There is that scene in The Godfather Part 2 when Michael Corleone is being chauffeur-driven through the backstreets of Havana. Completely ignorant, for once, of both history as process and as destiny. Histories with a small “h” and a big “H”. It is New Year’s Eve, 1958, the last day of the Batista regime.
Michael knows nothing about Cuba. His understanding of politics is admittedly Machiavellian (“keep your friends close and your enemies closer”) but limited to family, omertà (the Sicilian honour code), bribery and extortion; all equivalent in mafia language. Family with a big “F”. Michael thinks only of Family and of the failed attempt on his life, for only by unravelling this mystery will he be able to reassert power. What power? Do human beings really have power? This is the mystery—the curse—of Family. The question goes to the heart of all the great tragedies. In unravelling the mystery, you unravel yourself. Family unravels. Identity unravels.
Michael’s convoy arrives at a military checkpoint where a group of Cuban rebels is being interrogated. A rebel suddenly breaks free and detonates a bomb, killing himself and a senior officer instantly. For the first and only time in the film the scales fall from Michael’s eyes. Now he shall be forced to look people in the eyes, return their gaze, acknowledge the space of a body and the fabric of clothing, their petty work, their lives and loves, and the time which governs everything, and which is running out.
O light, let me look at you one final time…
On arriving at Hyman Roth’s villa, Michael takes his associate aside and relates his experience, the great marvel he has just witnessed. Cuba is being run by a gang of mercenaries. They work for money. How can the regime possibly defeat rebels who refuse money, bribes—refuse Family—and who are prepared to die for an idea? “Stupid thugs,” responds Roth.
Roth is a character from crime fiction in its modern rather than postmodern form, closer to Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle than to contemporary forms of the genre. How quaint and romantic he appears in this film. After the fall of the Batista regime, and fearing Michael’s revenge, Roth flees the US for Israel, where he intends to settle under the Law of Return—only to discover that his application is rejected by the Israeli High Court due to his past criminal convictions!
History is a process without subject or goal. Roth’s error is to believe in both. But neither he nor Batista is a subject in power. They are imaginary interpellations. As for history, it is a rebel conundrum, a revolutionary algebra, that may ultimately never be solved—in Cuba or anywhere else.
“We’re bigger than US Steel,” Roth boasts to Michael at the villa, oblivious to the unfolding drama playing out below in the streets of Havana. We can buy them all. We can buy the casinos and the stupid government, the land and its lazy people. And when they launch an investigation back home, we can buy up the government there too (in the film the US Senate committee chairman of the mafia hearings is on Roth’s payroll). But Michael knows it’s a hollow boast. He understands that history is going nowhere and that no one is in control. Bigger than US Steel? It won’t be nearly big enough, not for what’s coming.
But history is also History. However imaginary it appears, it remains real. Michael cannot escape his past. His only escape will be the self-imposed exile that results from the total alienation of his own family. The divorce from his wife. The murder of his brother. Such is the curse of Family. The curse of Money. He will end his days as a voice and nothing more. The mere semblance—the spectacle—of power. Il Duce holed up in a military compound, far from the people he supposedly governs, people who—given half a chance—would take his possessions and tear him to pieces. Fade to Black.
Featured image: Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth and Al Pacino as Michael Corleone discuss the Mob’s Cuban business interests in a scene from The Godfather, Part II, 1974. (Photo by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
