Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel, and cowardly. He was full of himself, a consummate fraud and an intellectual vacuum. He was intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke in clichés, and was a glutton for publicity. But ah! He did come out nice in a couple of publicity photos, high cheekbones and all. And we wonder why he’s a hit in Hollywood.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CUBA BEFORE CASTRO

  In 1955, a murderer and terrorist was in a Cuban jail. I’ll let the prisoner himself, Fidel Castro, describe a Batista-era jail: “I feel like I’m on vacation!” No one ever got the same impression from one of Castro’s jails. It gets even better: “Tonight it’s angel hair pasta with calamari in red sauce and some Italian chocolates for dinner followed by an excellent cigar. Tomorrow morning I’ll be in the courtyard again lying in a lounge chair in my shorts feeling the sea breeze in my face. Sometimes I think I’m on vacation.”1

  Funny how the liberal media, which regularly ignores Castro’s gulag of torture and executions, invented a Batista that Castro wouldn’t recognize. “Batista murdered thousands,” wrote the incomparable Herbert Matthews in the New York Times in 1957, “usually after torture.”

  The Chicago Tribune’s Jules Dubois was more prosaic: “The Cuban dictator [Batista] is an egomaniac, a man of greed, a sadist. He crushes everyone who is an obstacle in his path. He orders the persecution, torture, assassination, and exile of his obstructionists. He directs the thought control of the entire population and insists upon the deification of his person and his relatives. He instills fear and total subjugation among his subordinates. He purges the judiciary to destroy the independence of the courts. He operates a police state with censorship of all media and limitless spies.”2

  Then the sagacious Dubois caps it: “It was not until Fidel Castro came along that the people of Cuba found the leader to fight for their lost liberty.” Actually, it was not until Fidel Castro that inner tubes (for rafts) and ping-pong paddles (for oars) became the hottest items on Cuba’s black market—or that Cuba even needed a black market. It was not until Fidel Castro that Cuba experienced the highest rate of emigration, per capita, of any nation in the Western Hemisphere in the twentieth century. It was not until Fidel Castro that the police state painted by Dubois became a reality.

  But from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from CBS to CNN, from Harvard to Berkeley, liberal pundits and professors all assert that pre-Castro Cuba was a pesthole of grinding poverty, oppression, and hopelessness.

  Colin Barraclough of Toronto’s Globe and Mail epitomizes these scribbling donkeys. “Fulgencio Batista presided over one of the most blood-soaked and corrupt, yet frighteningly successful, regimes of the century. Supported by an army of thugs and torturers, and aided by American mobster Meyer Lansky, Batista built an island of fantasy dedicated to the seven deadly sins. Batista’s thugs protected their patch with sadistic pleasure—the bodies of those who objected to the corruption or the opulence were often found hanging from lamp posts. By the late 1950s, an evening out could be a disturbing experience. Your driver could turn around at a stoplight and show you photos of bodies bloodied with bullets and young faces ripped apart by tortures so savage that the daiquiris, the sweet roast pork, the yummy yams, the fine Havanas, the hot sex, nothing tasted good any more.” Barraclough wrote this in 2004. Not content with denouncing Batista’s Cuba, the rest of the article promotes travel and trade to Castro’s Cuba.

  Just a reminder: Batista’s Cuba had the second highest per capita income in Latin America (higher than Austria’s or Japan’s ) as well as net immigration (in 1958, for example, the Cuban embassy in Rome had applications from twelve thousand Italians for immigrant visas).3 Castro’s Cuba, on the other hand, has the highest political incarceration rate on earth (as of 1995, 500,000 prisoners had passed through Castro’s gulag, according to the human rights organization Freedom House.4 Given Cuba’s population, Castro incarcerated at a higher rate than Stalin and is shunned even by Haitian refugees. But the only shortcoming of Castro’s Cuba, according to the Globe and Mail, is that “All car-rental companies are state owned and rates are exorbitant.” And, of course, the Globe and Mail criticizes the American trade “embargo.”

  Leftists just love how Castro has transformed Cuba, no matter what it’s done to the Cubans. Armando Valladares, who served twenty-two years in Castro’s dungeons before President Ronald Reagan appointed him U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission, wrote:What shocked me the most about United Nations politics during my time there was the double standard of many governments. One of the most glaring examples was the attitude of the Spanish government under the leadership of Socialist president Felipe González. While I was in Geneva, friends in Spain sent me a copy of a confidential report on the violation of human rights in Cuba, prepared in secret by the Spanish Chancery itself. This report documented systematic torture, crimes, and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of Cuban political prisoners, including religious persecutions. But the Spanish foreign ministry’s official document concluded by stating: “But even so, we cannot condemn Castro because that would be proving the Americans right.”

  “A week before this report was leaked to the Spanish press,” continues Valladares, “the Spanish Chancery issued a statement declaring that Spain did not believe that Cuba had human rights problems.”5

  Here you have it, friends. Castro gets away with his wholesale butcheries, lies, repression, and terrorism because for half a century now, his bearded and military-clad figure has symbolized anti-Americanism in its most virulent—hence appealing—form.

  But a few facts: Back in the bad old Batista days, so many hundreds of thousands of Spaniards sought immigration to Cuba that flustered Cuban officials finally imposed quotas to stem this flood of Europeans wanting to live in Cuba. From 1910 to 1953, Cuba took in more than one million Spanish immigrants (along with 65,000 immigrants from the United States)—and Cuba’s population in 1950 was only 5.8 million. 6 Here’s another fact that explains all the immigration: In 1958, Cuba had almost double Spain’s per capita income. Quite a contrast from Castro’s paradise. And how about this: Today, Spain’s two biggest retail chains are owned (and were started) by Cuban exiles.

  Here’s something else: When the right-wing Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, Fidel announced a national holiday—in honor of Franco, not in enmity. Something that many leftists don’t acknowledge is that Castro has stayed true to his fascist roots. Indeed, leftists like José “Pepe” Figueres of Costa Rica and Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela were Castro’s first and bitterest enemies in Latin America. They were socialists, all right—but they were pro-American socialists, hence instant foes. Franco, a genuine fascist with the blood of tens of thousands of Communists on his hands, was an instant friend, because of Spanish anti-Americanism.

  All of this is no apology for Batista. Cuba’s prosperity (higher per capita income than Austria or Ireland, double Japan’s), its civil institutions (including a completely independent judiciary), and its free, vibrant, and sassy press were in spite of having a political hoodlum at the helm. But Batistiano political rule was benevolent compared to Fidelista everything rule.

  Cuban Americans hear Batista compared to Castro in practically every political conversation: “Hey, both were dictators, right? And Cuba was horribly poor and exploited back then, right? So what’s the big deal? At least now the people have pride, free health care, free education . . .”

  “At first I’d want to tear my hair out!” That’s Manuel Márquez-Sterling. His father, Carlos, helped write Cuba’s constitution in 1940 and was considered by many Cubans and by U.S. ambassador Earl Smith as the winner of Cuba’s last presidential election, in November 1958. Then Batista’s people got hold of the ballots and declared Batista the winner. The U.S. embassy conducted its own investigation and considered Carlos Márquez-Sterling the legitimate winner. So did Fidel Castro, who’d threatened to assassinate Carlos several times
unless he withdrew his name from contention (he didn’t).

  Castro knew damn well Márquez-Sterling would win. And he knew damn well this would blow Castro’s scheme of filling Cuba’s political power vacuum as the only “viable alternative to Batista.” (This Castroite fable is still nearly ubiquitous among Cuban “scholars.”) Having failed to intimidate Márquez-Sterling and botching a couple of assassination attempts against him, Castro’s armed goons simply rounded up all the ballots at gunpoint and burned them. So there, Márquez-Sterling, said the Castroites. See? We won anyway.

  Márquez-Sterling was Batista’s best known and most vociferous political enemy in Cuba. His son Manuel was himself roughed up by Batista’s police. He bristles at the equation of Batista with Castro. “The comparison is ludicrous, preposterous, completely idiotic. It’s not even a case of apples and oranges. It’s grapes to watermelons. I’m a retired college professor. I dealt with some of America’s best-educated people. And I’d hear this outrageous idiocy repeatedly.

  “Look, I finally said to all my students, faculty, cohorts, and friends. You find me a country—and not just in Latin America, but anywhere—that in its first fifty years of independence climbed to the world’s top 10 percent in almost every socioeconomic indicator, as Cuba did. Go ahead, show me one.

  “In the late 1950s, Cuba had a political problem, not a socioeconomic one. Overall, Cuba was rich, her people healthy and well-educated. The Cuban peso was always on par with the U.S. dollar. Cuba’s gold reserves covered its monetary reserves to the last penny. But that’s only half the story, because Cuban labor laws were among the most advanced in the world. Cuban labor got a higher percentage of the national GNP than in Switzerland at the time.

  “And regarding that vaunted Castroite health care we hear and read about constantly, in 1957, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was the lowest in Latin America and the thirteenth lowest in the world, for heaven’s sake! Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in that department. Now (and using Castro’s own inflated figures) it’s twenty-fourth in the world. And this with 60.4 percent of Cuba’s pregnancies ending in abortion (which skews infant mortality rates downward). In 1957, Cuba had twice as many physicians and teachers in relation to population as the U.S. It ranked first in Latin America in national income invested in education and its literacy rate was 80 percent. In 1958, Cuba even had more female college graduates (to scale) than the U.S.

  “Before Fidel, Cubans were already among the healthiest and best-educated people in the world—and it didn’t require Hitler-level political executions and Stalin-level gulags to achieve. Back in the mid-1960s, my father, a Cuban scholar and political figure of wide reputation, the man who would have been Cuba’s president with honest elections, wrote a manuscript seeking to set the record straight about the Cuban revolution. In it, he stressed many of the things I’ve just catalogued. Well, no U.S. publisher would touch it.

  “But the president of one of America’s biggest, most prestigious publishing houses at the time (a man who had never been in Cuba, by the way), had the courtesy to respond to my father in a curt rejection letter. ‘Mr. Márquez-Sterling,’ he wrote, ‘You certainly have peculiar notions about Cuba.’

  “So here’s an American who got all his information about Cuba from Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, and Jack Paar, responding this way to the man who had lived in Cuba his entire life, whose family had been involved in Cuban politics for two centuries, who helped draft the Cuban constitution of 1940, and who probably won her last elections!

  “Like I said, given the wholesale ignorance—let’s be polite and call it that—on Cuban matters, given the enormous success of Castro’s propaganda offensive on these matters—you want to pull your hair out sometimes!”

  Well put, Mr. Márquez-Sterling. I know exactly what you mean. It reminds me of my old college history prof, Dr. Stephen Ambrose: “Castro threw out an SOB and liberated Cuba.” Liberated Cuba from what? There were no ration cards or food shortages under Batista.

  There was no totalitarian control of the media. I’ll quote a U.S. State Department document here: “It is no exaggeration to state that during the 1950s, the Cuban people were among the most informed in the world, living in an uncharacteristically large media market for such a small country. Cubans had a choice of fifty-eight daily newspapers during the late 1950s, according to the UN statistical yearbook.” It is true that newspaper articles were occasionally subject to modifications at Batista’s behest. More seriously, as in the case of Manuel Márquez-Sterling, some of Cuba’s cheekier reporters were occasionally jailed or manhandled by Batista goons. But Batista’s censorship was an on-again, off-again type of thing.

  Batista didn’t control what Cubans learned in school. He didn’t decide who they worshiped, what they earned, where they traveled or emigrated. Recall Jeane Kirkpatrick’s book Dictatorships and Double Standards, in which she distinguishes authoritarian from totalitarian rule: “Authoritarian regimes do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. . . . Totalitarian regimes claim that the state has jurisdiction over the whole of society—that includes religion and family, the economy. The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don’t at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. They believe that everything is Caesar’s—the government should claim it and control it.”

  Well, Batista probably didn’t even qualify as authoritarian. He was certainly no Franco or Pinochet, or even a Stroessner or Peron. (Had he been, had he extinguished Castro’s rebels like a true dictator, Miami jukeboxes today would feature more Tanya Tucker than Gloria Estefan.)

  The first two presidents I mentioned above (Franco and Pinochet) were professional military men. Batista, though a “general” (self-appointed), is said to have disliked military trappings. He’d made it legitimately to sergeant in Cuba’s pre-1933 professional military. He merited that. Chances are he’d have made colonel, perhaps even general, on genuine merit. But his heart wasn’t in it.

  Batista joined the military, like so many others of his humble social stratum in Cuba, as a means to get ahead in life, to get an education, and to have a job. But Batista’s true calling was politics. “I think you’ll find him a likable individual despite what others may have told you,” Eisenhower told Earl Smith upon his appointment to ambassador in the summer of 1957.7

  Batista’s first coup in 1933, known as the “Sergeants’ Revolt,” disbanded and demoralized Cuba’s professional military, replacing much of the professional officer corps with a new crop of self-appointed “colonels” and “generals.” This bunch was much better versed in political guile, corruption, and the third degree for political enemies than in any of the military basics and virtues. A professional military would have come in handy in 1958, but Cuba didn’t have one.

  President Batista always went out of his way to be photographed in civilian clothes in a family setting. He was scrupulous in keeping his uncouth military and police operatives well behind the scenes, and was rarely seen with them in public. “Batista never wanted to be a black soldier,” wrote Cuban journalist Gastón Baquero, himself black and employed by Cuba’s oldest and most aristocratic newspaper, El Diario de la Marina. “Instead, Batista always longed to be a white caballero [gentleman].”

  The mulatto sergeant-become-president Fulgencio Batista always studiously avoided the “caudillo” image. That was for President Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic, for President Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, for President Rojas Pinillas in Colombia, and all the rest. Cuba was different from the rest of Latin America. It was more North American culturally, commercially, and—as Batista was desperate to prove—politically. Batista wanted to put up a respectable, democratic image.

  Ba
tista was mostly self-educated. He read voraciously and was always boning up on his English. He kept a bust of Abraham Lincoln in his office and a home in Daytona Beach. When Ike refused him exile in the United States he was hurt, but—as a shrewd and seasoned politician himself—he “understood the reasoning.” All who knew Fulgencio Batista say he genuinely yearned to be a popular, democratically elected leader, which he’d actually been from 1940 to 1944.

  Batista, de facto head of Cuba after his coup in 1933, voluntarily relinquished his post in 1940 and presented himself as a candidate in Cuba’s presidential election that year. He won handily in what American observers described as scrupulously clean elections.

  Another interesting fact: In 1940, at a time when Cuba’s population was almost 70 percent white, Cuba’s people elected a black president, one who’d been born to former slaves in a palm-leaf shack with dirt floors. Cuba’s aristocracy still scorned Batista. As president, he was denied entry into the exclusive Havana Yacht Club.

  Race was a factor in Cuba’s revolution. When Batista’s soldiers captured some of Castro’s men who tried to invade Cuba from Mexico in 1956, they exclaimed “Son blancos!” (Hey, they’re whites!) “Get them!” Many or most of Batista’s soldiers were black and practically all of Castro’s rebels were white.

  “You’re from the Georgia? Good! I really like your treatment of blacks up there. Down here all blacks are marijuaneros [marijuana smokers, dope fiends] or Batistianos.” This was a July 26 Movement’s (Castro’s group) operative talking. He was signing up an American volunteer named Neil McCauley for Castro’s rebel force in 1958.