The Cuba Libre Story

This documentary is a great portray of Cuba's History until 1959. Then it is just a propaganda from the US Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 9 out of 10 commentators are CIA Agents or Cuban Exiles. For them Castro is just another one dictator who destroyed Cuba's economy (the Batista's casino-mafia economy) and oppress his own people. Of course I would have the same opinion if my family cooperated with mafia, Batista's corrupted officers and US Companies. There is no serious judgement about the US embargo which destroyed Cuban Economy and deprived basic medical and drugs supplies to the Cuban people. Moreover, they don't either judge the Bay of Pigs Invasion, a direct US invasion to an independent nation and its President, so as to protect the interests of their multinational companies (ITT, United Fruit, Francisco Sugar Company, Bethlehem Steel Corporation etc). Moreover, this "documentary" don't even judges the assassinations attempts from the CIA to Castro (they comment the excessive number of the rumored assassinations and not that a foreign country tried to kill a President of a foreign State). Finally, they don't even bother refer to Cuba's medical and educational system (both systems are considered as top quality systems globally) or any other facts about the Cuban economy from 1959. Let me refer that, there isn't any homeless Cuban citizen, there aren't any more the Batista's era slums, the child mortality is the lowest globally, the life span is even higher than the US', and there isn't any unemployment. In general, this is a shameless, ahistorican, anti-socialist propaganda from Netflix.

The only point they want to make towards the later episodes is: Socialism Bad! They keep referring to Socialism as a form of Government, when in fact it is an economic system. Dictatorship/Authoritarianism is the problem, not socialist economy. There is some good history but it's hard to get around the Reich Wing fog cast upon it.

A very interesting documentary, well researched and rather seamlessly delivered!!

I took off 1 star because most of the series covers from 1900 to the present and I wish they had spent more time on earlier history. Also they mostly focused on rural Cuba and ignored Havana.

Overall I still I thought this series was very informative because they talked to a lot of people who were there at the time. That means you don't have to just rely on historians to tell you what they think. They interview Cubans on the island as well as in exile - that is as fair and objective as you can get. Maybe the people that think this series is biased shouldn't assume the subtitles catch everything and give it to you verbatim.

Unfortunately it is far away being objective...Poor one sided American narrative based on mostly exile Cuban accounts: The revolution in Cuba is almost a coincedence, Castro brothers are bloody dictators, USA "only" tried to protect their financial interest, the bad Soviet guys did not wait for a sec to cooperatw with evil Cuba. A waste of time unless you are interested in propoganda movies.