Ronald Tavel’s THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO is one of Andy Warhol’s triumphs as a filmmaker. A playwright (Tavel himself) taunts a number of actors into improvising a truly ridiculous but subtlely meaningful meditation on Fidel Castro and his family, at a time when the revolution was bringing back disquieting stories of executions and imprisonments and, particularly, virulent hatred and torture of homosexuals in Castro’s Marxist paradise. Hilarious as JUANITA is,
it remains a history lesson wherein fascism itself is on display and the audience is encouraged to laugh—-but with some discomfort.