I just finished watching Andy Garcia's The Lost City. It is a movie about Cuba, and more specifically La Habana, on the lost days of the Batista regime and the eve of Castro's take over.

The movie is a bit long and slow at some points.

It is, however, a moving portrait of what has befallen my dear Cuba and its people.

There is a scene, towards the end of the movie, when the Andy Garcia is getting ready to board a plane to the U.S. The government thug at the airport forces Andy to give up his personal property, including a pocket watch that had been given to him by his father.

When we left Cuba, the government thug took all of our personal property, including a small pendant that my mother wore. It had been given to her by my father on their first "official" date. It was nothing, a little trinket, but the SOB Castro thug just yanked it off my mother's neck and laughed while doing it. I saw my father almost start towards the bastard, but my mother just put a hand on his hand to calm him down. I watched it all with both fear and anger--I too wanted to hit the thug.

It was just one more little indignity that we were forced to endure on the way to freedom. But watching a similar scene on the movie brought back emotions and feelings that I thought had been buried long ago. I wept like a kid watching that scene.

Getting back to the movie, it has not been well received by many of the critics. One "criticism" of the movie is that it does not show "enough poor" people in Cuba--the people who supposedly supported "la Revolucion."

Here is some info on pre-Castro Cuba:

A UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957 states: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S."

In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933 – five years before FDR's New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn't manage this till 30 years later.

Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. This was in the 1930's. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off a Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S.

The anti-Batista rebellion was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself). Here's the makeup of the "peasant revolution's" first Cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the anti-Batista fight: seven lawyers, two university professors, three university students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor and a colonel who defected from the Batista army.

If you get a chance, watch the movie.

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