Every country in the world dealt with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s & 1990’s in different way, and the government in Cuba chose to round up patients and send them to a military facility turned into a sanitarium where they were very carefully ‘supervised’. If the patient conformed and behaved they were allowed out on a visit home once a week accompanied by an official ‘companion’ to ensure that they would return. This new move is a fictionalized narrative based on one such patient who was being troublesome to authorities and constantly escaping and jeopardizing the facility’s security.
To keep Daniel (Armando Miquel Gomez) under control the Doctor in charge assigns him a permanent companion on a 24 hour basis in the shape of Horacio (Yotuel Romero) a disgraced champion boxer who is now expected to take on the task as a penance after being suspended from the sport for a year for taking drugs. Both men are initially hostile to this arrangement but when they unexpectedly realize that they have a lot in common, they bond and become fast friends.
Both men have their own dreams. Daniel wants to be able to arrange to be smuggled out of Cuba to a new life elsewhere, a fact that he keeps secret from Horacio. The boxer on the other hand wants to be re-instated back into the National squad and finally be given a chance to compete in the Olympics. However forces outside of their power work against them, and in the end they have no hope of succeeding.
When Horacio first takes up his role at the hospital he is overly-cautious about mixing with any of the patients or even touching anything with his bare hands for fear of being infected. It is something he eventually overcomes, enough to even start having a relationship with Lisandra (Camila Arteche) one of the female patients, who is one of the rather eccentric cast of characters in this drama. Another is a rather slimy opportunistic Doctor who has been forcing patients into having sex him and he then gets his comeuppance when it is discovered that he too has contracted the virus and is immediately forced into now being an inmate.
The movie is an unusual take on the AIDS pandemic as it focuses less on the heinous degenerative effects of the disease on these HIV patients, and much more on how their freedom has been curtailed because the Authorities believe this will stop it spreading in their country. Despite them being confined against their will, it did also seem that the patients were given all the drugs that the Cuban Authorities had at their disposal without a second thought. In fact in this tale it isn’t until the very end when Daniel has the ravages of full-blown AIDS, that we are faced with the vicious reality of how pernicious this fatal disease was.
Two powerful performances from Gomez and Romero ensure that this movie is lifted above being just another AIDS melodrama and into an exceptional and unique viewpoint on that very troubled time in our recent past. The movie directed by Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud who should be applauded for the excellent way he handled it’s sensitive and mature story.
