The Big Cigar

How Bert Schneider, a well-heeled Hollywood producer with a coke problem and a soft spot for radical politics, smuggled Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers who was awaiting trial on a murder charge, into Cuba in 1974. Schneider, set up a movie built around Newton called The Cigar. He never intended to make the movie, but it provided Newton the cover he needed to get himself and his girlfriend at the time out of the country.