Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Woman suing Netflix over film
South Florida publicist claims defamation
It’s a legal conflict that centers on a love affair.
In the movie, Ana Maria Martinez is played by the bewitching Ana De Armas, dancing through nightclubs in backless dresses and marrying a handsome Cuban defector with a dark secret at a society wedding.
But in real life, Martinez is suing Netflix for defamation in South Florida federal court over her portrayal in the 2019 film “Wasp Network.”
The film, which dramatizes efforts by the Castro regime during the 1990s to infiltrate and spy on Cuban exile political groups in Miami, says it is “based on true events.”
But in her lawsuit, Martinez and her attorneys call the spy thriller’s version of the near past “false and defamatory.”
Juan Pablo Roque, who is portrayed in the film by the Brazilian actor Wagner Maura, is Martinez’s ex-husband and one of the Netflix
drama’s main protagonists.
In her lawsuit, she says he is really a “Machiavellian” villain who sexually assaulted her at the direction of the Cuban government during their sham marriage, which she says was a cover for his espionage activities.
Martinez also says her film portrayal makes her look “sexually immoral” and depicts her as leading “a lavish lifestyle paid for by drug money and terrorist activities.”
A spokesman for Netflix declined to comment for this article. Lawyers for the streaming service have until Jan. 11 to file a response to Martinez’s suit.
Citing the pending litigation, Martinez and her attorneys declined to comment.
Legal experts caution that defamation lawsuits like the one brought by Martinez have a high bar to clear. In order to win, she will have to prove that the movie’s directors and producers maliciously and intentionally disregarded the facts.
But historians say that, regardless of the suit’s merits, it stands out as an attempt to re-litigate a key moment in the history of Cuban exiles in South Florida.
The history, real and imagined, of Roque and Martinez
Woven into the on-screen spy intrigue of “Wasp Network” is the love story between Martinez and Roque.
In the ’ 90s, Martinez, now a publicist, was a single mother of two.
In both the film and in real life, Roque was a fighter pilot who “defected” from Cuba in 1992, swimming across Guantanamo Bay to surrender to American guards at the Caribbean base.
Once in Miami, he became active in Cuban exile politics, while secretly working with a group of spies who had infiltrated Cuban exile groups, federal court records say.
In the film, Roque uses the proceeds from drug smuggling to live a swanky lifestyle with Martinez, played by De Armas, at his side.
In real life, Roque and Martinez married in 1995. But the marriage — which she believed to be real — was for him just part of his cover as a spy, she says in the lawsuit.
“If you look up the definition of sociopath, it describes him well,” she told the Miami Herald in 2012.
One exile group, called Brothers to the Rescue, welcomed Roque and put his piloting skills to use patrolling the Florida Straits with civilian aircraft. The organization’s mission was to help guide Cuban rafters safely to the United States.
In 1996, just days before Cuban jets blew up two Brothers to the Rescue airplanes in international airspace over the Florida Straits, Roque disappeared.
Four Brothers to the Rescue pilots died in the incident. Roque returned to Cuba as a hero, though his exact involvement in the downing of the planes remains unclear.
According to the lawsuit, Martinez discovered that Roque was a spy only after seeing his triumphant homecoming to authoritarian Cuba broadcast on television three days after his disappearance.
Her husband, she realized, hadn’t been an anti-communist freedom fighter. Instead, he’d been working for the Cuban state all along. The revelation left her “emotionally destroyed and psychologically devastated,” the lawsuit says.
“Boy, it was fraught in the 90s,” said Paul George, resident historian at the HistoryMiami Museum. “And that in itself is amazing, Castro had been in power for 40 years and there were still those great passions.”
George says he remembers how the Cuban exile community commemorated the downed pilots with memorials and annual gatherings.
“I remember the outcry in the community to the downing of those pilots. It took over the news,” he said.
In 1999, a federal grand jury in South Florida indicted Roque for spying. The indictment was part of a larger case brought against five other Cuban spies who were captured in the United States and eventually convicted.
Known as The Cuban Five, the espionage prosecutions eventually made their way in front of the Supreme Court before being ultimately upheld.
When the Miami Herald interviewed Roque in Cuba in 2012, he had fallen on hard times and was in the process of selling his house and some of his belongings to try to raise cash.
He remains a fugitive in the eyes of U.S. judicial authorities.
The difficulty of litigating history
In the film, the spies are shown in a favorable light. In Martinez’s lawsuit, they are villains.
And that difference in perspective is just fine, said Nova Southeastern University law professor Robert Jarvis.
“The First Amendment gives reporters and screenwriters and other creative sorts lots and lots of protection,” Jarvis said.
And anyway, even if the film claims to be based on true events, Jarvis points out, the fact that Martinez’s role in the actual spy drama of the 1990s was highly publicized in the news media makes things difficult for her.
“The burden of proof is on her, and she has to prove the defendants acted with actual malice. That’s very difficult to show.” Difficult, but not impossible.
If the lawsuit advances far enough to the point where the people who made the film have to turn over their emails and text messages, Jarvis points out that evidence of malicious intent — if there was any — may surface, paving the way for a jury trial and a possible payout.
“It’s very clear that at some point you can go over the line and the First Amendment would not protect you,” Jarvis said. “What is not clear is where that line is. It’s decided on a case-by-case basis.”
But George, the historian, notes that the lawsuit harkens back to a period of time when Miami’s Cuban exile community was much more politically active and engaged in a lot more anti-Castro activity.
“What we’ve seen is a diminution of activism here, and it goes back to the fact that we are two to three generations removed from the revolution,” George said. “Even though Miami is a case study in activism by a community that considered themselves exiles rather than immigrants.”