Cuba and the Cameraman (2017)

There is a particular kind of documentary that only time can make. Cuba and the Cameraman is one of them. Released in 2017 and running at just under two hours, the film is the product of roughly four decades of footage gathered by American journalist and documentary maker Jon Alpert, who first visited Cuba in the 1970s and kept returning, camera in hand, across the following years. The result is a portrait of a country and its people assembled across an extraordinary span of history, taking in the height of the Castro era, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Special Period of economic hardship in the 1990s, and the slow, complicated drift toward the modern day. It is the sort of project that simply cannot be manufactured or rushed, and that long gestation gives the film a texture that more conventionally produced documentaries rarely achieve.

Alpert is the director, the cameraman, and in many ways the connective tissue of the whole enterprise. He is not a detached observer here. His on-screen presence, and the genuine relationships he built with his subjects over the years, are central to how the film works. The three Cuban families he returns to again and again, the Borrego brothers Angél, Cristobal, and Gregorio among the key figures, are not interview subjects in the traditional sense. They are people Alpert came to know, and that familiarity shows in every frame. Alongside the family stories, Alpert also secured a number of face-to-face encounters with Fidel Castro himself, which gives the film an access that would be remarkable in any era, let alone sustained over four decades. For documentary fans, it sits comfortably alongside other films that use personal, long-term observation to illuminate larger political realities, such as Island Soldier, another 2017 documentary that takes a similarly patient, human-centred approach to a story shaped by forces far beyond its subjects' control. If the idea of a journalist building a relationship with a closed-off nation over many years appeals, the long-form observational style is also something worth comparing to Next Goal Wins, another documentary that finds its beating heart in the people rather than the politics surrounding them.

The film arrived on Netflix in 2017, which gave it a wider audience than the festival circuit alone might have managed, and it received considerable attention for the sheer scope of its ambition. Whether you arrive knowing a great deal about Cuban history or relatively little, the personal framing of the story gives the film an accessibility that more academic treatments of the same period would struggle to match. It is polished but unshowy, the kind of filmmaking that gets out of its own way and lets the decades do the talking.

A-Z World Movie Tour Cuba I didn't have much choice in the way of movies so I had to settle for a documentary. Boy am I glad I chose this. What a fantastic, insightful and real documentary. Filmed over about 40 years Jon Alpert visited Cuba and interviewed the same group of real people to document how their lives changed throughout the years. The connections were genuine. The people were sweet and welcoming. The facts were shocking in places and thought provoking in others. Well worth the watch.

I came away from this one genuinely moved by how much a camera and a bit of patience can achieve. There is something about watching real lives unfold over that kind of timescale that no dramatisation could replicate, and Alpert's willingness to keep showing up, year after year, pays off in ways that feel earned rather than engineered. If you have any interest in documentary filmmaking as a form, or in twentieth century Latin American history, or honestly just in watching real human beings get on with their lives under extraordinary circumstances, this one deserves your time. Sometimes the simplest approach is the right one.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-08

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Cuba and the Cameraman (2017) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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