The Cuba Libre Story

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.

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 lease is available online. It is not a long document. The standard cover story for the US is repeated. For example, that the lease is perpetual. That the rent is some 4000 a year. There is no excuse for not reading the lease and seeing what the actual terms are. A careful review undercuts the US claim that it occupies Guantanamo legally, unfortunately.

As the title says. I was born in Cuba in 1989, so don't tell me I know nothing because I do. This documentary is very well made, and is up to you whether you understand the point they are making or not. I love History and I love Fidel Castro so don't get me wrong. I have read Cuban history books, and I had the pleasure of having great professors from kindergarten all the way through my years in the University of Havana. I lived 26 years in Las Tunas and my mom has a MD in Economics and taught me about Marx, Lenin and Castro. I have lived on both sides of the country and have seen things first hand, if you didn't like it because it didn't match your views or your reckoning, get your facts together and go and read "El diario del Che en Bolivia", "La historia me absolverá" and "La edad de oro", oh, and also some history book written for the kids in the fifth grade, then you will see the documentary is not that bad after all.

I really enjoyed this documentary. It provides a quite objective view about the whole history of Cuba from the beginnings to today. The several comments from authors, historians and witnesses are very helpful guiding the story. Sadly I don't really like the narrator's voice in English. If you are a German speaker, I'd recommend you to switch to German, because then all of the Comments are narrated, and the narrator sounds better to me.