Madrid Spain.- José Basulto, president of the humanitarian organization Hermanos al Rescate, sued the film The Wasp Networkfrom Netflix, for defamation against him.
According to information published by the magazine The Hollywood ReporterBasulto stated that the film presents him as a terrorist and drug trafficker and accuses both its director, Olivier Assayaslike Netflix, of portraying him as a puppet of the United States and a traitor to Cuba.
The lawsuit, filed Monday before a federal court in Florida, also refers to the distortion of the activity of the group of five Cuban spies sent to Miami in the early 1990s to infiltrate exiles.
“The film is an obvious attempt to rewrite and whitewash history in favor of the Cuban communist regime and it is inaccurate. (…) It presents the Cuban Five as brave heroes who simply defended their homeland. In reality, the Cuban Five were an espionage network that produced actionable intelligence that allowed the Cuban government to commit extrajudicial killings,” the document states.
Basulto also remembers the knockdown, in 1996, of two Brothers to the Rescue planes that were participating in a humanitarian mission to rescue Cubans who were heading to the United States on rafts.
With the shooting down of the planes, directed by the regime, four young Cuban-Americans lost their lives.
Basulto denounced the scene that states that the planes were shot down because they violated Cuban airspace when in fact they were shot down in international airspace.
According to the complaint, Cuba interfered in the shooting of the film to ensure a favorable narrative of the story. Basulto points out the requirements of the Cuban film authorities, which do not allow the filming of scripts that are “harmful to the image of the country.”
The leader of Brothers to the Rescue requested a court order that prohibits Netflix from continuing to broadcast the film or that forces it to edit some scenes and remove any reference to the film being based on real events.
Already in 2020, the Cuban exile Ana Martínez, represented by the actress Ana de Armas, had denounced that the character characterized her as a promiscuous “party girl”.
For its part, the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance has denounced the film for considering it untrue.
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