Michael Maclear accompanied Fidel Castro’s guerrillas on their triumphal march into Havana on Jan. 1, 1959. Nearly 50 years later, the veteran journalist and documentarian returned to Cuba to find out what had happened to the lush island and its people since. The result, Maclear’s compelling new documentary After Fidel, will premiere on History Television on Friday.

Back in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Maclear was CBC’s ‘go-to’ guy, investigating the world’s trouble spots. As its leading foreign correspondent, he interviewed India’s distinguished PM Jawaharial Nehru and Congo leader Patrice Lumumba in the turbulent weeks before his assassination. Cuba was part of a beat that took Maclear from Vietnam to Japan to South Africa in less than two years.

Still, Castro made a lasting impression. ‘The first time I met him,’ recalls Maclear, ‘he was with his army en route to Havana. I was in a room crowded with troops and foreign press – though, interestingly, there were no Americans present. Castro arrived and he seemed bewildered. There he was, age 32, and suddenly he was The Man, ruling a country.’

Maclear believes that Castro was at a crossroads in those early revolutionary days. ‘My impression was of a man who was not sure of himself and where he wanted to go. A few months later, I tracked him down — literally. He was sleeping in different places, moving from one hotel to another and had become deeply suspicious of the CIA.

‘In the interview, he says, ‘there will be free elections, open society, human rights, no nationalization of property.’ He says these things and he seems completely sincere. I believed it at the time.’

That interview, still vivid five decades later, forms a centerpiece in After Fidel. Intercut with footage of the aging but still riveting Maclear, the sequence makes for incisive viewing. It underscores Maclear’s provocative question, ‘Could the relationship between Cuba and the United States have been saved?’

With Fidel too ill to be filmed and access denied to his brother and heir apparent, Raul Castro, Maclear’s documentary also tells the story of two families and how they are faring 50 years after the revolution. Nilvia Barroso, a dockworker and single mother of three children, has her life contrasted with that of Aida Bahr, a respected feminist author and mother of two teenaged boys. Despite their differences in education and ancestral backgrounds, the two women have children attending the same university in Havana.

‘I went to see how the system works,’ comments Maclear, who came away impressed by the success of Cuba’s educational and medical institutions. Despite grinding poverty, it isn’t ‘downtrodden, with long faces and a policeman on every corner.’

After Fidel completes Michael Maclear’s ‘look back’ trilogy, which includes his personal docs Vietnam: Ghosts of War and A Town in Africa.