Batista?
Batista is portrayed as a blue eyed blond. In fact he was black. Andy Garcia (a cuban-american whose family fled the Castro regime) once shocked Sydney Pollock by telling him this fact.
share"Cubans roared with mirth over the movie Havana, staring Castro fan Robert Redford, and produced by Castro fan Sydney Pollock. Reviewers hailed it as "historically accurate." One scene shows Batista in a meeting with American gangsters. Batista has blonde hair and blue eyes just like Redford…. Hey, he was a Yankee capitalist lackey, right? So he must have looked like a Yankee capitalist.
"Batista was black?!" gasped a badly freaked Pollock at a Hollywood party shortly after the movie came out. He’d run into Andy Garcia who informed him, between guffaws.
In fact, a high proportion of Batista’s army was black and mulatto, especially the officer corps. Castro and Che murdered 600 of them without trial in the first three months of 1959. Even the New York Times admits it. Had these massacres taken place anyplace else, they’d be called lynchings and the United Nations, NAACP, etc., would raise holy hell. Imagine, in any other setting, a lily white regime (like Castro’s) lynching several hundred blacks, dumping them in mass graves, then getting a standing ovation by the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and Hollywood!"
Please allow me to suggest that the Internet Movie Database not be used as a political forum to promote a pro-private enterprise, anti-Communist agenda. What if I railed on and on that promoters of private enterprise were pro-Nazi, because Nazi Germany supported big corporations, and the Nazis hated Communists? I doubt you'd be pleased and you'd likely say: "What has this got to do with the movie??"
Precisely.
IMDB is a forum to discuss movies, not politics. Is it too much to ask to keep it thus? Perhaps you could, instead, debate how this apparent disparity in ethnic portrayals plays out in the characters as they evolve within the movie. Now 'that' would be appropriate on IMDB.
Thank you.
"Cubans roared with mirth over the movie Havana, staring Castro fan Robert Redford, and produced by Castro fan Sydney Pollock. Reviewers hailed it as "historically accurate." One scene shows Batista in a meeting with American gangsters. Batista has blonde hair and blue eyes just like Redford…. Hey, he was a Yankee capitalist lackey, right? So he must have looked like a Yankee capitalist.
Why do you feel the above are Castro fans?
Anyway he was also white in CUBA and on THE UNTOUCHABLES
See some stars here
http://www.vbphoto.biz/
Batista presided over a military, pro-Western dictatorship, Castro presides over a Communist anti-Western dictatorship. Both men represent authoritarianism, corruption and regimes that deny civil rights, particularly for homosexuals and women, and freedom of speech. Castro has the added shame of being a hypocrite who confiscated wealth from the landowners and yet hoards several millions himself. Why would any democratically-minded individual who lives outside Cuba seek to elevate either man other than out of misplaced single-minded pro-US or anti-US ideology? Neither dictator is a true supporter of freedom or the working man, although Castro has admittedly fooled many of his countrymen and women into believing he has their best interests at heart.
However, as loathsome as Batista was if as the OP and others state Pollack and Redford presented the man as blonde and blue-eyed that is very dishonest, and no doubt designed to vilify him even further amongst the liberal-left. It seems some on the liberal-left would have a hard time attacking a non-white dictator for fear of 'racism' never mind how despicable and oppressive that dictator's regime may be. Perhaps that explains the relative silence in the West over Robert Mugabe's 'land seizures' (naïve white liberal: "hey, if he's stealing land from white people, no matter how violently, he can't be all bad, right, even if he's also murdering black farmers too?"), as well as the West's hesitancy to stand up to extremist Islamic organisations like Boko Haram until it's too late.