Film Premier - One Man’s Story: Phillip Agee, Cuba and the CIA

Don’t miss the Santa Cruz film premier of One Man’s Story: Phillip Agee and the CIA.

Film and discussion with guest speaker, Dawn Gable

Produced by the Cuba-Irish connection of directors Roberto Ruiz and Bernie Dwyer, One Man’s Story: Philip Agee, Cuba and the CIA (33 mins.) focuses on the dark side of U.S. foreign policy. The film allows former CIA agent Phillip Agee to tell his captivating story - supported by excellent archival material - of US covert, as well as open, operations in Latin America.

“I entered the CIA as a patriotic conformist from a comfortable family,” explains Agee, now 71. “It wasn’t until I got down to Ecuador and had been working there a year or two that I began to get a political education.” In all, Agee worked 12 years for the CIA in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico before he resigned in 1968.

He has since become one of the most important whistle blowers of our era, exposing US involvement in brutal dictatorships and the use of mercenaries secretly paid with US taxpayers’ money. After his book, Inside the Company, uncovered heinous secrets of US Intelligence in 1975, his passport was taken away “to protect national security”.

Agee is obsessed with setting the record straight in the U.S. where recent history is barely taught and what is presented comes through a fine sieve. Now, with One Man’s Story, his first hand testimony may spark alarm regarding current US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to name a few, and help young people realize what being “patriotic” really means.

An outspoken critic of the U.S. blockade on Cuba, Agee encourages U.S. citizens to continue doing business with and traveling to Cuba. In One Man’s Story, after outlining terrorist acts perpetrated by the CIA against Cuba since 1959, Agee justifies Cuba’s need to send agents like the Cuban Five to Florida to monitor Miami sponsored terrorism against the island - a story portrayed by filmmakers, Dwyer and Ruiz in their previous co-production, Mission Against Terror.

Bernie Dwyer is an Irish filmmaker and journalist for Radio Havana Cuba. Ruiz, a documentary filmmaker for Cuban TV, is a graduate in English and Spanish literature.

Dawn Gable lived and worked in Cuba as a translator for Granma International in Havana.