Havana-Sent

'We Cubans can laugh at our own tragedy," says 27-yearold Rene Lavan, who stars in this month's Bitter Sugar, a smoldering love story set against the political discord of modern-day Havana, Lavan's birthplace. The film, directed by Leon Ichaso and acclaimed at the Miami Film Festival, is inspired by all-too-true events: girls seduce foreign tourists for precious dollars, and young rockers inject themselves with the AIDS virus for (among other reasons) the mandatory sanatorium sentence, so they know at least they will eat. While the black-and-white film's interiors were shot in the Dominican Republic, its exteriors were photographed in Cuba by an illicit camera crew.

The wrenching material was intimate to Lavan, whose family immigrated to Miami on the Mariel boatlift when he was 11.

"When I First got the script, I thought, This could have been me if I stayed in Cuba," says the actor, who now lives in L.A. "It was not just playing a role, it's the story of my people." Lavan plays Gustavo, an honor student and Castro supporter who can no longer tolerate the decay and desperation wrought by an oppressive regime and joins the rest of his generation who spend their youth in frustrated, hopeless holding patterns.

When he was a child, becoming an actor was as far from Lavan's reality as the U.S. shore.

He made it to both, landing a part on the soap opera One Life to Live, as well as appearing in the films True Lies and Speechless. "I wanted to be a baseball or football player," he recalls.

"My grades weren't so great, so my coach told me to go to a drama class, keep my mouth shut, and get a passing grade. But I didn't keep my mouth shut." Not a tragedy.

RIZA CRUZ