The actor Diego Boneta watched every existing video that showed the tyrant in his youth and looked through dozens of photos and testimonies
14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 27 August 2024 – Last year a young and very talented Mexican actor invited me to dinner in Madrid. He was Diego Boneta, known mainly for bringing Luis Miguel to life in the successful biographical series, although he had also worked with Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger on Hollywood productions. The motive for his invitation was to talk about Fidel Castro. He was interested in my take on him as dramatist and actor, but also as an opponent of the regime. Diego was facing the most difficult role of his career to date: to play the Cuban dictator.
I was really surprised by how much he had already researched his role. He’d watched every existing video that showed the tyrant during his youth, and had looked through dozens of photos and testimonies. But beyond mastering the voice and the gestures of his character, Boneta wanted to understand his soul, his ambitions, doubts, weaknesses and frustrations. And he’d already begun to grab that by the balls. When I asked him, ’what do you think was his ideology during the period of time covered by the film?’, he replied, ’his only ideology, at that point and, I believe, until the end of his life… was power’.
The most interesting thing, for me, wasn’t the disastrous planning and execution of the event but rather the reactions to it
Firstly, we talked about the letter that an adolescent Fidel wrote in English to President Roosevelt in 1940. In the missive he addressed the most powerful man in the world as “my good friend”. He wrote that he was willing to reveal the location of the best iron ore mines in the country for a payment of ten dollars. But also, he lied about his age, saying he was 12 when in fact he was 14.