The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

The critic's dilemma with propaganda films lies in the controversial subject matter and the fact that they are generally made by the crème de la crème of directors - a blessing and a curse. All these films are supposed to convey is a certain political mind-set, the glorification of a person, revolution or regime - in impressive imagery that is, the rest is artistic license. The latter is why directors are carefully chosen for these projects in the first place - their unique style should warrant the film's success. This was the case with Eisenstein's and Dovzhenko's masterpieces in the 1920s/1930s or Riefenstahl's infamous "Triumph of the Will" aestheticising Nazis, and it also applies to Mikhail Kalatozov's "I am Cuba" retracing the Cuban revolution. Interestingly however Kalatozov, whose breathtaking "Cranes are Flying" took the Cannes Grand Prize in 1958, failed in the eyes of the Cubans and the Soviets, who didn't consider it revolutionary enough, too naïve, too stereotypical. Its rediscovery however is well deserved, and it's due to its sublime beauty.More than half a century on much more has remained from "I Am Cuba" than just a historic document tinged by communistic propaganda. Above all it is a poetic portrayal with incredible visuals, a riveting collage of very different lives on the same soil, connected by their love for their country. "I Am Cuba" is a feeling. It comprises the Cuban homeland and a time of upheaval, strong emotions that have bottled up for years and years to finally come to the forefront leading up to inevitable confrontations. The film's perspective still comes across as powerful and relevant, story-wise and camera-wise. Kalatozov films in long takes which are often choreographed with absolute precision, uses stylized high contrast black and white cinematography, extraordinary crane and tracking shots, tilted camera angles and seemingly even moves freely through Havana in one of the most famous continuous camera shots in film history. With his superb technical and cinematic artistry Kalatozov transcends the moment and while his approach wasn't appreciated back in the days, his rediscovery in the 1990s prompted an array of quotes from this work. Indicator enough that Cuba is worth a visit, at least on the silver screen.

Mikhail Kalatozov's "I Am Cuba" and its production were an exercise in identity. Soviet-made, the film aspires to personify the revolutionary Cuban. It is renowned for its cinematography, which the paucity of dialog leaves to carry a heavy burden. Indeed, the camera itself is a player in this morality play about capitalism and communism. For instance, the opening sequence is a luscious homage to Cuba's unmolested natural expanses and true-to-their-land people. Kalatozov's shots often feel like POV—but whose? Perhaps the most remarkable of these pseudo-POV shots is the one that opens the first vignette, set in a Batista-era pre-Castro rooftop pool party. This Essay takes that shot as a case study for how the cinematography of Kalatozov and his DP Sergei Urusevsky further the identity infomercial that is I Am Cuba.The continuous three-minute-and-fourteen-second one-shot scene opens on an American-style brass band. The hand-held camera weaves among a coterie of barely dancing women whose main function appears to be looking attractive. Then its first magic: face-en-face the railing, it slides down a couple stories—still outdoors—to the pool deck below. This is the first time we're sure that the shot is not POV, unless from the vantage of a levitating deity. Poolside, we meander throw more revelers sipping, sightseeing and sunbathing. We follow one into the water and— magic trick #2—beneath its surface for more flesh and frivolity. Everyone is white. The band plays on.To assemble the puzzle of whose eye the camera stands for, start with the scenes bookending this one. Immediately before, we have the film's very first images—those natural expanses of ocean and earth where folk toil with their hands. They stand for integrity. Immediately after, we're serenaded by a black singing of crazy love. He might have integrity, too, as might the Cuban women in this jazz club, but for the obtuse, uncouth, nasal, illiterate, uncultured, loveless American businessmen ogling them. Soon, we're back on the singer and the hand- held camera is drunk with his love. Once the men get the objects of their shallow affections on the dance floor, the cinematography shakes with an increasingly vertiginous violence—implying that Betty's pangs are of agony, not ecstasy. She's framed by the bamboo rods like an animal in a cage.Thus the sandwich of which the show-off shot by the pool forms the meat is: (1) serene camera documenting an honest people; (2) voyeuristic camera snaking among lackadaisical partyers; (3) intoxicated camera witnessing corruption of culture. Its anthropomorphic feel—from a technical perspective, the result of the hand-held style and medium- close range—results not from identification with the "I" in "I Am Cuba." Instead, the camera is a detective, dedicated to the truthful representation of this island nation in various phases. Sure, it can't help feeling moved by the inevitable emotions of what it captures, but fundamentally it is there as a journalist. For a film so propagandistic, using a documentary style was all the more important to maintain credibility.So back to the Batista-era pool party. Our first hope is that the camera is POV, and we're invited to the party and to rock out with the band. Next up, those dancers—didn't a couple of them make eye contact? Perhaps Kalatozov is being sloppy with the fourth wall here, but more likely he's deliberately stringing us along with our POV theory a bit longer. In any event, that game is up once we float down to the pool, and the road for the audience forks. Either try to enjoy as a voyeur, or resent being excluded. And even if you choose the former path, it usually leads to the second. Kalatozov leaves us underwater, the band finally muted, in a quintessentially voyeuristic and excluded perch. All the while, no one talks to us. No one notices us. We don't exist.Such a pejorative read of the first scene of the first vignette makes all the more sense when that scene is read in counterpoise to the last of the last vignette. That story's hero is trudging through mud and machine guns, fighting the good fight. The juxtaposition could not be starker: sun vs. smoke, music vs. mortars (and music, too—but of a military variety), privilege vs. purpose, frivolity vs. fearlessness, sky vs. soil. Kalatozov's point is that the glory lies in the latter— and, as suggested in the final triumphant frames, that only by winning them the hard way can one enjoy the former.

Kalatozov and Urusevsky's powerful propaganda story of the inequities of pre-revolutionary Cuba told in four vignettes filmed at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis was rejected by Cuban and Soviet audiences alike at the time and subsequently forgotten until after the collapse of the Soviet Union when it was rediscovered by Cuban novelist Cabrera Infante and promoted by movie brats Scorsese and Coppola for its technical brilliance and unparallelled artistry.The pained tones of Revuelta guide us through the film as the Voice of Cuba building with each story the viewer's sense of injustice with beautifully nuanced performances from Collazo as the beautiful and vulnerable girl who falls into prostitution, Gallardo as the embittered sugar cane farmer who loses everything to the big U.S. corporations, García as the tank-top wearing, Caddy riding, Molotov cocktail flinging student radical turned would be assassin and Wood as the humble farmer feted by tragedy to march victoriously into Havana, all of whom manage to rise above Urusevsky stunning visuals to shine.Clearly influenced by Riefenstahl, to the point where several of the Nazi propagandist's collaborators where hired to work on the film, the filmmakers' take agitprop to a new level with high-contrast infrared film and impossibly complex tracking shots, some of which seem to last longer than the revolution itself and involved passing the camera down a line of stagehands, creating a powerful vision that is still unmatched in modern cinema.Don't lower your eyes, look around.

The cameras are flying in this remarkable display of cinematic poetry that elevates I Am Cuba's heavy handed and sometimes mawkish propaganda message to an effective and inspiring pedestal. Like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will it is both visually mesmerizing and immediate to the early glories and heady times of change through revolution before the total onset of the totalitarian dictatorships that followed in each country.The dictatorial and brutal regime of Fulgencio Batista is in it's final days but the exploitation and repression of the Cuban people living amid poverty continues. The somber sultry beauty of the rhythmic isle we float through is suddenly thrashed by the crass noise of sloppy rock and roll poolside amid tall hotels and voluptuous swim suit models. Other interrelated stories feature a woman forced through economics to peddle herself to unctuous American businessmen and along with a student activist fight off a platoon of loutish US servicemen. Outside the city the farmers are also exploited by United Fruit Company and attacked indiscriminately by government planes. The cause is clear for all; they must rise up against the tyranny. This point is gracefully and heroically conveyed from end to end in I am Cuba.Matching their masterful artistry displayed in the powerful and moving The Cranes are Flying, Soviet director Mikhail Kolatozov with cinematographer Sergei Uresevsky blueprint some audacious camera acrobatics. With some of the finest tracking and crane shots I have ever witnessed (the hotel pool scene and the funeral for the student activist are as good as it gets in any film) I could rhapsodize endlessly on its form but I am Cuba's content also offers some fascinating incite to time and viewpoint. The film is anti American Imperialist, Capitalist, Western Influence and Coca Cola with a hint of anti-semitism thrown in but even with this stilted viewpoint I am Cuba remains a powerful and moving document on the struggle against government repression.All leaders of the Twentieth Century understood the power of film and its possibilities to reach, persuade and motivate the masses to their way of thinking. Propaganda is an indispensable tool to all who hold power and film is a perfect delivery system. Democracies (The 49th Parallel, Purple Heart) as well as Dictatorships (see above) and anyone else interested in consolidating and maintaining power would be lost without it. I am Cuba is a magnificent and passionate tract in that vein that clearly does Castro proud but with nuances in ideology would have done the same for Roosevelt Churchill or Robert Mugabe. In the case of I am Cuba it's the singer not the song that shines.