Posted on 04/22/2003 1:08:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Less than a week after HBO yanked Oliver Stone's documentary on Fidel Castro, PBS said it's tackling the life of the controversial Cuban dictator.
WGBH Boston has started production on a two-hour political biography of Castro, who has led Cuba since 1959, for the PBS "American Experience" series. Producer Adriana Bosch plans to interview Cuban public officials, former political prisoners and Castro friends and family members as well as world leaders.
Bosch is an experienced documentarian whose "American Experience" biography on Ronald Reagan (news) won a George Foster Peabody Award. The Castro documentary is slated to air next year.
"There is a need for an objective, well-researched documentary on Castro," Margaret Drain, executive producer of "American Experience," said in a statement. "For nearly 50 years, he has commanded our attention ... yet he is unknown to most of us. Current events in Cuba make this film particularly relevant."
Indeed, Castro's recent crackdowns persuaded HBO last week to pull "Comandante," the Stone documentary, which was originally scheduled for broadcast in May. The Cuban government earlier this month executed three men convicted of hijacking a ferry in an attempt to get to the United States.
Stone, the "Platoon" director who spent three days with Castro in February 2002, was expected to offer a largely flattering portrayal. "We should look to him as one of the Earth's wisest people," Stone told reporters at this year's Berlin International Film Festival in February.
HBO has not yet rescheduled the program and is discussing having Stone return to Cuba to get more updated material. "Given the recent events in Cuba, the (documentary) has become incomplete," an HBO spokesman said Monday.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
As I've said before in other posts, I'm hoping very hard that Bush will send a "hunter-killer" team into Cuba to get rid of this a--hole. It's an absolute embarrassment that we, as a free nation, have allowed this murdering scum to continue to breathe as long as we have. His evil deeds are not on the same level as Saddam only because there are less Cubans than Iraqis, and he has no bordering neighbors to invade. Cuban military officials have been involved in every major dictatorship coup in Central America for 40 years. Time to end this.
It's funny how people say that the Middle East cannot be successfully democratized. When I hear that, my first thought is that it is racist (or something like that). But then I think of Latin America, where "democracy" is in place, and think, "Well, maybe they're right".
"Postindustrial social democrat" Gary Hart thinking about running for president again*** After listening to a couple of his major addresses, and conducting a lengthy, wide-ranging interview with him, I would say Gary Hart poses a unique challenge to American political conventional wisdom. And there seems little doubt that if he were to make a serious run, and if he got sufficient attention, he could - at a minimum - shake up the entire process. "I have a rather archaic view of history," he says during our talk. "You ought to qualify to run for the presidency before you run, not try to figure it out after you get elected - like in the movie The Candidate, where Robert Redford asks at the end, 'What do we do now?'"
That's easy, of course, to say if you have published a dozen books, established yourself as a Jeffersonian scholar and just got your Ph.D. in politics - as Hart did two years ago, from Oxford no less. But what is striking about Hart is precisely his seriousness in pondering the role and future of America way beyond the narrow, Rove-like calculations of a political operative. He proudly boasts of "writing every word" of the thick, major policy papers he presented over the last few months. And anyone who knows him wouldn't doubt the boast for a moment.
Nor is Hart's political posture so easily pigeonholed into the limited spaces that now make up modern American politics. Perhaps the best definition comes by way of one of his former advisers, who says, "Gary is basically a postindustrial social democrat." In Europe that might be easy to grasp. But what does it mean in American terms?
"I can boil all this down into two themes," Hart answers. "First is to restore the ideal of the republic. The second is to shift American culture from consumption and spending to investment and saving. The bumper-sticker version might be: 'We must earn our rights by performance of our duties.'"
That's one helluva wonkish slogan to run on. But Hart is deadly serious about it. He's written a trilogy of weighty books on the "restoration of the republic," and his novel I, Che Guevara, written a handful of years ago under the pen name John Blackthorn, envisions a Jeffersonian revolution in post-Castro Cuba. He now argues for a renegotiation of the social contract in which the American people would take on more civic duties in exchange for improved physical, social, economic and environmental security. It's a vision, he says, that America has been able to glean only fleetingly three times in the last half-century. "There was that moment when we were asked not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country," Hart says. "And that changed my whole generation. Then there was Clinton's brief, too brief, mention of an AmeriCorps." The third incident, which Hart describes as a "massive missed opportunity," was a week after September 11, when George W. Bush said, "We are all in this together."
The economic and social rights won through blood and sacrifice over the last two centuries have made America a "hugely" better place, says Hart. "But we have lost the other side of the coin," he adds. "Participation, responsibility and ownership."
On that basis, he sketches out a political program that is no less than a hybrid of socially progressive ideas and small-c conservatism: national health care, children's and citizens' savings accounts, tighter regulation of markets and corporations, a national energy strategy, environmentalism, and radical campaign-finance reform. In turn, Americans might be asked to pay a consumption tax, he says, participate in community service and learn to scale down their lifestyles to something more compatible with finite resources.***
Sounds like just another way of saying communism to me.
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