“Looking for Fidel”

Tonight at 8 on HBO

* (one star)

IF Cuba is so great, why doesn’t Oliver Stone go and live there?

He really seems to dig the place, especially the attention he is paid by Fidel Castro, who doesn’t seem to mind it when Stone shows up to jaw with him for hours, or even days, on end.

Which raises the question: As the leader of a country – albeit a small one – doesn’t Castro have anything better to do than to spend large chunks of his time being interviewed by Stone?

By the looks of it, it couldn’t have been altogether pleasant to sit for so long in the company of the director of “JFK” and “Nixon” – who Castro apparently believes is a figure of great importance in the U.S., judging by the access Castro has granted him.

Their epic conversations were edited way down (thank Heaven!) for tonight’s one-hour HBO documentary, titled “Looking for Fidel” – a meaningless title since Stone likely didn’t have to search too hard to find Castro, who was simply sitting there waiting for him in his office.

The film is a followup to Stone’s previous Valentine to Castro, “Commandante.” The sequel arises from a new round of interviews Stone conducted with Castro last May after a renewed crackdown on Cuban hijackers, dissidents and poets made headlines around the world.

In “Looking for Fidel,” Castro gets a chance to explain the new round of arrests and the subsequent stiff sentences that resulted from them (death for three hijackers and jail terms of up to 20 years for some dissidents), and also give Stone a tutorial on the Cuban justice system.

As director, Stone has assembled these dialogues into a film whose production qualities are so amateurish it would have been rejected by public-access cable.

The jumpy, home-movie style camerawork and hard-to-read, white-on-white subtitles make watching this film a grueling, laborious exercise.

And after spending an hour with Stone, you might find yourself asking: Hasn’t Cuba suffered enough?