I saw this last night and must say sat through it completely enthralled. I didn`t have time to re-read my review of the stage production (see below) as I had intended to before rushing off to the cinema, but having done so now I can only marvel at how closely the movie follows the play. There is no need to go through the plot or the underlying factual ground again here; it is all set out in the previous review. What then is there left to say about the movie?
Two thoughts came to mind as the movie began and took hold as one got drawn into it: first, how appropriate that it should have opened during the week of Obama`s Inauguration, and second, which became even more compelling at the end, that maybe in not too distant a future, we shall see another avatar of the same, say a Paxman / Bush interview "with no holds barred", in which George W will confess his guilt over everything associated with his neo-con strategy of the `War on Terror`!
In the movie too, as in the play, the characterisation of the two protagonists is superbly done by Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Lingella as Richard Nixon; if anything, Lingella has definitely got the upper edge. We can of course see them in closer detail, with facial expressions and body language fully exposed. Sheen`s Frost comes across as a weak, fumbling, playboyish tv personality who is a bit out of his depth in dealing with the larger than life figure of Nixon, even as a disgraced ex-President. Both of them of course have an entourage of their own. Nixon`s loyal minder is well played by Kevin Bacon as a concerned and protective aide, while Frost`s friendly female companion and other staff remain true to their parts. The two sides have moments of confrontation over the implementation of the agreed deal but in the end the interviews are allowed to proceed according to plan.
And so it was that the denouement came after the first three rather anodyne sessions, during which Nixon was able to gain the upper hand and expound self-confidently on his personal history, foreign policy and other matters. The tables turned with Watergate which was the subject of the last session. In this sense the underlying reality that was his undoing was to surface again, in retrospect. It happened when Frost, who had by then become depressed at his own lacklustre performance as the interlocutor, was goaded into an aggressive mode by the discovery of a damning piece of evidence, unearthed by one of his assistants from the congressional records, that he was then able to put to Nixon, to unsettle him. It was also at this point that I began to feel distinctly empathetic towards Nixon, for he was obviously a troubled man. His `confession` was wrung out of him not so much by hostile as assertive questioning, nor was it an unqualified admission of guilt, but rather he proffered it as a rational, if flawed, explanation of his conduct, which the viewing nation could therefore see for itself as amounting to wrongdoing in fact. But while his reputation as a `tricky dicky` probably remained unaffected, what came across was that he did grapple with inner demons, and while it may not have been sufficient to rehabilitate him fully he was not to be condemned to remain a pariah for ever.
And in any case would the American public have felt morally vindicated if Nixon had been `broken`, in the manner of a weepy emotional spectacle? That he was wrestling, had wrestled, with his conscience was clear. After all, he was the product of a system that requires all aspiring politicians, and those who achieve high office, to be beholden to a whole array of supporters, promoters and hangers-on. They are all steeped in a cut-throat culture of corruption. They navigate a path to victory through what to lesser mortals is a daunting minefield of legal traps and loopholes. Favours done have to be returned and supporters protected. In the final analysis, however, the best that could be said for him was that he presented a credible case of mitigation rather than of innocence. But he did resign, and ended his life in virtual seclusion, away from the nation`s gaze. So we can afford to take a charitable view now (some 35 years after the events in question and 14 years after his death) and say, without re-writing history, that justice of sorts was done after all.
Lingella has been nominated for the best actor award in this year`s Oscars; I think he deserves that. Ron Howard too has been nominated for best direction, though there he may face stiff competition from `Slumdog Millinaire`. The film has also been nominated for the best adapted screenplay category. On the whole, the movie provides a thoroughly satisfying experience; so it will be interesting to see what awards it picks up.
RAMNIK SHAH
Sunday, 25 January 2009
Saturday, 24 January 2009
`Slumgdog Millionaire`
"Slumgdog Millionaire" (`SM`) is the talk of the town right now, not all of it complimentary, having won 4 Golden Globes and been nominated for the Oscars in 10 categories, of which the 3 that count most are for Best Film, Best Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also opened in India yesterday and continues to arouse controversy, both there and here, with the e-waves buzzing with blogs and exchanges, many of them highly critical. So here is a collection of my thoughts, extrapolated (and edited) from my recent writings elsewhere:
We mustn`t forget that the film is based on a book,"Q&A", a novel by Vikas Swaroop. Swaroop is a senior career Indian diplomat, currently Deputy Indian High Commissioner to South Africa. He wrote it in 2003-04 (while he was posted to the IHC in London), and its film rights were taken up even before the book was published (because the powers that be clearly recognized its quality and potential). Danny Boyle, who directed the movie, is one of the new breed of British filmmakers who came into pominence with his `Trainspotting`, and the earlier `Shallow Graves` which I had thoroughly enjoyed at the time. The title `Slumdog Millionaire` came with the film right deal, but as Swaroop said on BBC Radio 5 on Sunday 4 January, he was quite happy with that and the fact that the story line changed to accommodate the movie project, which he recognized is a different medium that involves a whole lot of other and different issues and considerations.
"Q&A" was dramatised on radio in 2007 (I mentioned it in my annual review of that year); that version was a more faithful adaptation of the book than the film which, though it adheres to the basic theme and structure of the original, takes a large dose of cinematic licence in the form of the romance between the hero Jamal (played by Dev Patel, British born son of ex-Kenya Asian parents) and his childhood sweetheart Latika (played by the Indian Freida Pinto); indeed all the rest of the cast were Indian. Boyle has been saying that he had looked in vain for an Indian actor to play Jamal also, but found none who was physically suitable for the part.
Swaroop said the idea of the plot had come to him when there was a scandal involving a participant in our `How to be a Millinaire` who was accused (and I think convicted) of cheating. So he translated that into an Indian setting, except that unlike the British case, where the person concerned was an educated middle-class type, his hero was going to be an unsophisticated youth with no formal education who was engaged in the perennial struggle for survival in the mean streets of Mumbai, but who was able to answer the quiz questions by reference to the knowledge and wisdom he had acquired through his life`s experiences.
There is no denying that SM`s portrayal of Mumbai`s underbelly, of its underclass of slum dwellers, and its culture of low level life, is absolutely briilliant, as is the photography. The idea of the tv game show is of course an accepted part of the Indian entertainment scene. And so the basic plot line worked; how it did is something best left to your judgment.
SM is a British, not an Indian, production, though of course it is about India - set in India, with Indian characters and an essentially Indian story. It is certainly not a Bollywood nor indeed a Hollywood movie. It cannot therefore be judged by traditional Indian standards. In this respect, it is not much different from `Gandhi` or `A Passage to India` - the first became a universal epic, the second based on a great work of literature made a significant contribution to an understanding of the Indo-British colonial dynamic. A common feature of these and other similar films is that the makers of them are empathetic to Indian perspectives.
SM is not a documentary either, but fiction. It is based on a book, by (as we have seen) an Indian writer, and while (as I have previously mentioned) the flim- makers have departed from the original script, the screen adaptation nevertheless stays true to its basic structure and theme. But even so, without a degree of verisimiltude, a work of art can fall flat. The `rags to riches` phenomenon is not new; to that extent it mirrors real life; only of course the exact circumstances and details may vary. Here it is the device of the `Who Wants to be a Millionaire` (WWM) that is employed. In other situations, it could be just a lottery win, or a fortuitous `find` of a bagful of cash or other valuables, that could transform someone`s life, or a fight with `baddies` resulting in the hero making off with their loot, or just sheer hard work and struggle against any number of odds, ranging from natural disasters, to beaurocracy to racial discrimination to competitors and rivals - the possibilities, both in real life and therefore in fiction are endless.
The WWM scenario in SM is really an artistic device. The story line was to link every question to an underlying experience that had taught the contestant a lesson that contained the answer or a clue to it which he was able to recall. And so it is through this means that we learn of the painful past and growing up of Salim, the hero. And what a damning indictment of Indian society that was - damning but realistic. I won`t go into the details here because these have been amply dissected and discussed widely. But to those who who have condemned Danny Boyle for showing the stark `underbelly` of Mumbai*s (and by implication India`s) poverty-ridden shanty towns with all the vices portrayed there, I would say, why be so squeamish, why turn a blind eye to them? Most of us are familiar with the ugly side(s) of India`s society, not just in terms of the deformed, disabled, desperate and disfigured beggars we see everywhere in India, but also of the general squalor, decay and deprivations that are part of the daily lives of literally millions of people there. As for scenes of violence, well, we have them in films about war (not just in the Western cinema, but also in Indian movies, eg. `Ashoka` and of course countless other standard Bollywood ones) or crime (eg. `Fargo`, or the most recent `No Country for Old Men` mentioned in my annual review for 2008).
What most Indian film-goers are used to seeing and want is sanitised treatment of all these issues in their films and tv soaps - full of song and dance, plastic romance and robotic characters, both good and bad. So it is `social realism` that seems to have offended critics of the film. Well, what SM does is to disabuse them of the aura of well-being associated with the standard Bollywood fare, though at the same time it fulfils the promise of a `feel-good` movie. If people found the scenes of gritty realism, and of the culture of corruption and criminality, and of the misery and general decay all around in the streets and slums of Mumbai to be upsetting then that is how the subject was treated in the book - if anything even more toughly. Paradoxically however, though at first it appeared as if this was a `feel-bad` movie, once the story unrolled and the mystery unravelled, it was transformed into a `feel-good` one as the hero managed to win the ultimate prize against all odds and expectations. Even so, how can anyone deny that below the glitter of Mumbai, there is a huge underbelly of poverty and deprivation, of literally hundreds of thousands of people living, working, travelling, just existing, cheek-by-jowl? As Danny Boyle has said, what he was most impressed by was that yes, there was poverty, but not of the `abject` kind (that being the epithet normally applied to the term), but rather that the people of Mumbai (and presumably of India generally) are resilient, enterprising and philsophical.
The flashbacks in the narrative add a touch of suspense and thrill, and unfold the story leading to the hero`s trial by ordeal in the WWM hot seat, very effectively. The endpiece, the proverbial Bollywood number on the station platform, was the right note to end the film on, after the dramatic climax of the hero`s passing the gruelling tests both of the contest itself and of the torture at the hands of the police.
A R Rahman`s music was superb; my only regret and complaint is that its sound level in our multiplex cinema auditorium was so loud (as it usually is, with deafening crescedoes) that I wasn`t able to enjoy its micro-nuanced effect - I suppose it is best heard on a CD. It reminded me of other movies where Indian classical or semi-classical themes have been incorporated into their sound tracks, eg. Satyajit Ray`s `Pather Panchali` and a certain sequence in `Bullitt` (starring Steve McQueen), both of which contained jazzy compositions by Ravi Shankar.
Some people have even criticised Boyle`s casting of Indian actors, but can we not imagine what the reaction would have been if he had used only (white) British ones? Incidentally, apparently Amitabh Bhachan has not been happy with SM`s commercial and critical success, but he of course has an axe to grind here (he was the first anchor of the Indian WWM show, but then was overshadowed by his successor Shah Rukh Khan who made an even bigger success of it) - he would have been an invidious choice for the film, where he is an invisible presence in one scene! And are the Indian commentators rattled because SM is not an Indian but a British production? But then it was the same when `Gandhi` was made - if the Indians were capable of producing a world-class film biopic of Gandhi at that time, then they should have done it, but it did not happen. There was a carping critique of the film by Alice Miles in The Times on 14 January 2009 in which she accused cinemagoers of pornographic voyeurism (?) and of Boyle`s "forestalling potential criticism about another country`s horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors" , and alleged, contrary to fact, that "(m)uch of the dialogue is in Hindi"!
Be that as it may, the broader appeal of the film is that it is the culmination of a process that had already begun, of bringing Indian culture into the public imagination here in the west. Not just Bollywood, Indian fashion and tourism, outsourced IT software networks, global Indian corporate activities, Indian diasporan interactions but also great contemporary Indian or Indiasporan literary figures (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, V S Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai et al - all these have been steadily making an impact on British and American consciousness, now heightened by the recent attack on Mumbai and its landmark Taj Mahaj Palace Hotel. SM will prove to be an icing on the cake. It is exciting and energizing, pulsating with sound and sight. Freida and Dev, both young, pretty/handsome, and personable, make a romantic couple worthy of any make-believe, feel-good scenario and the final scene, though it is in the classic Bollywood glitzy genre, will surely resonate with audiences as a lasting impression. It thorughly deserved the four Golden Globes and now, even one or two Oscars!
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey England
We mustn`t forget that the film is based on a book,"Q&A", a novel by Vikas Swaroop. Swaroop is a senior career Indian diplomat, currently Deputy Indian High Commissioner to South Africa. He wrote it in 2003-04 (while he was posted to the IHC in London), and its film rights were taken up even before the book was published (because the powers that be clearly recognized its quality and potential). Danny Boyle, who directed the movie, is one of the new breed of British filmmakers who came into pominence with his `Trainspotting`, and the earlier `Shallow Graves` which I had thoroughly enjoyed at the time. The title `Slumdog Millionaire` came with the film right deal, but as Swaroop said on BBC Radio 5 on Sunday 4 January, he was quite happy with that and the fact that the story line changed to accommodate the movie project, which he recognized is a different medium that involves a whole lot of other and different issues and considerations.
"Q&A" was dramatised on radio in 2007 (I mentioned it in my annual review of that year); that version was a more faithful adaptation of the book than the film which, though it adheres to the basic theme and structure of the original, takes a large dose of cinematic licence in the form of the romance between the hero Jamal (played by Dev Patel, British born son of ex-Kenya Asian parents) and his childhood sweetheart Latika (played by the Indian Freida Pinto); indeed all the rest of the cast were Indian. Boyle has been saying that he had looked in vain for an Indian actor to play Jamal also, but found none who was physically suitable for the part.
Swaroop said the idea of the plot had come to him when there was a scandal involving a participant in our `How to be a Millinaire` who was accused (and I think convicted) of cheating. So he translated that into an Indian setting, except that unlike the British case, where the person concerned was an educated middle-class type, his hero was going to be an unsophisticated youth with no formal education who was engaged in the perennial struggle for survival in the mean streets of Mumbai, but who was able to answer the quiz questions by reference to the knowledge and wisdom he had acquired through his life`s experiences.
There is no denying that SM`s portrayal of Mumbai`s underbelly, of its underclass of slum dwellers, and its culture of low level life, is absolutely briilliant, as is the photography. The idea of the tv game show is of course an accepted part of the Indian entertainment scene. And so the basic plot line worked; how it did is something best left to your judgment.
SM is a British, not an Indian, production, though of course it is about India - set in India, with Indian characters and an essentially Indian story. It is certainly not a Bollywood nor indeed a Hollywood movie. It cannot therefore be judged by traditional Indian standards. In this respect, it is not much different from `Gandhi` or `A Passage to India` - the first became a universal epic, the second based on a great work of literature made a significant contribution to an understanding of the Indo-British colonial dynamic. A common feature of these and other similar films is that the makers of them are empathetic to Indian perspectives.
SM is not a documentary either, but fiction. It is based on a book, by (as we have seen) an Indian writer, and while (as I have previously mentioned) the flim- makers have departed from the original script, the screen adaptation nevertheless stays true to its basic structure and theme. But even so, without a degree of verisimiltude, a work of art can fall flat. The `rags to riches` phenomenon is not new; to that extent it mirrors real life; only of course the exact circumstances and details may vary. Here it is the device of the `Who Wants to be a Millionaire` (WWM) that is employed. In other situations, it could be just a lottery win, or a fortuitous `find` of a bagful of cash or other valuables, that could transform someone`s life, or a fight with `baddies` resulting in the hero making off with their loot, or just sheer hard work and struggle against any number of odds, ranging from natural disasters, to beaurocracy to racial discrimination to competitors and rivals - the possibilities, both in real life and therefore in fiction are endless.
The WWM scenario in SM is really an artistic device. The story line was to link every question to an underlying experience that had taught the contestant a lesson that contained the answer or a clue to it which he was able to recall. And so it is through this means that we learn of the painful past and growing up of Salim, the hero. And what a damning indictment of Indian society that was - damning but realistic. I won`t go into the details here because these have been amply dissected and discussed widely. But to those who who have condemned Danny Boyle for showing the stark `underbelly` of Mumbai*s (and by implication India`s) poverty-ridden shanty towns with all the vices portrayed there, I would say, why be so squeamish, why turn a blind eye to them? Most of us are familiar with the ugly side(s) of India`s society, not just in terms of the deformed, disabled, desperate and disfigured beggars we see everywhere in India, but also of the general squalor, decay and deprivations that are part of the daily lives of literally millions of people there. As for scenes of violence, well, we have them in films about war (not just in the Western cinema, but also in Indian movies, eg. `Ashoka` and of course countless other standard Bollywood ones) or crime (eg. `Fargo`, or the most recent `No Country for Old Men` mentioned in my annual review for 2008).
What most Indian film-goers are used to seeing and want is sanitised treatment of all these issues in their films and tv soaps - full of song and dance, plastic romance and robotic characters, both good and bad. So it is `social realism` that seems to have offended critics of the film. Well, what SM does is to disabuse them of the aura of well-being associated with the standard Bollywood fare, though at the same time it fulfils the promise of a `feel-good` movie. If people found the scenes of gritty realism, and of the culture of corruption and criminality, and of the misery and general decay all around in the streets and slums of Mumbai to be upsetting then that is how the subject was treated in the book - if anything even more toughly. Paradoxically however, though at first it appeared as if this was a `feel-bad` movie, once the story unrolled and the mystery unravelled, it was transformed into a `feel-good` one as the hero managed to win the ultimate prize against all odds and expectations. Even so, how can anyone deny that below the glitter of Mumbai, there is a huge underbelly of poverty and deprivation, of literally hundreds of thousands of people living, working, travelling, just existing, cheek-by-jowl? As Danny Boyle has said, what he was most impressed by was that yes, there was poverty, but not of the `abject` kind (that being the epithet normally applied to the term), but rather that the people of Mumbai (and presumably of India generally) are resilient, enterprising and philsophical.
The flashbacks in the narrative add a touch of suspense and thrill, and unfold the story leading to the hero`s trial by ordeal in the WWM hot seat, very effectively. The endpiece, the proverbial Bollywood number on the station platform, was the right note to end the film on, after the dramatic climax of the hero`s passing the gruelling tests both of the contest itself and of the torture at the hands of the police.
A R Rahman`s music was superb; my only regret and complaint is that its sound level in our multiplex cinema auditorium was so loud (as it usually is, with deafening crescedoes) that I wasn`t able to enjoy its micro-nuanced effect - I suppose it is best heard on a CD. It reminded me of other movies where Indian classical or semi-classical themes have been incorporated into their sound tracks, eg. Satyajit Ray`s `Pather Panchali` and a certain sequence in `Bullitt` (starring Steve McQueen), both of which contained jazzy compositions by Ravi Shankar.
Some people have even criticised Boyle`s casting of Indian actors, but can we not imagine what the reaction would have been if he had used only (white) British ones? Incidentally, apparently Amitabh Bhachan has not been happy with SM`s commercial and critical success, but he of course has an axe to grind here (he was the first anchor of the Indian WWM show, but then was overshadowed by his successor Shah Rukh Khan who made an even bigger success of it) - he would have been an invidious choice for the film, where he is an invisible presence in one scene! And are the Indian commentators rattled because SM is not an Indian but a British production? But then it was the same when `Gandhi` was made - if the Indians were capable of producing a world-class film biopic of Gandhi at that time, then they should have done it, but it did not happen. There was a carping critique of the film by Alice Miles in The Times on 14 January 2009 in which she accused cinemagoers of pornographic voyeurism (?) and of Boyle`s "forestalling potential criticism about another country`s horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors" , and alleged, contrary to fact, that "(m)uch of the dialogue is in Hindi"!
Be that as it may, the broader appeal of the film is that it is the culmination of a process that had already begun, of bringing Indian culture into the public imagination here in the west. Not just Bollywood, Indian fashion and tourism, outsourced IT software networks, global Indian corporate activities, Indian diasporan interactions but also great contemporary Indian or Indiasporan literary figures (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, V S Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai et al - all these have been steadily making an impact on British and American consciousness, now heightened by the recent attack on Mumbai and its landmark Taj Mahaj Palace Hotel. SM will prove to be an icing on the cake. It is exciting and energizing, pulsating with sound and sight. Freida and Dev, both young, pretty/handsome, and personable, make a romantic couple worthy of any make-believe, feel-good scenario and the final scene, though it is in the classic Bollywood glitzy genre, will surely resonate with audiences as a lasting impression. It thorughly deserved the four Golden Globes and now, even one or two Oscars!
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey England
Revisiting `Frost/Nixon` on stage
Before going to see `Frost/Nixon` the movie, which went on nationwide release here yesterday, I thought I would revisit my review of the stage production of it almost exactly a couple of years ago. So here it is, as it was posted on the Africana/Orientalia site on 7 February 2007 (Message #18572). I will then compare it with the screen version in due course.
"`Frost/Nixon` has been playing at London`s Gielgud Theatre for the last six months, and is now about to transfer to New York`s Broadway. It has been much acclaimed by professional critics here. Seeing it at the weekend, one could understand why. It is simply sensational. American audiences will surely be enthralled and entertained in equal measure.
The play of course is about and based on the Frost / Nixon interviews in the spring of 1977. It is docu-drama par excellence, with a theatrical aura that perfectly fits and depicts the two principal characters, but without any artificial or imaginative additions. It is realism at its most natural; the history it portrays needed no embellishments.
But first some background: by the mid-`70s, David Frost, the British tv personality, now an al-Jazeera news anchorman and a freelance broadcaster based in London, with `gravitas` befitting an elder media statesman, was already an established trans-Atlantic celebrity. Then he was the `playboy` talkshow host, with his own programme series on both sides of the water, and even `down under` in Australia. At that particular point however his career was somewhat on the slide. By some extraordinary luck, or clever manipulation (take your pick) he managed to secure an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon who promised him that it would be "with no holds barred". Nixon too was suffering from a lack of purpose and focus after his downfall. In this respect, both interlocutor and subject needed each other to boost their morale.
So the play begins with the the ground work and build-up to the main event. We see him at work, getting a team together of old friends (like John Birt, who was later to become Director General of the BBC), negotiating the deal with Nixon, whom he paid $600,000 (financed from his own private resources, since at that stage no networks were interested), with both parties advisers fretting over the finer details of the package. This was settled as a sequence of four one-hour sessions, covering different aspects of Nixon`s presidency. One of these was `Watergate`, the exact parameters of which were later to be in contention but resolved with much mutual posturing and threats of litigation. One half of the play is taken up by these preliminaries, and then come the interviews proper, but we sit through a two hour production without a break for an interval, an extraordinary feat sustained by the sheer power of the narrative!
The encounters between the two men are the mainstay of the story. In the first three, Nixon gets the better of Frost. He gives away nothing of importance; there are no damning revelations, no admissions of culpability. Both of them however observe the courtesies of the game while seeking to strike or defend and score or shield points. It is as if we are witnessing a verbal, albeit sedentary, boxing match; after every round, so to speak, they retreat into their respective corners, to confer and be coached by their aides. To Frost`s allies, the project seems doomed; his eternal self-assurance is under threat. On the eve of the fourth and last session, there is much soul-searching and even a nocturnal phone conversation between the two men which may or may not have taken place in reality but which set the scene for the final denouement. And so in the last telling quarter hour, the punch line is delivered; Nixon is cornered and `confesses` his guilt; he is confronted with evidence that he cannot deny. This is best left unexplored here, for even though the facts are already on record and too well known, what matters is their dramatization- so gripping and expertly done. But lest it be thought otherwise, despite all that we know about Nixon`s political disgrace, personality defects and moral foibles, it is his own candid self-analysis of his character and acceptance of blame, in hindsight, that is so disarming. He thus comes across, paradoxically, as an honourable man because, as he explains, during the only emotional outburst that we see, he wasn`t going to shop his closest associates to the Feds when he learnt of their wrong-doing, because you just don`t do that to your own people. And his answer to the basic question, "why did you not destroy the (White House) tapes?" was also rational and convincing, namely that the system had been put in place by his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and protocol and public interest demanded that it be continued.
The play`s author is Peter Morgan, a veteran and accomplished writer of many tv and movie scripts, though this was his first stage production. Frost is played superbly by Michael Sheen, the same actor who played Tony Blair against Helen Mirren in (his, Morgan`s `The Queen`, about the relationship between monarch and prime minister at the time of Princess Diana`s death. His other major achievement was `The Deal` (supposed to have been agreed between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994). So Morgan is past master at capturing both the minutiae and the nuances of political posturing, dialogue and relationships, all of which is evident here. Frank Lingella`s rendering of Nixon is equally impressive, and while remaining a little too controlled throughout, it softened just enough, in the last scenes, to give us a glimpse of the emotional turmoil of his `alter ego` as he came to terms with his fate.
More topically, for us in Britain, the possible analogy with what may yet happen to Tony Blair, who is soon due to go into the wilderness and will surely be judged by his hubristic handling of the Iraq affair and other foreign policies and who also could be damaged by the `cash for honours` investigation currently under way, was just too compelling and provided an exciting backdrop to a memorable experience.
To New Yorkers and those in the vicinity, I would say: don`t miss this, book your tickets now. It will be a unique opportunity to revisit the Frost / Nixon interviews almost exactly 30 years on!
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey, England"
"`Frost/Nixon` has been playing at London`s Gielgud Theatre for the last six months, and is now about to transfer to New York`s Broadway. It has been much acclaimed by professional critics here. Seeing it at the weekend, one could understand why. It is simply sensational. American audiences will surely be enthralled and entertained in equal measure.
The play of course is about and based on the Frost / Nixon interviews in the spring of 1977. It is docu-drama par excellence, with a theatrical aura that perfectly fits and depicts the two principal characters, but without any artificial or imaginative additions. It is realism at its most natural; the history it portrays needed no embellishments.
But first some background: by the mid-`70s, David Frost, the British tv personality, now an al-Jazeera news anchorman and a freelance broadcaster based in London, with `gravitas` befitting an elder media statesman, was already an established trans-Atlantic celebrity. Then he was the `playboy` talkshow host, with his own programme series on both sides of the water, and even `down under` in Australia. At that particular point however his career was somewhat on the slide. By some extraordinary luck, or clever manipulation (take your pick) he managed to secure an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon who promised him that it would be "with no holds barred". Nixon too was suffering from a lack of purpose and focus after his downfall. In this respect, both interlocutor and subject needed each other to boost their morale.
So the play begins with the the ground work and build-up to the main event. We see him at work, getting a team together of old friends (like John Birt, who was later to become Director General of the BBC), negotiating the deal with Nixon, whom he paid $600,000 (financed from his own private resources, since at that stage no networks were interested), with both parties advisers fretting over the finer details of the package. This was settled as a sequence of four one-hour sessions, covering different aspects of Nixon`s presidency. One of these was `Watergate`, the exact parameters of which were later to be in contention but resolved with much mutual posturing and threats of litigation. One half of the play is taken up by these preliminaries, and then come the interviews proper, but we sit through a two hour production without a break for an interval, an extraordinary feat sustained by the sheer power of the narrative!
The encounters between the two men are the mainstay of the story. In the first three, Nixon gets the better of Frost. He gives away nothing of importance; there are no damning revelations, no admissions of culpability. Both of them however observe the courtesies of the game while seeking to strike or defend and score or shield points. It is as if we are witnessing a verbal, albeit sedentary, boxing match; after every round, so to speak, they retreat into their respective corners, to confer and be coached by their aides. To Frost`s allies, the project seems doomed; his eternal self-assurance is under threat. On the eve of the fourth and last session, there is much soul-searching and even a nocturnal phone conversation between the two men which may or may not have taken place in reality but which set the scene for the final denouement. And so in the last telling quarter hour, the punch line is delivered; Nixon is cornered and `confesses` his guilt; he is confronted with evidence that he cannot deny. This is best left unexplored here, for even though the facts are already on record and too well known, what matters is their dramatization- so gripping and expertly done. But lest it be thought otherwise, despite all that we know about Nixon`s political disgrace, personality defects and moral foibles, it is his own candid self-analysis of his character and acceptance of blame, in hindsight, that is so disarming. He thus comes across, paradoxically, as an honourable man because, as he explains, during the only emotional outburst that we see, he wasn`t going to shop his closest associates to the Feds when he learnt of their wrong-doing, because you just don`t do that to your own people. And his answer to the basic question, "why did you not destroy the (White House) tapes?" was also rational and convincing, namely that the system had been put in place by his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and protocol and public interest demanded that it be continued.
The play`s author is Peter Morgan, a veteran and accomplished writer of many tv and movie scripts, though this was his first stage production. Frost is played superbly by Michael Sheen, the same actor who played Tony Blair against Helen Mirren in (his, Morgan`s `The Queen`, about the relationship between monarch and prime minister at the time of Princess Diana`s death. His other major achievement was `The Deal` (supposed to have been agreed between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994). So Morgan is past master at capturing both the minutiae and the nuances of political posturing, dialogue and relationships, all of which is evident here. Frank Lingella`s rendering of Nixon is equally impressive, and while remaining a little too controlled throughout, it softened just enough, in the last scenes, to give us a glimpse of the emotional turmoil of his `alter ego` as he came to terms with his fate.
More topically, for us in Britain, the possible analogy with what may yet happen to Tony Blair, who is soon due to go into the wilderness and will surely be judged by his hubristic handling of the Iraq affair and other foreign policies and who also could be damaged by the `cash for honours` investigation currently under way, was just too compelling and provided an exciting backdrop to a memorable experience.
To New Yorkers and those in the vicinity, I would say: don`t miss this, book your tickets now. It will be a unique opportunity to revisit the Frost / Nixon interviews almost exactly 30 years on!
RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey, England"
Thursday, 1 January 2009
50 Years of Castro: Impressions of Cuba Revsited!
As Cuba celebrates 50 years` of its revolution, I am reminded of what I wrote about my visit to Cuba in 2004. It was posted on the Blue Ears site (which later became Global Ear, now alas no more!). Am planning to see `Che` tomorrow. Here, then, is my blog of November 2004:
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Travel::
Impressions of Cuba
Having just returned from a week`s trip to Cuba, let me record my impressions of the country here. My fascination for the place goes back to 1961. To a 20-year-old student radical, when the `Bay of Pigs` happened, Castro`s Cuba became instantly and inextricably linked with revolution and resistance, and acquired an aura of rustic romance. So it was thrilling to set foot there some 43 years later, and to find that the `Revolution` (of 1959) is still alive and kicking, personified by Castro as a much revered father figure of the nation.
Our trip started at Varadero, which used to be the Americans` den in their backwaters for gambling, prostitution, tax evasion and other associated vices in the 1940s and 50s. Evidence of this can still be seen nearly 50 years on, in the faded facades and forticos of crumbling buildings of the period and the empty but well laid out streets and avenues, reminiscent of US mid-town life, flowing with the ubiquitous and battered Fords, Pontiacs and Chevrolets, whose colourful bodyworks are of course powered by reconstructed Russian engines as maintained and further modified by Cuban ingenuity.
From Varadero to Cienfuegos to Trinidad and then on to Havana, as we drove through the lush countryside, one could not but notice how leisurely and peaceful the pace of life was. People milled and mingled around in town centres, just as they would anywhere else. More noticeably, they waited by the roadside for transport, which is the one public utility that is most evidently lacking in Cuba. They have an excellent universal health care service and an equally comprehensive education system (both free at all points of use) but do not have a good transport infrastructure either in terms of a road or rail network or of trams and buses. And so it is customary for drivers to stop and give lifts to pedestrians.
In general, then, people are not prosperous, but they are not poverty-stricken either. They enjoy a subsistence level national wage (reputed to be around US $15 a month) which means their necessities of life (basic food, shelter, clothing etc) are assured; anything above that would depend on extra-curricular activities! There is a large bureucracy designed to ensure that people follow rules: eg. ration books are essential for daily purchases; every cow and horse (believe it or not) has an ID assigned at birth and any such animals to die have to be accounted for (to prevent `black` marketing in meat and skin products); inspectors check that vehicles stop at every railway crossing (which are invariably unguarded) even along disused lines for trains that may never come or appear infrequently; and records are meticulously kept of the most mundane transactions, again so that no one derives any unfair or unmerited advantage.
But at the top layers of government, access to officials or ministers is easy. Indeed, as a (British Asian) business contact explained, state security of the kind that we are used to is afforded only to Castro, his Deputy and his brother (who is professionally involved in such matters); others can be approached like ordinary citizens, without corruption or backhanders. The economy runs on an extraordinary rather than a complex dual Cuban Peso and US $ level, except that two days after we arrived there (on 8 November) the US Dollar became `non grata` as a trading currency, to be replaced by the CUC (the convertible Peso) which meant that one could exchange US Dollars at par. So for tourists and foreigners, everything is always quoted in terms of the US $ and the rates and prices are not that cheap either - for example a small beer (Crystal) at a cafe, restaurant or hotel, usually cost between $1 and $2.50. The same applies to food in such places; though marginally cheaper for visitors it is of course wholly out of the economic range of the locals. But the remarkable thing is that the Cubans live with this dichotomy as routine; there is no resentment, no embarrassment and no envy.
Walking in the grottiest parts Old Havana for example, at no time did I feel either threatened or out of place. On the first evening, I deliberately wandered about wearing a tee-shirt bearing the Canadian colours and the logo of Niagara Falls, with a pouch around my waist, just so that if I did anything out of the ordinary it could be seen that I was a foreigner - but nobody either accosted me or even gave me a second glance. At other times, most people tended to assume that I was a Latino - because of the brown skin of course, even though I was better dressed and looked like a tourist. Now, not knowing a word of Spanish was a major drawback of course. But we managed to get by, though I did wish I was better at languages.
Even so, I had a most enjoyable cultural experience one afternoon when I left my British English group to take an excursion in Matanzas in the company of tourists from Mexico, Argentina, Spain and Venezuela - albeit with a bi-lingual Cuban guide who interpreted everything of importance into English for the benefit of poor me and a German couple. What it showed was that when it comes to social niceties, learning about strange lands and other forms of personal communication there is no fundamental difference between the English- and the Spanish-speaking worlds.
If Varadero is a reminder of the American presence in the pre-Castro period, Trinidad is living testimony to the grandeur of a more distant past, with its streets, squares, cathedrals and palaces preserved as they were some 3 or 4 centuries ago with the help of UN funding for world heritage sites. Driving up and round the coast from there, we even visited the famous Bay of Pigs and a couple from our party, in typical British eccentric fashion, stripped bare to take a swim there just to prove something (?).
And what of Havana? The city is full of monuments, to the victorious revolution, of course, and lots of historic towers and buildings of the colonial era. It is essentially a mixture of the old and the new. There is even a Fountain of India, which at first I thought might be to celebrate the post-colonial Gandhi/Nehru connection, but no, it is a picturesque marble structure erected in 1837, with nothing (that I could detect) to indicate why. One dominating feature of the city`s landscape is the Malecon - the gigantic sea wall around the northern shore. I had my business contact host`s driver stop along it at night to take a closer look - even on a normal evening the waves were fearsome and some lashed over; so imagine what it would be like during one of those hurricanes?
And then, of course, there is Hemingway`s House, with its large surrounding grounds and gardens. It was left by him to the Cuban nation as a legacy and has been preserved in the same state - now as a tourist attraction - solid, stately and serene. We are allowed to peep into all the rooms through large windows and see the furniture, the rugs, the objet`d`art and other decorations and, above all, the books - hundreds of them lining the walls of every room, including the spacious toilet in the main house, and in the guest cottage outside. Anyone with long eyesight or a special lense could read the titles of the books; in the study it was possible to make out some of them, eg. `The Partisan Reader` (no other details), `Enemies of Promise` by Cyril Connolly, Nevil Shute`s `Beyond the Black Stump`, `The Republic` by Charles A Beard and `Doctrine and Action` by Dr Oliveira Salazar.
The opulence of the estate was unmistakeable; there is the huge swimming pool (now empty and exposed), while his yacht `El Pilar` remains anchored on stilts in a seemingly navigable condition in the large boatyard. And as if the property was not set high enough, there is the inevitable stone tower, which one can climb up to along an iron ladder of the modern fire exit variety; so I did and the view was fantastic. Oh, and I forgot to mention a stuffed lion, as a trophy, below in one of his studies - as proof of his East African safari! But though much is made of his Cuban connection, he was really an expatriate - not so much The `Quiet` American as a gregarious, party-loving playboy (there are stories about him seen swimming naked with Ava Gardener who was rumoured to be his daughter!) and, to paraphrase Graham Green again, he could even have been `Their Man in Havana`, `their` here meaning the FBI - at least they were keeping track of him!
On the long flight to Havana, I had finished Jon Snow`s extremely readable `Shooting History - A Personal Journey`. To those not familiar with his name, he is of course the celebrated British TV journalist and now Channel 4 news anchorman. In it he recalls a conversation he had with Castro (he had been asked by Neil Kinnock to record a meeting he, Kinnock had with Castro) when he confirmed that the Americans had once tried to blow him up with an explosive cigar. But he also told Kinnock during a banter about beards and baldness that he saved some eighty hours a week by not shaving! I thought of this when we visited the Plaza de la Revolucion where Castro gives his annual speech on 1st January when up to 2 million people gather to hear him. It is surrounded by buildings housing all the principal ministries, the most notable of them being the Minstry of the Interior which sports a giant mural of Che Guevara. Che of course is perhaps the best known revolutionary hero after Castro to be admired, and here again I was reminded of `The Motor Cycle Diaries` about his early life that I saw less than a couple of months ago. The Plaza is not large in comparision with other similar places; Tiannamen Square in Beijing for example is much, much bigger, though there the presence of the Chinese army is unmistakeable, whereas here there were no visible guards.
We also visited the famous Hotel Nacionale de Cuba, built in elegant Colonial style in 1927 and set on a landscaped crag overlooking the Malecon and the Atlantic Ocean. The bars and the galleries of the hotel contain photos and sketches of people like Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Paul Robeson and Winston Churchill (among others) all of whom had stayed there at one time or another. Another night, my business friend took me to a live show there, but quite frankly it did not compare favourably with the Cubanacana Cabaret that I have seen performed here in London. And that brings me to music; this is such a fundamental aspect of life in Cuba that one simply cannot escape it, nor should we want to. Just as when you land at Las Vegas`s McLaren Airport you are immediately drawn into the gambling culture of the place (with one-armed bandits placed in the customs hall and so on) so here in Cuba, the music beguils and captures you the moment you arrive. The air is filled with the rhythms and sounds of `son bembe`, `salsa` and `Trova`. In hotels, restaurants and public places, they play - not to serenade you as much as just to infect you with the spirit of the music, and so if you get up and do a few steps they are delighted - of course you are then expected to tip them!
From music to literature and art : there is no shortage of galleries, museums and meeting places. So many of these were within a hair`s breath of our hotel; I ventured into the `Palacio de Bellas Artes` right across, attracted by a large expectant crowd of people who had gathered and were obviously waiting for something to happen. I usually find, in foreign cities, that the best way to make some local contact is going to an art gallery, museum or college/university related cafe or site where one is bound to meet some intellectual type who speaks English! Well, this for once did not work: I could not find anyone with whom I could have a conversation in English and it was only after a broken and elementary exchange with a couple of people that I managed to find out that about to open was an exhibition of paintings by the celebrated Cuban writer, painter and musicologist Alejo Carpentier. They gave me a brochure in Spanish which maybe someone will translate for me some day!
(And food? I should have mentioned that my business friend, living a bachelor style existence in a sleek upmarket kind of apartment block where he also had his office, entertained me to an Indian meal there prepared and served by, wait for it, his Cuban-Indian cook! Cuban-Indian not of the native Indian variety but rather from India - originally from Kerala who had been settled in Cuba for some three decades and married to a local Cuban woman. He said he had cooked for top people, including even Castro, and of course spoke Spanish. The vegetarian meal he had prepared was like one we would have at home, with hot chapatis, curry, rice and dahl and other condiments, served as they do in India, straight off the oven! My friend spent a certain number of months only in Havana and needed home comforts).
As for the flow and exchange of information generally, we could get CNN in both English and Spanish at all the hotels. The locals do not have such easy access but news cannot be suppressed. Special editions of local papers announcing the death of Arafat were on sale in the streets almost immediately and hotel workers did ask about Faluja; so they knew what was going on and were concerned about world affairs, though from a different perspective - and why not?
So to sum up, I am glad I went and saw for myself that Cuba has stood up to the American hegemony and is surviving despite the embargo that has now lasted some 40 years. Cuban technology, engineering and medical expertise developed and flourished as a direct result of American sanctions because, as our guide emphasized time and again, `necessity is the mother of invention`, These professional skills have not only made the country into what it is, largely self-reliant, but they have long been exported to other Third World countries, particularly in South and Central America. The Cubans` contribution is valued and respected there.
But I fear for its future: for once Castro goes (and despite all the anti-Cuban rhetoric repeated by Bush during the recent election, it is clear that the Americans are now basically waiting for him to die rather than wanting to topple him) the country will get sucked into the global market economy - because the capitalist hawks are waiting in the wings and, let us face it, the country is ripe for `development`... . Are there any parallels with other Communist societies? In China and Vietnam, we have the spectre of a dynamic, though paternalistic, leadership embracing the pragmatism, if not the ideology, of capitalism, in a measured and controlled way (unlike in Russia). In both those countries, there is a long historical tradition of self-help interacting with the competitive spirit and the survival instinct, against the background of a burgeoning population.
In Cuba, a different kind of cultural environment prevails and the people are fairly laid back. The sound social structure of the Cuban nation will therefore be severely tested by any push towards a free market type economy, and the present broad mass of an equally poor population will be split into those who can ride with the new wave and those who will be left high and dry - thus giving rise to all the ills of extremes of poverty and wealth that we have come to see in other parts of the developing word. So maybe the end of the Revolution is not too far off, who knows?
PS> After returning from my trip, in the last couple of days, I have resumed reading "Dirty Havana Trilogy" a fictional account of low-level life in Cuba by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, translated by Natasha Wimmer, and must say it all makes sense! RAMNIK SHAH, Surrey, England
Posted By Ramnik on 11/21/2004 Travel Add your comments Reads: 32
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Impressions of Cuba Posted by Ramnik on 11/21/2004
Castro saves 80 hours a WEEK by not shaving? No, of course not. I have checked the reference - at page 234 of Jon Snow`s book (HarperCollins/Publishers 2004 - Hb - ISBN 0 00 717184) - and it should of course have been `eighty hours a year`. Sorry. RAMNIK SHAH
Posted By Ramnik
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Travel::
Impressions of Cuba
Having just returned from a week`s trip to Cuba, let me record my impressions of the country here. My fascination for the place goes back to 1961. To a 20-year-old student radical, when the `Bay of Pigs` happened, Castro`s Cuba became instantly and inextricably linked with revolution and resistance, and acquired an aura of rustic romance. So it was thrilling to set foot there some 43 years later, and to find that the `Revolution` (of 1959) is still alive and kicking, personified by Castro as a much revered father figure of the nation.
Our trip started at Varadero, which used to be the Americans` den in their backwaters for gambling, prostitution, tax evasion and other associated vices in the 1940s and 50s. Evidence of this can still be seen nearly 50 years on, in the faded facades and forticos of crumbling buildings of the period and the empty but well laid out streets and avenues, reminiscent of US mid-town life, flowing with the ubiquitous and battered Fords, Pontiacs and Chevrolets, whose colourful bodyworks are of course powered by reconstructed Russian engines as maintained and further modified by Cuban ingenuity.
From Varadero to Cienfuegos to Trinidad and then on to Havana, as we drove through the lush countryside, one could not but notice how leisurely and peaceful the pace of life was. People milled and mingled around in town centres, just as they would anywhere else. More noticeably, they waited by the roadside for transport, which is the one public utility that is most evidently lacking in Cuba. They have an excellent universal health care service and an equally comprehensive education system (both free at all points of use) but do not have a good transport infrastructure either in terms of a road or rail network or of trams and buses. And so it is customary for drivers to stop and give lifts to pedestrians.
In general, then, people are not prosperous, but they are not poverty-stricken either. They enjoy a subsistence level national wage (reputed to be around US $15 a month) which means their necessities of life (basic food, shelter, clothing etc) are assured; anything above that would depend on extra-curricular activities! There is a large bureucracy designed to ensure that people follow rules: eg. ration books are essential for daily purchases; every cow and horse (believe it or not) has an ID assigned at birth and any such animals to die have to be accounted for (to prevent `black` marketing in meat and skin products); inspectors check that vehicles stop at every railway crossing (which are invariably unguarded) even along disused lines for trains that may never come or appear infrequently; and records are meticulously kept of the most mundane transactions, again so that no one derives any unfair or unmerited advantage.
But at the top layers of government, access to officials or ministers is easy. Indeed, as a (British Asian) business contact explained, state security of the kind that we are used to is afforded only to Castro, his Deputy and his brother (who is professionally involved in such matters); others can be approached like ordinary citizens, without corruption or backhanders. The economy runs on an extraordinary rather than a complex dual Cuban Peso and US $ level, except that two days after we arrived there (on 8 November) the US Dollar became `non grata` as a trading currency, to be replaced by the CUC (the convertible Peso) which meant that one could exchange US Dollars at par. So for tourists and foreigners, everything is always quoted in terms of the US $ and the rates and prices are not that cheap either - for example a small beer (Crystal) at a cafe, restaurant or hotel, usually cost between $1 and $2.50. The same applies to food in such places; though marginally cheaper for visitors it is of course wholly out of the economic range of the locals. But the remarkable thing is that the Cubans live with this dichotomy as routine; there is no resentment, no embarrassment and no envy.
Walking in the grottiest parts Old Havana for example, at no time did I feel either threatened or out of place. On the first evening, I deliberately wandered about wearing a tee-shirt bearing the Canadian colours and the logo of Niagara Falls, with a pouch around my waist, just so that if I did anything out of the ordinary it could be seen that I was a foreigner - but nobody either accosted me or even gave me a second glance. At other times, most people tended to assume that I was a Latino - because of the brown skin of course, even though I was better dressed and looked like a tourist. Now, not knowing a word of Spanish was a major drawback of course. But we managed to get by, though I did wish I was better at languages.
Even so, I had a most enjoyable cultural experience one afternoon when I left my British English group to take an excursion in Matanzas in the company of tourists from Mexico, Argentina, Spain and Venezuela - albeit with a bi-lingual Cuban guide who interpreted everything of importance into English for the benefit of poor me and a German couple. What it showed was that when it comes to social niceties, learning about strange lands and other forms of personal communication there is no fundamental difference between the English- and the Spanish-speaking worlds.
If Varadero is a reminder of the American presence in the pre-Castro period, Trinidad is living testimony to the grandeur of a more distant past, with its streets, squares, cathedrals and palaces preserved as they were some 3 or 4 centuries ago with the help of UN funding for world heritage sites. Driving up and round the coast from there, we even visited the famous Bay of Pigs and a couple from our party, in typical British eccentric fashion, stripped bare to take a swim there just to prove something (?).
And what of Havana? The city is full of monuments, to the victorious revolution, of course, and lots of historic towers and buildings of the colonial era. It is essentially a mixture of the old and the new. There is even a Fountain of India, which at first I thought might be to celebrate the post-colonial Gandhi/Nehru connection, but no, it is a picturesque marble structure erected in 1837, with nothing (that I could detect) to indicate why. One dominating feature of the city`s landscape is the Malecon - the gigantic sea wall around the northern shore. I had my business contact host`s driver stop along it at night to take a closer look - even on a normal evening the waves were fearsome and some lashed over; so imagine what it would be like during one of those hurricanes?
And then, of course, there is Hemingway`s House, with its large surrounding grounds and gardens. It was left by him to the Cuban nation as a legacy and has been preserved in the same state - now as a tourist attraction - solid, stately and serene. We are allowed to peep into all the rooms through large windows and see the furniture, the rugs, the objet`d`art and other decorations and, above all, the books - hundreds of them lining the walls of every room, including the spacious toilet in the main house, and in the guest cottage outside. Anyone with long eyesight or a special lense could read the titles of the books; in the study it was possible to make out some of them, eg. `The Partisan Reader` (no other details), `Enemies of Promise` by Cyril Connolly, Nevil Shute`s `Beyond the Black Stump`, `The Republic` by Charles A Beard and `Doctrine and Action` by Dr Oliveira Salazar.
The opulence of the estate was unmistakeable; there is the huge swimming pool (now empty and exposed), while his yacht `El Pilar` remains anchored on stilts in a seemingly navigable condition in the large boatyard. And as if the property was not set high enough, there is the inevitable stone tower, which one can climb up to along an iron ladder of the modern fire exit variety; so I did and the view was fantastic. Oh, and I forgot to mention a stuffed lion, as a trophy, below in one of his studies - as proof of his East African safari! But though much is made of his Cuban connection, he was really an expatriate - not so much The `Quiet` American as a gregarious, party-loving playboy (there are stories about him seen swimming naked with Ava Gardener who was rumoured to be his daughter!) and, to paraphrase Graham Green again, he could even have been `Their Man in Havana`, `their` here meaning the FBI - at least they were keeping track of him!
On the long flight to Havana, I had finished Jon Snow`s extremely readable `Shooting History - A Personal Journey`. To those not familiar with his name, he is of course the celebrated British TV journalist and now Channel 4 news anchorman. In it he recalls a conversation he had with Castro (he had been asked by Neil Kinnock to record a meeting he, Kinnock had with Castro) when he confirmed that the Americans had once tried to blow him up with an explosive cigar. But he also told Kinnock during a banter about beards and baldness that he saved some eighty hours a week by not shaving! I thought of this when we visited the Plaza de la Revolucion where Castro gives his annual speech on 1st January when up to 2 million people gather to hear him. It is surrounded by buildings housing all the principal ministries, the most notable of them being the Minstry of the Interior which sports a giant mural of Che Guevara. Che of course is perhaps the best known revolutionary hero after Castro to be admired, and here again I was reminded of `The Motor Cycle Diaries` about his early life that I saw less than a couple of months ago. The Plaza is not large in comparision with other similar places; Tiannamen Square in Beijing for example is much, much bigger, though there the presence of the Chinese army is unmistakeable, whereas here there were no visible guards.
We also visited the famous Hotel Nacionale de Cuba, built in elegant Colonial style in 1927 and set on a landscaped crag overlooking the Malecon and the Atlantic Ocean. The bars and the galleries of the hotel contain photos and sketches of people like Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Paul Robeson and Winston Churchill (among others) all of whom had stayed there at one time or another. Another night, my business friend took me to a live show there, but quite frankly it did not compare favourably with the Cubanacana Cabaret that I have seen performed here in London. And that brings me to music; this is such a fundamental aspect of life in Cuba that one simply cannot escape it, nor should we want to. Just as when you land at Las Vegas`s McLaren Airport you are immediately drawn into the gambling culture of the place (with one-armed bandits placed in the customs hall and so on) so here in Cuba, the music beguils and captures you the moment you arrive. The air is filled with the rhythms and sounds of `son bembe`, `salsa` and `Trova`. In hotels, restaurants and public places, they play - not to serenade you as much as just to infect you with the spirit of the music, and so if you get up and do a few steps they are delighted - of course you are then expected to tip them!
From music to literature and art : there is no shortage of galleries, museums and meeting places. So many of these were within a hair`s breath of our hotel; I ventured into the `Palacio de Bellas Artes` right across, attracted by a large expectant crowd of people who had gathered and were obviously waiting for something to happen. I usually find, in foreign cities, that the best way to make some local contact is going to an art gallery, museum or college/university related cafe or site where one is bound to meet some intellectual type who speaks English! Well, this for once did not work: I could not find anyone with whom I could have a conversation in English and it was only after a broken and elementary exchange with a couple of people that I managed to find out that about to open was an exhibition of paintings by the celebrated Cuban writer, painter and musicologist Alejo Carpentier. They gave me a brochure in Spanish which maybe someone will translate for me some day!
(And food? I should have mentioned that my business friend, living a bachelor style existence in a sleek upmarket kind of apartment block where he also had his office, entertained me to an Indian meal there prepared and served by, wait for it, his Cuban-Indian cook! Cuban-Indian not of the native Indian variety but rather from India - originally from Kerala who had been settled in Cuba for some three decades and married to a local Cuban woman. He said he had cooked for top people, including even Castro, and of course spoke Spanish. The vegetarian meal he had prepared was like one we would have at home, with hot chapatis, curry, rice and dahl and other condiments, served as they do in India, straight off the oven! My friend spent a certain number of months only in Havana and needed home comforts).
As for the flow and exchange of information generally, we could get CNN in both English and Spanish at all the hotels. The locals do not have such easy access but news cannot be suppressed. Special editions of local papers announcing the death of Arafat were on sale in the streets almost immediately and hotel workers did ask about Faluja; so they knew what was going on and were concerned about world affairs, though from a different perspective - and why not?
So to sum up, I am glad I went and saw for myself that Cuba has stood up to the American hegemony and is surviving despite the embargo that has now lasted some 40 years. Cuban technology, engineering and medical expertise developed and flourished as a direct result of American sanctions because, as our guide emphasized time and again, `necessity is the mother of invention`, These professional skills have not only made the country into what it is, largely self-reliant, but they have long been exported to other Third World countries, particularly in South and Central America. The Cubans` contribution is valued and respected there.
But I fear for its future: for once Castro goes (and despite all the anti-Cuban rhetoric repeated by Bush during the recent election, it is clear that the Americans are now basically waiting for him to die rather than wanting to topple him) the country will get sucked into the global market economy - because the capitalist hawks are waiting in the wings and, let us face it, the country is ripe for `development`... . Are there any parallels with other Communist societies? In China and Vietnam, we have the spectre of a dynamic, though paternalistic, leadership embracing the pragmatism, if not the ideology, of capitalism, in a measured and controlled way (unlike in Russia). In both those countries, there is a long historical tradition of self-help interacting with the competitive spirit and the survival instinct, against the background of a burgeoning population.
In Cuba, a different kind of cultural environment prevails and the people are fairly laid back. The sound social structure of the Cuban nation will therefore be severely tested by any push towards a free market type economy, and the present broad mass of an equally poor population will be split into those who can ride with the new wave and those who will be left high and dry - thus giving rise to all the ills of extremes of poverty and wealth that we have come to see in other parts of the developing word. So maybe the end of the Revolution is not too far off, who knows?
PS> After returning from my trip, in the last couple of days, I have resumed reading "Dirty Havana Trilogy" a fictional account of low-level life in Cuba by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, translated by Natasha Wimmer, and must say it all makes sense! RAMNIK SHAH, Surrey, England
Posted By Ramnik on 11/21/2004 Travel Add your comments Reads: 32
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Impressions of Cuba Posted by Ramnik on 11/21/2004
Castro saves 80 hours a WEEK by not shaving? No, of course not. I have checked the reference - at page 234 of Jon Snow`s book (HarperCollins/Publishers 2004 - Hb - ISBN 0 00 717184) - and it should of course have been `eighty hours a year`. Sorry. RAMNIK SHAH
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