This film is a lyrical and romantic memoir told through the eyes an eleven year old boy living in a rural Cuban town the year of the Castro revolution. It is an obviously genuine worthy labor of love.
The names CUBA LIBRE and CUBAN BLOOD are merely attempts to wrongly market this as an action film. DREAMING OF JULIA makes much more sense. It has more in common with European cinema than with RAMBO and the revolution is merely an inconvenience to people's daily lives and pursuits. That fact alone makes the film more honest than most works dealing with this time period in Cuban history.
The excessive use of the voice-over narrator does undermine the story but the film makes up for it with unqualified clips from Hollywood films that say so much more visually than the narrator could.
The comparisons to CINEMA PARADISO and are fair game as the film does wax melancholy about movies, but there is an underlying pain at the loss of a lifestyle that surpasses lost love.
The revolution, like the film JULIE, never seems to have an ending.
