TV Reviews : The Contradiction That Is Cuba

If only “Portrait of Castro’s Cuba” (Sunday at 4 p.m. and Monday at 9:05 p.m. on TBS) had arrived in our living rooms before “Frontline’s” recent devastating expose of Cuban-sponsored drug trafficking. By taking on a particular aspect of the Marxist-Leninist bastion in crisis, the PBS story revealed much more about Cuban realities than producer-director Kirk Wolfinger’s two-hour attempt to encompass this complex island.

As with many of Ted Turner’s pet projects, “Portrait” is impeccably photographed and edited, buttressed with some extraordinary archival footage (a young Castro giving his inaugural speech with a dove on his shoulder) and James Earl Jones’ stentorian but uninsistent narration. It makes for a fine package to deliver a clear point: Neither the United States nor Cuba will go away, so they should find some means of rapprochement.

All well and good, but the Cuba presented here in William Duggan’s script is too complicated for the report to squeeze into a TV format. Since the place is home to a bundle of contradictions--sensual culture and Stalinist austerity, atheism and Santeria, Marxist ideology and tourist resorts--any look at Cuba needs a fluid, even fanciful approach to let the contradictions sink in.

Wolfinger and Duggan strain under the aegis of balanced reporting, though, and come up with some doozies. Cuba, we’re told, is facing unprecedented economic decline tied to the decline of its benefactor, the Soviet Union; at the same time, Cuba “stands tall in the rank of nations” because of its internationalist posture.

This is nonsense. A reminder of Cuba’s profound isolation on the world stage happened just last Wednesday, when it was the only member of the U.N. Security Council to vote against the final peace settlement with Iraq. Such a lapse follows from a report that never pokes inside Castro’s inner sanctum, where Cuban power resides. The two hours are filled too much with looks at those with no power--working people with good hearts who can’t express their real views on camera. This “Portrait” of a garrison nation is a case of chasing after phantoms.