This excellent Irish documentary on the lengthy – indeed, continuing – espionage battle between the United States and Cuba reaches domestic cinemas after touchdowns in festivals around the globe. Gary Lennon, director of the much-admired A Doctor’s Sword, joins with Ollie Aslin, making his debut, for a film that takes a balanced approach to its tangled subject matter. We are with the Cubans during their infiltration of American society. But the other side does get to offer its own commentary.
The film is particularly concerned with a group of Cubans who posed as anti-Castro agitators in southern Florida from the early 1990s. This was a busy transaction. During that period, Cubans were still risking their lives to escape the home country for, as they saw it, sanctuary in the US. An organisation called Brothers to the Rescue – on this evidence, lavishly financed – worked to pluck the travellers from maritime peril and bring them to the promised land. The agents inveigled their way into that body and set about subverting it.
We begin with a nippy history of Cuba before and after the revolution and then move on to personal testimonies from the dedicated operatives. So committed were they that they often did not let their families, left at home as relatives of a “defector”, know they had remained true to the cause. Deep into the film there is a discussion of financial compensation, but one spy explains that he made more in his cover job with the US government than he did from the Cuban intelligence services. They lived off $1 hamburgers and 35c sodas.
The directors cunningly work footage from a vintage Cuban TV show in with archival material and testimonies from the living participants. Few documentaries have offered such fascinating material on “trade craft” and such honest appraisals of the sheer tedium involved. One spy seems to have spent months doing little more thrilling than surreptitious plane-spotting.
We are in a world that clashes the Floridian chaos of Carl Hiaasen’s novels with the complex corruptions of those by James Ellroy. One is tempted to demand a dramatic movie based on these yarns, but Castro’s Spies tells its story so compellingly that no such compromise is necessary.
Released to coincide with May Day celebrations. And why not?
