As enthusiasts of Latin American cinema prepare for Friday’s start of the sixth annual Havana Film Festival in New York, some Cuban-Americans are denouncing the event as propaganda for the Castro regime. They also say the New York Times, as the festival’s presenting sponsor, is shilling for a communist strongman yet again.

The celebration is a New York City transplant of a festival that takes place in the Cuban capital every December, run by the island country’s national film institute, Icaic. The New York version culls films – particularly award winners – from the Havana festival, adds other motion pictures from Latin America to the screening schedule, and rounds out the program with tributes and discussions.

This year, for example, the festival will contemplate “Cuba’s revolutionary film tradition” and will show “award winning documentaries” from the genre. One of its tributes is to the Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, director of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” a film criticized by many as a glorification of the murderous Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Another will recognize the Cuban filmmaker Pastor Vega, one of the founders of Icaic.

That institute – a cultural arm of the Cuban state – selects the films that appear in the Havana festival, according to one of the organizers of the New York event, Carole Rosenberg.

Ms. Rosenberg is president of the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, under whose auspices the New York festival is run. The organization enjoys “a very close relationship” with the Cuban national film institute, and the institute, Ms. Rosenberg said, also helps determine the films to be screened in New York and decides who from Cuba – if anyone – will be able to leave the island to participate in the festival. Also, “there is support from the Cuban government in the sense that they give us money,” a spokeswoman for the New York festival, Diana Vargas, said.

For its part, the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba describes itself as an “autonomous, nongovernmental, and nonprofit” organization. Many critics of the Cuban regime, however, said there is no such thing as an autonomous, nongovernmental organization under Fidel Castro’s totalitarian rule.

“Everything is related. You cannot separate culture and art and politics when you talk about Cuba,” a New York-based Cuban-American filmmaker, Ivan Acosta, said. “As everyone knows, nothing is done in Cuba without state supervision.”

Whether or not the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba is indeed independent, it and its American Friends express an enthusiastic and favorable attitude toward the cultural achievements of the Castro regime.

“Cuba’s multi-racial heritage and unique position as the Caribbean’s largest and least commercialized nation have allowed Cuban culture to flourish,” the organization’s Web site reads. “The arts have been actively supported by the government,” whose “commitment to cultural development” the Ludwig Foundation praises, along with the “rich cultural landscape of present-day Cuba.”

The many Cuban artists who have defected to America – the most visible recent example being the 43 Cuban dancers who requested asylum when performing in Las Vegas last November – appear to feel differently. So does a Cuban actor and director living in Miami, Reinaldo Cruz, who fled the communist regime in 1998. During his film career in Cuba, Mr. Cruz said, he became intimately familiar with ICAIC, which he said was the sole producer and distributor of movies in Cuba – and which, like all government organs on the island, censored the materials it distributed.

As such, Mr. Cruz said, the Havana Film Festival and its New York cousin have one purpose. “It is to project the power and the image of the regime of Castro. It was founded for that,” Mr. Cruz said.

A Cuban-American author and poet who works in New York, Alexis Romay, expressed a similar view of the festival, labeling it “tendentious propaganda” for the Castro regime. A writer for an underground dissident quarterly, Mr. Romay expressed further dismay at the role of the New York Times in spreading the propaganda to New Yorkers.

So did another New York-based Cuban-American writer and filmmaker, Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, who said it was “ironic” for a publication that relies on a free press for its very existence to promote and abet the complete lack of free expression in Cuba.

“It’s totally irresponsible,” Ms. Rodriguez Ichaso said. “The dictatorship in Cuba has been in power so long, a lot of the journalists are too young to know the truth about it, and too lazy to look it up.”

Another New York writer highly critical of the Castro regime, Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice, said the Times should be more aware of its own past, in addition to the history of the Castro dictatorship.

“I would think that, in view of the Times’s peculiar history of certain correspondents in such dictatorships as Cuba and Stalin’s Russia, they would not be so eager to celebrate this dictator once again,” Mr. Hentoff said.

The columnist, a longtime advocate of the restoration of civil liberties to Cuba, was referring to Times reporters Herbert Matthews and Walter Duranty. Matthews, as the paper’s Cuba correspondent in the 1950s, filed dispatches from the island that portrayed Fidel Castro as a committed idealist. Duranty achieved a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 – and notoriety decades later – as an apologist for Stalin, denying the Soviet-induced famine at Ukraine in his reporting from the region.

The director of the Washington based Center for a Free Cuba, Frank Calzon, also spoke of Times sponsorship of the festival as of a piece with its past reporting on communist dictatorships.

“This is not more or less than the kind of love fest that the Times had for Stalin at one time,” he said. “There are many, many issues relating to Cuba right now that ought to merit the attention of the New York Times, so I cannot think of a worse time than now to engage in this kind of fellow-traveling.”

As to why the Times chose to act as the festival’s presenting sponsor, many of the filmmakers posited profound ignorance as a likely motivation.

“These are the same people who’d wear a Che Guevara T-shirt without ever having read his work,” Mr. Romay said.

To Mr. Acosta, however, “They have no excuse not to know.”

“They have a duty of investigating and finding out what is going on, instead of being useful idiots,” the filmmaker said of the press and broadcast sponsors of the event, which, besides the Times, include the Spanish-language paper El Diario, local TV station NBC 4, and the local affiliate of the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo.

In a statement issued by e-mail from the Times director of public relations, Toby Usnik, the paper responded: “The Times’s marketing department sponsors a variety of film and arts festivals each year as a service to its readers who appreciate a diversity of thought and opinions in culture. This festival is one such sponsorship.”

To the Cuban-American filmmakers, however, it appeared that “diversity of thought and opinions” would not be found within the Havana festival here. When asked whether the festival included films by Cuban exiles critical of the Castro regime, Ms. Rosenberg said: “My organization, and what we do, is totally cultural, and I find that it’s really what we were founded to do. I really stay away from the political side.” She acknowledged, though, that no dissident films will be screened at the festival.

Many of those who are criticizing the festival said that rather than present a one-sided, government-directed view of the Cuban regime, the Times either should have pushed for the Havana Film Festival to be more open and inclusive of dissenting voices, or should have helped sponsor an alternative festival dedicated to the documentary films of the Cuban exile community.

“Let those who do not think Fidel Castro is the best thing since sliced bread have a say,” Mr. Romay urged. Such sponsorship would be extremely valuable, according to Ms. Rodriguez Ichaso, who said Cuban exiles have no way of screening their films “unless you find a brave soul that decides to be politically incorrect and show our movies.”

To that end, she and Mr. Romay suggested that those upset by the Times’s actions engage in a letter-writing campaign against the imbalanced support of Cuban film.

“If there are people who love freedom and who are fair, and love fairness, they should be aware of this. And if they don’t think it should happen, they should write letters to the Times,” Ms. Rodriguez Ichaso said.

The festival runs from April 15 to April 21. Films are being screened at locations throughout New York City, including New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, Quad Cinema near Union Square in Manhattan, and the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.