Cuban Filmmaker Stonewalled in Trying to Tell the True Story of Che by Mary Grabar, February 17, 2011 Agustin Blazquez learned that grants & prizes for documentaries in his series Covering Cuba would not be forthcoming. The latest, & 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. Still, Blazquez, changing his approach, scaling back, & doing his own editing on his own equipment, has managed to produce a compelling film that demolishes the radical heartthrob s reputation as a brave guerrilla fighting on behalf of the oppressed. Testimony comes from survivors, relatives of victims, & scholars. For example, Jaime Suchliki, history professor & director of the University of Miami s Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies, presents U.S. concerns about many Vietnams in the region. Antonio Jorge, chief economist of the Ministry of Treasury, from 1959 to 1960, who received Guevara s requests for government funds in person, testifies to Che s looting of the government as National Bank president. The Argentinean-born Che s contemptuous attitudes towards Cubans, blacks, & peasants are revealed by those who knew him & are backed up in his own writings. Wheelchair-bound Margot Menendez, whose brother was executed, describes the treatment she & other women received as they waited futilely to visit relatives in prison. Strip searches & arbitrary cancellations are recalled. So are the beatings by guards when the women rushed Che s car as it entered the prison yard. Blanca Rojas recalls learning of her father s execution by seeing it on television the same night she gave birth to her son. The dramatic footage is shown of Col. Cornelio Rojas made an example who st&s; tall & defiant up to the point when the gun shots in the head bring him down. Journalist Humberto Fontova recounts Che s 1962 terrorist bomb plot that would have likely exceeded the devastation of 9/11. It was planned to explode in New York City s shopping district on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. The plan was foiled by the FBI. Fontova exposes Che not only as a sadistic killer but as an incompetent revolutionary. Che, who had inherited his father s social & ethnic pretensions as an Argentinean of mixed European heritage, as well as his mentally unstable mother s radical tendencies, had severely bungled his work as the head of banking & as minister of industries in collectivizing farms. It was then that Castro sent him to what he knew would be his death in Bolivia, for Che could not even put compass to map. Contrary to AFI s depiction, Che s delight was in shooting at least 240 defenseless victims as young as 15. Che also delighted in having people & their children rounded up off the street & forced to watch executions. Such facts & testimonies presented in a straightforward manner show the real Che. One sees the horror melded over the decades into a resigned sadness in the faces of family members of his victims. Such understated testimony should make any Che-t-shirt-clad student pause. Nor could he make headway with PBS that has a division for educational media. The late Reed Irvine in 1996 recounted Blazquez writing directly to 65 public television stations after getting nowhere with PBS, but getting only four responses all rejections. Blazquez then testified at a hearing before a House of Representatives appropriations committee about PBS. Still, the censorship & bias continue. Despite the hostility, Blazquez works on his 8th documentary, about an exiled Cuban-American singer who has similarly found American TV and show business doors closed to her. --pajamasmedia.com/blog/cuban-filmaker-stonewalled-in-trying-to-tell-the-true-story-of-che/The Film Too Hot for Public TV By Cliff Kincaid  |  February 17, 2011 It documents how Che was not a hero but a sadistic killer As Congress debates federal funding for public TV and radio, Mary Grabar has written a column for Pajamas Media about how telling the truth about the Castro regime in Cuba is not an assignment that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has wanted to take on. She focuses on how Agustin Blazquez, a Cuban exile, ran into a series of roadblocks from PBS and its parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), when he requested funding for films on life under the Castro dictatorship and Castro s murderous accomplice Che Guevara. Not only did public TV refuse to fund the anti-communist films, public broadcasting would not consider airing them. His new documentary, Che: The Other Side of an Icon, also got the label too hot for public TV. It is a response to what Blazquez calls the pro-Che propaganda in the popular press. He explains, It profiles the life of the man killed in Bolivia, as well as Che, the icon, who lives on today. It presents the real man behind the myth, his legacy and why he has become so popular among the youth, revolutionaries and terrorists of the world. It explores the dangers of believing in Che s carefully constructed fake public image. The film includes interviews with people who worked directly with Che, knew his family in Argentina and Havana, and who were knowledgeable about his personal background and philosophy. It documents how Che was not a hero but a sadistic killer. Grabar s column takes a look at the film and examines how Blazquez faced opposition from public TV to telling the truth about Castro s communist revolution. She reports, 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. Blazquez provided me with some additional details, saying about the Che film offering, I mailed the 104-page proposal to CPB on Monday, April 2, 2007.  On Tuesday, May 8, 2007, John Prizer from CPB called me about 6:35 p.m. to notify me that they rejected my project. The next day Prizer talked to my proposal advisor and told him, PBS won t do a project like that. Grabar describes the interference he gets on college campuses. Dead silence is what mostly greeted Blazquez when he contacted over 100 campuses for the screening of his first film, she says. Subtle impediments in the form of last-minute room changes and announcements torn off walls were placed in his path at the two campuses where he did manage to get permission to air his documentary. Disgusted by the pro-Castro bias of public TV, Blazquez has some advice, which is pertinent since taxpayer funding for public TV and radio is now a big issue on Capitol Hill. My advice to the American public in general is not to donate a penny to the CPB or PBS, he says, and to demand all taxpayer funds be denied to public broadcasting. Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. --aim.org/aim-column/the-film-%E2%80%9Ctoo-hot%E2%80%9D-for-public-tv/AFI and PBS Embrace Pro-Castro Propaganda, Ignore Agustin Blazquez Documented Criticism by Humberto Fontova For his documentaries on Fidel Castro and Che Guevara Cuban-American filmmaker Agustin Blazquez takes a truly revolutionary approach. Rather than expecting officials of Castro s police state to reveal facts, Blazquez interviews eye-witnesses to Castroism who are (get this!) free to reveal facts without threat of Castro s firing squads and torture chambers! And it s not an inconsiderable threat. To wit: Castro s Stalinist regime jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin s own, murdered more political prisoners its first three years in power than Hitler s murdered in its first six, and voraciously devoured its own children, complete with show trials. The cheeky Che Guevara often signed his correspondence Stalin II. (Tee-hee!) Needless to add, his thoroughly novel approach to revealing what actually happened in Cuba has caused Agustin Blazquez major problems in the film industry. When back in 2001, he asked the American Film institute to screen his documentary Covering Cuba, the AFI s President balked that such a documentary was too controversial for them to air. The following week, the AFI cranked out the press releases and snapped on the spotlights to screen Michael Moore s Fahrenheit 9-11. Controversy? What Controversy? The AFI later denied giving controversial as the reason for declining my film, Blazquez says. But it s the absolute truth. I remember it like it was yesterday. And I ll submit to a lie detector test while repeating it. In fact when the AFI proudly screened Stephen Soderbegh s Che at Grauman s Chinese Theater in 2008, the film s controversy was cheekily flaunted by both the AFI and the stars as the film s main cheeky charm. Che Guevara is a hugely controversial figure, snickered a dapper Lou Diamond Phillips in front of the theater. (Tee-hee!) For his documentary Che The other side of an Icon , (a sort of antidote to Soderbergh s hagiography) a few years later Blazquez approached PBS which refused to either fund or later to even broadcast the work. PBS seemed so outraged by a film that relies on eye-witnesses to Che s handiwork on men who worked alongside him in Cuba, on daughters and wives of his victims, on the very man who helped capture Che in Bolivia that they rejected his 104 page proposal via a brusque phone call, rather than the customary mail. We would never take on a project like this PBS John Prizer told Blazquez. Then when Blazquez privately funded the film, PBS refused to even show it. Castro s own propaganda ministry boasted of their role in the film s production: Actor Benicio del Toro presented the film (at Havana s Karl Marx Theater) as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) for its assistance during the shooting of the film, which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba, read their press release. The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) is an arm of Stalinist Cuba s propaganda ministry. For their screenplays, Stephen Soderbergh and Saul Landau both relied on Castro-regime founders and apparatchiks. Seems that if Agustin Blazquez wants assistance from PBS or the American Film Institute, he ll first need a glowing reference letter from Fidel Castro, who jailed and exiled the most filmmakers in the Western hemisphere. --bighollywood.breitbart.com/hfontova/2011/02/23/afi-and-pbs-embrace-pro-castro-propaganda-ignore-agustin-blazquez-documented-criticism/