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♪National Anthem of Cuba
Good afternoon.
Today, the United States of America
is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.
The most significant changes
in our policy in more than 50 years,
we'll begin
to normalize relations between our two countries.
My name is Joseph Juhn,
Korean American working and living in New York.
Shortly after President Obama
announced a move to normalize relations with Cuba
I traveled there.
So, I'm ready to head out.
With a GoPro I had just purchased for the trip
I was looking for an adventure
in this time-frozen socialist island.
But a different kind of adventure awaited me.
Your family stay here before?
No, just by myself.
The taxi driver who came to pick me up from the hostel
wasn't, well, a typical Cuban.
Wow
so, we just found out that our host,
is actually Korean Cuban, third generation
and she doesn't speak Korean, but she's fully Korean.
It's amazing. Korean diaspora!
The first Cuban I met in Cuba,
was a Korean descendant.
I couldn't believe it.
As a Korean American,
I've always been interested in the notion of Korean diaspora.
How Koreans in different parts of the world
form their own sense of identity away from the homeland.
But no,
I had not imagined I would meet a Korean Cuban like this.
This is the home of a third generation Cuban family.
This house is decked out with everything that's Korea.
Wow, unbelievable!
She's all excited to share with me the living history.
Only us, no more Koreans.
We go to the school with Cubans,
sometimes my father speaks in Korean
and we answer in Spanish.
So, her husband won nine medals.
He worked very hard. High job in Cuba.
Is this your name? Lim Eun Jo?
My husband's.
Lim Eun Jo.
In Spanish, Jeronimo Lim.
Jeronimo Lim.
My wedding.
Your wedding, oh wow!
It's beautiful.
I'm so incredibly blessed to be experiencing this.
I didn't deserve this.
Little by little,
I was cast a magical spell on this mysterious man,
Jeronimo.
A Korean surrounded by his Cuban comrades
of the communist party.
But later wearing a traditional Korean hanbok
and playing Korean drums.
These two contradictory images evoked a sense
of wonder and awe.
A Korean Cuban revolutionary, how could this be?
This is history.
Yeah, this is history.
This is history.
He worked
hard, hard
for the Koreans.
Excuse me my English.
I try to
explain... my way.
No, your English is perfect, it's flawless.
I spent the rest of my time in Cuba
just like any other tourists.
Indulging in the beach,
jazz,
cigar and rum,
and enjoying the year-end festivities.
Happy New Year!
But only one image stuck with me for long after the trip.
And without having the slightest idea
of what I was about to experience,
I even made a proclamation there.
And I came back,
this time with my younger brother
and close friends
working in the media and film industries.
Cristina!
I am happy to see you again!
I am happy to see you too.
Patricia and Nelson welcomed our efforts
to make a film about their father,
and dedicated to drive us all around Cuba
so we can trace the footsteps of Jeronimo.
Since time in memorial
we are geopolitically condemned
surrounded by very greedy three powers.
First, China.
Then, Russia.
Then, finally, Japan,
and they took over.
That is the Korean history.
This Cuba story starts
with Hawaii.
Hawaii
wasn't exactly land of paradise
during the turn of the century.
It was dominated and controlled by
sugarcane plantation owners
in search of cheap labor.
Listen, Korean immigration story is
not immigration.
I call more aptly
it's history of surrogate slaves.
Very few Koreans knew
exactly where Mexico or America was
and when you read
the advertisement in the Hwangsung shinmun
it sounds like it's part of the United States.
Just wait a second, here's an immigration company,
advertising for Mexico, but
we have no diplomatic relations
and Mexico is a hellhole in 1905.
So if you go to Mexico
and you sign a contract for four years,
You're trapped. You're almost like a prisoner.
And if you look at the haciendas,
as they were called,
they had armed guards on horseback
circling the haciendas
to keep people from escaping.
In Korean, "nunmuree mani itseupnida", meaning,
people were crying.
They work as slaves,
literally, all their lives.
You understand? They are slaves!
In the 1920s, Cuba was enjoying a flourishing economy,
because of the production of sugar
and the price of sugar in the international market.
The Cuba story
is the ultimate demonstration
that Koreans never quit
even in defeat or death!
That spirit comes from Jeronimo.
Yeah, I was a close brother with him
because more or less same age
we go to a lot of places together
we play,
we even had a baseball team, him and I.
He was a great brother.
He was an excellent brother.
Cared for all of us,
guided us in a certain way being the oldest
so we just kind of followed him.
Oh, yes !
because he was very good looking.
Very attractive,
very intelligent
and like most of us,
he could talk.
Matanzas, the Athens of Cuba
is where Jeronimo cultivated his love for art,
poetry,
and also a fighting spirit.
Eduardo Chibás was a highly respected
individual in Cuba.
Many people thought that he could be elected President.
Jeronimo must have been quite influential
to be able to sit down with Eduardo Chibás.
Despite poor living conditions,
Jeronimo's father, Lim Cheon Taek,
collected funds from other Korean Cubans,
which was one spoon of rice per day,
to support Korea's independence fight against Japan.
Jeronimo's mother, Gudelia, also founded
the Korean Women's independence group in Cuba.
Together, they inspired their children
to be proud of who they are, and where they come from.
A blast of atomic energy, which roared
the final death knoll for all Japanese militarists.
Korea, the people who had been under the Japanese lash
for nearly forty years,
the Hermit Kingdom was free again.
After Korea was liberated,
Koreans in Cuba no longer had an imminent, collective mission
that unified them.
Now, their survival in Cuba
preceded the matters of the homeland.
Restored to Koreans were the basic freedoms
long denied them by the Japs.
For Jeronimo,
his father's homeland may have been too far and abstract.
A different mission awaited him in his homeland, Cuba.
Police patrol excited cars
in Havana.
Behind the scenes strong man General Batista
had overthrown the constitutional regime.
The present coup was accomplished in only 77 minutes.
Batista staged a revolt.
Cuba's political freedom has ended.
As Batista cancels the June 1st elections.
As his soldiers patrol the streets
to establish what he calls,
a disciplined democracy.
Cuba's political freedom has ended.
A highly trained and well-equipped North Korean Army
swarmed across the 38th parallel to attack
unprepared South Korean defenders.
Third generations slaves, second generation slaves,
when they heard the Korean war, you know what they said?
Screw Koreans!
Caught offguard, they were all but overwhelmed.
They held out their dream
that Korea would be whole and one
after the liberation.
Fulgencia Batista's government
imprisoned many people,
killed many people.
So the Cuban people were tired,
and expected change!
And Fidel Castro
he was a little more on the radical,
we need to take the arms, like a revolution!
There is not communism, or marxism.
Our political philosophy is
representative democracy
and social justice.
While Fidel Castro was in the mountains,
in the Sierra Maestra,
in the city there was a clandestine group,
probably Jeronimo was part of that.
Mostly young men and women,
because Jeronimo was quite young at the time.
arm the rebels
provide them with food,
very important, communicating to the public, to the Cuban people,
trying to gain their support.
I don't think without the clandestine movement,
the early days of the revolution would have survived.
Jeronimo, he felt he was a Cuban.
A real Cuban.
All Lim Cheon Taek's children,
they were poor, so they lost
the hope of returning to Korea.
They realized that they had to live in Cuba
maybe for a long time or maybe forever.
When the Cuban revolution was successful in 1959
there were new opportunities for everyone
and they wanted to be part of this revolutionary moment
and this change
and they were integrated very soon.
So Jeronimo became fully Cuban,
Korean roots were lost.
I suspect that Jeronimo's sense of Korean identity
was replaced by another ideology following the revolution.
Luckily, we found one lady in Korea who confirmed this belief.
She was a member of Cheondogyo,
a Korean religion,
which Jeronimo's father, Lim Cheon Taek,
practiced for some time all the way in Cuba.
She claimed to have exchanged letters with him
shortly after the Revolution.
The unfortunate people of Cuba
will discover that they have been betrayed.
From the early days, Cuban intelligence
I dare to say, was one of the top in the world.
The Americans,
the Soviets,
the Israelis,
and then up are the Cubans.
Barbarroja.
Now, why he was called Barbarroja?
Because he was red.
His hair, his beard, and,
very unlike Cuban.
Piñeiro was a fierce fighter.
Piñeiro,
from the early days, played a very powerful role
in the intelligence community.
When I looked at your documents
and when I looked at his picture
and very strong hug from Barbarroja Piñeiro
let me to think about whether Jeronimo
had played a role in the intelligence community
by taking advantage
that he was Korean Cuban.
He said that he was recruited
to be a spy.
He said he went into the hotel
and he's being spied on all the time
when he was in North Korea.
One time he wanted to go outside
the city to venture for himself and see what's going on,
he had to do some kind of trick,
so he finally said he got away. And he went by himself one time.
But he constantly had a shadow when he was in North Korea.
If you seek prosperity
Mr. Gorbachov,
tear down this wall!
Here they shout, "Die Mauer muB weg! The wall must go!"
All through today thousands and thousands of West Germans
have come to the wall to see for themselves.
How do you measure such an astonishing moment in history?
The people of Cuba are living in a crisis,
a "Special Period".
Since the collapse of the Eastern and Soviet nations,
the people here have been living through the crisis
with shortages of food,
medicine, clothing, oil.
United States imposed trade sanctions against Cuba
back in 1960.
North Korea is again facing a failed harvest
and long withered malnutrition and starvation.
In North Korea, the children are always the first to starve.
Jeronimo was at the center
of the rise and fall of the Revolution
that promised equality and prosperity to members of
all minority groups,
including Korean Cubans.
"It is the duty of a right thinking man
to seek meaning in life"
Jeronimo once wrote to his children.
Is it possible that Jeronimo sought for a different meaning
in life by this point?
While these thoughts were running through my head,
one evening in Cuba,
we were stopped by a couple of solicitors from one restaurant.
Where are you from?
We're from New York.
My grandpa, my grandpa is Korean.
Can we interview you?
What began as trying to take us into a restaurant,
one guy claimed that he is part Korean
and that his grandfather lived just around the corner.
I wonder what Jeronimo
might have felt during his stay in Korea.
It's the homeland where his father left
exactly 90 years ago.
It's the homeland his father so desired to see liberated
from Japan.
Now,
Jeronimo was there
celebrating the 50 year anniversary of its independence.
For the first time in his life,
Jeronimo may have felt he belonged,
completely,
without having to prove himself.
Perhaps it was the moment
he found his another self.
1903,
he was born in Gwangju, Gyeonggi.
1985,
passed away in Cuba.
What a story.
After meeting Jeronimo's grandson, Nelsito,
I became more curious about the future generation
of Korean diaspora in Cuba.
I hoped to seek wisdom
from those who have already experienced diaspora
for thousands of years.
Bring peace to all of us and all of the people of Israel.
So why don't we start with the idea of diaspora?
So the heart of diaspora is pain.
The idea that you can't live in your ancestral homeland,
that you can't be where you want to be
and perhaps you can't practice a religion
or culture in the way that you otherwise would.
But what results from the pain is innovation.
The idea that you can change some of the traditions
and adapt them
and modernize them
and make them relevant wherever you are.
Perhaps Jeronimo also knew
that innovation was the only way
to preserve his roots and identity.
In Cardenas,
a neighboring city to Matanzas,
I witnessed innovation.
I actually see as the heroes
the people who live in the diaspora.
They are the ones who have to work hard to
preserve the tradition.
And it seems that many Koreans living in Cuba
are on a sacred journey to find themselves.
My one last remaining goal was this,
to find out what Jeronimo did in his final years
to turn the pain of diaspora
into innovation.
To close the loop, we hit the road for the final time.
We went to Manati.
It's a port city where Koreans first arrived in 1921.
Jeronimo built a monument there in 2001
to pay tribute to his ancestors
and to transmit a message of resilience and hope
for future generations.
When I began this project three years ago
I was simply mesmerized by Jeronimo's role
in the Cuban revolution
and his acquaintance with Che Guevara.
Never did I imagine
I would discover a man
whose noble pursuit of meaning in life
would result in rekindling
the humble origin
of Korean diaspora in Cuba.
We had one last stop before reaching the monument.
To meet with Esminda,
one of the few Korean descendants who remained
in Manati.
But here our van broke down
and we had to wait for a local truck
to pick us up.
We did not expect this type of truck.
But later, we were told that
this was the kind of truck that Jeronimo took
to get to the monument by himself.
Lastly, Nelsito,
could you read the letter from your grandfather?
Yeah.