The Poet of Havana

This movie is about Cuban songwriter Carlos Varela. He was born in 1963, only a few years after Castro's Communist Revolution took over Cuba. From the 1980s on he kept the faith, walking the fine line between expressing his artistic feelings and being blackballed or worse, because of his ideas. His was truly a lost generation. As an English speaking American I cannot conceive what life must have been like for those individuals who remained in Cuba during that time. They stayed a difficult and courageous course. The film attempts to chart that course, to show what these people went through and how important Carlos Varela and his music are for many of them. It does this with varying degrees of success. The movie makers may be forgiven this. To adequately express the past fifty plus years of Cuban history would require something along the lines of War and Peace. I may be prejudiced here because I also saw Carlos Varela in concert and no concert movie can possibly match that. Still this is a powerfully important movie, its historical importance heightened by the recent reopening of relations between Cuba and the United States.

Note to filmmakers: I can't find English translations of most of Carlos' songs anywhere on the Internet. Could someone please make translations of songs in the movie available? You can't begin to understand the importance of this man without knowing the words to his songs, starting of course with "William Tell."