 Wow, it's just alive. You're brave. If you practice sports like surf, it's even more exciting. The problem is that sometimes surfers take it as something legal. I'll never stop. In the new documentary, Havana Libre, filmmaker Cory McClane follows a community of Cuban surfers who refuse to abandon their sport despite police harassment, government bureaucracy and being shut off from the international surfer community. If you want to feel something and understand Cuba, you just need to get to know these characters going about their lives, trying to pursue something that they love and seeing how difficult it is. Cuba has had this really difficult relationship with the water. The Cuban government essentially made the water off limits to all of its people unless expressly given permission for it. To try and develop a sport in that space is already really difficult. The fact that it's primarily a Western sport is also not particularly appealing to the government there. And so together, those reasons basically forced surfing to be this underground sort of invisible sport. And so a lot of what our film is about is them no longer wanting to be invisible, wanting to be legitimate and be able to practice it in public proudly. We would constantly be talking to the surfers and they'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, we got arrested there this time, but we had to run from the cops this time. So it's illegal. They'd be like, it's not legal. And we'd be like, so it's illegal. They'd be like, it's not legal. Everything is nuanced there. Nothing is straightforward. You may be fine. You may come under scrutiny. You may get the full hammer of the law and you just never really know. The subjects in Havana Libre are distinctly anti-political and routinely voice their desire to be free to practice and enjoy their sport. When I asked Frank how he identifies himself, he identifies himself as a surfer. It's not that they don't care about politics or they don't care about what's happening in their country. It's quite the opposite. But for them, that's the community that they feel the most a part of is surfing. It's what they want to be the most a part of. And I think they really feel the impediment of these forces that are outside their control, kind of keeping them from what they feel is basically their destiny. They don't have the open mind for new things. While the rest of the world already had the surf as a sport, and they were developing it and advancing it, we were frozen in time. One of the biggest obstacles Cubans surfers face is the American trade embargo. It cuts off the ability for them to get supplies to make boards and knowledge to everything. What? What is that? Surfing? What is that? Everyone started surfing on plywood. And so Frank, one of our main characters, took the surface off of his school desk when the teacher wasn't looking basically like disassembled it, ran out the door and took it home and turned it into a surfboard. And when they saw these magazine clippings, it was this process of dissection and mimicry. They'd like get an image and they'd be like, oh, it's not flat. It's got a little bit of a curve here. Like, how are we going to get that curve? And then they'd see like a picture of a broken board and be like, oh my God, it's full of foam. The common way that they started making boards is they found refrigerators and would strip the core out of the door, glue them together and then use cheese graters to basically sand it all down into shape. Sometimes it could take like two years from start to finish to make a surfboard. It just really hit us. The whole process of trying to connect there is so challenging. You know, the internet thing is tremendous. To get online costs $3 and the monthly Cuban salary is only $20. The fact that people are still doing it tells you how important that little piece of the puzzle is. McLean and his crew followed the subjects on a trip to the U.S., which had a profound impact on everyone involved. We took them to all these places, kind of like trying to blow their minds. We're like, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? The place that blew their mind the most was the grocery store, which to us was heartbreaking. It was sort of this moment where we realized that they don't necessarily even know what they're not a part of, but they know that there's something out there that interests them, that they want to be a part of. And they don't necessarily have the full scope of it yet. And to see it in person and to see the ease in which people are able to pursue some of the things that they can. Yeah, I think it's, I don't know, both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. There are a lot of films about Cubans leaving Cuba and I think what's different is that our characters still feel like Cuba's home and they want to be able to do what they want to do at home. You see how much chaos politics can cause in day-to-day life. You know, everything is connected to politics. And so for them, surfing is really this ability to just release all of that. And so when they say they're constantly trying to escape politics, all they want to do is live in this peaceful lifestyle that they see people around the world being a part of. This film is sort of about how difficult that simple task is.