STONE GETS TOUGH ON FIDEL

Oliver Stone's "Looking for Fidel," to premiere Wednesday on HBO, is called the follow-up in tough mode to "Commandante," his previous softball portrait of the Cuban leader. This time, instead of tossing bouqets at Castro in a loving (some said fawning) approach to El Commandante, Stone reportedly confronts him about his vicious crackdown on political dissidents and the shocking execution of three Cuban ferry hijackers who were barely out of their teens.

According to the HBO synopsis of "Looking for Fidel," Stone interviewed key players besides Castro, including "prisoners accused of hijacking, leading dissidents, wives of prisoners and human rights advocates. ... In one extraordinary roundtable, Stone brings together Castro, several accused hijackers, prosecutors and defense attorneys ..." That ought to be interesting. Even Cubans who idolized Castro were thunderstruck by the three executions and reportedly felt they were the ultimate, unconscionable betrayal of the Cuban revolution.

The AP's Frazier Moore writes that HBO viewers "were spared 'Comandante' when the network yanked it before its scheduled airdate a year ago." That film "was undone last spring" because of the crackdown and executions. "No less a defect," Frazier adds, "'Comandante'" was a barely coherent vanity production placing the filmmaker at its core while dabbling with the question: Who's that old fellow with the beard beside Oliver Stone?"

Moore says "Looking for Fidel" is "a much more balanced portrait" though "hampered by stylishly fidgety camera work and choppy editing." Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times, who has also seen both films, writes that "Fidel" is "much grimmer" than "Commandante" and is "charged with intensity."

Stone told Mitchell that this time he did his homework. He noted, however, that he did not intend the follow-up "to be a document, like an Amnesty International inquiry into each and every prisoner. But," Stone said, "I did film the dissidents, to hear what they had to say. 'Fidel' is more narrow in focus; I tried to get him angry this time." And was he successful in provoking El Commandante? "Yes," Stone said, "he was defensive." In the first film, the director also concedes: "Perhaps I was pandering, perhaps I was softballing him with the questions, as some people say."

For more background have a look at VERGING ON CUBA, an item from last November about a panel discussion by novelists Russell Banks and William Kennedy, who had recently spent time with Castro; New Yorker writer John Lee Anderson, who lived in Havana for a year; Cuban-American novelist Achy Obejas; Norman Pearlstein, editor-in-chief of Time Inc.; Terry McCoy, editor of "Cuba on the Verge: An Island in Transition," and others with a longtime interest in Cuba.

What struck me then as most revealing was 1) what Banks had to say about the cohering force of Cuba's national mythology, comparing its strength to Israel's and that of the United States, and 2) Obejas's conclusion that, regardless of whether or when Castro goes or who replaces him, the greatest influence on daily life in Cuba will depend on American politics more than its own.