After watching Summer Hours and Carlos in the early 2010s, movies I rated 16 and 15 respectively⁠—both very high scores on my scale⁠—I decided that I would be sure to watch any Olivier Assayas movies that popped up on future Skandies lists, no matter where they ranked.  But as it turned out, Clouds of Sils Maria was not really for me, Personal Shopper I wished I had skipped, and Non-Fiction had me reconsidering my commitment to watching Assayas films.  But Wasp Network is sort of a Carlos lite, so I was much more into this one than its recent predeces­sors.

The premise is this.  In 1959, Fidel Castro and his band of revolu­tionaries overthrew the government of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.  Batista had been an American client, and as wealthy Cubans fled to the U.S., the Eisenhower administration launched an economic embargo of the island and backed efforts to topple Castro.  That often meant pairing up the CIA with organized crime syndicates that had worked hand in hand with Batista, and now found their casinos and brothels shut down by the revolu­tionaries.  Castro’s new government focused on rapidly improv­ing Cuba’s standard of living, with a particular emphasis on education, health care, and infrastructure.  These initiatives won Castro popularity among the Cuban working class, but put a strain on the economy.  The Soviet Union stepped in to subsidize Castro’s Cuba in exchange for access to its tropical goods and strategic position, less than a hundred miles from the coast of Florida.  (Though Castro later claimed that he had become a Marxist years before he seized power, and though the repressive autocracy he set up suggested an affinity for Soviet-style govern­ment, he had tried to come to an understanding with the U.S., but American enmity drove him into the arms of the USSR.)  This made Cuba a critical battleground in the Cold War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 would be the closest that the world has ever come to a deliberate nuclear war.  This is the historical background against which we see a Cuban pilot fly across the Florida Strait to Miami, where he is soon giving a press confer­ence explaining why he has defected.  Before long, he has been contacted by anti-Castro people in Florida, recruiting him to serve as one of their pilots.  He balks when he discovers that the organization he’s signed on with has him spending less time assisting refugees fleeing across the strait in rafts than flying to Honduras to pick up drug shipments⁠—the higher-ups shrug that they have to finance their efforts somehow.  But those efforts themselves aren’t all as benign as dropping anti-Castro leaflets onto Havana⁠—one of the big figures in the counter-revolutionary movement is a terrorist named Luis Posada, whose chief strategy is to stage violent attacks on hotels and resorts, on the theory that hurting the tourism sector will cripple the Cuban economy to the point that Castro will be ousted in a popular uprising.  spoilers really
   kick in here The twist, revealed halfway through the film, is that it turns out that the pilot, and some of the other “defectors” the movie has been following, are not defectors at all, but agents of the titular “Wasp Net­work”, sent by the Cuban government to infiltrate anti-Castro organiza­tions in the U.S. and report back to Havana.

Or, rather, that’s the obvious twist.  The more subtle twist is this.  One of the main themes of the movie is that of competing loyal­ties to family and to country.  The pilot has a wife and six-year-old daughter whom he seems to abandon without a word⁠—one day he doesn’t come home from work but is instead suddenly on Univision badmouthing economic conditions in Cuba.  His wife has Cuban security services at her door, and his daughter is taunted by classmates who tell her that her daddy is a traitor.  Though the pilot sends letters trying to convince his wife to join him in Florida, for years she refuses, partly out of a feeling of personal betrayal, but even more out of patriotism⁠—she quails at the idea of living in the evil empire across the strait.  But by the time their daughter is eleven, her husband’s entreaties have finally worn her down, and when she lands in the U.S. and learns that her husband had been working for the Cuban government all along, her reaction is complex.  She’s immensely relieved, even proud, to hear contacts in the Cuban government explain that her husband is not a traitor but a hero, and she tells him that she understands his decision… yet she is still clearly hurt that he’d break up their family for the sake of geopolitics.  And when the U.S. government learns of the spy network and arrests the pilot, he again has to choose between family (by informing on others in the network, thereby gaining early release) or country (by stay­ing mum and thus staying in jail), and again he chooses country, and she vows to stand by him.  They have a second daughter now⁠—another little girl who will grow up without a dad.  And the thing is… none of this really matters!  It would be one thing if this story⁠—which is true⁠—had taken place in 1961, around the time of the Bay of Pigs when America vs. Cuba was a huge flashpoint in the Cold War, or even 1975, when much of Carlos is set and Cu­ban troops were mucking around in Angola.  But the events of Wasp Network happened in the 1990s.  The Cold War was over.  This fellow rotted in a jail cell in the Florida panhandle as a re­sult of a conflict half a century earlier.  While he did so, a gray and ailing Fidel Castro stepped down due to infirmity; Castro’s chief American adversaries, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, had been dead for decades.  It’s hard to escape the feeling that this story is equivalent to one of a Japanese man who sacrifices upwards of a decade with his family, his children sent off to be raised by different sets of relatives, in order to bravely defend his homeland and its emperor by holing up on an island to fend off American invaders… in 1955.

(I would end there, but I should probably tack on this explana­tion.  Part of the rea­son that Posada resorts to terror attacks is that he, and other anti-Castro forces, had assumed that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Castro regime was bound to collapse in turn⁠—I watched a lot of The McLaughlin Group around this time, and the pundits on that show predicted that Castro’s ouster was imminent seeming­ly every week⁠—and everyone was astonished to find Castro and commu­nism continuing to hang on in Cuba even without Soviet support.  It sure seemed like even a little push would be enough to bring the regime down.  As it turns out, not so much!)

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