“Some of it, of course, is true, just as a caricature holds some truth. But as with a caricature, the truth can be lost in the exaggeration.” The city should be seen as a successful example of modern America, not a crucible of molten racial tension, it says.Americans were shocked when the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Alex Penelas, said that local police would not help take Elian away. The parallel was drawn by many people between his defiance and the local officials in the 1960s who said they would not help to desegregate schools.That was a message which shocked many in America’s black community, which has often found itself in conflict with the Cuban-Americans. “When riots erupted in Miami’s black communities several times in the 1970s and 1980s, allegations by blacks of mistreatment by Cubans were usually raised as underlying factors,” wrote the Hispanic journalist Juan Gonzalez in his book Harvest of Empire.Many Floridians were shocked too: that is not the city they see. The Herald’s letters pages have been riven by dissenting arguments over the Elian saga; most of those advocating that the boy remain in America have Hispanic names, while the other side has mostly Anglo names.

The Herald has cut back the number of letters in the past few days.There is a sense of frustration and embarrassment in the city and people are not keen to talk about it. “I just can’t believe this is still going on,” said a woman in a record shop in Miami Beach, who preferred not to be named “This is just crazy They should let the boy go. Now.”Most of America thinks the same, according to opinion polls. All of the polls show that a majority believe Elian belongs with his father in Cuba, and that belief does not vary significantly by party political affiliation.

But in some ways, it is precisely that sense of isolation – of being misunderstood, fighting for justice on their own – which drives the crowd in Little Havana. Like many such communities, the sense of exile forges their conviction.. Siddiqullah Barmak has a sense of humour. When I say that President Bill Clinton claims democracy is about dialogue, he roars with laughter. When I recall the embarrassment of a woman-belittling sheikh who admits that some women are “exceptions to the rule”, he shakes helplessly

Siddiqullah Barmak has a sense of humour.

When I say that President Bill Clinton claims democracy is about dialogue, he roars with laughter. When I recall the embarrassment of a woman-belittling sheikh who admits that some women are “exceptions to the rule”, he shakes helplessly.
Surprising, when you listen to Mr Barmak’s story. A fiercely intelligent, independent man, he should be one of the finest film-makers in Afghanistan. But he lives in a slum with an open sewer outside his front door in a land that is not his, paying the rent by acting the part of a foolish old man in a popular Pashtu-language BBC soap opera.His two children, Frohar and Bozourgmehr, are noisy – their shrieks are deafening in his tiny front room – but Mr Barmak’s story is a cultural tragedy, the epic of a man whose expanding vision collided with the walls of his country’s history. It is the story of Afghanistan, told by the son of a former police officer who from his earliest days dreamt of being not a general or a mujahedin fighter or a rich farmer, but – of all things – a filmdirector.”When I was a child, there were three cinemas that showed Western films – the rest showed Indian movies – and so I watched Brando, Belmondo, lots of Italian comedies, all imported from Iran with Persian subtitles,” he says.

“At home, I used empty boxes to create movie theatres, beaming light through a hole in the box and using damaged 35mm film which I’d bought at a store in the market to show images on the wall of the box.”At the beginning of the Communist revolution in Afghanistan, there was a brief cultural freedom and Mr Barmak, at 17, found himself helping to make The Green Field, a clunker of a propaganda movie funded by the World Food Programme in which a destitute farmer had no money to marry his sweetheart – until, of course, an educated scientist introduced profitable agricultural reforms. In 1980, Mr Barmak was directing his first film on location in Afghanistan when his cameraman accidentally filmed a column of trucks driving towards the crew. They were Soviet invasion troops.”They arrested us because they thought we were mujahedin fighters or foreigners and I wasn’t able to explain for a while that we were merely making a feature film,” he says. “Until that day, I never reflected on the Russian occupation. But from that moment onwards, I felt the presence of a stranger who was watching me and following me.”Mr Barmak took his revenge when he was sent to the All Soviet Cinema Institute in Moscow, a Russian film school for aspiring directors. His first film there, shot in Moscow’s old quarter by an Armenian cameraman, was called The Wall and showed the efforts of a group of children to cover a black wall with white paint against the shadow of Russian army boots.