Against the background of a return to flag-waving patriotism, demonically derisive movies like Richard Lester's Cuba … seem suddenly anachronistic in the very casualness of their anti-American assumptions…. Americans are not merely ugly, but grotesquely hideous. Certainly, [Lester did not] set out to make any overt political statements, to win over any hearts and minds, as it were. Cuba, though shot in Spain, treats Castro's triumphant entrance into Havana in 1959 as if it were the Second Coming of Christ, or, at the very least, the ideological equivalent of Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station. Lester and his scenarist, Charles Wood, are not "selling" Castro to the non-Marxist infidels. They are commemorating his historically "inevitable" victory in the context of the slightly comical spectacle of greed and venality in the last days of the Batista regime….
[If] the chaos of Cuba is in the background of the film, the romance of Casablanca is clearly in the foreground, and it is in its foreground that Cuba fails most dismally…. By the time we get the final shootout between the Castro and Batista forces, Lester has completely lost control of the movements of his characters on his historical chessboard, and the picture as a whole joins that fascinating and proliferating category assigned for the Ambitious Failure….
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