Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE DOPE TRAFFICKER NEXT DOOR

  For years, Cuba received a $5 billion annual subsidy from the Soviets. In total, the Soviets pumped some $110 billion into Cuba. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change, more than five Marshall Plans, in fact—and pumped not into the war-ravaged continent of Europe, but into an island of seven million people. From Soviet handouts alone, Communist Cuba should be wealthy. Instead, its people have government ration cards and starvation portions that make them far worse off than Cuban slaves in 1842. How did that happen?

  First off, forget about the corruption of the Batistas, Trujillos, and Somozas. If you want to see Latin American corruption at its best and highest, Fidel Castro is your man. Cuban military defectors Rafael del Pino, Osvaldo Prendes, Juan Antonio Rodriguez, and Norberto Fuentes, among others, have told the tales, but the mainstream media mostly yawns.

  Sometimes, though, court cases get a little more reporting. One such case began in 1987 when the U.S. attorney in Miami won convictions against seventeen drug traffickers who had used Cuban air force bases and Cuban MiG escorts for their cocaine shipments into the United States. Remember, Raul Castro runs Cuba’s military.

  So in 1993, the U.S. attorney in Miami drafted an indictment charging Raul Castro as a leader of a ten-year conspiracy that sent Colombian cocaine through Cuba to the United States. The Cuban defense ministry was declared a “criminal organization.”

  One of these smugglers, Reuben Ruiz, recalled in a PBS documentary, “My Cuban contact told me, ‘Nobody will hurt you. The Cuban air force is completely at your service tomorrow.’”1

  In the words of Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of the books Evil Money and NarcoTerrorism, “The Cubans provided safe haven, fuel, passports, radar escorts [for Colombian cocaine shipments]. And for all that, they were paid. In addition, they were taking commissions from each shipment of drugs that went through Cuba.... In return, the same smuggling boats brought arms to the insurgencies—the Communist insurgencies that the Cubans were supporting in Latin America, in this case specifically the M-19 in Colombia.” As another example of Castro’s support for Communist insurgencies, CNN, on January 1, 1999, quoted commander Tiro-Fijo (Sure Shot) of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as saying, “Thanks to Fidel Castro, we are now a powerful army, not a hit-and-run band.”

  Drugs are where the money is for Cuban Communists who have destroyed their own economy. Cuban intelligence defector Manuel de Beunza said in the same PBS documentary, “I took part in a meeting where Fidel Castro himself ordered the creation of companies to be involved in drug dealing and smuggling.”

  Here’s Rafael del Pino, Castro’s air chief until defecting in 1987: “In the western part of Cuba, we have nineteen SAM missile sites and we have hundreds of radars and we have a regiment of MiG-23 interceptors. And it is completely impossible that a small airplane could fly from Colombia to the United States without the knowledge and the permission of Raul or Fidel Castro.” The Colombian planes flew almost daily.

  In July 2001, Madrid’s TV Channel 5 broadcast a show titled “Cuba and Drug Trafficking.” Spanish journalists posed as drug dealers and filmed (with hidden cameras) their dealings with drug dealers in Cuba. As to security? One Cuba-based dealer snorted, “Forget it. I pay for the security right here in Cuba. I answer only to the [Cuban] government.”

  “The evidence against Castro is already greater than the evidence that led to the drug indictment of Manuel Noriega in 1988,” a federal prosecutor told the Miami Herald in July 1996. A total of four grand juries revealed Cuba’s involvement in drug trafficking.

  Yet nothing came of it. The Clinton Justice Department—the same gang that returned Elián González to Cuba—refused to pursue an indictment. Actually, the Clinton administration did the reverse: It issued a proposal for a joint U.S.-Cuba program to interdict drug shipments in the Caribbean. This was the brainchild of General Barry McCaffrey, then acting as Clinton’s drug czar. Under the proposed program, a joint U.S.–Cuban command would share intelligence and surveillance equipment. “Our current Cuba policy is mistaken,” McCaffrey stressed later in a Georgetown University speech. “We need to engage them on this issue.” In 1995 and 1996, U.S. generals, at the instruction of the Clinton State Department, made several trips to Cuba to meet with Raul Castro and lay the groundwork for McCaffrey’s brilliant plan, though the plan didn’t come off. McCaffrey regretfully blames “congressional pressure”—which grew after Cuba shot down the Brothers to the Rescue planes—for foiling his grand alliance with the Castro brothers.

  Meanwhile, drug czar McCaffrey attempted a similar joint effort with Mexico in 1997. McCaffrey heartily applauded the appointment of General Jesús Gutiérrez as Mexico’s drug czar. “A man of absolute and unquestioned integrity,” gushed General McCaffrey while hosting the visiting Gutiérrez in Washington, D.C.2

  McCaffrey ordered the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to share U.S. intelligence and surveillance technology with Gutiérrez—who two weeks later was arrested by the Mexican government for being on the payroll of Amado Carrillo, also known as the “Lord of the Skies,” also known as Mexico’s drug kingpin. “Some DEA officials consider Carrillo the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” declared a PBS Frontline program.

  During Gutiérrez’s trial, where he got a seventy-seven-year sentence, we learned that McCaffrey’s “man of absolute and unquestioned integrity” intended to give our DEA and CIA intelligence—and even our sophisticated electronic equipment—to “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker.” Moreover, Carrillo had a long relationship with Castro and had been a frequent guest at Cuba’s Cayo Largo resort.

  “Cuba is an island of resistance to the drug threat,” declared the same sage and cocksure General McCaffrey at a press conference a little later in Havana. “They are very keen on cooperating in the fight against drugs. . . . They are sincere.... I am convinced these people do not intend to be, and represent no national security threat to us.”3

  “Poor Cuba,” lamented General McCaffrey in a speech at Georgetown University shortly afterward. “Location puts it in the path of international drug crime. But I do not see any serious evidence, current or in the last decade, of Cuban government complicity with drug crime.” Undaunted, in 1999 McCaffrey placed a direct hotline from the U.S. Coast Guard in Key West to the Cuban coast guard.4

  And with curious coordination, on August 28, 2001, Cuba’s justice minister expressed his willingness to cooperate with the Bush administration on drug interdiction, while General McCaffrey gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he lectured the Bush administration on why it should create a joint Caribbean drug interdiction command that specifically included Cuba.

  But when it comes to Cuban cooperation, let’s remember Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, who writes: “Cuba also provided radar services and escorts of Cuban coast guard boats for drug shipments.” And here’s what drug smuggler Reuben Ruiz says: “You know the big U.S. Coast Guard boats, the ones that are equipped with all the radars and everything? Well, Cuba has those too, and they would scan the whole area to make sure it was clear of U.S. Coast Guard boats for us. . . . And they’d tell us, okay, the coast is clear this way—go this way, go that way.”

  When Republican congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida learned of General McCaffrey’s proposal for a joint command in Key West with a U.S. Coast Guard admiral and a Cuban commander in the same office, he said, “Why not include a kingpin from the Medellin cartel too!”

  And who can forget famous Clinton financial backer (to the tune of $20,000) Luis “El Gordito” Cabrera, or the pictures of him from the 1995 White House Christmas party, smiling with Hillary and backslapping with Vice President Gore. After he was arrested for cocaine smuggling—exactly two weeks after that party—pictures turned up of Cabrera smiling and backslapping with Fidel Castro.

  The affection was warranted. Castro had approved Cabrera routing his cocaine shipments through Cuba in return for a nice cut
of the profits. The details turned up during Cabrera’s trial. During the Clinton years, there were well-documented investigations of Clinton contributors with links to Red China. The investigations finally forced the Democratic National Committee to return nearly $3 million in contributions. (These investigations were also the subject of several well-documented books, including Year of the Rat and Red Dragon Rising by Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II, and Absolute Power by David Limbaugh.) Communist Cuba has always been jealous of Red China, and some think Cabrera was Castro’s attempt to gain his own influence over the White House. During the Clinton years, China received permission to buy high-tech militarily relevant technology for its nuclear weapons program. If Castro didn’t get access to our nuclear technology, he at least came tantalizingly close to getting DEA intelligence and technology.

  During his trial, Cabrera was eager to sing about his drug-smuggling arrangements with Castro in exchange for a lighter sentence. But Cabrera’s lawyer, Stephen Bronis, was shocked to discover that Janet Reno’s Justice Department didn’t want to hear about it. “It was pure politics and it stinks,” Bronis told the Miami Herald.5

  According to Bronis, Castro had told Cabrera, “I know your friends from Cali [the Colombian drug cartel]. I’ve met them. I know they’re here in Cuba. I like doing business with them.” But we don’t need to rely on Bronis’s word. We know from official Justice Department documents that Castro was so close to the Colombian cocaine barons that in 1984 Manuel Noriega visited Cuba, where Castro offered to mediate a spat between the Colombian drug lords and the Panamanian dictator. This information is in the United States’ indictment of Noriega.

  “Cuba was a paradise for us.” said Alejandro Bernal during a December 2001 interview. Bernal was Mexican drug kingpin Amado Carrillo’s contact with the Colombians. Bernal was interviewed in his country club prison in Colombia by Miami’s El Nuevo Herald while awaiting extradition to the United States. “We lived like kings in Cuba, hombre. And this goes way back. All of us knew it. You wanna go to place where nobody bothers you? Five million dollars for Fidel—it’s that easy. He’ll see to it that nobody touches you.”

  But according to Bernal, Carrillo paid Castro considerably more than $5 million. Bernal says Carrillo had houses and hotel suites in Cuba, which he used for drug deals and torrid sessions with his mistress. This confirmed what Mexican authorities reported during an investigation in 1997, when they also discovered that Carrillo laundered hundreds of millions in drug money in Castro’s Cuba. This investigation came right after Carrillo’s death (he died from complications from attempted plastic surgery).

  Hollywood likes to continually to retell the myth of how Castro cleaned up the allegedly gangster-ridden Cuba of Fulgencio Batista. The more interesting truth is that Castro is the dope trafficker next door, running the Cuban leg of the Colombian drug cartel. Funny how you don’t often hear about that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ROCK AGAINST FREEDOM!

  Havana hotels are off-limits to most Cubans, especially black Cubans. Cuba practices segregation, but somehow all the liberals who condemned South African apartheid swarm to Cuba’s segregated hotels open the drapes and say, “Ah, will ya look at that beach!” Then they order room service champagne, fire up a Cohiba, and toast the enforcer of tourist apartheid.

  Liberals—and the United Nations—called for economic sanctions against South Africa. The UN General Assembly passed the resolution: “We demand a total and immediate economic break with South Africa.” Yet the UN General Assembly yearly denounces the U.S. “embargo” of Cuba. And so do American liberals.

  “The Cuban embargo is the stupidest law ever passed in the United States,” said Jimmy Carter, who when he was in the White House (recall his “human rights” foreign policy) imposed embargoes against South Africa, Rhodesia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Nicaragua.1 (And unlike these embargoed countries, Cuba trades with every country on earth, and in 2003 the United States was Cuba’s sixth biggest trading partner, despite being “embargoed.”)

  Someone remind me: What terrible threat did Rhodesia—which fought on the Allied side in both world wars and offered to fight alongside us in Vietnam—ever present to the United States? Fidel Castro called the United States a “vulture preying on humanity”—but Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith (who flew combat missions on our side in World War II) never did, nor did he provide a haven for terrorists; indeed, he fought terrorists and Communists.

  Someone remind me: When did apartheid-era South African firing squads shoot down scores of U.S. citizens, or steal $1.8 billion from American citizens, or travel to Cu Loc prison camp outside Hanoi to join in torturing American POWs to death, the way Castro’s Cuba did? In fact, South Africa tried to stem Cuba-supported Communism in Africa.

  In Latin America, someone remind me: When did Uruguay, or Paraguay, or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, or Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua point missiles at us?

  Perhaps sanctions are to be applied to punish regimes for their internal wickedness? Fine, but neither Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, nor apartheid South Africa, nor Pinochet’s Chile had political incarceration rates anywhere near to Castro’s, or execution rates, or rates of state-supervised theft of private property, or the total denial of human rights, or anything remotely like the internal repression of the Cuban police state. During the height of apartheid, black Africans immigrated into South Africa; no one starved in Rhodesia because of state-run farms and rationing (they had to wait for Robert Mugabe for that); and Chile under Pinochet enjoyed a famous free-market economic recovery. Latin Americans aren’t banging on Cuba’s door, hoping to get into that Communist paradise; no one swims to Cuba hoping to enjoy greater freedom and a higher standard of living.

  Ponder this for second, friends: Before Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the United States. Cuba went from being the Western Hemispheric nation with the highest per capita immigration rate,2 (yes, higher than the United States, including the Ellis Island years) to one where 20 percent of the population fled, and where probably 80 percent sought to flee. They fled in planes and ships, they crammed into the steaming holds of merchant vessels, they squeezed in the wheelholds of transatlantic jets, they leaped into the sea on rafts and inner tubes, knowing that their chances were about one in three of making landfall. Thus they vote with their feet against a place Jack Nicholson declared “a paradise.” Thus they flee the handiwork of the man Colin Powell assures us “has done good things for Cuba.”3 Thus is their desperation to escape from Bonnie Raitt’s “happy little island.” And these were but a fraction of those clamoring to flee.

  “We emphasize the importance of maintaining sanctions. Sanctions were imposed to help us end the apartheid system. It is only logical that we must continue to apply this form of pressure against the South African government.”4

  That’s Nelson Mandela addressing (and thanking) the Canadian parliament in June 1990 for imposing and championing economic sanctions against South Africa. Yet need I mention that for more than forty years Canada has been Castro’s most generous business partner? Need I mention how Canada consistently bashes the United States for its “counterproductive” policy of sanctions against Cuba?

  “Sanctions which punish Cuba are anathema to the international order to which we aspire.” That’s Nelson Mandela in September 1998 while decorating Fidel Castro with the “Order of Good Hope,” South Africa’s highest civilian award. Yet probably no world figure is more associated with economic sanctions than Nelson Mandela.

  “For a long time our country stood alone on applying sanctions to South Africa. Ultimately, we were on the right side of history.” That’s Democratic senator Chris Dodd praising sanctions. “U.S. sanctions against Cuba can only be thought of as bullying tactics by the world’s strongest superpower against a small nation.” That’s Senator Dodd speaking at the National Press Club in September 2002.

  “There is no acceptable justification for the trade embargo or the diplomatic
isolation of Cuba,” writes former senator George McGovern. “The economic boycott of Cuba is a failure.” For thirty years he’s been banging the drums against it. He includes, of course, the obligatory dismissal of those who fled Castro’s tyranny: “I wouldn’t let a handful of noisy Cuban exiles in south Florida dictate our Cuba policy.”5 (Emphasis mine.)

  By the way, notice McGovern’s use of “our.” Call me overly sensitive, but he seems to imply that those “noisy Cuban exiles” (United States citizens like me) don’t qualify as gen-you-wine Americans. Imagine the repercussions, the media and Democratic caterwauling, if, say, Trent Lott or Tom DeLay expressed similar sentiments about any other ethnic group in America.

  George McGovern—a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner (awarded by Bill Clinton)—is a longtime fan of the great Fidel. McGovern says his frequent Cuban host is “very shy, sensitive, witty.... I frankly liked him.”6 The Cuban Maximum Leader first hosted his American admirer in 1975. In May 1977, the bedazzled McGovern wrote a travelogue of his visit in—where else?—the New York Times. Fidel took McGovern on an “impromptu” jeep ride into the countryside. Occasionally they stopped. “Everywhere we were surrounded by laughing children who obviously loved Fidel Castro!” wrote the rapt gentleman from South Dakota.7

  Alas, McGovern’s visit also had a practical and humanitarian purpose. “In my pocket,” wrote McGovern, “I carried a letter from the Boston Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant requesting that his parents be permitted to leave Havana to see him play in Boston. . . . Castro assured me this could be arranged,” gushed McGovern.8

  How touching. Some people might have asked themselves: What’s wrong with this picture? Why should a “president” decide whether Luis Tiant’s parents travel to see their son pitch in the United States? And why should I be praising one who does?