I had been fascinated by the revolutionary experiment in Cuba since the late 60s, when I had met a group of Cuban filmmakers at the Tirrenia film festival in Italy in 1969, as I was writing my thesis on French novelist, director and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, to graduate in Aesthetics of Film from the University of Bologna.  During the Q & A session, we soon discovered that we didn’t need a translation from the Spanish, as Italians we could understand everything they said and viceversa.  Since many of us were leftist students, we had lots of questions about how they had structured a new kind of society in Cuba that was not based on the capitalist model, in fact functioned without money being exchanged.  We discovered that it also meant poverty for the citizens, but we were still enthralled at that time by this legendary island community, the land of Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.  (We also believed in Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural revolution, so we were pretty naïve)

Many years later I finally realized my dream of visiting Cuba; in December 1984 I signed up as a journalist to travel with a group to the Havana Film Festival, because American citizens were only allowed to travel to Cuba for specific reasons of study or cultural exchange.  I interviewed Pastor Vega, one of the filmmakers I had met in Italy in 1969, who was the festival director; I asked him about the increasing difficulties of maintaining a communist state supported by Russia.  I walked around taking pictures of the friendly Cubans, and I was assigned an escort, a charming Navy soldier, who kept an eye on what I was doing; but I used his presence to my advantage, I asked him to tell people that it was okay to let themselves be photographed by a foreigner, that they would not get in trouble with the authorities; everybody lived in fear of being reported for some real or imagined violation.  The poverty and the decay were appalling, it seemed that all the Cubans who could do so had emigrated, only the poor and helpless had remained, and the party faithful.  Still the mojitos at the Hotel Nacional were wonderful, and so were the dinners at La Bodeguita del Medio; although food at the hotel was pretty bad and extremely salty.  They organized an extravagant Las Vegas  style show for festival guests, like they had staged during the carefree 1950s for visiting gamblers; of course, Cubans were not allowed to attend such a decadent display of naked flesh.  Only hotel guests could to shop of the boutique, so I bought sneakers for a Cuban guy who asked me, since he could not find this kind of merchandize anywhere else on the island.  We did meet Fidel, then 57, who greeted each of us personally with a handshake, for a reception at the Palace of the Revolution; then he proceeded to talk endlessly as he’s been know to do, surrounded by an impenetrable crowd of fans.