Exile Filmaker Shunned For Exposing Che Guevara
Those who worship Che and Fidel get Invited to surreal events such as London's a couple of years ago celebrating a half century of Cuba's Fantasy Revolution.
Via Pajamas Media Hat Tip Cubanology
"Those who document the reality of the Castro regime, however, do not find themselves well received in the academy.
For example, Juan J. Lopez once taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago but was denied tenure in spite of a teaching award and a well-received book published by The Johns Hopkins University Press titled Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro’s Cuba.
Lopez had escaped Cuba with his parents and moved to the United States in 1967.
Agustin Blazquez who wrote about Lopez’s predicament in 2002 also is a Cuban exile frustrated by the artistic/academic community that, while ostensibly worshiping all that is “Latino,” shuns those who expose the communist Castro regime.
In Cuba, Blazquez had been apprehended twice on bogus charges, and saw the inside of El Castillo del Principe prison that he calls a “dungeon.”
In 1965, at the age of 21, he used the offer of an acting school scholarship in Canada to request an exit permit and managed with some finagling of the communist bureaucracy to leave
After living in Spain and Canada, Blazquez arrived in the U.S. in 1967. He was greeted with warmth by Americans — except those in the art world.
He learned that grants and prizes for documentaries in his series “Covering Cuba” would not be forthcoming. The latest, and seventh, titled Che: The Other Side of an Icon, was produced on a budget of $14,000. Only about $4,000 of that was from a non-profit that he had started himself.
He had submitted a more typical budget of $494,000 to CPB-PBS (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting System)
Blazquez had no success with the publicly supported organization, nor did he with the taxpayer-supported American Film Institute in his other projects.
In fact, he could not even get an airing on POV (Point of View), the program created by PBS specifically for the purpose of airing “controversial” films. More
