Best movie of this year hands down!

Fresh and Exciting

Awesome Movie

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This picture has a serious problem to start,inappropriate contract of a mercenary in such situation when Castro already had Cuba in your hands,the triangle love story is totally unbeliavable to fit in,they tried to improve the picture adding a female sexy character to Connery has some reason to stay there,the battle on cane field depose against the picture laying down at mass grave of the useless,it was so ridiculous scene,also great stars featured are quite often lost on it,for some good acting like the fine Jack Weston and Chris Sarandon 6 out 10!!!Resume:First watch: 1982 / How many: 3 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 6

Perhaps the reason I like this film so much is because I don't, normally, like the cinema of Richard Lester. I've always found it too frenetic to be funny and too fragmented to be involving on any human level. However, CUBA is, arguably, the most misunderstood picture to close out the decade of the 70s. It is a brilliant visual satire of a society in total materialistic collapse with every character in the picture (save the white knight James Bond figure played by Sean Connery who is rendered completely ineffectual by the chaos that is tumbling down upon him)is literally on the take. What is extraordinary here is that the mise-en-scene is as visually dazzling and stylistically coherent CAPTURING chaos as it is satirically barbed, subtle and consistently ingenious. You really have to WATCH this movie. There's always something inventive and extremely droll going on around the edges. The supporting cast of Jack Weston, Hector Elizondo, Walter Godell, Martin Balsam, Chris Sarandon, Denholm Elliott and Alexandro Rey (unrecognizable)was flawlessly assembled but because the film doesn't ANNOUNCE its satirical intentions and Lester refuses to telegraph his gags and put anything in the center of the frame, most people came away from the picture pooh-faced. Well, there is one other problem with CUBA and Lester has to take the brunt of the responsibility for it which is, in his corrosively ebullient fervor (and perhaps because, as a director he never responded to women very much), he left poor, ultra-lovely Brooke Adams out to dry as a character. It's clear that he has nothing but contempt for the "Casablanca" aspect of the story involving her and Connery but he should have done a better job disguising the fact. I think Connery is terrific in his role making the pathos of his Gable-like flawed hero comical and deeply affecting. Lester was even more successful in JUGGERNAUT satirizing a genre while squeezing the maximum thrills out of it at the same time. CUBA doesn't work successfully on both levels in the way that JUGGERNAUT does. But it is the most impressively detailed and dynamically precise cinematic rendering of what the last days of a politically corrupt regime looks like - as it goes into free-fall - that a mainstream commercial film maker has ever given us.

There have been many stories of people going to countries on the eve of a revolution and finding out why there's a revolution. "Cuba" is kept afloat by strong performances. Sean Connery plays Maj. Robert Dapes, sent to Havana to help Batista fight the revolutionary army, but he soon figures out that the revolution is clearly going to succeed. In the process, he meets Alexandra (Brooke Adams), an old flame now married to a philandering cigar factory owner.I guess that overall, there's nothing here that we haven't seen before. But the way that they filmed it gives one the feeling of a society about to explode. Also starring Jack Weston, Hector Elizondo, Denholm Elliott, Martin Balsam, Chris Sarandon, Lonette McKee, and Alejandro Rey (aka Carlos Ramirez on "The Flying Nun"). Worth seeing.One more thing that I have to ask is whether or not Sydney Pollack remade this as "Havana". The two movies don't have the exact same plots, but they're certainly pretty close.

Although the film is not terrific, what can be said for it is that a lot of effort was put into the creating of the film that was full of diverse action and story; from the film's beginning to the film's end not everything is so clear, and where the film is going is also uncertain.By following the individual characters around Cuba, and by observing the personal backgrounds & lives of these characters, one gets a decent idea of what Cuba was like at this period of time (from the corruption to the guerrilla war) that is at the same time entertaining. Although at points some of the subplots interfere with the overall film, a decent job was done in this well-acted, well-shot film that combines a lot of themes and a lot of ideas with a diverse story. Overall, worth watching.