Don't Argue, Just Spit!

Shortly after the Cuban revolution in 1959, a group of American students went to visit Cuba. At the Miami Airport they were hassled, punched, and spat at, by right-wing Cuban exiles. One of the students struck up a conversation with his assailants and said: "Look. If things are that terrible in Cuba, wouldn't you rather want us to see that, so that when we come back we can tell everybody here in the U.S. how awful it is?" The attackers started discussing among themselves in Spanish what to answer, till the leader of the group said: "Don't talk to them, they will only confuse you. Just spit at them and continue yelling your slogans". DON'T ARGUE, JUST SPIT!, shot in Cuba and the United States, is a film about the distorted image of Cuba that the different American administrations - with the American media in their wake - have created in the 30 years since Fidel Castro came to power. Wayne Smith, former head of the American Interest Section in Havana (the American Embassy, without that formal title) outlines how the American government reacts to images they themselves have first created. Ernesto Bentacourt, the director of 'Radio Martí', the voice of America, a radiostation broadcasting to Cuba, brands Cuba as "surrogate of the Sovjet Union, engaged in the creation of wars all over the universe." Alicia Torres, mass communications specialist, who wrote a dissertation about the representation of Cuba on U.S. television, explains the mechanics of distortion of information by American TV programmes. Archival material supports her thesis. Saul Landau, political scientist and filmmaker - with a good many films about Cuba to his name - describes the journalists, who are not lying but who know that a negative story about Cuba will be better received by their editor than a positive one, and thus go out looking for dissidents rather than for people who are supporting the Castro-regime. He shows how Cuba is always being implicitly compared with the U.S., rather than with other more similar countries in the area as for instance the Dominican Republic or El Salvador. Andres Gomez, editor of the only Cuban-American progressive magazine, tells about the way American policy and press affects the Cuban-American community, whose majority (although terrorised by its own extreme right wing, with full support of the American administration) favours normalisations of U.S.-Cuban relations. Throughout the film, the use of correspondence - fragments of letters from an old man in Cuba to his granddaughter in the U.S., who is there because her mother and stepfather fled the country when Castro came to power and who feels homeless - symbolises the emotional links between the two countries. Their voices are superimposed on images of Cuba and the U.S.: the desert, the sea, the Bay of Pigs, Washington by night, and elderly Cubans doing their morning exercises in the street. Attractive images that evoke the places this entertaining documentary is discussing.