The Cuban Five, also known as the Miami Five or the Wasp Network, were members of a group of Cuban intelligence officers dispatched to Miami in the early 1990s to spy on and sabotage Cuban exile organizations and U.S. facilities, including the Southern Command, Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, and Homestead Air Reserve Base. The Netflix film Wasp Network, directed by Olivier Assayas and with a cast including popular stars Gael García Bernal and Penélope Cruz, purports to recount the true story of this affair.
Although the director delivers a thrilling narrative, he deceives viewers unfamiliar with Cuban history. The film portrays the spies as courageous heroes who were just defending their homeland and the members of Cuban exile organizations, along with some of their leaders, as terrorists. Not only is this approach devoid of nuance, it’s a move that attempts to rewrite history in an irresponsible way. At the time, the Cuban Five were universally understood as a spy network that produced actionable intelligence enabling the Cuban government to commit extrajudicial killings.
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