Glenn Gebhard Cuba: The Forgotten Revolution on Center Stage

Glenn Gebhard came Center Stage with Mark Gordon to talk about his new film CUBA: THE FORGOTTEN REVOLUTION, which tells the virtually unknown story of Cuban revolutionaries Frank Pais and Juan Antonio Echeverria — a school teacher and architecture student, respectively – whose names seldom appear alongside their more famous contemporaries, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Center Stage with Mark Gordon airs Tuesdays at 7PM (PST) on KXLU Los Angeles, 88.9 FM and streaming live on the internet at www.kxlu.com

More About CUBA: THE FORGOTTEN REVOLUTION
Through archival stock footage and exclusive interviews with Cuban revolution participants and observers, family members of the men, Americans who fought alongside Castro and Guevara, and a former CIA agent, we learn how these young men, who worked largely independently from each other, played critical roles in the eventual overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldíva. Scholar Lillian Guerra, of Yale and Florida State University, explains: “It is as if we told the tale of the American Revolution as solely Washington’s story, leaving out Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and others.” New scholarship and recently accessed footage challenge the prevailing view — in part manufactured and perpetuated by Che Guevara — that Castro’s army of 200 guerillas single-handedly defeated tens of thousands of Batista’s professional soldiers and liberated the people of Cuba. In actuality, Pais and Echeverria’s city-based insurgencies in Santiago and Havana held the key to generating popular support for resistance and undermining the authority of Batista and his secret police. Both Pais and Echeverria rivaled Castro in popularity and power during the height of the Revolution yet neither man lived to see the movement succeed. A close associate reportedly gunned down Pais in the street; Echeverria died in a daring raid on the palace. The film highlights the complexities inherent in revolutions and examines the shaping (and reshaping) of the final historical record. After Castro assumed power in 1959, he harnessed the power of the emerging medium of television to advance a narrative that effectively expunged Pais and Echeverria — and others responsible for the outcome — from Cuban history.


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