Read Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant Online
Authors: Humberto Fontova
Tags: #Politics, #Non-Fiction
Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant (21 page)
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“Kneel and beg for your life!” they taunted William Morgan as this American citizen was bound in front of a Castro firing squad on March 11, 1961. Both Fidel and Raul were in attendance. Morgan simply glowered back. An eyewitness, John Martino, says Morgan had walked to the execution stake singing “As the Caissons Go Marching.”
“I kneel for no man!” Morgan finally shouted back.
“Very well, Meester Weel-yam Morgan.” His executioners were aiming low, on purpose. “
Fuego!
”
Fuego!
”
The first volley shattered Morgan’s knees. “See, Meester Morgan? We made you kneel, didn’t we?”
Four more bullets slammed into Morgan, all very carefully aimed to miss vitals. They slammed into his shoulders. They slammed into his legs. He winced with every blast. Long minutes passed. Finally one of Fidel’s executioners walked up and emptied a tommy gun clip into Morgan’s back.
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These are the sort of people America’s businessmen want to do business with.
Jimmy Carter tried the “be nice to Castro and he’ll be nice back” approach by lifting the travel ban to Cuba in March 1977. Castro reciprocated by sending thousands of Cuban troops to Africa (where they used poison gas, sarin to be precise). He also sent thousands of psychopaths, killers, and perverts to America in the Mariel Boatlift. Thanks, Fidel!
Even earlier, in 1975, Gerald Ford (under Kissinger’s influence) had relaxed the embargo. He allowed foreign branches and subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade freely with Cuba and persuaded the Organization of American States to lift its sanctions. Castro reciprocated by starting his African invasion and by trying to assassinate Ford.
You read right. On March 19, 1976, the
Los Angles Times
ran the headline “Cuban Link to Death Plot Probed.” Both Republican candidates of the day, President Ford and Ronald Reagan, were to be taken out during the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. The Emiliano Zapata Unit, a radical Bay Area terrorist group, would make the hits. When nabbed, one of the would-be assassins, Gregg Daniel Adornetto, sang about the Cuban connection. Their Cuban intelligence officer was Andres Gomez. Adornetto had met him years earlier when he’d traveled to Cuba for training and funding as a member of the Weather Underground.
Los Angles Times
ran the headline “Cuban Link to Death Plot Probed.” Both Republican candidates of the day, President Ford and Ronald Reagan, were to be taken out during the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. The Emiliano Zapata Unit, a radical Bay Area terrorist group, would make the hits. When nabbed, one of the would-be assassins, Gregg Daniel Adornetto, sang about the Cuban connection. Their Cuban intelligence officer was Andres Gomez. Adornetto had met him years earlier when he’d traveled to Cuba for training and funding as a member of the Weather Underground.
Even President Ronald Reagan explored a deal with Castro, early in his first term. Alexander Haig met personally with Cuba’s vice president, Carlos R. Rodriguez, in Mexico City. Then diplomatic wiz General Vernon Walters went to Havana for a meeting with the Maximum Leader himself. The thing came to nothing, because Walters had Castro’s number. He reported that Castro was hell-bent on exporting revolution to Grenada and Central America. Reagan reimposed the travel ban, and within a year he booted Castro’s troops out of Grenada. Reagan’s support for anti-Communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua rolled back Castro’s Marxist allies.
But during the Clinton administration it was time to play nice again. In 1993, Mobile, Alabama, became a “sister city” with Havana. Representatives of the two cities found ways to spend all sorts of American tax dollars on “get to know you” bashes. But the Cuban official who had so charmed Mobile during these years of “engagement” was unavailable to attend the ten-year celebratory bash for the sister cities. What happened?
Well, Oscar Redondo is his name, and he’d been fingered by the FBI and deported for espionage.
5
Even better, Castro defector Juan Vives tells us that Cuba’s intelligence agency makes a point of taping the nighttime cavortings of “friends” who visit Cuba on such cultural exchanges. Vives says Gabriel García Márquez, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Jack Nicholson are among those recorded.
6
All you visiting trade delegations should be sure to smile at those chandeliers and sprinkler heads in your posh Havana hotel rooms.
5
Even better, Castro defector Juan Vives tells us that Cuba’s intelligence agency makes a point of taping the nighttime cavortings of “friends” who visit Cuba on such cultural exchanges. Vives says Gabriel García Márquez, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Jack Nicholson are among those recorded.
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All you visiting trade delegations should be sure to smile at those chandeliers and sprinkler heads in your posh Havana hotel rooms.
The idea that American tourists will show Cuba’s poor huddled masses what capitalism provides; what they’re being denied; the idea that American “engagement,” travel, and trade will undermine Castro’s regime—all that is humbug.
Don’t you think Cubans know perfectly well that they’re poor and oppressed? Tens of thousands of them talk and visit with their American relatives weekly; when they brave storms and tiger sharks on floating chunks of Styrofoam, they don’t do it for a thrill, like the yuppies in
Outside
magazine—seventy-seven thousand Cubans have died making the attempt.
7
Some 1.3 million tourists from free countries visited Cuba in 2002. Millions have been visiting for decades. Has it made a dime’s bit of difference in any Castroite policy? Has it improved the lot of ordinary Cubans?
Outside
magazine—seventy-seven thousand Cubans have died making the attempt.
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Some 1.3 million tourists from free countries visited Cuba in 2002. Millions have been visiting for decades. Has it made a dime’s bit of difference in any Castroite policy? Has it improved the lot of ordinary Cubans?
Like the European and Canadian tourists (and the roughly two hundred thousand Americans who went in 2003), any new flood of American tourists will stay in fancy hotels, dine in fancy restaurants, and rarely meet an ordinary Cuban. Every dollar they spend will be with a business owned and run by Castro’s military.
It can’t be said often enough: Castro’s cold war is not over. “The much bigger war against America is my destiny.” Castro wrote that in 1958, right before his “rebels” kidnapped fifty U.S. military personnel from Guantánamo.
In November 2003, the UPI reported on Castro’s star pupil and current lifeline, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Chavez was caught providing funds and false passports to al Qaeda operatives. A week later, FOX News quoted North Korea’s highest-ranking defector on the presence of North Korean weapons in Cuba.
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Liberals accuse Cuban Americans of being “blinded by emotion,” of being “unable to see reason” with regard to Castro. But our posture is the empirical one—the one based on firsthand experience with the
Lider Maximo
and on the evidence. Our approach is based on what José Ortega y Gasset called “the Science of Man”—history.
Lider Maximo
and on the evidence. Our approach is based on what José Ortega y Gasset called “the Science of Man”—history.
“Private trade, self-employment, private industry, or anything like it will have NO future in this country!” That’s what Castro shrieked into the microphones twenty years ago.
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“We will not change Cuba’s political system or Cuba’s economic system! We will accept no conditions for trade with the U.S.!” That’s Castro in 2002.
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Castroland has the highest incarceration rate and the lowest press and economic freedom indexes on Earth, right alongside its ally North Korea. The Castroites are very vigilant against the slightest crack in the system. Castro himself warned Mikhail Gorbachev that his dabbling with glasnost and perestroika was a folly that would doom both socialism and Gorbachev. He warned Daniel Ortega that allowing elections in Nicaragua would doom him. He was precisely right on both counts.
Liberals love to point at Cuban dissident and embargo opponent Osvaldo Paya. But they never point to the many Cuban dissidents who
support
the embargo—who in fact want it tightened. These dissidents (like Oscar Biscet and Marta Beatriz Roque) find themselves rotting in Castro’s dungeons. Denounce the embargo from Cuba (like Paya) and your utterings will find themselves splashed throughout the Western press. You’ll even be allowed to travel abroad to receive awards and kudos. Support the embargo, and you face the Castroite billy clubs.
support
the embargo—who in fact want it tightened. These dissidents (like Oscar Biscet and Marta Beatriz Roque) find themselves rotting in Castro’s dungeons. Denounce the embargo from Cuba (like Paya) and your utterings will find themselves splashed throughout the Western press. You’ll even be allowed to travel abroad to receive awards and kudos. Support the embargo, and you face the Castroite billy clubs.
Alcibiades Hidalgo was Cuban defense minister Raul Castro’s chief of staff for over a decade. In 2001, he defected to the United States. “Lifting the travel ban would be a gift for Fidel and Raul,” he told the
Washington Post
in an interview.
Washington Post
in an interview.
Castro doesn’t deserve any gifts from us.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FIDEL’S USEFUL IDIOTS
The idiocies and gaffes
by Western elites about Castro and Cuba would defy belief if they weren’t by now predictable. Take Vanessa Redgrave. A few years ago, she remarked in an interview that Fidel was “good friends” with legendary Cuban patriot and poet José Martí. Only problem was that Martí died in a battle against the Spanish in 1895.
by Western elites about Castro and Cuba would defy belief if they weren’t by now predictable. Take Vanessa Redgrave. A few years ago, she remarked in an interview that Fidel was “good friends” with legendary Cuban patriot and poet José Martí. Only problem was that Martí died in a battle against the Spanish in 1895.
Take director Sydney Pollack and actor Robert Redford. In their movie
Havana,
they cast Fulgencio Batista as looking like an America businessman, with hair and eyes the same hue as Redford’s. Cuban exile, novelist, and Cervantes Prize winner Guillermo Cabrera Infante later bumped into the famous Hollywood director, who turned red-faced with shock and embarrassment when a laughing Cabrera had to inform him that Batista was black.
1
Havana,
they cast Fulgencio Batista as looking like an America businessman, with hair and eyes the same hue as Redford’s. Cuban exile, novelist, and Cervantes Prize winner Guillermo Cabrera Infante later bumped into the famous Hollywood director, who turned red-faced with shock and embarrassment when a laughing Cabrera had to inform him that Batista was black.
1
Both Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola (
Godfather II
) spent millions to achieve a realistic, historically accurate portrayal of the Havana of New Year’s 1958, when Batista fled and Castro’s rebels entered. To show the tumult and frenzied mobs, the crowds looting, the utter mayhem, they hired more extras than Mel Gibson in
Braveheart
or Ridley Scott in
Gladiator
. However, Havana was
deathly quiet
that night, the streets
empty.
Not one reviewer or major media source pointed out these astounding gaffes.
Godfather II
) spent millions to achieve a realistic, historically accurate portrayal of the Havana of New Year’s 1958, when Batista fled and Castro’s rebels entered. To show the tumult and frenzied mobs, the crowds looting, the utter mayhem, they hired more extras than Mel Gibson in
Braveheart
or Ridley Scott in
Gladiator
. However, Havana was
deathly quiet
that night, the streets
empty.
Not one reviewer or major media source pointed out these astounding gaffes.
Part of the trouble is the “furious ignorance,” as Guillermo Cabrera Infante calls it, about a nation that’s been in the headlines for more than forty years. And part of it is double standards—like when the Spanish government honored Fidel Castro with honorary citizenship the
very week
it served indictment papers for murder against Augusto Pinochet.
very week
it served indictment papers for murder against Augusto Pinochet.
Why not serve indictment papers to Fidel? Fidel has plotted cowardly murders his entire life. Even in high school Fidel got into an argument over a debt (he was always a deadbeat) with a schoolmate named Ramon Mestre, who pounded him like a gong. Fidel cried uncle and slunk away, whimpering that he’d go fetch the money he owed Mestre. Instead he came back with a cocked pistol, hoping to surprise and murder the unarmed Mestre, who’d already gone home. A bit later Fidel was fingered for two murders while attending the University of Havana. Both involved ambushes where the victim was shot in the back. Shortly after Fidel got to Havana, on January 6, 1959, he ordered his goons to arrest Ramon Mestre, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in fifteen years. Mestre ended up serving twenty years in horrible dungeons.
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Find old pictures of Fidel as a “guerrilla” in the Sierra Maestre and you’ll notice his favorite weapon was a scoped rifle. He never had to get
anywhere near
a Batista soldier. Indeed, he’d start every “battle” (puerile little skirmishes) by firing off a shot in the distance. Then he’d let his “guerrillas” do the actual “fighting” (usually murdering unsuspecting soldiers in their bunks, terrorizing unarmed peasants, and rustling cows). While his men engaged in their murder and banditry, Fidel would scurry back to camp to talk to reporters.
anywhere near
a Batista soldier. Indeed, he’d start every “battle” (puerile little skirmishes) by firing off a shot in the distance. Then he’d let his “guerrillas” do the actual “fighting” (usually murdering unsuspecting soldiers in their bunks, terrorizing unarmed peasants, and rustling cows). While his men engaged in their murder and banditry, Fidel would scurry back to camp to talk to reporters.
One former guerrilla comrade, Huber Matos, (who later served twenty-five years in Castro’s dungeons for the crime of having taken Castro’s “democratic” and “humanistic” blather seriously) remembered what Fidel was like in “combat.” “Fidel and I were on a hill in the Sierra and a Batista plane suddenly appeared—but way off, looked like a speck. Well, it dove and started shooting, strafing something below it. The plane was so far off and doing so little shooting I thought nothing of it,” recalls Matos. “So I continued talking while watching the plane. Well, I’d been talking for quite a while and hadn’t heard a word from Fidel—which is extremely strange. So I look around.... Where in the hell?
“Fidel was nowhere to be found. So I went back to the cave that served as our little encampment at the time—and there he was, huddled at the far side, trying to drink coffee with his hands shaking like castanets.”
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3
That’s the real Castro, but the useful idiots keep lining up to praise him. Take Norman Mailer’s breathless ode to Fidel: “You are the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War. It’s as if the ghost of Cortez had appeared in our century riding Zapata’s white horse.”
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Take the perfumed love letter that Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern’s campaign manager, wrote about the Maximum Leader: “One of the most charming men I’ve ever met! Castro is personally overpowering. It’s much more than charisma. Castro remains one of the few truly electric personalities in a world where his peers seem dull.”
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Take leftist professor Saul Landau: “As Fidel spoke, I could feel a peculiar sensation in his presence. It’s as if I am meeting with a new force of nature. Here is a man so filled with energy he is almost a different species. Power radiates from him.”
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Castro the cowardly murderer—the real Castro—gives that spirit to the Castroite military. When it was sent to Angola, it emulated Che Guevara in
desastre
(disaster) and
fracaso
(complete failure) in its fight against the Unita (pro-Western) Angolan rebels and the South Africans (mostly black troops, by the way). Castro sent fifty thousand troops to Angola and got routed by the South Africans, who never had more than four thousand. According to Castro air force defector Rafael del Pino, Cuban MiGs actually had orders to
avoid
dogfights—to skedaddle at top speed—at the mere
sighting
of a South African Mirage. The MiGs’ strict role was ground support, which is to say, strafing and bombing defenseless villages. In any other role they were blown from the skies like skeet.
7
desastre
(disaster) and
fracaso
(complete failure) in its fight against the Unita (pro-Western) Angolan rebels and the South Africans (mostly black troops, by the way). Castro sent fifty thousand troops to Angola and got routed by the South Africans, who never had more than four thousand. According to Castro air force defector Rafael del Pino, Cuban MiGs actually had orders to
avoid
dogfights—to skedaddle at top speed—at the mere
sighting
of a South African Mirage. The MiGs’ strict role was ground support, which is to say, strafing and bombing defenseless villages. In any other role they were blown from the skies like skeet.
7
One story in Cuban defector Juan Benemelis’s book
Castro: Terror and Subversion in Africa
was a gem. A few weeks after getting to Angola, the swaggering Cuban general Raul Diaz Arguelles snapped on his holster, affected a Pattonesque scowl, and mounted an armored vehicle with some fellow officers. They were off to the front. They’d arrived to kick enemy butt. They’d show Unita’s Jonas Savimbi and those South Africans the tactical brilliance of Castroite officers. Within hours a South African patrol ambushed him. With a well-aimed bazooka blast they sent the mighty Arguelles and his toadies spinning through the air like those human cannonballs you see at the circus, which is fitting. Castroite commanders have always been more clowns than soldiers. They make Groucho Marx in
Duck Soup
look like Hannibal.
Castro: Terror and Subversion in Africa
was a gem. A few weeks after getting to Angola, the swaggering Cuban general Raul Diaz Arguelles snapped on his holster, affected a Pattonesque scowl, and mounted an armored vehicle with some fellow officers. They were off to the front. They’d arrived to kick enemy butt. They’d show Unita’s Jonas Savimbi and those South Africans the tactical brilliance of Castroite officers. Within hours a South African patrol ambushed him. With a well-aimed bazooka blast they sent the mighty Arguelles and his toadies spinning through the air like those human cannonballs you see at the circus, which is fitting. Castroite commanders have always been more clowns than soldiers. They make Groucho Marx in
Duck Soup
look like Hannibal.
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