Cuba: The Forgotten Revolution

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CUBA: THE FORGOTTEN REVOLUTION tells the virtually unknown story of Cuban revolutionaries Frank Pais and Jose Antonio Echeverria - a school teacher and architecture student - whose names seldom appear alongside their more famous contemporaries, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. These young men, who worked independently from each other, played critical roles in the eventual overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldíva in 1950s Cuba. New scholarship and recently accessed footage challenge the prevailing view - in part advanced by Che Guevara - that Castro's army of 200 guerillas single-handedly defeated tens of thousands of Batista's professional soldiers and liberated the people of Cuba. In actuality, Pais and Echeverria's insurgencies in Santiago and Havana held the key to generating popular support for resistance and undermining the authority of Batista and his secret police. Both Pais and Echeverria rivaled Castro in popularity and power during the height of the Revolution, yet neither man lived to see the movement succeed. Pais was gunned down in the street and Echeverria died in a daring raid on the palace. The film highlights the complexities inherent in revolutions and examines the shaping (and reshaping) of the final historical record. After Castro assumed power in 1959, he harnessed the power of television to set forth a narrative that effectively removed Pais and Echeverria from the record. Through archival stock footage and exclusive interviews with Cuban revolution participants and observers, family members, people who fought alongside Castro and Guevara, and a former CIA agent, we learn about Cuba's forgotten revolutionaries.