Word: cubanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story La Concha (The Seashell) on the San Juan beachfront. With a casino, eight restaurants and cocktail lounges, a sea-shell-shaped nightclub set by surf's edge. La Concha is aimed to please the crowd bored with Miami and scared of going to Havana because of the Cuban rebellion. The Puerto Rican government built the hotel for $6,000,000. leased it for two-thirds of the net to Associated Federal Hotels, a Southwestern chain (Phoenix's Westward Ho, San Antonio's Gunter), which spent another $1,200,000 on furnishings. (A similar deal...
Batista has almost no enthusiastic support among Cubans outside the government; Castro, by contrast, gets ardent backing from students, professional classes who chafe at the indignities and corruption of dictatorship, and the political left. But the Cuban masses refuse the danger and cost of active support for Castro and, by abstaining, line up for Batista. The eventual solution for divided Cuba is no more foreseeable than that of another violence-torn island-far-off Cyprus...
When the old man (Tracy) has fought the sea and the fish for three days and returns to his Cuban sea village, the narrator (also Tracy) tells those of us who can hear him that "the old man knew the depth of his tiredness." It is not difficult to see why Tracy is tired. His director, John Sturges, has insisted on everything, and allowed for nothing. He has Tracy running the gamut from the Hollywood equivalent of an El Grecian Christ figure, to the benign, twinkling-eyed mentor of an obnoxious little boy, who takes himself as seriously...
...would to a guided tour or a slide lecture. It also exaggerates Hemingway's literary use of African lioncubs in the old man's dreams, and confuses his visions of Africa with fishing flashbacks and highly ambiguous scenic shots. They may just as well have been filmed on a Cuban beach as in Africa, and the lions seem so visually irrelevent that including them in several crucial scenes of the movie only adds an unsuitable touch of thematic obscurity. All this, even with Tracy's first-rate performance, results in what Producer Leland Hayward admits to be a technically "sloppy...
Captain Armando Piedra, 40, pilot for Cubana airlines, was flying from Havana to the Cuban city of Cienfuegos eight months ago when rebels fighting for Fidel Castro popped up among the passengers, commandeered the plane, forced Piedra to head for Mexico. A fortnight ago it fell to Piedra, who is also a good amateur skin-diver, to dive to the sunken hull of a Cubana airlines Viscount that crashed and killed 17 of 20 passengers when rebel hijackers tried to force it to land near Cuba's Nipe Bay (TIME, Nov. 10). By last week, when Piedra took...