While his family fled to America in the wake of the revolution, Cuban intellectual Sergio has stayed behind-more due to passivity than political commitment. Unable to imagine himself a part of the new landscape, his days are spent killing time: gazing out his balcony telescope; taking lazy, aimless walks down neighborhood streets lined with both shady trees and his own clamorous memories; smoking in bed. All the while his head teems with thoughts of Cuba's cultural inferiority to Europe, self-pitying diatribes, and erotic reveries. Disgusted by his own diffidence, Sergio can't even see the irony when his scathing assessment of the teenage actress manqué he picks up on the street works equally well to describe himself. No less than the "underdeveloped" Erica, he has become alienated, filled with "the inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop. " Probably because his film's central figure is so inactive, director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea constructed his 1968 masterpiece out of a riot of influences and styles, throwing seemingly everything he could think of into the pot. There are minidocumentaries on the cruelties of Batista forces, stream-of-consciousness flashbacks and flash-forwards, delicate little photomontages, newspaper headlines, visits to Hemingway's home, even a philological debate attended by Sergio. The last does get a little tiresome; but other than the one misstep, Memories of Underdevelopment is such a vivid, consistently fresh and surprising film-intellectually and sensually vibrant from start to finish-that it's little wonder its belated foreign release single-handedly put Cuban cinema on the map. -Bruce Reid.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro's trusted comrade Ernesto Che Guevara found himself becoming a bureaucrat. Seeking a return to action, Che eventually traveled in secret to Bolivia in 1966, hoping to foment a revolution on the South American mainland that would spread throughout all of Latin America. This documentary, which relies greatly on a journal Che kept during his time in Bolivia, as well as interviews with contemporaries who fought in the hills with him, provides an insightful look at his thoughts during the last year of his life. Che's apparent intent in Bolivia was, of course, to copy the success of the Cuban Revolution, but the words of his journal, as read in the documentary, betray his increasing hopelessness. His band of guerrillas was tiny and hungry, often more concerned with killing birds for food than with any principles of global revolution. According to those who appear on camera to speak of Guevara's final days, it seems the peasants were terrified of getting involved. Tracking Guevara's movements through the Bolivian mountains, the documentary proceeds at a leisurely pace, but it also provides a great deal of information about Guevara's final days, leading up to his execution by Bolivian troops acting, some say, under the direction of the CIA. -Robert J. McNamara.

This powerful documentary is simply a series of interviews with a fascinating array of Cuban intellectuals and homosexuals who have been persecuted under the Castro regime. The directors are themselves exiles, and they have created a convincing indictment of El Jefe, implicating also those who would turn a blind eye towards repression from the left.

The Gabriel Garcia Marquez Collection includes: Letters From The Park Miracle In Rome The Summer Of Miss Forbes A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings I'm The One You're Looking For The Fable Of The Beautiful Pigeon Fancier