Fidel Castro—who will be portrayed in three upcoming movies— is already a movie star, kinda. While he’s been featured in archival footage used in many a documentary—everything from Looking for Fidel (2006) to The Fog of War (2003), he has never been portrayed by an actor, which is weird, considering he’s one of the most important political figures of the 20th century. The closest any movie has come, (someone correct me if I’ve missed something), is Andy Garcia’s The Lost City (2005). Andy actually cast someone in the role (Gonzalo Menendez), but then shot the dude only from behind, never showing his face and never letting him utter a line. Andy then used archival footage showing the real Fidel. The effect was schizophrenic, bizarre and I was pissed. It felt to me as if fellow Cuban Andy was punking out—as if he were saying that Fidel is such a larger-than-life figure that no one could possibly play him onscreen and get it right. I called Andy on it in an interview once, and he told me, in part, ‘he IS larger than life.’ But I was still fuming. I had wanted him to have the guts to at least try to demystify the person who has managed to awe a large part of the world (and Hollywood) with smoke and mirrors—the way Julian Schnabel had, in a roundabout way, in the smart, clear-eyed Reinaldo Arenas biopic Before Night Falls.

Starting later this year, we’ll see how three other movies deal with casting Fidel: He will be prominently featured in Soderbergh’s Che biopics The Argentine and Guerilla (he will be played by mexicano Demian Bichir). This week it was also annoucned that Moxie Pictures and Killer Pictures are teaming up to turn the Anthony de Palma book The Man Who Invented Fidel into a movie. The book is about the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, who did the first major interviews with then-rebel Fidel while he was hiding out in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Fidel knew a gullible sucker when he saw one and used Matthews’ reports to mythologize himself in the eyes of the world (among other things, he exaggerated the number of troops that were fighting with him and talked up his supposed intentions to set up a democratic government). This sounds like a promising take on Fidel and I can’t wait to see who they’ll pick to play the main man. Stay tuned.

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