Havana

In Havana, Robert Redford gets more out of Cuba than he did out of Africa. In what begins as a classy reunion with Sydney Pollack - their last collaboration was the Oscar-laden Out of Africa (1985) - Redford's remarkably honest and open contribution proves a saving grace. Artistically, Havana follows the political course described by the revolution led by Fidel Castro. It commences in hope and promise, only to give way to confusion and disillusion. In this case, the fault lies not with the stars or Pollack, who has proved that he can work on the sweeping scale that Havana aspires to. The blame lies primarily with the screenplay by Judith Rascoe and David Rayfiel, which is all sizzle and no steak.

Sometimes it pays off to be a security guard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As the Spirits of Havana band, a Canadian-Cuban collaboration, was doing a sound check Friday afternoon, Miguel Santos approached the Cuban conguero and timbale player and asked to jam. During the band's first set Friday night, Santos sat in on bongo during a descarga, and after the set, the former Orquesta Lucena member from North Philadelphia was radiant. Such is the power of Cuban music. Saxophonist Jane Bunnett, from Toronto, has devoted her energies to producing some of the most honest, intellectual Cuban-jazz fusion, and the now-infamous city of Guantanamo is where her sights are set now. On Friday, some of the most radically musical passages came when Bunnett was isolated, either in duo or during extended improvisations, with pianist Osmany Paredes, chiefly on "Lagrimas Negras" and "La Comparsa.

GUILLERMO Pernot may be Argentinean by birth, but his heart and palate belong to Cuba. It's not just that Pernot's wife, Lucia, is a native Cuban whose family escaped Fidel Castro's communist regime in 1959 when she was just 9 months old. The Caribbean island-nation is also home to cuisine that, as far as the 55-year-old chef-partner at Old City's Cuba Libre Restaurant & Rum Bar is concerned, is second-to-none. "It's a basic style of food," Pernot (pronounced per- NO )

I knew all about Robert Redford's new movie, Havana, before I walked into the theater. As a matter of fact, I could have told you the plot right from the moment I first heard a movie was being shot about the last days before the Castro revolution: Hard-bitten American goes to Havana, pursues decadence, finds violence, falls in love with beautiful radical, discovers his true self, revolution brings redemption for all, The End. I was right....

What do you get when you cross Rocky and Bullwinkle and Bram Stoker and The Untouchables and plop it all down in Cuba, circa 1933? You get confused. You also get Vampires in Havana, a screwy animated feature about bloodsucking monsters, bloodsucking mobsters and bloodcurdling Fascist bureaucrats - all of them in hot, hairy pursuit of a trumpet-playing naif by the name of Joseph Emmanuel, a.k.a. Pepito. Written and directed by Juan Padron, Vampires in Havana is a fast, freewheeling comedic cartoon about gangland Draculas and a mysterious potion called Vampisol that enables the dagger-toothed nightstalkers to bask in sunlight just like us normal folks.

"Who the Hell Is Juliette?" answers the question posed in its title, but raises another. What the heck is "Who the Hell Is Juliette?" Part documentary, part fiction, the movie fits no easy category. Mexican director Carlos Marcovich uses both forms to arrive at what he hopes is the truth about his subject, a Cuban teen-ager named Yuliet Ortega. Marcovich met Ortega in Havana, where he had traveled to film a music video. He hired her as an extra, and was captivated by her hard-luck story: abandoned as an infant by her father; her mother committed suicide soon after.

It's a wintry night in the new Old City. Frosty winds slap street denizens like ice cubes tossed at a frat party. Coats are tucked as tight as bedsheets. Tucked, that is, until the door of Cuba Libre is reached. Then it's time for heat to escape like steam from a radiator. Old City's newest bistro, Cuba Libre - owned and operated by Larry Cohen and Barry Gutin of Egypt and Shampoo fame - is like a thermos, holding in moist heat while giving off sensuous aromas and spicy flavors.

The sad, dark eyes of Elian Gonzalez, framed behind a chain link fence, look into the gathering crowd in Havana. He looks like a tiny prisoner, and to thousands of Cubans, that is exactly what he is. They call him "The Kidnapped Child. " In the streets of Havana, where many today pointedly wear T-shirts with the legend "Liberen a Elian" (Free Elian), the case of Elian Gonzalez has become a symbol of U.S. injustice towards Cuba. To be sure, the demonstrations demanding his return are carefully organized by the government.

After studying rare and exotic marine life in Cuban waters, a group of U.S. scientists captured the island's biggest fish. Fidel Castro boarded their boat in Havana on Friday night to learn about the monthlong expedition. "We've had a lot of surprises scientifically and culturally," environmental writer Bill Belleville said yesterday. "Fidel is vital for his age and very engaging. He wasn't just spouting rhetoric. He was genuinely interested in what we are doing. " Belleville is among 41 researchers and crew members conducting the first deep-water exploration near Cuba.

Rich and Dave Posmontier don't perform together much anymore. The Posmontier Brothers Quintet broke up a few years ago, but Rich apparently has trouble accepting that. "I wouldn't call the group dead," he said. "I hate to pronounce something dead before its time. " Whatever, the Posmontier Brothers Quintet has been on hold long enough to declare tonight's performance at Havana in New Hope a reunion. And Rich Posmontier clearly was excited about the happening during a conversation this week.

HAVANA - Clarinets, reedy and thin, played something I'd never heard before. The low whine hung like humidity up and down narrow Consulado Avenue in Old Havana. I cocked my ear and detected the music coming from somewhere upstairs, through windows of a decaying, Spanish colonial-looking apartment building within sight of the national opera house. Brightening with each step as I drew closer, the sound wove an unforgettable sonic tapestry somewhere between laughing klezmer and the noble shriek of bagpipes.

HAVANA - The nominee for U.S. Secretary of State, Sen. John Kerry, once held up millions of dollars in funding for secretive U.S. democracy-building programs in Cuba. Defense Secretary hopeful Chuck Hagel has called the U.S. embargo against the communist-run island "nonsensical" and anachronistic. Both men are now poised to occupy two of the most important positions in President Obama's cabinet, leading observers on both sides of the Florida Straits to say the time could be ripe for a reboot in relations between the longtime Cold War enemies - despite major obstacles still in the way. Kerry's confirmation hearing was held last Thursday, with Hagel's likely to begin next Thursday.

African leader to share power JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Opposition forces in the Central African Republic that took control of a large swath of the country in recent weeks have succeeded in forcing President Francois Bozize's government to share power, officials said Friday. In a deal averting a battle for control of Bangui, the capital, Bozize and the opposition agreed to a coalition government during peace talks in Libreville, the Gabon capital. The talks were brokered by the regional Economic Community of Central African States.

HAVANA - Cubans who were tuned in to the nightly soap opera on a recent Saturday received a burst of bad news, from the other side of the Caribbean. State TV cut to the presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez revealed that his cancer had returned. Facing his fourth related surgery in 18 months, he grimly named Vice President Nicolas Maduro as his possible successor. The news shocked not only Venezuelans but millions of Cubans who have come to depend on Chavez's largesse for everything from subsidized oil to cheap loans.

HAVANA - Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo, who went from rebel commander fighting alongside Fidel Castro to a foe launching commando raids against the island before settling inside Cuba as a moderate, pro-dialogue dissident, died early Friday. He was 77. Gutierrez-Menoyo died of a heart attack in a Havana hospital, his wife, Flor Ester Torres Sanabria, told the Associated Press. Gutierrez-Menoyo had lived permanently in Cuba since August 2003, after visiting the island during a family vacation and deciding to stay for good.

Cuba's announcement Tuesday that it no longer would require its citizens to apply for exit permits to travel abroad lifted a widely detested restriction on freedom of movement while maintaining Havana's absolute power to deny departures of top professionals for fear they will defect. Published in the Communist Party newspaper Granma, the policy change, which takes effect Jan. 14, opens up the world for the first time in a half-century to average Cubans - provided they have passports, the means to travel, and visas from the countries they want to visit.

HAVANA - Cuban authorities released noted blogger Yoani Sanchez more than a day after she was taken into custody near the eastern city of Bayamo, where she traveled for a Spanish man's trial over a car crash that killed another prominent dissident. Sanchez said via Twitter that authorities "deported" her and her husband back to their Havana home late Friday night and that she had been held for 30 hours. "We were released! Thanks to all those who raised their voices and their tweets so we were able to return home," she wrote.

ORCHESTRA TIX DEAL Individual tickets for Yannick Nézet-Séguin's inaugural season as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra go on sale at noon Monday. That day only, the orchestra will cover all box-office fees for tickets purchased in person at the Kimmel Center Box Office at 15th and Spruce. The first 150 people in line will get either a free parking pass or a pair of tickets to the "West Side Story" concert in October. Box office closes at 6 p.m. THE DEEP BLU-RAY SEA Leave it to director James Cameron to go all out on a Blu-ray package for "Titantic.

Sometimes I am a voyager in time. I do not need a hotel for this, or a bag that's full of mini-containers of mouthwash and shampoo. Memory is a landscape I can run to fairly easily — and since we are talking travel, I will admit it: I go and go. Recently, I climbed out of one of my 1960s daydreams, rubbed my eyes, and looked around. Let's see here, I thought. I am in a hotel that smells, just slightly, of cigars. Is that a radio over there? It is. A rotary phone is ringing just behind the desk, and someone's using a pencil — the type you grind to a point — to draw a line on my map. The top of this unfolded grid of streets says "Havana," so I know that phone and radio and pencil are real.

HAVANA - Cuban President Raul Castro said Thursday that his government is willing to mend fences with bitter Cold War foe the United States and sit down to discuss anything, as long as it is a conversation between equals. At the end of a Revolution Day ceremony marking the 59th anniversary of a failed uprising against a military barracks, Castro grabbed the microphone for apparently impromptu remarks. He echoed previous statements that no topic is off-limits, including U.S. concerns about democracy, freedom of the press and human rights on the island, as long as it is a conversation between equals.