COMPELLING VIEWS OF CUBA, HUNGARY ON KCET

Reds of a different color.

This is Communist-regime night on KCET Channel 28. First comes its own documentary, “Hungary: Pushing the Limits” at 9 p.m., followed by the more compelling “Cuba: In the Shadow of Doubt” at 10 p.m.

Hungary became a Soviet satellite after World War II, but 1956 is the year that most remember. It’s been three decades since Soviet tanks crushed a Budapest revolt whose radio pleas for help (“This is Hungary calling. This is Hungary calling”) went unanswered in the West.

Three years later, in another hemisphere, Fidel Castro overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and began establishing a socialist state that U.S. Presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan have accused of exporting revolution.

“Our biggest challenge was to be balanced and not make a boring film,” said Carol Polakoff about the Cuba documentary that she, Suzanne Bauman and Jim Burroughs took three years to assemble. “We wanted to make it soft and tough on both sides.”

They succeeded. “Cuba: In the Shadow of Doubt” is scrupulously even-handed and even-minded in tracing the roots of the Cuban revolution from the 19th Century to the present and in granting equal time to supporters and critics of Castro’s Cuba.

Some of the old footage, which the producers obtained from Cuban archives, is fascinating, showing a very young Fidel as a rebel being arrested and imprisoned under Batista’s corrupt reign. Some of it is chilling, showing executions of Batista officials in the early days of the revolution.

The hour has twin centerpieces: an interview with Castro and an arduous trek to La Plata, the former guerrilla stronghold high in the Sierra Maestra mountains from which Castro and his followers carried out raids against Batista for two years.

The producers waited months for Castro to answer their requests for an interview. They finally gave up and put the documentary together minus the interview, only to get a call in February, 1985, saying that the Cuban leader had agreed.

Returning to Cuba in April, they had two all-night sessions with Castro. “That’s when he likes to work,” Polakoff said. “It was like meeting a figure of history, like meeting Napoleon.”

On the screen, Castro talks about his days in prison and his guerrilla strategy, including the critical seizure of a radio station that “immediately achieved ratings.” He talks with passion about the state of his nation.

Castro still has enormous charisma. He’s refuted, in part, by the bland, undynamic Kenneth N. Skoug Jr., director of the office of Cuban Affairs for the U.S. State Department.

“One of our biggest disappointments was that we could not get anyone else from the Administration to go up against Castro,” Polakoff said. “We asked Henry Kissinger and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), but no one would do it. Castro is very intimidating.”

As a result, Polakoff admits, there are times when Castro seems to go unchallenged.

Polakoff said that she and her fellow film makers were the first non-Cubans allowed to visit La Plata since 1958, when Castro’s forces were filmed in hiding. The Americans made two trips, the first to scout the location, the second with cameras.

“These old revolutionary characters picked us up,” Polakoff said. “They were old funny guys, and we went by jeep for 2 1/2 hours and then another 1 1/2 hours by donkey. It’s like a ghost town there, and you really got a feeling how isolated they must have been when they went down the mountain each day to fight the Batistas.”

Polakoff said that she was concerned that filming La Plata, with its spirits of the past, would romanticize the revolution to the point of distortion. But that doesn’t happen.

In fact, the last half of the program asks tough questions about contemporary Cuba while airing two prevailing theories about Castro: One, that he was pushed toward the Kremlin by the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and other U.S. policies; the other, that his Marxist agenda was set in stone well before he overthrew Batista.

The program notes that the revolution has come at a cost, that freedom in Cuba exists only within the “framework” of Marxism.

“60 Minutes” recently detailed the Cubanizing of Miami by Cuban refugees and their offspring. And on tonight’s program, we hear an elderly American resident of Isle of Pines, Cuba, recalling how Cubans left their homes with caretakers “thinking they would come back.”

They didn’t. And now, with the revolution seemingly irreversible, they may never return.

But Dezso Biczo returned to Hungary, where he was one of the resistance fighters who were crushed by the Soviets in 1956. Produced by Jeffrey Kaye and Peter Stone for KCET, “Hungary: Pushing the Limits” accompanies Biczo on a return visit to his homeland to record the social, political and economic changes that have occurred there in 30 years.

He finds a stereotype-smashing Hungary that is perhaps the most Westernized of the Soviet Bloc nations, but one whose gleaming image of prosperity belies a still-edgy and tenuous relationship with the Kremlin. You get the feeling that the string could be yanked at any time.

The hourlong program (which also airs tonight at 8 on Channel 24 and at 10 on Channels 15 and 50) is a nice survey of Hungary that includes an intriguing mini-profile of national television, where an American-look-alike anchorman observes that there is no state censorship in Hungary, only, uh, self-censorship.

Most intriguing are the irony and clashing emotions of Biczo returning to the scene of the battle. At one point, he watches visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s motorcade pass a spot where Biczo once fought the hated Soviets.

What the hour doesn’t explore, though, is the impotence that rendered America helpless to assist the rebels in Budapest. Nor does it explain the “whys” of present Hungary--why it can exist today as an exception to the model and why, above the din of jackhammers and Western rock music, echoes of 1956 linger.