Posted on Sun, Aug. 05, 2007
BY PABLO BACHELET
pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com.
WASHINGTON --
Cristina Khuly says the sense of grief from her uncle's death didn't
sink in at first.
It hit her when she called her mother to confirm that Armando Alejandre
was one of the four men killed by Cuban MiGs over the Straits of Florida.
''Until then it was all on TV,'' says Khuly. ``It wasn't real.''
Now, more than a decade later, Khuly wants to make the tragedy real for
a much broader audience with the Oct. 1 release of Shoot Down, her
blow-by-blow account of the Feb. 24, 1996, downing of two Brothers to
the Rescue aircraft.
The 90-minute documentary tells the rich back-story of the most serious
crisis across the Straits of Florida since the 1962 missile showdown,
from the growing tensions produced by Cuban rafters washing up to the
Florida shores like debris to the Cuban opposition's bold demands for
political change.
It details the travails of family members who, Khuly says, were thrust
into ``a whirlwind of grief, politics and media attention.''
The movie has done well at festivals and among critics. A July 25
screening for lawmakers hosted by U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida drew
support from the community and renewed calls for justice. ''Did [Fidel]
Castro get away with it?'' asked U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami.
``I think, lamentably, the answer is yes.''
But Khuly hopes the movie will appeal beyond Miami.
Many Americans, says Khuly, have only a nebulous notion of the complex
escalation of events that led to the shootdown. Too many believe that
the Cessnas were shot down in Cuban territorial waters, as Havana claimed.
''If we can't all agree on what happened,'' says the 37-year-old Khuly,
a sculptor and former model-turned-filmmaker, ``then how are we going to
go forward?''
Khuly's husband, Douglas Eger, suggested they make a documentary after
newspapers in 2005 -- including the Miami Herald -- refused to run an ad
by family members of the victims offering a bounty for the capture of
three MiG pilots and a Cuban general.
Khuly knew how difficult it would be to take on such a charged subject.
''I was walking over the graves of dead relatives,'' she says. She
realized it would be impossible to please everyone. ``I have to do it
the way I see it.''
Neither Khuly nor Eger -- who is the movie's producer -- had much
movie-making experience. Eger invested in high-tech start-ups and Khuly
had done a short film on Cuban sculptor Enrique Gay García.
They founded a small production company, Rogues Harbor Studios, and
financed most of the $750,000 to make Shoot Down out of their own pockets.
Eger did most of the research legwork. The couple pored over hundreds of
hours of interviews, court documents and cockpit transcripts.
Dinners at home began with the pledge not to talk shop but inevitably
turned into brainstorming sessions. When the tone became testy, their
two dogs interceded, tails wagging.
The movie explains how a humanitarian mission got tangled in the
politics of Cuba-U.S. relations.
In the early 1990s, Brothers to the Rescue volunteers would drop water
and direct Coast Guard vessels to pick up rafters, who were grabbing
onto anything that floated and fleeing Cuba by the thousands. Many died
at sea.
Then, in 1994, the Clinton administration struck a deal with Havana:
Cubans intercepted at sea would be sent back to Cuba or to third
countries. Brothers to the Rescue planes became reluctant spotters for a
Coast Guard that was sending refugees back to Cuba.
The group's mission turned more political. On a couple of occasions,
they dropped leaflets over Havana.
Top Cuban officials warned Washington to stop the flights. Brothers to
the Rescue founder José Basulto's pilot's license was suspended, but he
was allowed to fly during his appeal. Gen. John Sheehan, the head of
U.S. Atlantic Command, says Fidel Castro made so many threats it was
hard to tell if the threat against Brothers to the Rescue was real.
''We were doing what we are supposed to do as activists,'' says Basulto.
The Feb. 24 events are recreated with scenes of three Cessnas navigating
in the solitude of the vast Caribbean waters, unaware of the approaching
MiGs. Menacing 3D radar screen animations trace the tracks of the
Cessnas and the fighters.
The soundtrack is actual cockpit recordings. After graciously greeting a
Havana air controller, Basulto takes the course closest to Havana,
skirting the 12-mile limit of Cuba's territorial waters.
The two other Cessnas veer north and away from Cuba.
After they are blasted out of the sky, well outside Cuban territorial
waters, the MiG pilots burst into their infamous celebratory hoots,
``Les dimos, carajo!'' -- essentially saying ``We got them.''
Mario de la Peña, Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales and Armando Alejandre Jr.
died. Customs radar operator Jeffrey Houlihan is left wondering why U.S.
F-16s never scrambled to intercept.
The first edits to the film were personal to Khuly, who provided the
narration. The storytelling was too dense and difficult for non-experts
to follow. She took out some details and removed herself so that
``audiences did not feel they were being manipulated.''
She let the protagonists carry the story, much the way a sculpted figure
emerges from the hands of the artist. ''You can't fight the stone,'' she
says.
Khuly says her mother Maggie Alejandre Khuly -- a spokesperson for the
families -- told her story with ''no political screed or outbursts of
anger.'' She was the ''anti-stereotype'' of the politically impassioned
Cuban American.
''I felt it wasn't my story as much as my mother's story,'' says Khuly.
Richard Nuccio, a Clinton White House adviser on Cuba, is the U.S.
government insider, caught by his awareness of the impending showdown
and his limitations to stop it.
The shootdown, Nuccio tells the interviewer, ``increased the likelihood
that someday there will be American troops in Cuba dealing with problems
like the problems we are dealing with in Iraq.''
Hitherto unseen footage shows Castro telling an interviewer he took
responsibility for the shootdown but denied the planes were taken down
to distract attention from his problems at home.
At first, festivals balked at the movie's political theme. ''We had to
fight to get people to watch it,'' says Eger.
But skeptical audiences, and critics, appreciated its tell-it-as-it-is
approach. It secured the best documentary prize at the 2007 Sonoma
Valley Film Festival, and official selections at the Jackson Hole and
Cinequest festivals.
The movie will open to the public Oct. 1, in Miami's Tower Theater. In
keeping with the movie's mission to generate debate, the showing will be
followed by a panel discussion. The format will be repeated in
Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Eger and Khuly emerged from the movie unscathed enough to contemplate
their next project, which they say will deal with environmental themes.
''Even after the movie,'' says Khuly, ``we're still married.''
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