GFF 2021: Castro’s Spies
Compelling doc following the Cuban Five, a group of undercover agents who lived in Florida in the 1990s gathering intel for Castro
One of the most important battlegrounds in today’s culture wars is how willing we are to re-examine the past. To ask, often via well-travelled Mitchell and Webb memes, who the bad guys really were. And for those of us who are millennial or younger, who likely inherited caricature images of Fidel Castro as a cigar-chomping despot, films like Castro’s Spies provide a vital service.
Ollie Aslin and Gary Lennon’s film traces the journey of the five Cuban agents who took on false identities and travelled to Miami. Heading to the States alone and unarmed, the agents’ goal was simply to gather information – creating an early-warning system for future terrorist attacks or even the full-blown US military invasion which they feared was always on the horizon.
The film skilfully weaves together the personal lives of these men with the great historical narrative of which they would become a part. It tells the cultural story of how the most powerful nation in the world was able to paint Cuba as a communist boogeyman, leering menacingly from across the water. And it also tells the story of five fairly average men, compelled by a sense of duty to abandon their lives in Cuba and act the part of traitors in an attempt to protect their homeland.
Castro’s Spies succeeds because of how well it ties these threads, both the political and the personal.
Castro's Spies has its UK premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, screening 26 Feb to 1 Mar – tickets here