and its own betrayals of Cuba. For Garcia, and for most freedom-loving Cubans, Batista is no more the answer to what the nation needs than the communists who come later. The hatred you feel when watching Batista's goons torture a suspected rebel is no less than what you feel later when you watch Ché Guevara walk out of the high grass to greet his next victim.
“The Lost City” is a work of a fiction, but just because it may not have happened exactly like Garcia portrays it, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.
What Garcia succeeded in capturing was how the revolution tore Cuba, and its families, in so many different directions. Like Fico Fellove (Garcia) and his family, my family had to decide what they would do in the face of evidence that Fidel Castro would not deliver on his promises of democracy.
On the night of Dec. 31, 1958, soon after hearing that President Fulgencio Batista had left the country, my grandfather and his brothers had to make a choice. For my great-uncle, Rolando Masferrer, it was a no-brainer. As a senator and comandante of the paramilitary Los Tigres, he was an archenemy of Castro’s. His brothers Kiki and Raimundo, my grandfather,also had to leave.
(In one chilling sequence in the movie, Garcia injects actual film footage of the execution by one of Guevara’s firing squads of the Masferrers’ cousin, Cornelio Rojas, who was the police chief in Santa Clara.)
What about the rest of the family?
My father was at the marina as my grandfather and his brothers prepared to make their way to Key West on Rolando’s old U.S. Navy PT boat. Rolando asked if my father was coming along. My grandfather said no, he would have to stay to take care of his mother and sister.
They eventually made it to America, ironically, by first going through Venezuela, whose dictator-in-training Hugo Chavez today is propping up the Castro dictatorship.
My mother’s family was similarly divided.
Maria de Lourdes Godinez was the second-oldest of 10 children, and the eldest of five daughters, in an upper-middle class family. Once my grandparents decided they would be leaving, they sent their children to America in pairs. My mother and the next-oldest daughter, my aunt Ana, ended up at a Catholic orphanage on Staten Island, N.Y., where they lived for several months until the rest of the family could depart.
My mother has a story that could have very well been a scene out of “The Lost City.”
Once Castro’s police knew that someone was planning to leave the country, soldiers would come to your house and seize it on behalf of the people, or other such nonsense.
Like clockwork, the soldiers arrived just before my mother left. However, the night before, her uncle Carlos, who was involved in the anti-Castro underground, had dropped off some guns for safekeeping. If the soldiers found them, there would be big trouble, so while my grandmother stalled then, my mother took the guns and hid some of them in the bushes and threw the rest over a fence.
Another “true fact” depicted in “The Lost City” is the brutally unflattering — but in the end entirely accurate — portrayal of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara. Garcia gave us not the Che who rode motorcycles but the Ché who ran Castro’s execution chambers in the weeks and months after they seized power. Sometimes, Ché personally dispatched his victims with a shot from his .45-caliber pistol — all in the name of a “revolution,” of course, where the end justifies the means.
Ché succeeds in seducing Fico’s brother and eventually his lover, too, with his charm and his rhetoric. But from the beginning, Fico is on to Ché, Castro and the rest of their lot. He sees what they are doing, and planning to do, to Cuba, and he won’t be a part of it. So he leaves his lost city before he loses his soul.
“Son-of-a-bitch, fucking communists.”
“The Lost City” tells a powerful story that should ring true not only for Cubans and Cuban Americans, but for anyone never willing to sacrifice their family or their freedom.
But it is not a perfect film. Far from it.
Some scenes were out of focus; in others, the colors seemed off.
Also, Garcia, who worked for some 20 years to bring “The Lost City” to the screen, may have been too close to the story to tell it the way it deserved to be told. He wanted to show it all, when what was needed was an editor willing to sacrifice parts for the good of the whole.
That would have been easy to accomplish.
Cut some of Bill Murray’s scenes.
Cut out both of Dustin Hoffman’s scenes.
Cut out a couple of the numerous musical interludes.
They could have made way for more development of some of the key characters, so the audience could better understand their differing perspectives on what was happening on the island.
For instance, what was going through Batista’s mind as his dictatorship collapsed?
Some of the other male characters — especially Fico; his brothers Ricardo and Luis; their father and uncle; and Che Guevara — were well developed and well played by the actors.
(I know it’s early and I doubt Hollywood will give “The Lost City” this kind of acknowledgment, but let me suggest Oscar nominations might be in order for Tomás Milian, who plays the family patriarch; Enrique Murciano, who plays the tragically doomed brother Ricardo; and Jsu Garcia, for his portrayal of Ché.)
The women of the Fellove family were not as well treated. I wanted to know why Aurora, who fell in love with Fico after her husband, Luis, was killed after a failed raid on Batista’s palace, allowed herself to be seduced by Ché, Fidel and their revolution. I wanted to understand how the woman, despite having Fico’s love and hearing his warnings, could be so dumb and ignorant.
In the end, Aurora is not just a character, but Cuba herself. She wanted a better, freer life, and in the search for her lost city, and in her grief, she was seduced by the empty promises of the revolution.
Just like Cuba.
Just like so many fools in the world today.
Forty-seven years later, I guess we are still trying to figure out how it happened.
And how Cuba and its people can once again re-discover their lost city.
To read more about Andy Garcia and what motivated him to make "The Lost City," read here and here.
For a list of theaters where the movie is currently showing, and where it will premier in the coming weeks, go here.
Recent Comments