FIDEL CASTRO - KENNEDY CLAN ACTOR SAYS CUBA BLOCKADE AFFECTS U.S. FILMMAKERS

Actor Christopher Lawford, a nephew of President John Kennedy who confronted the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, has told Australian interviewers that he has been trying to make a film about that incident from Cuba's perspective but that he has been stymied by the U.S. blockade. Lawford, whose father was Rat Pack member Peter Lawford and mother is JFK's sister Patricia, told The Australian newspaper that he sat next to Prime Minister Fidel Castro in Havana during a screening in 2001 of Thirteen Days, a film about the missile crisis in which Lawford co-starred. "It was incredible," he told the newspaper. "I went there and sat next to the guy my uncles were trying to kill. But President Castro believes if president Kennedy had lived, the embargo would have been lifted and they would have normalized relations." In a separate interview with the ABC, Lawford said Castro "got up at the end of the film and he said, 'You've made a great film, but you've ignored Cuba, now you have to make a film of what was happening here in Cuba during those thirteen days." Lawford said that he had returned to Cuba six times in an effort to do just that "but as you know we have an embargo against Cuba which is one of the greatest foreign policy tragedies in the history of the United States."  


05/04/2006