Farewell to Cuba

The Menendez family moved from a mansion in Havana to a seedy neighbourhood a block from the beach in the days before Miami was chic.

"We were living in one of those ' efficiency motels' that the northerners would come down and rent for a week."

Otherwise, the place felt pretty much like home. Whole chunks of Miami in the early Sixties were a kind of Havana North, even down to some of the Cuban capital's more exotic fauna.

Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, for instance, lived just around the corner. Lansky used to run most of the rackets in Havana and had to leave almost as fast as the Menendez family, albeit for different reasons.

"I grew up watching him walk his dog on Collins Avenue," chuckles Garcia. "He was a very amusing-looking" - no more than five feet tall, he was known as the Little Man - "and behaving, character. But he was very low-key."

Lansky appears in the film, played by Dustin Hoffman, in a performance one would strain to describe as low-key.

Young Andrés seems to have had a fairly typical American adolescence, playing Little League baseball while the family clawed its way back to wealth, first through the hosiery business - "the hallway used to be full of socks" - then through a perfume company, which his brother still runs.

Despite 15 years of stardom, Garcia has generally managed to maintain his privacy, living a quiet family life in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Toluca Lake.

Now, however, having spent 18 years raising the money and, finally, making a film about the experiences of a Cuban family very like his own, he is laying bare his background and beliefs.

In a Hollywood where "liberal" is the prevailing mode, political statements are more likely to be heard from Leftleaning stars such as George Clooney, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn.

Apart from a handful of Right-wingers such as Adam Sandler, Kelsey Grammer, Bruce Willis, James Woods - and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the other side tend to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Garcia was, however, prepared to speak out during the media frenzy surrounding-Elian Gonzalez, the six-yearold-Cuban boy who became the centre of a political tug-of-war between Havana Cubans, Miami Cubans and both governments.

Not only in front of the cameras, he was out on the streets, but if you read below the headlines you find that he was basically appealing for calm. He may be Right-wing, but he's no extremist.

Garcia's rise to fame began in 1981, as a gang member in the first episode of Hill Street Blues, but his career really took off five years later with The Untouchables.

To avoid typecasting, he rejected the role of Capone's enforcer, Frank Nitti, holding out instead for that of the only Italian cop on Elliott Ness's squad.

Since then, career highlights have included The Godfather: Part III (which brought him an Oscar nomination, in 1991) and When a Man Loves a Woman (where, three years later, he very effectively played the straight man to Meg Ryan's grandstanding alcoholic).

He has also picked up an armful of ALMAs (American Latin Media Awards), including one for his recurring role as Terry Benedict in Ocean's Eleven through Thirteen. (Scenes are being reshot for the latest episode, for release next February.)

Garcia's on-screen charisma (the camera picks up an angular quality in his face which is much less noticeable in real life) has obscured the fact that he is also a firstrate actor - an Al Pacino without the fireworks (not to mention the arrogance).

"I spent seven years without working," he once said. "So if they're making cop movies, I'll play cops. I got two kids to bring up." The family has grown since then: he now has three daughters and a son, all of whom put in an appearance in The Lost City.

The film is unashamedly partisan, reflecting Garcia's beliefs, which were forged in the Miami of the Sixties, a city he describes as "definitely anti-Castro, and therefore anti-communist".

Few opportunities are lost to expose what Garcia sees as the hypocrisy of the incoming revolutionary-elite. Che Guevara is depicted not as the poster-boy of a million student bedrooms, but as a pragmatic practitioner of realpolitik, unhesitatingly dispatching enemies of the revolution.

"The things Che did at the La Cabaña fortress are part of Cuban history," insists Garcia. "People might not know about it but, if you read about Che, it's written. And he himself talks about the necessity to execute, so these are not things I'm making up."

One surprise, though, is that Garcia is against the US trade embargo. "I would like to see it lifted," he says. "I think Castro will do anything in his power to keep the embargo in place, so he can continue to point to this evil enemy to the north.

The reality is that Cuba trades with the entire world. Its economic problems have everything to do with the system in Cuba, and nothing to do with the US embargo."

But closer contacts with the lost country are not something Garcia will ever seek, he says, at least while Castro, 80 this Sunday, remains in power. As it is, he hasn't been back in 44 years (he recently turned down an invitation to attend the Havana Film Festival); didn't shoot a foot of his new film on the island; and is an American now.

"I think that if you listen to the last scene in the movie, when my character says: 'I don't have any money but I feel as though I'm worth more than I ever was,' - that's pretty clear for me," he says, heading off for a private dinner with former Czech President V·clav Havel who, it turns out, is a founding member of the Committee for Democracy in Cuba. Garcia, ever the nonjoiner, is not a member.