Jon Alpert kept a camera pointed at the same three Cuban families for the better part of four and a half decades, and the result is less a single documentary than a running record of a country most outsiders only ever saw in headlines.
What is Cuba and the Cameraman about?
Alpert first traveled to Cuba in the early 1970s as a young journalist and kept returning, camera in hand, long after most foreign crews had moved on. Cuba and the Cameraman follows the Borrego family and their neighbors from that cautiously hopeful decade through the economic collapse that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, when Cuba lost its main trading partner almost overnight and daily life grew markedly harder. The film closes in the period around Fidel Castro's 2016 death, letting the same faces age on screen across the full stretch of footage. Rather than narrating Cuban history from the outside, the documentary lets it accumulate through birthdays, harvests, home repairs, and quiet conversations captured over dozens of separate visits.
About the cast
Jon Alpert directs and appears as the recurring presence behind the lens, and his own decades of return visits are as much a part of the film's structure as the families he follows. The Borrego family anchors the story across generations, with Fidel Castro appearing in archival footage Alpert shot during several of his trips, giving the documentary rare direct access to Cuba's head of state alongside its ordinary citizens.
Context & significance
Alpert built his career as a broadcast journalist known for long-term access projects, and Cuba and the Cameraman grew out of assignments that were never meant to become a multi-decade undertaking. The film's structure, returning to the same households roughly once a decade, sets it apart from the more typical single-visit approach to documentary coverage of Cuba, and it captures policy shifts and hardship through their effect on specific families rather than through statistics or expert commentary.
Watching Cuba and the Cameraman on Ktime
Cuba and the Cameraman streams on K-Time with a free account login, no subscription required to read this page or browse the catalogue further. The film is presented in its original English-language form for viewers who want the unfiltered, decades-spanning record Alpert assembled.