CUBAN NETWORK FILM. Directed by Olivier Assayas, the film Cuban Network is the adaptation of a book by Fernando Morais, which retraces the real affair of the five Cuban spies.
France 2
Sunday July 10 at 9:05 p.m.
9/16 | Above 10 only
[Mis à jour le 10 juillet 2022 à 20h30] Cuban Network is a drama film by Olivier Assayaz which adapts the book “Os Últimos Soldados da Guerra Fria” (The last soldiers of the Cold War) by Fernando Morais. This tells the story of the five Cuban spies, a true story that took place in the 1900s in the United States. In 1997, several bomb attacks took place in hotels in Havana. In 1998, five Cubans were arrested in the United States, accused of espionage. They are convicted of espionage, conspiracy, and assassination plots, allegedly targeting the United States Military Command and four groups of anti-Castro exiles.
The Cuban government denied for three years that the five officers belonged to the Havana intelligence services, before changing the tune. Two of the spies were released in October 2011 and February 2014, the other three in December 2014, as part of an exchange between Cuba and the United States. Olivier Assayas had to carry out a real work of research and simplification to adapt this dense and very factual book on the big screen. For the filmmaker, the story of the “Cuban five” represents “a fragment of contemporary history that cinema has never really tackled”. What appealed to him was the complexity of the contemporary politics that underlies this case. “And above all, there was a broader framework, where the intimate and the universal mingled, individuals caught in the cogs of politics and history”.
Synopsis – In the early 1990s, some Cuban citizens, seeing in the collapse of the Soviet bloc a possible weakening of the regime of Fidel Castro, decided to act to hasten its downfall. While some anti-Castroites stayed put, others went into exile in Florida in order to prepare guerrilla actions there. Among these, there is René Gonzalez Sehweret. He does not hesitate to abandon his wife Olga and his daughter to defend his ideals. On the spot, he meets the members of the network, partly financed by drug trafficking, such as Juan Pablo and his fiancée Ana Margarita or even Gerardo. “Wasp network”, bringing together men loyal to Fidel, try to undermine their project…