Cuba and the Cameraman Fails to Ask the Right Questions: New at Reason

Television critic (and Cuba expert) Glenn Garvin views Jon Alpert’s Cuba and the Cameraman on Netflix and is appalled by Alpert’s lengthy history of superficial documentary work:

Even when Alpert inadvertently asks a question that might lead Castro into swampy territory, there’s never any follow up. When Alpert queries the Maximum Leader, during a visit to the United Nations, how he feels about a group of anti-Castro demonstrators across the street from his hotel, Castro blandly salutes the nobility of dissent. “I admire those who are against, because they are active,” he says. “They move around. They work.” That virtually begs for a question about Cuban dissidents like Armando Valladares or Ana Rodriguez, then both nearing the end of their second decades in hellhole prisons for defying the regime. None is forthcoming.

Watching even a few minutes of Cuba and the Cameraman comes at the cost of a fearful number of brain cells. (And if you sit through the scene in which Alpert’s young daughter asks Castro to sign a note to get her out of school, make sure there’s an ICU located nearby.) Yet, however unintentionally, Alpert has introduced some revealing moments into his film.

View this article.