It’s a story about brave political prisoners standing up to a brutal communist dictatorship, so Hollywood never had much interest in telling it. Nevertheless, Cuban filmmaker Lilo Vilaplana was not about to let their story go untold.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa in National Review:
The ‘Plantados,’ Cuba’s Immovable Heroes
If Nelson Mandela had been Cuban rather than South African, he never would have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize or become a 20th-century human-rights icon and statesman. Instead, he would have been a “plantado,” one of the political prisoners (the “immovable ones”) who refused to cooperate with the regime in exchange for shorter sentences and lesser punishments.
“Cooperate” meant accepting the re-education and indoctrination program introduced in the early 1960s by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, then in charge of “La Cabaña,” an 18th-century fortress turned into a prison and execution camp.
For most of the plantados who spent decades in Castro’s cells, there was no redemption, except among some in Cuba’s South Florida exile community. Many in the West, including the self-proclaimed champions of civil rights, were oblivious to the plight of Castro’s political prisoners — often deliberately so.
That’s why Plantados, a new film directed by Lilo Vilaplana, is important. Released recently at the Miami Film Festival, it follows the story of Ramón, a former plantado who escaped and discovers years later that his torturer, lieutenant Mauricio López, is living with impunity with his family in Miami.
Ramon’s discovery takes us back, through his painful memory, to Castro’s prisons, where he suffered the worst tortures and witnessed executions and unspeakable acts of violence against other political prisoners. The punishments included being thrown in sewer trenches, having to stand naked for days in tiny cells shared by four prisoners, where only one could lie down to sleep, suffering routine beatings, watching the humiliation to which their loved ones were subjected when visiting them, and other degrading experiences.
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Accuracy Check: Hollywood never had ANY interest in this story, just as it never had any interest in the black Cubans who were political prisoners longer than Mandela and under much worse conditions.
“If Nelson Mandela had been Cuban…”
He would have been first in line to be part of the communist regime. That SOB was easily one of the most white-washed figures of the 20th century.
The problem, or part of it, is that this makes Castro, Inc. look like what it is, in clear and graphic terms, and the usual suspects have long been vested in a very different narrative. That’s why the “Wasp Network” book and movie, despite being flagrantly compromised, were taken as more or less legitimate and on the level. It’s not about the truth and never has been–it’s about what a certain crowd wants to project as the truth.