Video by CSUN’s Nava Questions U.S. Cuba Policy

A week after Fidel Castro’s historic meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome, ending a decades-long estrangement between the Marxist leader and the Roman Catholic Church, Cal State Northridge history professor Julian Nava will premiere a video documentary on Cuba that calls for a similar rapprochement with the United States.

The theme of the hourlong video: The time has come for America to end its 34-year trade embargo against the impoverished country.

“We have relations with other countries we don’t agree with, including Vietnam and China. Why not Cuba?” remarked Nava, a former member of the Los Angeles Board of Education and a U.S. ambassador to Mexico in the Jimmy Carter administration.

The video--which will be shown Tuesday at the Northridge campus--is replete with images of the struggling island nation: barefoot, undernourished children repeating communist slogans; hospital workers recycling tiny, plastic medicine vials; doctors and other professionals serving meals to tourists at their homes to acquire hard currency.

Never pretending to be objective, the documentary seeks to show the human cost of the embargo and the Cuban people’s efforts to triumph in spite of the sanctions. No anti-Castro forces, either from the Cuban exile community or the U.S. government, appear.

Writers, government officials and people on the streets of Havana and other Cuban cities tell the camera that they only want the chance to make their own way.

In one scene, a woman on the street speaks so passionately that a crowd gathers to cheer her.

“It hurts us in health,” she says of the embargo. “It hurts us in nutrition. It also hurts us psychologically.” Her voice rises to shouting level: “Leave us alone! We want our revolution!”

In another scene, an aging Cuban peasant in a rumpled green hat eloquently offers his explanation of why even U.S. allies such as Canada have begun expressing reservations about the blockade.

“When you see a giant beat up on a child, everyone goes for the child,” the man says.

The video is the culmination of several years’ work on behalf of Cuba by Nava, who is Mexican American. He first traveled there in 1960, soon after Castro came to power. He returned with a video crew in 1994, 1995 and earlier this year.

The author of numerous books and articles on U.S.-Latin American relations, Nava said he has come to agree with America’s goal of democracy in Cuba, but not its means.

He believes the embargo now primarily serves to fortify Castro, who, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has struggled to carry the region’s Marxist flag alone.

“Your blockade keeps us in power,” Nava quoted one Castro ally telling him on his most recent trip. “It makes us appear indispensable.”