With the announcement of Fidel Castro's ambiguous "retirement" from government, the time is ripe for research and rediscovery into the strange recent history of Cuba and its revolution. One touchstone in that history, and one of the oddest great movies ever made, remains I Am Cuba, which, thanks to a happy stroke of timing, was recently issued on DVD in a dandy box set from Milestone Video that includes a couple of extra discs of supplementary materials (including the feature length making-of documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth), handsomely packaged in a cigar box. The movie itself was made in the early 1960s by a filmmaking team headed by director Mikhail Kalatozov. Kalatozov, who had enjoyed one of the major international successes of post-Stalin Russian filmmaking with the 1957 patriotic love story The Cranes Are Flying, was literally a man on a mission: I Am Cuba was conceived by the Soviet Union and the Cuban government as a joint project that would result in a movie that would not just make the case for Castro's revolution but also help it to spread. The idea was that the film's exciting fusion of visual dazzle and firebrand propaganda would light in a fire in the heart of everyone who saw it, and revolution would break out all over the globe.
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