Peel the Onion | The Cuba Libre Story Netflix Review (Part II)

By J.B.Browne

The Cuba Libre Story

To my almost pleasant surprise, the Cuba Libre Story starts bold, informative, and even a little binge-worthy. It's an emotional yet skillfully woven tour of Cuba's tumultuous history, including four centuries of brutal Spanish colonial rule, the Spanish-American War of 1898, Cuban "independence," the rise of sugar production, US intervention, and the emergence of military strongman Fulgencio Batista.

The first few episodes chronicle Cuba's past as an abused child of dominant colonial powers hungry for an economic and strategic gateway to the New World. Titles like Breaking Chains, War & Sugar, Gangster's Paradise, and A Ragtag Revolution give you an idea of what's covered.

In 1906, for example, the year of the US invasion, American investments reached $150 million, which at the time was more than anywhere else outside the United States. The Americans may have helped to "liberate" Cuba after the war with Spain, but not without putting American business interests first. After the war, American companies controlled Cuba's economy, and the American ambassador even dictated policy to the Cuban government. Insurrection against America's dominance of Cuba was inevitable, and Cuba's rebellion and eventual revolution took hold.

The docuseries masterfully peels back the palm leaves of the inner workings of Cuba's history – an island of conflict and ideals. The sense of humanitarian injustice is an emotional jetwash for the viewer. At moments, it seems like Cuba's truth, now re-framed, is being revealed to us for the first time — as a port of call for the American underworld who exploited labor practices under the duress of American capital, making Cuba famous for cigars, sugar, and rum. But also drug smuggling and the illegal implementation of Guantanamo Bay, once a naval patrol base for the Panama Canal and now an internationally renowned torture camp. A perpetual thorn in the side of Cuban pride.

Most mind-boggling is that the US has leased the Guantanamo Bay base from Cuba in perpetuity since 1903 for an annual rent of just $4,085. The base is massive, featuring untold amenities for US sailors, and in true American excess-style, hosts the only McDonald's restaurant in Cuba.

Splicing together over 50 exclusive interviews with various experts and eyewitnesses, either exiled from Cuba or within, the story almost escapes western bias but for the European scholars who provide the most balanced views. Elsewhere we see both followers and opponents of Castro and Batista. Most interestingly, we hear from Nikolai Leonov, ex-KGB head in Latin America from 1953 and Putin's former boss and mentor. Che and Fidel receive their socialist revolutionary dues. But Cuba's history told through the lives and stories of Christopher Columbus, freedom fighter and poet José Martí, Batista, and many more, only serve to add more shape and context to Cuba's eternal struggle for self-determination against imperialism.

Gleaned from the Cuban State Film Archive ICAIC, Russian state film archives of Krasnogorsk, and the Red Army and KGB's film archives, the quite astounding historical footage beams us right back to Cuba's treasured past. According to the filmmakers, all footage from the Spanish-American War, the first war in history to be filmed, was re-scanned, digitally restored, and re-mastered. All of which offers us the best historical time travel bubble to see Cuba's history from what the filmmakers call "a transnational perspective."

So, is it biased? In the end, some of us more enlightened to the tentacles of US propaganda through hypnotizing apps like Netflix would be remiss to conclude that any American-based Netflix docuseries would be anything but. However, the bias only comes into focus in the last few episodes, and it's the subtle-cavalier handling of Batista that it becomes clear. Also, there's the issue that as the series closes out, reactionary exiles are given more screen time.

Most if not all have an anti-Castro bias, from Jaime Suchlicki (Cuban exile and academic at the University of Miami's Cuban Studies Center), who is anti-universal healthcare while opposing US-based Cuban academics like himself even visiting Cuba; to unreliable witnesses like former Castro lover Marita Lorenz who US courts had already deemed as an "unreliable witness" during the Kennedy Assassination trial. Elsewhere there are sweeping assumptions about the "failures of socialism" like, for example, food shortages without any context of the direct consequences of the US's quite inhumane and ongoing embargo on the island. The series doesn't even mention Cuba's higher literacy rates nor contextualize its world-class healthcare system, which is arguably the best there is in the western hemisphere and free.

My take is that there is a sense in which the Cuban struggle for national independence, for national self-determination, is looked at by the American mediascape with great hostility. Why? Because it upsets the image and stabilities of the status quo, making it virtually impossible for Americans to see the truth on tv, by reading books or watching films about Cuba that are not already politically colored — that an independent Cuba managed, against all odds, to claim socialist revolution away from the clutches of US imperialism. Whether homeland or death, Che/they succeeded. Watch it, learn more about Cuba, but know the context of where and why it's there.

As he would refer himself, J.B. Browne is a half "foreign devil" living with anxiety relieved by purchase. HK-born Writer/Musician/Tinkerer.

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