No Man Is an Island, Eh?

Dueling Reds.

On Sunday, ABC launches “Stephen King’s Rose Red,” a three-part zombie by bankable fright writer King. Same night, Showtime begins a risky two-part biography of Fidel Castro.

One channel is delivering six inane hours (with commercials) about ghosts no scarier than Casper, the other four brawny ones about a formidable Communist tyrant--the longest-serving leader of any nation today--who has thumbed his nose at 10 U.S. presidents and survived the fall of the Soviet Union.

Although escapism is no dirty word, is there a message here about broadcast TV’s low aspirations compared with pay cable?

Monday’s Part 2 of “Fidel” will be followed on Showtime by “Dreaming a New Cuba,” Ariel Semmel’s absorbing New York Times Television documentary that monitors daily lives of Havana residents. These include irreverent rappers, an elderly newspaper vendor, a gay hairdresser, a physician who moonlights as a cafe singer, and a 17-year-old hooker whose father lives in the U.S.

All are affected to some extent by the 40-year-old U.S. trade embargo of Cuba. Some are pleased with life under Castro, others not. At one point, for example, a young man who boldly equates Castro with Hitler is reprimanded by an aging gray-head who praises the Cuban leader. Is the older man expressing his true feelings in front of the camera, and do repercussions await the Castro critic in a Cuba whose president equates dissent with betrayal?

These films arrive when Cuba is again in the news, this time because of a controversial makeshift prison at the island’s Guantanamo Bay naval base, where the U.S. is holding captured Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. And it wasn’t long ago, either, that the Elian Gonzalez case returned Castro to the spotlight for another media close-up.

The one from Showtime is highly watchable and unsparing, with hardly any false emotion or cheap sentiment from director David Attwood in an account that almost always allows history to speak honestly for itself. The exceptions are a few composite minor characters and instances of manufactured dialogue.

Two years ago, Showtime’s stylish film on Manuel Antonio Noriega depicted that Panamanian dictator as clownish and wicked. In contrast, “Fidel” is nothing but sober when tracing Castro’s career path from mainstream activist to full-fledged revolutionary en route to becoming a totalitarian ruler. In his future are perilous clashes with the U.S., most notably the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

Filmed in Mexico and drawn from books by Georgie Anne Geyer and Robert E. Quirk, “Fidel” is meticulously balanced while, in effect, presenting two related but separate Castros.

The protagonist (Victor Huggo Martin) of Part 1 is heroic, an idealistic young lawyer making personal sacrifices on behalf of freeing the “Cubano people” from the smothering embrace of brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista (Tony Plana) and his U.S. mentor to the north.

Ironies flow. At one point, Castro angrily tells his tiny band of followers that Batista “is just the man the Yankees ... want to have in charge.” Yet this Yankee hater later quotes the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident ... “) when defending himself in court after his group is all but wiped out attempting to occupy the heavily fortified Moncada barracks.

In 1956, after spending less than two years in prison for that armed insurrection, Castro is in the rugged Sierra Maestra with his brother, Raul (Maurice Compte), and charismatic Argentine Ernesto Che Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal), assembling the peasant-supported ragtag guerrilla force that will be Batista’s undoing.

After toppling Batista, however, the Castro of Part 2 is corrupted by power. Now wearing the trappings of authority in addition to his signature beard and pea-green fatigues, he is a crazed, villainous demagogue, one who perverts the “true people’s democracy” he and his comrades fought to establish and stages Stalinist show trials to relieve his raging paranoia. Nourishing a cult of personality, meanwhile, the former Fidel is now officially worshiped as “beloved Fidel.”

In the heady first days of his reign, Castro promises agrarian reform and revolutionary programs in education and medical care. When asked about election, he replies: “The revolution first.” Or as Che argues: “The first task of the revolution is to keep the revolution.”

Castro keeping his boot on his people’s windpipe after unseating Batista is, in a sense, an Orwellian classic revisited, the new ruling pig of Cuba’s “Animal Farm” imitating the oppressive farmer he overthrew.

That transition is a bit ragged and swift here, as if Castro were struck post-Batista by a thunderbolt epiphany telling him to be oppressive, when in fact, he was said to have closely studied the European fascists and their tactics in his youth.

One moment, too, he is anti-Communist as well as anti-American, then seemingly the next secretly planning a “Marxist-Leninist society” for Cuba, the intervening layers of development becoming a blur.

Nor does Stephen Tolkin’s screenplay join the debate over whether Castro was a committed Marxist before victoriously rolling into Havana in early 1959 or turned to Communism only after being spurned by the Eisenhower White House, whose support of Batista typified this nation’s dark record of backing ruthless Latin dictators with strong business ties to the U.S.

The romances in Castro’s life here are especially fascinating, from his marriage of five years to aristocratic Mirta Diaz-Balart (Patricia Velasquez) to his affairs with moneyed Naty Revuelta (Margarita d’Francisco) and longtime companion and fellow hero of the revolution, Celia Sanchez (Cecilia Suarez). Next to Fidel, Sanchez is the most intriguing figure on the screen, from the moment he encounters her in the mountains to her death in 1980.

Martin, a Mexican actor in his first English-language film, doesn’t quite attain the mystique or “perversely captivating combination of seductiveness and violence” that veteran journalist Geyer saw in Castro. But he’s solid throughout, and does have size and explosiveness. He hasn’t much to live up to, for all that most Americans know of Castro is the caricature--his appearance, marathon speeches, rhetorical bombast and deep affection for baseball, cigars and retaining power, even as his policies appear to fail prodigiously while he blames Cuba’s economic plight on the U.S.

If he remains largely an enigma when the end credits roll, it’s a reminder that viewers should not count on incisive truths from a political drama, even one as well made as “Fidel.”

“Fidel” will be shown Sunday and Monday nights at 8 on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard .rosenberg@latimes.com.