Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  National security adviser McGeorge Bundy was particularly incensed and dismissive. On the ABC Sunday chat show Issues and Answers on October 14, 1962, he said the reports of Soviet missiles in Cuba were nothing but “refugee rumors.” “Nothing in Cuba poses a threat to the U.S. . . . Nor is there any likelihood that the Soviets and Cubans would try to install a major offensive capability,” stressed the disdainful Bundy.

  JFK himself had an idea who was planting these silly rumors: “There’s fifty-odd thousand Cuban refugees in this country, all living for the day when we will go to war with Cuba, and they’re all putting out this kind of stuff. ”27

  A week later, with the missiles plain as day in U-2 photos, JFK publicly announced that they were there—and the world held its breath.

  What had happened? Why the shift? Well, CIA head John McCone (a Republican) had finally insisted on some U-2 flights over western Cuba—where the Cuban freedom fighters and infiltrators had reported seeing the missile sites.

  A few weeks earlier, America’s U-2 program had been shifted from the CIA to the Defense Department, so Defense Secretary Robert McNamara controlled the authorization of U-2 flights—and he repeatedly forbade any over western Cuba. But McCone finally won the argument, which was threatening to become a political issue.

  Many of the Cuban exile infiltrators who had given the Kennedy administration the intelligence in the first place—at great risk to their own lives—found themselves stranded in a Cuba swarming with Soviet soldiers after the “resolution” of the crisis. Dozens of these young heroes huddled in mangrove swamps along Cuba’s coast, dodging Castro patrols and waiting for their scheduled “exfiltration” by motorboats back to the United States.

  Their wait was in vain. Their mission accomplished, their evidence about genuine weapons of mass destruction only ninety miles away from America’s coast (and hosted by the most pathologically anti-American regime in history) delivered, these heroes promptly fell through the cracks of the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal. They were expendable.

  “Let’s take all the necessary precautions to stop these Cuban exiles with the commando attacks they launch in order to seek publicity from upsetting the agreement,” were President Kennedy’s words to his attorney general brother the night of October 28, 1962.28 Remember, mere days earlier Robert Kennedy had been cracking the whip to the CIA to launch more commando raids!

  So now the scheduled boat runs to the Cuban coast by the infiltrators’ comrades were canceled. These irksome “Cuban refugees” now died in suicidal firefights against Castro’s troops or were captured, tortured, and finally bound to the stake in front of the blood-, bone-, and brain-flecked paredón. “Viva Cuba Libre!” they yelled.

  Many of these men had fought at the Bay of Pigs. They could not have imagined that the Kennedy administration would betray them again. In that earlier disaster, as Russian tanks and fifty-one thousand Communist troops were about to overwhelm commander Pepe San Roman’s starved, thirst-crazed, ammo-less Brigada 2506, he sent this last message to his CIA handlers just offshore: “How can you people do this to us?” He said this in English, as he had been educated in the United States.

  Cubans captured at the Bay of Pigs were tortured and put under a death sentence. Castro said he would revoke that death sentence if they signed a document denouncing the United States. To a man they refused. “We will die with dignity!” barked their commander, Erneido Oliva, at his Castroite torturers. These heroes knew that it wasn’t the United States that had betrayed them, but the young Kennedy administration. A guilt-stricken JFK ransomed them back, only to return them to the fight and sell them down the river again. I must add something else. Almost half of the 1,200 Bay of Pigs survivors enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1963. They volunteered for the Vietnam War. These men had seen Communism point-blank and were willing to fight it anywhere.

  Ask Gloria Estefan. Her dad was one of these heroes, wounded as a tank commander at the Bay of Pigs, then wounded again as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He volunteered for two tours of duty in Vietnam. Wounded, he died a lingering death (Agent Orange was suspected as a cause).

  As a young girl, Gloria Estefan nursed her father through his final illness. But unlike the Hollywood Left, she’s never milked her father’s death for sympathy or to bash America. “My whole family paid a heavy price for freedom,” she said succinctly. “My father fought for those freedoms both at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam. I watched him die a slow death for fourteen years. I’m not about to let anyone stomp on his ideals. I always find that people have very little information about what happened in Cuba. Everyone always constantly talks about and buys into the idea that the U.S. is responsible for Cuba’s plight. But the only embargo in Cuba is Fidel’s embargo against the Cuban people. [Emphasis mine.] So when they ask me I tell them. How can I forget what Communists did to my country and my family?”29

  Had Richard Nixon demanded a recount in 1960 and exposed the Democrats’ voter fraud in Illinois and Texas, my kids would speak Spanish, Emmylou Harris (rather than Gloria Estefan) would be the toast of Miami, most of Cuba’s freedom fighters would be alive, and Fidel Castro would merit less textbook space than Pancho Villa, less even than Augusto Sandino.

  The Bay of Pigs operation had been planned during the Eisenhower-Nixon administration. Nixon advised Kennedy regarding Cuba: “Go in!” The Miami Herald quoted Nixon as saying, “We should assist the Cuban freedom fighters openly. It makes no sense to leash them.” One of Eisenhower’s last recommendations before handing the reins over to Kennedy was: “We cannot let the Castro regime last! Castro begins to look like a madman. . . . Do whatever it takes!”30 Well, we all know the rest of the story.

  In a 1960 campaign speech, Kennedy said, “The Republicans have allowed a Communist dictatorship to flourish eight jet minutes from our borders. We must support anti-Castro fighters. So far these freedom fighters have received no help from our government. . . . We must make clear our intention not to let the Soviet Union turn Cuba into its base in the Caribbean—and our intention to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.” 31

  “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” Kennedy said in his inaugural speech in January 1961.

  “I will never abandon Cuba to Communism. I promise to deliver this flag to you in a free Havana.”32 That was what JFK told the survivors of Brigada 2506 at the Orange Bowl on Christmas Eve, 1962. But Castro knew it was a lie. Kennedy had abandoned Cuba to Castro’s tender mercies.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE COWARDLY LEÓN

  On January 12, 1960, Castro worked himself into a fine froth on Cuban television. He raved at his revolución’s sinister enemies. He took a break from Yankee-bashing for a few seconds and ripped into Spain as fascists! . . . Monarchists! . . . The Spanish embassy is a nest for counter-revolutionaries! A foul hive for the CIA! etc.

  The broadcast was at night, and it so happened that the Spanish ambassador, Juan Pablo Lojendio, was home in his pajamas watching television. He saw Castro, grew livid, and summoned his chauffeur while grabbing a coat. “To the TV studio—and fast!”

  If only the United States had had an ambassador like that. Every day, for ten months, Castro insulted the United States. The staff at the United States embassy had had enough and wanted to strike back, but Ambassador Phil Bonsal, a northeastern liberal from central casting, had given stern instructions against any hint of criticism or protest at Castro’s crimes, thievery, and gutter-mouth. Our forbearance and enlightenment were supposed to impress all of Latin America.

  Ambassador Lojendio didn’t give a flying flip about forbearance and enlightenment. Honor and respect were more important. (Remember, this was Spain forty-five years ago.) He jumped out of the car before it stopped. He stormed into the studio and demanded: “Where’s the comandante? Where’s the premier?” A startled producer pointed at a door.

  Castro was still fulminating in front
of the cameras when the enraged ambassador burst into the studio. The studio crew scampered in confusion, tripping over wires, dropping their clipboards. The cameras shifted from Castro to Lojendio, to a shrugging producer, then back to Castro—just as the ambassador confronted him.

  “Lies!” yelled a red-faced Lojendio, his pajamas visibly poking out from under his sports coat. “I have been insulted! I have been insulted! I demand a chance to reply! You cannot insult my government, nor my government’s ambassador without the right to reply!”1

  Castro gaped. His eyes bulged. For once he was speechless. Wide-eyed, he backed off and threw his hands in front of him—not with clenched fists, but pleading not to have any trouble. As Castro cringed, his band of bodyguards burst in to restrain the Spanish ambassador. The cameras were promptly shifted. When they came back, Castro was seen reaching for his coffee cup (brandy, actually) with trembling hands, almost spilling it.

  After that, Spain got more respect, but the United States learned nothing from Castro the Cowardly León on television.

  “Those Americans,” snickered then Brazilian president Janio Quadros at a Latin American summit meeting, “are just like women. They have a masochistic streak; the more you slap them around, the more you get out of them.”

  From Spain, Castro got a serious tongue-lashing. From us, he got nothing—or actually, he got plenty. After shrieking, “Let the Yankees invade! I’ll produce 200,000 dead gringos!”2 (January 15, 1959), after branding the United States “a vulture preying on humanity!” and “the enemy of all Latin nations!” and “the enemy of the progress of all peoples of the world!” (July 1959),3 and after confiscating American property and businesses, including millions from United States cattle and agricultural companies in Cuba, Castro received about $200 million in U.S. foreign aid from the time he took over on January 1, 1959, until Eisenhower declared, “There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached,” and broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. That date was January 3, 1961.4 The $200 million figure is provided by CIA inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick, and consisted of U.S. government purchases of Cuban sugar at prices much higher than the world sugar price at the time.5

  Castro’s big boodle came a little later, in the summer and fall of 1960, and amounted to $1.8 billion worth of stolen American property. That’s the biggest heist of U.S. property in history—and more than all the “nationalizations” (thefts) of U.S. property by twentieth-century Communist and “nationalist” regimes combined. But Castro started snatching U.S. assets from the beginning, after barely two months in power. On March 3, 1959, he commenced the mass larceny by “nationalizing” the Cuban telephone company, an ITT subsidiary. Three months later his agrarian reform law snatched millions more from United Fruit and the Pingree and King ranches, among others. Not to mention the hundreds of Cuban-owned farms and ranches that were “intervened,” as they called it.

  Many Cuban Americans from the Camagüey region recall the “intervention” at one of the region’s most productive cattle ranches. The Castroites arrived and declared, as usual, that the ranch now belonged to “la revolución.” And they, being official revolucionarios themselves, were certainly entitled to eat lunch. In preparation, the head bar-budo (bearded one) started walking over to a pen that held the ranch’s prize breeding bull, worth $22,000 (in 1959 dollars).

  “Not that one!” the rancher yelled as he bustled over. “That’s a breeding bull, worth $22,000! Makes no sense to . . . ”

  But he was heavily outgunned at the moment (all barbudos traveled in heavily armed gangs). The Castroite looked back at his cohorts and snickered while unlimbering his carbine. “You can’t be serious?” the rancher pleaded, looking around wide-eyed, as the imbecile took aim. “Your own blasted revolución has much more to gain with that bull alive!”

  Blam! The bull collapsed from a shot to the head. The barbudos doubled over laughing as the rancher covered his face with his hands. The Reds then butchered the bull for an impromptu barbeque, all the while threatening the rancher with the firing squad for his impertinence. The bull’s worth was irrelevant. And chances are, the Castroites weren’t even hungry. What mattered was a point-blank demonstration of who was now giving the orders in Cuba—and the heavy price of disobedience.

  True to their tradition of outstanding—indeed, Pulitzer Prize–winning—reporting on Russian agricultural “reform” (the Ukraine Famine of 1931–33) the New York Times heartily applauded Castro’s “revolutionary” larceny, thuggery, and idiocy (Communist economics). “An agrarian reform was long overdue in Cuba,” sniffed a learned New York Times editorial in July 1959.

  What decent person could disagree? We envision diligent Peace Corps types placing land titles into the gnarled hands of campesinos, their clothes ragged, their arms streaked with sweat and dirt but their faces beaming. “Rejoice!” we say. “The cruel system that throttled Cuba’s agricultural production has finally been discarded!” “Rejoice!” we say again. “The selfish, lazy, and villainous are finally getting their just desserts. The virtuous and industrious are finally getting a chance in life!”

  “This promise of social justice brought a foretaste of human dignity for millions who had little knowledge of it in Cuba’s former near-feudal economy,” were the New York Times’s exact words. (Emphasis mine.)

  The problem was, in the 1950s the average farm wage in “near-feudal” Cuba was higher than in France or Belgium. And the average Cuban farm was actually smaller than the average farm in the United States, 140 acres in Cuba and 195 acres in the United States. In 1958, Cuba, a nation of 6.2 million people, had 159,958 farms, 11,000 of them tobacco farms. Plus, only 34 percent of the Cuban population was rural. This is according to a U.S. Department of Commerce document titled “Investment in Cuba” (a public document available to all the Jayson Blairs and Walter Durantys at the New York Times at the time, I might add.)

  And according to the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, in 1958 the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba was $3. If that sounds “near-feudal,” consider that the average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73. In Belgium it was $2.70, in Denmark $2.74, in West Germany $2.73, and in the United States $4.06. Let’s not even get into the average wage in the rest of Latin America or Asia, much less Africa. Though, nowadays, Cuba’s standard of living can indeed be compared to Haiti’s.

  “The general impression of the members of the mission,” continues the U.S. Commerce Department Study, “from travels and observations all over Cuba is that the living levels of farmers, agricultural laborers, and industrial workers are higher all along the line than for corresponding groups in other tropical countries.” (Emphasis mine.)

  A UNESCO report from 1957 says: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. . . . The average wage for an eight-hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 percent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 68 percent. 44 percent of Cubans are covered by social legislation.” That’s a higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time.6

  Liberals then and now like to think of pre-Castro Cuba as a veritable U.S. colony, a sordid playground of prostitution and casinos, horribly exploited by American corporations! JFK himself said this in an interview with French journalist Jean Daniel in 1963: “I think that there is not a country in the world, including all the regions of Africa and any other country under colonial domination, where the economic colonization, the humiliation, the exploitation have been worse than those which ravaged Cuba, the result, in part, of the policy of my country.”

  “Calumny. . . cheap demagoguery.” That’s what an exasperated Spruille Braden, former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, said after reading JFK’s idiotic claims in that interview. “That abysmal ignorance in Washington concerning this whole Cuban situation endures.”7


  In fact, only 5 percent of invested capital in Cuba in 1958 was American, and less than one-third of Cuba’s sugar output was by U.S. companies. Cuba had a grand total of nine gambling casinos in 1958. Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi, have double that number today. And chew on this one: In 1957, when it was touted as the “playground” for Americans, Cuba hosted a grand total of 272,265 U.S. tourists.8 That year more Cubans vacationed in the United States than Americans vacationed in Cuba. We had a “playground” too.

  College professors regularly trot out the brutal landowners/oppressed peasant myth. I heard this version myself from one of my college history professors. His name was Stephen Ambrose. You’d think Eisenhower’s official biographer and America’s bestselling historian might have known better. Not when it came to Cuba, where Castro’s siren song lulled his critical faculties to slumber. College professors might not know it, but the rest of us now know that the landless got no land anyway. They became slave laborers for Communist kolkhozes (state farms). Soviet advisers from the Ukraine began advising Castro’s National Institute for Land Reform in early spring 1959. Many professors and New York Times journalists used to think Communism worked, but it’s kinda hard to argue that now (to be honest, it was kinda hard to argue it then too). The Bolshevik Maxim Litvinov said “food is a weapon,” and Communists have always used it as a weapon. Castro wielded the weapon early, snatching farms and ranches and then issuing his infamous ration cards to his subjects.

  In 1958, the Cuban people had the third highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere. If you think that’s interesting, take a look at this chart, compiled by an intrepid Cuban exile living in Spain:

  Food Ration in 1842 for Slaves in CubaCastro Government Ration since 1962