Looking For Fidel Castro Essay

Seeing Cuba through Castro’s Perspective

Looking for Fidel is an interesting documentary film featuring an interview of Fidel Castro by an American film director Oliver Stone. This movie juxtaposes the difference of opinion between Fidel Castro and the majority of his supporters against his opposition and the Western media.

In the beginning, the documentary revolved around the executions of three political dissidents who tried to hijack a ferry and the fact that the U.S. government acted supportively towards Cuban airplane hijackers.

With the possible political rationale behind the hijacking, the film continued with a conversation involving some airplane hijackers, their attorneys, and Fidel Castro. In this conversation, the hijackers explained

First, Castro claimed that he was not a powerful leader who could do whatever he wished. Instead, he was a spiritual leader who guided Cuba into progresses. Second, he showed how most of his dissidents were financially sponsored by the U.S. government through various agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and his claimed was proven by the sponsorship notice in one of the dissidents’ website. This reduced the dissidents’ credibility from being activists into some people who obtained financial gain by opposing the government of their country, while expanding the debate on Castro’s leadership as something that encompassed beyond moral judgment. In this case, the U.S. government political interests might have played a role in challenging Castro’s leadership and the formation of the dissidents.

In the end, Castro emphasized that he would continue upholding his ideals of Cuba, regardless the hostile U.S.-Cuba relationship that might have resulted from his lack of acceptance towards the ideals of the U.S. Although he claimed to believe in the positive values of American, Castro emphasized how the U.S. government was not an entity worth negotiating with because it would only accept “surrender” for any conflict (Stone,