AllMovie

The U.S. embargo against travel to and from Cuba took effect in June 2004, as a right-wing political concession just prior to the presidential election. Those who supported and codified this act failed to foresee its devastating effects on individual citizens. From brothers and sisters on opposite sides of the Gulf of Mexico to Cuban parents separated from their ailing children, stories abound of familial devastation thanks to a travel restriction that imposes so directly and unfairly on the life and liberty of American citizens. In his documentary Those I Left Behind, filmmaker Lisandro Perez-Rey probes four such stories of interpersonal calamity: a wife and mother in Miami, helplessly estranged from her husband; married Cuban-American immigrants worried sick about their adult son's declining health and their inability to get money to him; a woman caring for her niece, and her devastation over the inability to bring her sister (and the girl's mother) over from the island; and an Iraq war vet who changes political camps when the Bush administration's restrictions kick in. Through it all, Perez-Rey sheds light on the human fallout from the U.S. government's thoughtless and ham-handed actions.