In the past seven Olympic Games, Cuba, an island nation with a population of 11 million people, has dominated the sport of boxing: 63 medals, 32 of them gold. Boxing has held a special place of honor in Cuban society since the revolution, not least because Castro has deployed the nation’s athletes as an unconventional tool of foreign and domestic policy. Sport propels the nation onto the world stage – allowing it to break out of economic and political isolation into a very public and superficially apolitical arena. While the country has never had the military might to challenge the U.S., it has found a way to compete inside the ropes of the boxing ring. Now, as Castro’s faltering health has thrown the future into question, Cuba’s athletes, as well as the rest its citizens will face a crucial time of transition. While the shift of power from Fidel to his brother Raul seems to have gone smoothly, there are some indications that changes in economic policy may lie on the horizon.

About the Film

WIDE ANGLE gains intimate access to the Havana Boxing Academy on the outskirts of Cuba’s capital. There, from the tender age of nine, boys hand-picked as future Olympians are molded into soldiers of the ring. They live and train at the academy with a single purpose: to bring home Olympic gold. Victory Is Your Duty follows the boys’ dramatic path over eight months of training, schooling and boarding as they build up to the biggest event of their lives — the annual National Boxing Championships.

For the summer 2009 re-broadcast, WIDE ANGLE host Aaron Brown travels to Miami, Florida, to tell the story of what happens when graduates of Havana’s boxing academies grow up – and defect to the United States. The boxers tell of the triumphs and obstacles they faced in Cuba and continue to face as they pursue a professional career in the rough-and-tumble world of American boxing.

This episode of Wide Angle is the precursor to the theatrical film Sons of Cuba.

About the Issue

As one of the most racially diverse nations in the world, Brazil has long considered itself a colorblind “racial democracy.” But deep disparities in income, education and employment between lighter and darker-skinned Brazilians have prompted a civil rights movement advocating equal treatment of Afro-Brazilians. In Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, blacks today make up almost half of the total population — but nearly two-thirds of the nation’s poor. Institutions of higher education have typically been monopolized by Brazil’s wealthy and light-skinned elite, and illiteracy among black Brazilians is twice as high as among whites. Now, affirmative action programs are changing the rules of the game, with many colleges and universities reserving 20% of spots for Afro-Brazilians. But with national surveys identifying over 130 different categories of skin color, including “cinnamon,” “coffee with milk,” and “toasted,” who will be considered “black enough” to qualify for the new racial quotas?

About The Film

“Am I black or am I white?” Even before they ever set foot in a college classroom, many Brazilian university applicants must now confront a question with no easy answer. BRAZIL IN BLACK AND WHITE follows the lives of five young college hopefuls from diverse backgrounds as they compete to win a coveted spot at the elite University of Brasilia, where 20 percent of the incoming freshmen must qualify as Afro-Brazilian. Outside the university, WIDE ANGLE reports on the controversial racial debate roiling Brazil through profiles of civil right activists, opponents of affirmative action, and one of the country’s few black senators.

Kidnapping is big business in Brazil, a country with one of the world’s largest gaps between rich and poor. In Sao Paulo, where someone is kidnapped every three days on average, “Ransom City” explores a twist in Brazil’s dangerous crime fad as the mothers of five celebrity soccer players are abducted and held for ransom in a six month period. The film follows Sao Paulo’s anti-kidnapping squad as they risk their lives investigating these kidnappings, and also profiles kidnappers who explain the rationale behind their life of crime. As the Brazilian team winds down from the 2006 World Cup soccer championship, WIDE ANGLE captures the stark contrasts between the haves and the have-nots in this crime-ridden, soccer-crazed nation.

In San Salvador, El Salvador, 2,000 miles from Los Angeles’s Eighteenth Street, a gang known as “18″ governs its territory like an armed militia. In the mid 1990s, thousands of Salvadoran nationals living illegally in the U.S. were deported to their homeland. Some brought L.A. gang culture back with them to a country beset by poverty and awash in arms. Organizing support for gang members in need, meting out justice to those who would defy the gang’s code and waging an endless vendetta against its enemies, 18 is helping to make El Salvador one of the most violent and crime-ridden countries in the world.

ABOUT THE FILM

WIDE ANGLE’s film, 18 with a Bullet, follows the life of this notorious Central American gang for six months. By the end of the film, most of the gang members profiled – Slappy, Sochi, and 18-year old Travieso – are in jail serving long sentences for their crimes.

For the summer 2008 re-broadcast, WIDE ANGLE follows the film with an update that tells another side of this transnational story. Like many Salvadoran gang members, Travieso was separated from his mother when she went north to find work in the United States.

Today, she runs a successful cleaning business in the U.S. and holds a temporarily legal immigration status, but her sacrifices and the remittances sent home have not managed to give Travieso the better life she had dreamed for him. This mother’s story paints a nuanced portrait of one immigrant’s experience and the sometimes heartbreaking difficulties of life stretched across borders.

Battered by hurricanes, embroiled in political turmoil, plagued by kidnappings and largely ignored by the international community, Haiti is trying, yet again, to create democracy. As the Western hemisphere’s poorest country attempts to organize for November presidential elections, hardened veterans of its endless cycle of uprisings and downfalls are trading guns for voter registration cards, warily giving the election process their support.

In a character-driven narrative, we capture life on Haiti’s streets and among its power-brokers by interweaving five personal stories. We follow Patrick Fequière, one of nine Electoral Council officials, as he navigates faulty generators, citizens lacking identification papers, and countless other headaches of the voter registration process amidst rising violence. We go behind the scenes with the strongmen of the National Front for the Reconstruction of Haiti party, Butteur Métayer and Guy Philippe, former rebels who drove President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in 2004. As Métayer organizes his constituents in a region historically known to be an epicenter of revolution, Philippe is hitting the campaign trail in a bid for the presidency. In a one-room hovel in the polluted, poverty-stricken slums of Port-au-Prince, Elizna Nicholas is raising seven children as a single mother and becoming increasingly disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of democracy. Upriver from her slum, businessman Serge Cantave valiantly lobbies to protect a state park from the ravages of illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture that endanger the country’s chances of economic recovery.

Through unfettered access to political strongmen, gangsters turned presidential hopefuls, and ordinary Haitian citizens, WIDE ANGLE reveals the country’s struggle to fashion a true representative government out of a volatile failed state.

The rise of new leftist leaders in South America has been swift and surprising. From Venezuela’s Chavez to Brazil’s Lula, from Argentina’s Kirchner to Peru’s Toledo, the swelling ranks of left-leaning governments have provoked fears among some conservatives. If the proverbial dominos are on the table — will Bolivia be the next to tip over? In recent years the country has been roiled by competing political forces, with the indigenous coca grower’s union (the “cocaleros”) becoming an unexpected powerhouse. Their hero is ex-Congressman Evo Morales, a former coca farmer from indigenous peasant roots, who rose up last year to defend the coca growers against the Bolivian military’s crop eradication program. Today Latin America’s highest-profile indigenous leader, Morales fell just 45,000 votes shy of the presidency in the country’s June 2002 election. This summer, as the standoff between the cocaleros and the government escalates, Wide Angle travels with Morales to the stunning highlands of Bolivia as he fights to expand the amount of coca that can be legally grown by farmers. The pitfalls of a drug-based economy — and the difficulty of finding suitable replacement crops to support peasant families — are all part of the story. We will profile powerful indigenous politicians working with Morales, a poor cocalero family whose survival is dependent on coca growing, a wealthy entrepreneur who is starting a chain of supermarkets, and a coca-eradication commander on a slash and burn mission. Cocaleros illuminates the shifting balance of power that’s underway in Bolivia — and spreading across Latin America.

Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

About the Film

Recently Mexico was startled by the murders of two young women lawyers, one from the political right and the other from the left. Both had fought to support human rights and legitimate protest, and to destroy the official and institutional corruption that has plagued Mexico for years — a system of bribes, debts and favors that has prevented the world’s tenth-largest country from fulfilling its political and economic potential. The election of President Vicente Fox in 2000 ended more than 70 years of single-party rule. This film examines the hopes that a new dawn has come in Mexico’s history, and the fear that graft and corruption are immovable.

In December 2001, the Argentinian government defaulted on $155 billion in public debt. Since then, this once-wealthy country has gone through five presidents and watched its currency fall by more than 70 percent. How do people survive in a broken economy? The solutions range from the ingenious — barter clubs where members can exchange goods and services without money — to the brutal, including outbreaks of rioting. With the most basic government services now only a memory and the army camped around the capital, how can the people of Argentina begin to put their society back together? What does a financial meltdown look like? And where do American interests or responsibilities lie?