Tears well up in his eyes, his voice chokes and he stops talking until he composes himself.

Emir Lopez is 40 years old, an aspiring filmmaker who recently finished “Cigar Song,” a script loosely based upon his eventful life.

Almost 30 years have passed since he was taken from his native Cuba and transplanted to Las Vegas.

“I was 10 years old,” he recalls. “I remember walking on the beach. There was an amusement park, Lenin Park, like Disneyland.

“I was with my mother.”

She said he was going to be joining his father that night.

It was the start of an adventure seared into his memory.

His mother, father and 5-year-old sister were with him.

It was April 5, 1980 – more than 10,000 people sought refuge from Fidel Castro at the Peruvian Embassy.

When President Jimmy Carter persuaded Castro to allow them to come to the United States he emptied prisons and jails, rounded up prostitutes and criminals and other undesirables and sent them along with law abiding citizens who wanted to leave their homeland for a better life.

Food and water were scarce. There wasn’t adequate room for the refugees at the embassy, where thousands stood shoulder to shoulder.

Castro organized protests – sending thousands of loyal Cubans to the embassy, where they cursed the refugees and threw rocks and bottles over the fence, bloodying many of their countrymen.

“I remember waking up the next morning and it looked like the army had taken machine guns and mowed everyone down, but everyone was just crowded on the ground and on floors sleeping,” says Lopez. “I remember the smell of pee and puke and hearing the sobbing and crying and feeling the early mist of morning.

“We stayed there for 45 days.”

A boat took them to Miami.

“It was full of all kinds of people – good people, rapists, killers, but there wasn’t any trouble,” Lopez says.

The shrimp boat took them to Miami, then the Lopez family went to Pennsylvania for processing before being sent to Las Vegas where his father had a sister who moved here in 1968.

His mother became a maid and his father became a kitchen worker until he started a jewelry store in 1983.

Lopez eventually attended UNLV and studied economics initially but got a degree in communications, intending to become a filmmaker.

Hollywood disillusioned him. He didn’t care for all of the sex and violence in films, preferring the type of industry that thrived in the early days, the “Golden Age” when Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis ruled.

“I was told I didn’t have to worry about being stabbed in the back in Hollywood,” Lopez says. “They stab you in the front.”

He returned to Vegas and for 13 years ran a successful mortgage company, until the economy soured and he lost his business and home.

The family was forced to downsize.

Today he drives a limousine.

“We had to start from scratch, just like when I came from Cuba,” he says.

His second wife, Ofelia, was a realtor. Together they have a son, Branden, 10. And she helped raise his three sons from a previous marriage, Emir, 19, Ryan 17 and Christian, 13.

“I used to work day and night for my mortgage company,” Lopez says. “Now that we don’t have anything, I feel so at peace.”

Today his energy goes to getting his film, “Cigar Song,” on the big screen.

A trip to Cuba four years ago to visit his ailing grandmother inspired the story.

“She had been ill,” he says. “I was there for two weeks.”

During the stay he saw the hopelessness on the faces of the Cubans.

“There is no life in their eyes,” he says.

The fond memories of his youth turned into the harsh reality of adulthood.

Nothing had changed since he was there 30 years ago – the same buildings and streets.

“There’s a lot of history there, a lot of ghosts,” he says. “Castro hasn’t added anything. He has sucked the place dry.

“When I was a little kid I didn’t see with political eyes. When I went back I saw so much pain.”

People are told what to do, what to think. The black market thrives.

Once, Lopez says, he was in favor of the embargo against the island nation but now he feels it is only hurting millions of people.

“I felt their pain,” he says. “They don’t have a life.”

People have nothing and don’t seem to want anything. They have no worries, but where their next meal is coming from.

Nobody owns cars. People walk everywhere.

Voodoo thrives.

“I saw a black lady crawling on bloody knees and said ‘Is anyone going to help her,’ and I was told, ‘No, she made a promise to St. Lazarus to crawl from here to wherever so that her ill son would be healed – they believe in that more than traditional medicine.”

As soon as Lopez down on the plane to return home he began writing his script. He worked on it for a year.

“Cigar Song” is about man named Jamie Colon, a black Cuban who travels with a Cuban baseball team.

During one tour out of the country the team defects and Colon joins them.

He came from a family of cigar makers and when he settled in Miami started a cigar star which turned into a chain, Ijaba Cigars. He became successful very quickly, which was his downfall. He turned to drugs and lost his wealth and ended up in the streets.

There is a feel-good ending that is reminiscent of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Lopez folds the history of Cuba into the story, the rich, multi-cultural heritage, the voodoo and Catholicism.

Lopez says the film is for those who live in America, not only immigrants.

“I want to show my appreciation to America,” he says. “And I want Americans to know how grateful they should be for living here – many American people don’t appreciate that. They take it for granted. I want every American to know what it’s like to not have what we have.”

Many producers and investors have expressed keen interest in the script, but so far nothing is firm.

“We had some investors lined up, but then the economy forced them to withdraw their support,” Lopez says. “Everything just died. Many of them were losing their homes, their businesses, their families.”

It has been a long road, many ups and downs, many dead ends – but that’s the nature of the business and Lopez is not discouraged.

He feels he has a solid producer on board, and some investors.

The film has a modest budget line, about $7 million.

“There’s no nudity, it’s a very clean film,” he says.

Lopez’ would like to film some of the movie in Cuba.

A Canadian film crew is willing to shoot some scenes in Hava for me, but it wouldn’t be same,” Lopez says. “My vision is to take the whole crew – actors and everyone – and land at the Havana airport and do this thing.”

While pursuing producers and investors, Lopez has written novel based on the script.

“I’m not in a big hurry to make the movie right now,” he says. “I want to push the book.”

Lopez says he’s finished with the mortgage business. His all-consuming passion is films.

“I’m working on putting together a convention here in Las Vegas – not a film festival but a convention where aspiring film makers will come and find everything they need to make their film,” Lopez says.

Meanwhile, he has written several other scripts, all in the same vain as “Cigar Song.”

“I want to restore the film industry to its Golden Age, one film at a time,” Lopez says.

by Jerry Fink

thejerryfink.com

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