In May 1968, just nine years after the Cuban Revolution, filmmaker Saul Landau was invited to join Fidel Castro in Cuba for an unprecedented in-depth interview.

Over a week, Landau and Castro traveled through the island's mountainous terrain through various settings, from military camps to a pickup baseball game to Castro's speech on the 15th anniversary of his attack on Fort Moncada which marked the beginning of the Revolution. Landau captured an unparalleled time into the relationship of the Cuban people with their popular leader, at a time when the country was being transformed internally while internationally vilified.

Recently restored and remastered by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Fidel was completed in 1969 using fascinating footage from Cuba's National Archive. The film's release in the U.S. was met with violence in several cities, although it is now considered a classic documentary.

"I found it completely absorbing from the start to finish. A tapestry for history." - Rolling Stone

"A masterful portrait" — Gore Vidal

Reflecting on an encounter four decades ago...

By late May 2007, Fidel Castro appeared to have recuperated from a difficult operation followed by a life-threatening infection. Instead of returning to public view in his ubiquitous uniform, he has transformed himself—at least temporarily—into a columnist for Granma, Cuba's daily newspaper. In his columns he addresses the dangers and irrationality of converting corn into ethanol, using food that could feed the world's starving and hungry and transforming it into gasoline for the wealthy while further contributing to global warming; Bush's dangerous and inhumane war policies; the idiocy of England's new nuclear submarine, and the insanity of designing new Cold War weapons—all in the age of impending catastrophic climate change.

The essayist Fidel exudes the same sense of astute practicality—a devastatingly cold grip on reality—combined with a seemingly inexhaustible optimism about the future, including the potential for creating one day the perfect human species, physically and morally. As I remember him in 1968, this political giant of our times had merged his Jesuitical education with texts from José Martí and the Cuban revolutionaries of the 1860s (don't forget Bolívar) and then Marx and Lenin, along with studies of agronomy and animal husbandry. This voracious reader and cosmopolitan intellect has also been the Machiavellian politician of the third world—getting the United States to import Cuba's enemies—and has emerged as the sole survivor of nearly fifty years of U.S. imperial wrath. The politician who has plotted the course of the Cuban revolution, from taking power to holding it, also has an opposite side. Don Quijote also lives inside Fidel Castro. This is reflected in Cuba's programs, bringing medical students from around the world to Cuba to become doctors at no cost and sending doctors to wherever Nature strikes the poor—Fidel offered them to the people of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but Bush naturally refused.

As I read his essays, in Granma, I think back almost forty years to the amazing jeep ride through the undeveloped mountain villages of eastern Cuba, during the filming of Fidel (1968), produced for public television. —Saul Landau