Cuba: The 40 Years War

Produced by: Peter Melaragno and Jim Burroughs
Narrated by: Martin Sheen
When: 4 pm Sunday April 3 2005
Where: HCC Ybor Room

Fidel Castro

Forty years after the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, five Cuban-American veterans traveled from Miami to Havana for an international conference on the invasion. It was the first time some of them had set foot on Cuban soil since release from Castro’s prisons in 1963.

A list of notables traveled with them: including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; Richard Goodwin; JFK’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith; and the CIA operative who ran the infamous Kennedy-era Operation Mongoose, the goal of which was to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Appropriate counterparts on the Cuban side were expected to attend, but whether Fidel himself would show up was never assured and remained a mystery till the opening session.

He did in fact attend, but our story is that of the veterans of Cuban-American Brigade 2506.

We followed Alfredo Duran, now a Miami attorney, and Mario Cabello, a truck dispatcher. These men went to Cuba as bravely today as they did forty years ago. Both men knew, however, that their presence in Havana put them on a collision course with the dominant and sometimes violent Cuban-American political forces.

The three-day event was packed with emotion, but nothing could prepare Mario for the embrace of a sister he had not seen in forty years. The high point of the conference itself occurred as Castro and Alfredo shared a microphone and joked while discussing the battle. One of the men shooting at Alfredo that day on the beach abruptly stood and marched up to shake his hand.

For the final day of the conference, a caravan of attendees traveled to the Bay of Pigs, advancing along the same roads the Cuban Forces used forty years earlier to resist the attack.

On the beach, Mario and Alfredo walked with former adversaries. There were tears. There were memories of friends lost. But the Miami Cuban community’s revulsion to these images was assured. Nonetheless, it was a moment when all who watched could only ask:

Why were these men not able to talk forty years ago instead of trying to kill one another?

This is a timely story; a story of war...and reconciliation.

Previous films by the producers: Cuba in the Shadow of Doubt and Against the Wind and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey (the Mariel Boat Lift; Academy Award nominee, 1983).