Second request for The Wasp Network (Waspnetwork). José Basulto, leader of the Brothers to the Rescue, has sued the Netflix film that portrays the story of the five Cuban spies, considered heroes by the Havana regime, who were released at the end of 2014 after an exchange with the Government of Barack Obama. Basulto considers that the film defames him, spreading a false image of him as a “US puppet” while idealizing the activities of Cuban agents.
According to the complaint, which was filed this Monday and which had access Magazine TheHollywood Reporter, “This portrayal of Mr. Basulto, Brothers to the Rescue, and the Cuban exile community was deliberately calculated to create two clear and unmistakable villains for the film.” The lawsuit is directed at French director Oliver Assayas, author of the film, and Netflix, owner of the distribution rights.
The lawsuit indicates that the tape says verbatim that José Basulto was “trained by the US as a terrorist” and calls Brothers to the Rescue a “militant organization.” The Cuban activist expresses his disagreement in particular with a scene in which the association’s planes are shot down for violating Cuban airspace when, according to his version, they were shot down in international airspace.
The complaint is added to the one filed in 2020 by Ana Margarita Martínez, ex-wife of former Cuban spy Juan Pablo Roque, and who allegedly hid her duties from her
The complaint is added to the one filed in 2020 by Ana Margarita Martínez, ex-wife of former Cuban spy Juan Pablo Roque, and who allegedly hid her functions and link to the network from her before secretly returning to Cuba. The Cuban, whose character was played in the film by the actress originally from Havana, Ana de Armas, considered that she was portrayed as a promiscuous person and a lover of excesses, something that did not correspond to her opinion with the reality of her mother in Miami.
Two years have passed and now this new lawsuit is added in which it is stated that “the film is an obvious attempt to rewrite and whitewash history in favor of the Cuban communist regime and is inaccurate in terms of the facts. (…) It portrays the five as brave heroes who were simply defending their homeland when, in reality, they were an espionage network that allowed the Cuban government to commit extrajudicial executions.”
Wasp Network is an adaptation of The last soldiers of the Cold War, a book by Fernando Morais starring the Spanish Penélope Cruz and the Venezuelan Edgar Ramírez, as well as the Mexican Gael García Bernal and the Brazilian Wagner Moura. Basulto was played by Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia. The exile considers that the film implies that his organization, whose purpose was to provide humanitarian aid to the rafters, had terrorist overtones, such as leitmotiv to justify spying on the Cubans, who were convicted in 2001 of conspiracy to commit murder and espionage, as well as being unregistered agents of a foreign government.
In the complaint, Basulto maintains that the Cuban government interfered in the filming, recalling that filming scripts “harmful to the image of the country and the people of Cuba” is not allowed on the island.
The Wasp Network is an adaptation of The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, a book by Fernando Morais starring the Spanish Penélope Cruz and the Venezuelan Edgar Ramírez
“These requirements are particularly important when it comes to a lawsuit for defamation, since the Communist Party of Cuba exercises prior censorship, since it requires that the ‘project script, storyboard or synopsis’ be presented and expressly establishes that any project that shows something negative about Cuba will be denied permission,” the complaint says. “Filming the true and accurate story was never an option,” the text states.
It is unknown why Basulto has taken more than two years to present this lawsuit, although he assures that it has had a great emotional impact on him and asks that the diffusion of the film be prohibited, that certain scenes be edited or suppressed. According to his version, Netflix wrote to him after receiving the notification of the lawsuit stating that “modern docudrama audiences understand that they are seeing dramatizations, not strict recreations of the events.”
The film was in the eye of the hurricane after its premiere in 2020 and opened an intense debate between Cubans who considered, like Basulto, that the film gave a good image of the Cuban regime and should be censored and those who defended that, despite the fact that there were inaccurate facts, one could not try to intervene in an artistic creation.
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