British mercenary Sean Connery arrives in Havana on the eve of the Revolution of 1959, hired by the Batista regime to defeat it. How he assesses the Batista regime is done largely by facial cues to his military guide, but we are (somehow) given to believe he sees the Batista regime is about to collapse. He finds a former teenage lover of his there (Brooke Adams)who is now married to the son of cigar-factory wealth (Chris Sarandon) Does she escape the revolution? Do we really want her to? I liked its brightly-lit brittle realist Havana hotel scenes, but I liked them in HAVANA with Robert Redford even more. In the simplest old-Hollywood terms, winners are winners, losers, losers. Castro obviously wins. You don't have a major star like Connery walk away from the people we ourselves are supposed to sympathize with, but do we really expect him to join the Revolution? Has Lester ever been interviewed about this film anomaly? I wonder where Connery stood/stands on the Cuban Revolution, & Cuba now, likewise Redford.

There is an error in the movie. Someone in The Prop Department placed a 1961 Chrysler New Yorker 4-Dr. Hardtop in what supposed to be December, 1958 Havana. However the actor who played Batista didn't look like him & the scene where Batista left was a good scene. So in all it was a good movie. Also Castro's Rebels were portrayed as Saints and there were other things that were good like an ambush at dinner scene & also Julio trying to be a hero and keeps killing the wrong people but in the end gets the guy who was messing with his sister. Sean Connery did a good job playing a guy who wondering if he's fighting for the wrong team. However The 1961 Chrysler shown in the movie was an error & shouldn't have been in the movie that is supposed to be Havana, December, 1958 to January, 1959. So that's it for now.

This film is laughably bad. In the scene in the restaurant Sean Connery and Brooke Adams are clearly at a loss for words. This scene is obviously unscripted and they are making up the dialog and not doing very well either! The entire picture falls apart in the last fifteen minutes with silly and uncoordinated action being filmed just to fill up the running time. I am sure that the actors (and this picture has a good cast) would like to forget that this flick was in their filmography. The dialog is silly, the action is senseless, the relationships unbelievable. The director has a lot to answer for. A waste of good film.

This drama/love story could have been excellent. Played out against the last months of the corrupt and US/UK-supported Batista regime, the collapse of the old society as Castro's fidelistas begin to take over is shown compellingly. The point is well made that a revolution will only succeed if the people are behind it which, in this instance, they clearly were.It's a shame that the movie couldn't have been filmed in Cuba, as of course all the famous landmarks of Havana are missing, but its real problems are threefold.Firstly the storyline is confusing, complicated and unconvincing, with none of the characters being allowed to hold one's attention.Secondly, the acting is poor. Even Sean Connery - who is normally excellent - seems to have had his mind on other things the whole time.And thirdly, for some inexplicable reason, the chanting of 'Fidel' as Castro enters Havana in triumph morphs into a Nazi crowd chanting 'Sieg Heil'. Whatever was this trying to say? When Castro actually came into power, one of the first things he did was to open all the 'whites-only' clubs to black people, and to make it clear in an early speech that there was no such thing as a superior race. To liken Castro to Hitler is a travesty of the facts.So, ultimately a flawed film. Watch it not for the story or the 'message' but for what is going on in the background.