By
editor on
December 28th, 2007
**Editor’s note- one of the most interesting films of the year**
By WILL WEISSERT | Associated Press Writer 
HAVANA - He fled Cuba in 1961, but still calls Fidel Castro his friend. He can’t stand communism, but bitterly opposes the U.S. embargo. He lives in Miami, but travels regularly to Havana, even appearing on state-run television. Max Lesnik always has an opinion, and often makes someone mad — no matter which side of the Florida Straits he’s on. “It’s always been up to me to be critical. I’ve always been the opposition, not with one government or the other,” says Lesnik, a Cuban revolutionary-turned-South Florida radio commentator, in an interview.”I don’t talk out of both sides of my mouth,” he adds. “What I say here, I say in Miami. What I say in Miami, I say here.” ‘Here’ is the sixth-floor of Havana’s Hotel Nacional.
Arriving in Miami nearly 47 years ago, he spent two decades publishing “Replica,” a Spanish-language magazine whose offices in Little Havana were bombed 11 times, allegedly by anti-Castro hard-liners who opposed his calls to do away with the American embargo. Lesnik’s life and politics are chronicled in The Man of Two Havanas, a documentary directed by his 45-year-old youngest daughter, Vivien Lesnik Weisman, which screened this month at the New Latin American Cinema festival. The film tells of Lesnik’s political activism, friendship with Castro, and early efforts to generate revolutionary propaganda when the bearded rebels took to the mountains of eastern Cuba. Lesnik hosted a Cuban radio program after Castro’s forces toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but became disillusioned as Cuba deepened ties with Soviet Union. He declared on the air that he was no communist, and motored to the United States in January 1961 aboard a small boat with 13 other former rebel collaborators. His wife and two daughters arrived two months later. Lesnik patched things up with Castro, and met many times with him — though he has not seen the Cuban leader since he underwent emergency surgery and ceded power to his brother Raul in July 2006. The documentary will be shown at the Miami International Film Festival in February. That might enrage some exiles, his daughter says, but “I think it’s a dialogue Miami’s ready to have.”
Categories: Cuba, Entertainment
Tags:
