Movie Exposes Cruel Limits On Cuba Travel

By Ana Menendez, The Miami Herald
November 12, 2006

Against the tyranny of abstraction comes Those I Left Behind , a new documentary that challenges U.S. policy toward Cuba through the strength and sadness of individual stories.
It premiered Thursday night at Florida International University. When the lights came on, there was sustained applause and also tears.
The film, by Lisandro Perez-Rey, explores the separation of four Cuban families and their efforts to remain connected despite politics and distance. There's enough in it to move and irritate just about everyone with a stake in the details. And that's the documentary's greatest strength -- its bullheaded insistence on story over ideology.
By now everyone knows Fidel Castro built his revolution by dividing families. And after a few black and white shots of a young, fulminating Fidel, Perez-Rey quickly moves on to the focus of the film: the new U.S. rules that, as if taking a cue from the dictator,   seek to get at politics through the family.
''We all know that in Cuba people can't leave,'' Perez-Rey told me Friday. ``There's nothing I can do to change the policy of a totalitarian government. I can only change the policy of my own government.''
The documentary traces the travels and disappointments of parents and siblings as they try to negotiate the new law. But the star of the film is Carlos Lazo, the Iraq War veteran who has spent the past two years campaigning against the new restrictions.
''I'm a veteran of two wars,'' Lazo said after the screening, ``Iraq and this war of love.''

LESS-FREQUENT VISITS
Before 2004, those with family in Cuba could visit once a year. But then the Bush administration changed that to once every three years and redefined ''family'' to exclude cousins, aunts and uncles.
The new law devastated thousands of families who had come to depend on the visits   economically and emotionally.
At first, there was an outcry, with many Cuban Americans openly protesting for the first time against a Republican administration.
But then came the old Cuban talent for making do. Many Cuban Americans quickly learned to circumvent the restrictions by going with ''religious'' organizations or flouted the law by traveling through third countries and finding other ways to get money to relatives.
Their own problems resolved, many stopped agitating.
Lazo was one of the few who refused to break the law and instead set about trying to change it.
Lazo arrived from Cuba in 1992, leaving behind two boys. He joined the military, served in Iraq and was awarded a Bronze Star.
But when he tried to go to Cuba in 2004 to visit his sons, he learned that because of the new restrictions, he would have to wait two more years.
Last year, the United States granted his sons visas   and they now live with him and his wife in Seattle. But Lazo refuses to stop campaigning for change.
''I think it would be a lack of honesty and care for others to solve my own problems and then be quiet,'' he said.

DEEPER MEASURE
Those I Left Behind may include too many moody shots of the sea and of birds flying freely, but no one who cherishes family can ignore its deeper message. The film remains a brave stand against the politics of hate, even if it's sad that such a documentary needs to be made at all.
Castro is dying, and his discredited revolution is in shambles. There has never been a better time to address the miserable failure of our own Cuba policy and refashion it into something both humane and workable. But in Washington it's still 1959.
Thousands of decent, Castro-hating Cuban Americans are suffering under the idiotic policies that, at this late stage, are still being pushed by a vocal   and embittered minority.
We've spent a generation asking Cubans on the island to rise up. When will we?