Arena — Season 1, Episode 376: Havana
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Cuba's legendary capital, once a playground for the rich, has an extraordinary faded beauty with its grand colonial palaces decaying into crumbling tenements. Since the popular revolution 30 years ago, Cuba has been viewed by the west as the acceptable face of communism, with Dr Fidel Castro seen as a folk hero and a benevolent dictator. But Cuban writers and artists in exile tell a different story - one of unspoken repression and intolerance. This Arena special goes behind the once great city's public face, persuading its inhabitants to speak intimately about their lives and revealing a Havana previously unseen. The film tells its story through the work of Cuba's greatest writers and artists, both in exile and at home, but mainly through the eyes of the people of the city of Havana.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.