When in January 1972 the guerrilla group Los Palmeros was killed on Las Américas avenue, Dominican Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó, who was in exile in Cuba, wrote a letter to the Cuban president at the time, Fidel Castro, asking him to authorize you to return to your country. In the document, Caamaño looks desperate, after learning about the event that shocked the Dominicans.
This episode is part of what “Caamaño. Militar a Guerrilla”, a documentary by filmmaker René Fortunato and which will premiere on February 16 at the Carlos Piantini Hall of the Eduardo Brito National Theater (and from then on in theaters) and which tells the story of the controversial character during the period from 1966, when President Caamaño Deñó went into exile to Europe, his life in Cuba, his arrival in the country in January 1973 and ends with his death, on February 16 of that year, on Caracoles beach.
The feature film is based on years of investigation by Fortunato, who had access to Caamaño’s personal file, including his personal diary. Fortunato had access to declassified intelligence reports from Cuba and intelligence reports from that Caribbean country.
In “Caamaño. Military to Guerrilla “, 85 minutes long, the filmmaker manages to discover a character that mutates according to the circumstances in which he lived during those seven years. A filming that has aroused the interest of Dominicans, which translates a respect for the work that Fortunato has been doing for decades.
This investigation was pending, from that time when the filmmaker premiered the documentary “April: La Trinchera del honor”, in 1988, where Colonel Caamaño has a vital role in the war for the restoration of the constitutional government, waged in the country , in April 1965. So this work goes through everything that the famous character lived in exile, in the post-war period of April.
“So the great novelty of this compilation is the five clandestine years that he lived in Cuba and Dominicans don’t know what life was like in Cuba. In this documentary there will be images of his life and his training in Cuba. It is a totally unknown aspect of Caamaño’s life”, Fortunato advances.
The film portrays the relationship that “the hero of April” had with Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, a topic that is little known in the country. “The document is full of images and novel data that will contribute to understand and learn more about the figure of this national hero, one of the most important figures in Dominican history of the 20th century.”
Through his diary, Fortunato discovered a Caamaño devoted and concerned about his family, a loving father, he describes how happy he was when his children went to visit him in Cuba, and even a Caamaño who was in love, who wrote love letters.
“This documentary shows Caamaño’s five-year period in Cuba, one of the difficulties I encountered is that there is very little bibliography of this stage, his guerrilla projector, there is very little documentation of that period, so I interviewed more than 15 survivors, who were with him, training in Cuba and those who were with him in London and in Europe, before leaving for Cuba, parallel to an investigation of interviews with journalists and documents with which he was putting together a story ” he commented.
According to the filmmaker, this work will allow us to know the human being and the hero in another dimension.
How he lived for so long in hiding, Caamaño speaks through his letters, his diary, he speaks through the written documentation that is accessed for the first time.
“The work leaves the viewer the option of evaluating Caamaño because many people criticize his final actions, the guerrilla and everything. This documentary is based on the principle that he is a man and his circumstances, it is necessary to evaluate the circumstances in which the human being takes his actions in order to understand them and this is a guide in this work, analyzing the circumstances in which he made decisions, we analyze the circumstances in which Caamaño was trapped in the 60s”, he explains.
In conclusion, Fortunato learned about the evolution and transformation of a character in history, he learned about the repressive military Caamaño, the hero of April, and the guerrilla fighter. “I discovered that Caamaño is not a fixed character, with a single behavior, he is a character in mutation.”
Unsupported
For the documentary René Fortunato invested 19 million pesos and arrives with a debt of ten million, his committed credit and all his savings invested in a film work that did not have the support of sponsors, despite complying with all the procedures of the Film Law to receive the support of investors.
The filmmaker did not have in his favor that his work is a historical investigation that touches on sensitive political issues and that the genre in which he develops it is not a commercial genre for sponsors.
“I count on the support of the people, to go see the documentary in movie theaters and be able to recover the investment and earn something to continue working in other jobs,” he said. Frasa nagically expresses it with concern.
Source-listindiario.com