The movie is an understated satire or black comedy, set in crumbling Cuba on the eve of revolution. The actors play it straight and let the absurdness of the situations speak for themselves, which I think is a good thing, as I've always felt that, when depicting strange events based on real life, playing them for laughs only serves to detract from their impact. (For example, I did not enjoy "The Wolf of Wall Street" for that very reason). "Truth is stranger than fiction" as Mark Twain famously said, and you only have to watch the news in 2020 to see the proof of that. The plot is adequate but unexceptional, merely used as a framework upon which to display a series of everyday events in the life of a country turning inside out, rather than being a significant end in itself. Using the device of co-incidence, what initially appear to be unrelated story threads are interwoven into a satisfactory whole. Overall I enjoyed the movie as an amusing slice of colourful historical life, where beautiful but decaying colonial buildings contrast with stark, brutal modernist architecture and the half constructed skeleton of a hotel, which has been occupied and adapted by the abject poor. Huge American luxury cars with outrageous tail fins against jeeps and tanks. Revolutionaries who all seem to sport Fidel Castro beards against decadent aristocrats.
Most of them thought it would be would be just another brief interlude of upheaval in the BAU of old school post-colonial corruption, but it turned out the new school had more staying power than they imagined, although I guess the corruption and poverty have remained much the same.
Review of Cuba
