The film will join ‘Wasp Network’, based on the book ‘The last soldiers of the Cold War’ 

The story of the five Cuban spies condemned in the United States will make it to the big screen very soon and twice thanks to a Canadian producer.

Canadian Pictou Twist Pictures and Picture Plant have partnered with the state-run Cuban Institute of Art and Industry Cinematographic (ICAIC) to take to the cinema Los Cinco. This production will be part of the Frenchman Olivier Assayas adaptation of the book “The Last Soldiers of the Cold War” by Brazilian writer Fernando Morais. The film narrates an “inspiring story of idealism and altruism,” in the words of Terry Greenlaw, one of the producers.

“The five of them handed over the rights of their history to the ICAIC and Pictou Twist, Picture Plant and Conquering Lion Pictures acquired them,” a spokeswoman for those producers said in a statement to 14ymedio.

Sources of the producers assured that none of the five spies living in Cuba will receive payments for rights

The same source assured that none of the five spies living in Cuba will receive payments for rights. After their return to the Island (three of them after being pardoned by former President Barack Obama in 2014), the spies became government officials and members of the National Assembly.

Cuba had decorated Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, René González, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando González as Heroes of the Republic while they were jailed in the United States. After denying for three years that they were his agents, the Government recognized in 2001 its ascendancy over the Wasp Network and led an international campaign for its liberation.

In 2014, Obama exchanged the three agents who were sentenced to life imprisonment by a US intelligence officer imprisoned on the island. The gesture was accompanied by the restoration of relations between the two countries.

The Cuban-Canadian co-production, with a budget of more than seven million dollars, will be inspired by the book What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of The Cuban Five (What’s on the other side of the sea: The true story of Five Cubans), by Canadian journalist Stephen Kimber. The film will be shot mainly in Cuba, but also in Colombia and Miami, and production will be finished next year.

Kimber, a fierce defender of the innocence of the five spies, three of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to commit murder, wrote the book after a trip to Havana where a Cuban friend told him that “nothing will change between the United States and Cuba until they solve the problem of ‘the five’ “.

The journalist began to interview them while they were in prison and participated in meetings and conferences in favor of the freedom of the five spies in the United States.

The journalist traveled to Miami, Washington and Havana to gather information about the spies. He also began to meet with them while in prison and participated in meetings and conferences in favor of the freedom of the five spies in the United States.

“Receiving Stephen’s letters in prison in 2010 was encouraging for us because we knew he would tell us our truth, which we believe he has done through his book,” says René González, one of the five spies.

“We consider that Stephen’s is the best book about the Five, Canadians have become our great friends and we can not think of better partners to help share our history, through cinema, with the world,” he added.

In Miami, however, the reactions to the movie have not been as warm. Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, president of the Democratic Directorate, a group of anti-Castro organizations, said it was “an infamy.”

“You can not rewrite history that way, the real heroes were the four boys they helped kill,” Gutierrez said in reference to the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by the Cuban military as they patrolled international waters to rescue rafters.

“You can not rewrite history that way, the real heroes were the four boys they helped kill”

“You have to read the transcripts of these individuals with their bosses in Havana to realize that they have nothing of heroes, of terrorists, of course, and that the objective of that group was to commit violent actions against nonviolent opponents of that regime.” adds Gutiérrez Boronat, who was part of the exiles watched over by Cuban intelligence agents.

The second film dedicated to the five spies will be called Wasp Network and will be directed by Frenchman Olivier Assayas. The film will feature the performances of the renowned artists Gael García Bernal and Penélope Cruz.

Morais has complained that the relationship with the government was not fluid and that he was not always able to interview or access the people he needed for his book.

However, in 2013, surrounded by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil and close ally of Havana, Armando Hart and Ricardo Alarcón, Morais presented a translation of his book in Spanish at the Third International Conference for the balance of the world, a sort of international of the left in Cuba. At that time, Morais said he hoped to “celebrate the return of the five soon in Havana.”

“The trial against the spies lasted several months with an irrefutable amount of evidence, they try to justify sending the spies because they supposedly protected themselves from violent exile actions,” said Mario de la Peña, father of the pilot of the same name who died after the demolition of his plane in international waters.

“Those spies tried to infiltrate American bases and penetrate peaceful organizations of exile whose only sin was to be against the Castro brothers’ regime,” he added.

“Gerardo Hernández and the others were convicted not only for espionage, but for conspiracy to commit murder, now they can write whatever they want, but the evidence that they are murderers is there,” said De la Peña.