Film Review: Castro's Spies worked quietly and in silence

"a fascinating historical period that holds up a mirror to aggressive US foreign policy"

Castro's Spies: into the lives of the Wasp Network

★★★★☆

Castro’s Spies (PG) is a documentary by Ollie Aslin and Gary Lennon about the so-called ‘Wasp Network’ — a group of Cuban operatives sent to the US in the wake of the Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, with a mission to infiltrate the CIA-backed groups of Cuban exiles who, having been thrown out of Cuba for being pro-American, were plotting to overthrow Castro’s rule.

With the scene set for a real-life spy movie, Aslin and Lennon immediately subvert the clichés: rather than James Bond-style adrenaline junkies, these spies were low-key janitors and construction workers, working ‘quietly and in silence’ to ensure that Cuba would never again be caught by surprise by another Bay of Pigs invasion.

Employing straight-to-camera interviews with the operatives themselves, along with historical TV footage and snippets from Cuba’s most popular TV programme in the 1970s — a long-running series about, yep, a Cuban spy operating in the US — Aslin and Lennon recreate a fascinating historical period that holds up a mirror to the aggressive US foreign policy that was the reason, as one of the operatives says, why they needed to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the Revolution.

(cinema release)