Stone was stoned when he made that film

Sep 26, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

What I find inexplicable about the American film maker, Oliver Stone, and the Caribbean economist, Professor Norman Girvan, is that despite all their panegyrics of Castro’s Cuba and Venezuela’s Chavez, they would not work and live in those two countries and they wouldn’t send their children to universities there.
Girvan is happy to remain on a small island (comparatively speaking) that Bob Marley, Usain Bolt and West Indies cricket have put on the world map. And Stone isn’t going to live outside the US.
Stone was at the recent Venice Film Festival to launch his documentary, “South of the Border” on Hugo Chavez and the bias the American press displays against him. Chavez, true to his chauvinist nature, turned up at the event, and while the cameras were snapping away at him, according to the BBC, Chavez grabbed one of the cameras and filmed himself.
Such silly bravado that Chavez is noted for will not be included in Stone’s film because the production is complete. But if Stone ever does a sequel, it is hoped that he captures Chavez in all his facetious moments as the crazy things he says on his radio programme.
Of course, the ailing Fidel couldn’t make it to Italy to be between Stone and Chavez – he is struck down with colon cancer. How interesting that only an act of nature could have stopped this man from going beyond fifty years of dominating Cuba. One wonders if Comrade Girvan knows what ailment Castro has?
They probably told him when he was in Havana earlier this year to receive an honorary doctorate from Havana University because in his acceptance speech, Professor Girvan spoke of “The Cuban miracle that can only be explained by the practice of a profound participatory democracy with a leadership that explains everything.”
Funny guy is Professor Girvan. For over fifty years, Cuba has been a communist society where secrecy was and is the order of the day. The Cubans must have treated Girvan as a special human being to tell him what medical ailment Fidel has because the Cuban people do not know that.
So much for participatory democracy where the leadership tells the people everything. Anyway, back to Stone. I doubt whether I would be interested in seeing “South of the Border.” It would contain all the flaws of so many other documentaries of the same genre, that is, films made by Americans so disgusted by their country’s bullying tactics around the world that they become admirers of little despots who pretend that they are fighting the big bad Yankee wolf.
To see “South of the Border” is to see all those other documentaries on Cuba where Fidel appears as the little guy standing up to the giant of the North. But there is no mention of Fidel’s pathological lust for power, the ancient economy in Cuba and the tremendous deprivations the Cuban have endured for over fifty years under Castro. What needs to be mentioned about liberal Americans like Stone (who is an excellent film-maker and someone whose work I admire) is that they have a genuine grievance against American hegemony.
They would argue, “Why is it right to have an embargo against Cuba but the American Government is a close ally of a medieval monarchy like Saudi Arabia?”
Point taken! That is wrong. There is no way in political theory that one can justify the embargo while America transfers trillions of dollars to Saudi Arabia. The trap Stone and other liberals fall into is that they offer sympathy to Cuba based on those American double standards. It is a tragic mistake and there is a precedent to guide us. English intellectuals supported Stalin because Hitler was a demented fascist.
The truth then was that both Hitler and Stalin were alike. You can knock the American Government for incredible hypocrisy in its foreign policy but avoid the pitfall of supporting little despots like Castro and elected dictators like Chavez.
Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship, so is Egypt. Why should America condemn Cuba and do business with these other oligarchs? American hypocrisy is one thing, Castro’s dictatorship is another. Both are facts. Chavez is in no moral position to condemn the US as an imperialist nation.
Chavez has serious imperialist tendencies. I wished Stone was more au fait with international relations when he made his film so we Guyanese could have described Chavez’s imperialist designs for him.
Finally, I hope that Stone has been doing research on the Venezuelan economy. Like Cuba’s, it isn’t growing. Chavez is failing.

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Stone was stoned when he made that film

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