Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  Castro’s regime replaced a government where Cuban blacks served as president of the senate, minister of agriculture, chief of the army, and as head of state.8 Nowadays Cuba’s jail population is 80 percent black, its governmental hierarchy 100 percent white. Only 10 percent of the Communist Party’s central committee is black (and Cuba’s most prominent political prisoner, Oscar Biscet, is black). In April 2003, three black Cubans “hijacked” a ferry and tried to escape to Florida. They were captured, given a summary trial, and executed by firing squads. Castro responded to the outrage of Cuban exiles with, “What’s all this fuss about me shooting three little negritos?”9

  “I never saw a black face on my official three-day tour of Cuba,” says talk-radio host and columnist Lowell Ponte. “And that was a Potemkin tour back in 1977. I was a visiting journalist for the Los Angeles Times. Surely you’d think they’d try to snow me—like they snow so many others? Problem was, they were showing me around only to high government officials—and the Communists simply couldn’t find one who was black!

  “But finally they dragged one out. He was a principal at a school, where the little kids, after their Communist indoctrination, all went to work in a battery factory where their hands and arms were all exposed repeatedly to acid. . . . Try this any place else in the world and we’d have Oprah, Katie, Eleanor Clift, Rosie, the whole bunch, up in arms about ‘child labor, child slavery.’ Castro, naturally, gets away with it.”

  The corruption and sporadic brutality of Batista’s regime rankled Cuba’s middle and upper classes. “We didn’t care who overthrew Batista as long as somebody overthrew Batista,” said pre-Castro Cuba’s wealthiest man, Julio Lobo. “I’ll take complete chaos over Batista’s rule.” Lobo owned fourteen sugar mills, several Cuban banks, and Havana’s baseball team. He said this while being interviewed by British historian Hugh Thomas. In the late 1950s, Lobo bankrolled Castro’s July 26 Movement (perhaps partly as protection money to keep Castro’s “guerrillas” from burning his cane fields and blowing up his sugar mills). Three months after Batista’s overthrow, Lobo presented Castro’s government, in a public ceremony, with a check for $450,000 as a goodwill gesture (or perhaps as more protection money against the confiscation affecting many of his competitors).

  Exactly one year after this gesture of revolutionary goodwill, Lobo received a request on government stationery from the new head of Cuba’s national bank, the noted economist Che Guevara. The legendary revolutionary wanted a word with the legendary businessman. At the midnight meeting, Guevara offered Lobo a government post as minister of agriculture. As a perk, Lobo could keep one of his fourteen mills and even his house. See? Guevara smirked. So much for those rumors about me as some rigid Marxist ideologue!

  Julio Lobo asked for a day to think it over. He scooted out of Cuba the following night, without even packing a toothbrush. Castro and Che’s offers were often the kind you couldn’t refuse.

  “We know now that Castro was trained as a Communist in 1946 and 1947 in the Russian embassy in Cuba.” This was Julio Lobo in exile, giving the commencement speech to LSU’s graduating class in 1963 (he was an alumnus). “We now know that Castro was sent to Bogotá to disrupt the Conference of Prime Ministers in 1948, where he took a very sinister participation, killing with his own hands several people.... Books give so many details about Castro’s Communist activities during that period that it is incredible that he was not only not prevented but actually aided and abetted in the process of taking over Cuba.

  “It is noteworthy that the laborers and peasants whom Castro purported to save always maintained a stony indifference to Castro’s summons for a general strike. It was the idealistic bourgeois and the intellectuals who were what Khrushchev called ‘useful idiots’ who assisted and helped unwittingly the Communist takeover.”

  Lobo’s audience included several Cuban exile students perfectly familiar with his record. LSU always held a sizable contingent of Cuban students, who often attended LSU to study chemical engineering for careers in Cuba’s sugar mills. One of these students in the audience was my cousin, who told me that he and his fellow exiles applauded politely, but they all knew Lobo was one of the “useful idiots.”

  Another useful idiot was José “Pepin” Bosch, owner of Bacardi, another huge Cuban company—until Castro snatched its properties and the Boschs fled and refounded Bacardi in Puerto Rico. Bosch had backed and financed Castro’s movement throughout the late 1950s—possibly with even more lucre than the shrewd and crafty Julio Lobo.

  Early in the Cuban “rebellion,” the United States government sent a “fact-finding mission” headed by CIA officer (and liberal) Lyman Kirkpatrick to Oriente province. The U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, had reported that Castro had Communist leanings. The pro-Castro Boschs were eager to convince Kirkpatrick otherwise, so the Bacardi folks became the “fact-finders’ ” hosts and guides. They made sure Kirkpatrick’s men met all the “right people.” Among them was an elegant young lady who spoke flawless English, Vilma Espin. “We only want,” she told the shrewd CIA fact-finders, “what you Americans have: clean politics and a clean police system.”10 Lyman Kirkpatrick seemed highly impressed with Espin’s credentials as a Cuban democrat. Unfortunately, Vilma Espin was a rabid (but secret) Communist Party member. Two years later, she married Maximum Brother Raul Castro, a man even more swinish and bloodthirsty than his brother Fidel.

  During Castro’s first year in power, Bacardi’s José “Pepin” Bosch was still so smitten with the glorious revolución that he begged a plane seat and accompanied Castro on his triumphal April 1959 tour of the United States. “Radical chic” didn’t start with Tom Wolfe’s witty revelation in 1970. Bored and ditzy debutantes threw themselves at Castro and his “rebels.” Take the aforementioned Vilma Espin herself. She was a graduate of both Bryn Mawr College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her father was a high executive at Bacardi and her family was rolling in money. Cuba’s old aristocracy loved Castro until they were stuck living under his system—that radical chic-ness disappeared in a flash, and most of them ended up in exile.

  Living under Fidel is hard even for most leftists. Practically all of Salvador Allende’s Marxist partisans who found refuge in Cuba after the Pinochet coup have since fled in desperation—some to the United States. My own family had a branch of old-line Cuban Communist Party members. They live in Miami today.

  Life in Castroland is damn hard for socialist ideologues. It’s a cinch, however, for terrorists and gangsters. Those are Castro’s true friends and cronies.

  The amazing thing is that after having been forced to flee from Castro, Cuban Americans in Miami are now condemned by liberals. Liberals typically pronounce the words “Miami Cubans” as if smelling curdled milk, and they inevitably denounce them as Batistianos. “Cuba policy has not been decided in Washington,” harrumphs Bill Press. “It’s been decided in Miami, by former Batista supporters, who lost the revolution to Castro in 1959 and still think they can reverse history.”11 Or as my late history professor Stephen Ambrose said, “Those rich Cubans fled to Miami and started agitating to go to war in order to reclaim all their ill-gotten property.” Even in some liberal (artistic, intellectual) Cuban exile circles, especially in New York or Spain, digs against Miami’s Cubans are de rigueur on grounds of class. To them, “Miami Cuban” represents what red-state America is to American liberals.

  Before Castro, Cuba had a huge middle class—36 percent of Cuba’s population in 1957, according to the United Nations. Most who fled Cuba from 1959 to 1966 were middle class white-collar professionals. The book Miami: City of the Future cites a University of Miami study that a majority of south Florida’s Cuban Americans qualified as blue-collar back in the old country. Almost all these Cubans fled with only the clothes on their backs.

  In his book The Spirit of Enterprise, George Gilder titled a chapter “The Cuban Miracle.” He wrote: “No other immigrant group so inundated a city and transformed it so quickly and successfully, while
achieving such multifarious business breakthroughs as the nearly 800,000 fugitives from Castro’s regime who made Miami their home after 1960.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1997 Cuban Americans owned 125,300 companies, with annual revenues of $26.5 billion. The 1998 census showed that second-generation Cuban Americans have higher educational and income levels than Americans in general. And of course they vote Republican. No wonder liberals hate them.

  CHAPTER NINE

  STUPID LIBERALS IN THE CIA

  “Castro is not only not a Communist, he’s a strong anti-Communist fighter.”1 That’s what the CIA’s reigning expert on Latin American Communism, a genius named Gerry Drecher (who worked under the alias of Frank Bender) said after meeting with Fidel Castro in 1959. Frank Bender also approached Rufo López-Fresquet, Castro’s first economics minister who accompanied Castro on that trip to the U.S., and offered to share his intelligence with Castro in the joint anti-Communist fight.2

  “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas.” That’s Robert Reynolds, who was the CIA’s “Caribbean desk” specialist on the Cuban revolution from 1957 to 1960.3

  “They were all pro-Castro.” That’s another CIA operative in Cuba at the time, Robert Wiecha. “All—and so was everyone in State, except [Republican] Earl Smith.”4 The CIA is a government bureaucracy like any other, with the same liberal bias, as Cuban Americans know all too well. Many able and patriotic Cubans walked away from the CIA from 1960 to 1962, amazed, aghast, and disgusted that the CIA wanted to work only with Cuban socialists. Former Fidelistas were their favorites. This wasn’t new for the CIA. From the beginning of the Cold War, it made a pet of the Democratic Left.

  “We want for Cuba what you want for the U.S.,” exclaimed Rubio Padilla to Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence. “We want free enterprise, the rule of law—not socialism.”5 Padilla was a medical doctor, a prominent lay Catholic leader, and one of pre-Castro Cuba’s most respected figures. He was untainted by any Batista connection. In fact, he loathed Batista and had worked against him his entire life. Padilla wanted to work with the CIA in the anti-Castro fight. But after seeing the leftist bigotry of the agency, he predicted its efforts would end in disaster and refused to be a part of it. He worked tirelessly for decades, helping destitute exiles and seeking his homeland’s liberation. But he wanted nothing more to do with the CIA.

  Unhappily, this antipathy was often mutual. “I’ve dealt with a fairly rich assortment of exiles in the past,” wrote CIA honcho Desmond Fitzgerald. “But none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro—a sculptor in silly putty.”6

  Desmond “Des” Fitzgerald was a Camelot CIA man, Harvard educated and a Kennedy family intimate. “Bobby Kennedy and Desmond Fitzgerald conducted most of their business together at Washington cocktail parties and receptions, rather than in their respective offices,” wrote John Davis in his book The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster.

  “Des Fitzgerald always called the attorney general ‘Bobby,’ not ‘Mr. Attorney General,’ and he was photographed so often at Georgetown cocktail parties that his CIA cover was probably blown,” said a CIA colleague. 7

  When Desmond Fitzgerald talks about “genuine stupidity,” you ought to know that he was the mastermind of many ingenious plots to assassinate Castro. One was to employ an exploding sea conch. Another involved infecting Fidel’s scuba regulator with tuberculous bacilli. Yet another plan was to douse his wetsuit with deadly chemical agents. As we know, none of these panned out. Fitzgerald finally settled on an ink pen with a poison hypodermic tip so thin that Castro wouldn’t feel it when the assassin “accidentally” brushed it against him.

  Many of the allegedly stupid Cuban exiles—and many of the CIA’s own lower-level operatives (who were generally on excellent terms with the Cuban exiles)—tried to dissuade Fitzgerald from his ingenious plans. What troubled them more even than the Austin Powers–level brilliance of the schemes was the man Fitzgerald was entrusting with Castro’s assassination. He was immensely proud that he’d set up an “inside job,” recruiting a Cuban official for the deadly deed. The Cuban exiles tried to tell Fitzgerald that man he’d recruited to assassinate Castro was a double agent.8

  The double agent was a Castro intimate named Rolando Cubela. He’d meet Fitzgerald or his subordinates in Brazil or France and then fly back to Havana and report them to his boss, Fidel Castro.

  “You think Castro’s just gonna sit on his ass and not retaliate?” snorted Frank Sturgis.9

  Sturgis knew Castro personally from flying arms to Castro during the anti-Batista days. The CIA employed Sturgis as part of its anti-Castro effort. Castro answered Sturgis’s question on September 7, 1963, shrieking: “We are prepared to answer in kind! U.S. leaders who plan on eliminating Cuban leaders should not think that they are themselves safe!”10 (Emphasis mine.)

  Lyndon Johnson came to agree with Sturgis. “I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” he said in an off-the-record chat with Howard K. Smith after viewing classified documents. “Kennedy tried to get Castro—but Castro got Kennedy first. It will all come out one day.”11

  General Alexander Haig came to agree with Sturgis too. Haig served as a military aide in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. “As I read the secret report, I felt a sense of physical shock, a rising of the hair on the back of my neck,” Haig wrote. He was reading a classified report one month after the Kennedy assassination. “I walked the report over to my superiors and watched their faces go ashen.” He was told: “From this moment, Al, you will forget you ever read this piece of paper, or that it ever existed.”12

  The classified intelligence report that so rattled Haig detailed precisely how a few days before the Dallas assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, accompanied by Castro intelligence agents, had been spotted in Havana. He’d traveled there from Mexico City.

  Haig saw this well before the Warren Commission report was published. Among the few people who knew that Oswald had traveled to Mexico City and visited the Cuban embassy were Cuban exiles: Salvador Diaz-Verson knew it, Carlos Prio knew it, and Emilio Nunez Portuondo knew it. This last got the hair-raising datum from a friend who worked at the embassy. The day after the assassination, Portuondo’s friend, a closet Castro hater, recognized Lee Harvey Oswald’s picture.

  “Asesinos!” screamed Elena Garro, a Mexican national with friends at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The day after the assassination she stood pointing at the embassy building. “Asesinos!” she yelled, convulsing in sobs. She recognized Lee Harvey Oswald too. She’d seen him hobnobbing with Cuban embassy people several days earlier. A friend of Garro’s, a Mexican intelligence agent named Manuel Calvillo, told her to watch it, and even to get out of town for a while. She was in danger from the Communists. Calvillo himself took Elena Garro and her daughter into hiding.13

  “Castro always had his best intelligence people in Mexico City,” says a man who often went up against them, longtime Cuban freedom fighter Raphael “Chi-Chi” Quintero, who today lives in Miami.

  The aforementioned Portuondo was well known in diplomatic circles, by the way. He’d been Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-1950s. Portuondo had already made a notorious name for himself when he ripped into the Soviets for their butchery of Budapest in 1956, causing much gasping and coughing from the assembled delegates to the General Assembly.

  Immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Portuondo told U.S. intelligence that Oswald had been at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, but he refused to divulge his source. Ironically, on the very day of the Kennedy assassination, Des Fitzgerald was meeting in Paris with double agent Rolando Cubela, giving him the poison ink pen to take back to Havana.

  The Central Intelligence Agency was scrupulous about excluding from its anti-Castro fight anyone with experience fighting Castro. Rolando Masferrer’s private army in Cuba, los Tigres, specialized in giving the Castroite “rebels” a taste of their own medicine during the
rebellion. “Hey, somebody had to fight the Castroites,” snorted Masferrer in an interview years later. “Batista’s army sure wasn’t.”

  The CIA wanted nothing to do with the exiled Masferrer. Indeed, Masferrer was jailed in Florida right before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Repeatedly rebuffed by the CIA, the enterprising Masferrer was forming another private army and was poised for an invasion himself.

  Or take a Cuban gentleman named Raphael Diaz-Balart. His two sons, Lincoln and Mario, are among the most effective conservative Republicans in Congress today. In May 1955, Batista personally ordered the release of Fidel Castro as part of a general amnesty after Castro had served a measly seventeen months of his fifteen-year sentence. Senator Raphael Diaz-Balart thought Batista’s general amnesty stupid. In a speech in the senate chamber, he said, “Fidel Castro and his group have repeatedly declared from their comfortable prison that they will leave prison only to continue plotting acts of violence and whatever it takes to achieve the total power they seek.” The senator continued, “They have refused to take part in any type of peaceful settlement, threatening both the members of the government and members of the opposition who support electoral solutions to the country’s problems.

  “They do not want peace,” Senator Diaz-Balart stressed. “They do not want a national solution. They do not want democracy, or elections, or fraternity. Fidel Castro and his group seek only one thing: power—and total power at that. And they want to achieve that power through violence so that their total power will enable them to destroy every vestige of law in Cuba, to institute the most cruel, most barbaric tyranny... a totalitarian regime, a corrupt and murderous regime that would be difficult to overthrow for at least twenty years.” Diaz-Balart was an optimist. It’s now been more than forty years that Castro has brutalized Cuba. But the senator was right about everything else.