In 1963, as the world learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro took an extended stay in Cuba with Jean Daniel, French journalist at L’Express. Two weeks before, Jean Daniel had secretly been received by the American president who had entrusted him with a message of conciliation to be passed on to Fidel Castro. The journalist became the privileged confidant of the distraught statesman, and witness to his precious words: for Castro, the death of the American president signalled “the end of his peace mission”. The reporter’s publications in the American press would then shake up public opinion and introduce the idea that peace between Cuba and the United States would have been possible if Kennedy’s assassination had been averted.

Castro saw in Kennedy the only president who believed in coexistence between socialists and capitalists. Yet, we know of the complex relationship the revolutionary had with the United States, crystallised in Cuba by the nationalisation of its commercial interests, which triggered the American embargo and invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the first American military defeat. This documentary aims to establish the links between the past and present through images of Cuba frozen in its eternal embargo, and look back at Cuban-American history from 1963 to the present day, through the vision of a journalist who would go on to become a renowned reporter. In Trump’s America, are there voices that follow Jean Daniel’s path in the direction of this much-awaited reconciliation?