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A new lawsuit for “defamation” was filed in Miami against Netflix for the film Wasp Network, this time by José Basulto, founder of the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue, who accuses the entertainment content platform of portraying them as “terrorists and criminals.”
The lawsuit, filed last week in a Miami court by Basulto and Brothers to the Rescue, maintains that the film released on Netflix, in June 2020, and which tells of the infiltration of Castro spies among exile groups in Miami, was not based on a “true story”, because it is riddled with “blatant lies” and paints the members of this organization as “terrorists who participated in criminal attacks” and “drug trafficking.”
Not only is it a “false representation that has no basis in fact,” but this thriller based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, by Fernando Moráis, wears a romantic aura and “glorifies the criminal activity carried out by the Wasp Network spies on U.S. soil, the complaint states.
According to the legal documents to which EFE had access, the film, starring Spanish Penélope Cruz and Venezuelan Edgar Ramírez, is “an evident attempt to rewrite and whiten the history” of the Wasp Network “in favor of the Cuban communist regime.”
The five Cuban spies who made up the Wasp Network, dismantled on September 12, 1998, with the arrest of all its members, provided intelligence information that “allowed the Cuban government to commit extrajudicial executions,” the lawsuit states.
Murders that include the death of four pilots from the Brothers to the Rescue organization, who took off on a humanitarian mission in February 1996, to rescue and assist rafters at sea bound for the United States that were shot down “in international waters” by Cuban military planes.
In addition, the 61-page document notes that the film “falsely portrays Cuban exile organizations as terrorists, those who were expelled from their country of origin due to the atrocities committed by the Cuban communist regime.”
The joint lawsuit was also filed against Olivier Assayas, French director of the film, and the production companies: Orange Studios, Nostromo Pictures, US One Comercio e Servicios de Criacao e Producao de Obras Com Direitos Autorais, CG Cinema, Rodrigo, Charles Teixeira, Charles Gillibert and Lourenco Santana.
The document asks the court for “compensation for damages” of all kinds suffered by the plaintiffs.
The first lawsuit against Netflix was filed in October 2020 by Cuban exile Ana Margarita Martinez, whose reputation, she said, was “damaged” in the film for “falsely” portraying her in a character with a “luxurious lifestyle paid with money from the drug and terrorist activities.”
