Films and Commentary from Saul Landau

“This is the culture that kids grow up on,” Landau told Press TV’s U.S. Desk on Saturday when asked where the culture of violence in the United States comes from.

"What did Cuba do to us?," Landau asks. "Well, the answer, I think, is that they were disobedient, in our hemisphere. And they did not ask permission to take away property. They took it away. They nationalized property. And the United States ... has never forgiven them."

The writer Alice Walker, actor Danny Glover and filmmaker Saul Landau, among other U.S. personalities joined the Cuban intellectual Miguel Barnet and a group of scholars of his country, who traveled to San Francisco to participate in the 30th Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), in the claim for the return of The Five to their homeland.

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The filmmaker Landau defended the innocence of the Cuban Five and called for their release and to strengthen efforts to achieve their final return to Cuba.

"Try telling a Cuban: 'You should pay higher rent, or pay for your own healthcare,'" said Saul Landau, a professor and filmmaker. "Cubans bitch and moan, like citizens everywhere, but there is no serious opposition to the current government," he told Al Jazeera. "They do not face a legitimacy crisis at home."

"They (the Mayan Indians) have a lot to teach us. My experience down there filming was a very humbling experience for me," Landau said. "There is no electricity. You are totally deprived of your biological comforts."

Speaking to Press TV's U.S. Desk on Sunday, Landau said, "President Obama has made very minor cuts in military budget but nothing that basically alters the fundamental position of the United States abroad."

Landau: "Well I think it started really in the early 1970's when wages began to freeze and then actually real wages went down and in order to keep Americans; everybody uses the word middle class, now people forgot about working people. 

Anyway, whatever we call them, the people who do most of the work in this country had their wages begin to decline 38 years ago and to make up for that so that they can continue consuming, there was an expansion of credit. This came not just in availability of credit cards but in the inflation of home values."

Landau: I think what it demonstrated here in Oakland is that majority of the population clearly support the occupiers. And they have rallied around them in one form and another to force the mayor and the city council and even the media, to begin to react in a more rational and reasonable way, now what the police do and what some of the provocateur do is a different stories.

The fact is if one break down this whole idea of occupation, well people are occupying cities across the US and indeed across the world, because they cannot go to their regular occupations, their jobs have been eroded, vanished, lost, gone, they are gone somewhere else, or just disappeared.

Occupy? They can't even occupy their own homes, because they are foreclosed or evicted, after they lost their jobs and could not pay their rents, so they are occupying. What they really saying is that the government the political system and economic system are illegitimate.

They no longer can serve the cause and the purpose that they have been set up for. And this has resonated around the world. They are no channels through which to mediate the grievances of millions and millions of people who are homeless, who are jobless, who are at bay, who have all kinds of qualification that should give them good jobs, but cannot get them.

So something is fundamentally wrong and this is what this movement is talking about, and I think it is done so in a very dramatic way. And it has mobilized discontent as we have not seen since the 1960s.