Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  He continued, “This is because Fidel Castro is personally nothing more than a psychopathic fascist.... I believe this amnesty—so imprudently adopted—will bring days, many days, of mourning, pain, bloodshed, and misery to the Cuban people. For Cuba’s sake, I ask God that I be the one mistaken.”14

  Why was Castro in prison to begin with? He’d been jailed for planning and leading the murderous attack on Cuba’s Moncada army barracks—an attack that killed more than a hundred people on July 26, 1953. Not that Castro personally had a hand in any of the shooting; he always studiously avoided combat where the enemy might shoot back. “Run!” one former colleague remembers Castro shrieking when Batista’s soldiers unexpectedly defended themselves. “Every man for himself!”15

  “Wait a minute!” said the colleague. “What about the girls? We can’t just . . . ?” (Castro’s July 26 Movement was a progressive bunch, shoving women into combat.) “No time to rescue the girls—no time for that!”16 Castro gasped as he streaked from the battle zone like a gazelle on steroids.

  Sadly, many of the saps Fidel and Raul left behind faced death and torture by Batista’s soldiers. These enraged and undisciplined troops handed Castro his fondest wish: the July 26 Movement now had martyr and victim status, thanks to Cuba’s then-free press. Unfortunately for Cuba, Batista had banned capital punishment. And Cuba had a completely independent judiciary. So Fidel received a pretty light sentence for plotting, leading, and inciting armed violence that left more than a hundred people dead. Actually, the judges who sentenced Castro to fifteen years almost apologized for it. According to Georgie Anne Geyer, Nieto Pineiro-Osorio, the judge who did the sentencing, “was vastly sympathetic to the Castro insurgents.” Some judges, like Manuel Urrutia, voted for acquittal.17

  A completely fair trial was possible under Batista; indeed, it was the norm. This ended in a flash when the “Castro insurgents” took power. No sooner had Castro entered Havana and assembled his sap cabinet than they reinstated the death penalty, abolished habeas corpus, and made their new revolutionary laws apply retroactively. The “trials” of “Batista’s war criminals” were shameless farces, sickening charades. The chief prosecutor, Che Guevara, said it best: “Evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.”

  You might think that Senator Raphael Diaz-Balart had Castro’s number in 1955. Well, in 1960, Diaz-Balart, living in the United States as an exile, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee. Its hearings were titled “Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean.”

  “As a Cuban, I appreciate the hospitality extended to me by this great brother country and am happy to respond to the subpoena of this distinguished committee,” Diaz-Balart began.

  Senator Kenneth Keating: Mr. Balart, you refer to Fidel Castro as the most prominent member of the Communist movement in the Western Hemisphere, but probably not a card-carrying member.

  Diaz-Balart: Yes, sir, that is correct. From 1945, when Castro started at the University of Havana, he was always very close to the known Communists there. He was a perfect front man for them—until he started killing fellow students.

  Jay Sourwine [general counsel]: Do you know who shot Leonel Gomez in 1947?

  Diaz-Balart: Fidel Castro shot Leonel Gomez, because he thought Gomez, being a friend of then Cuban president Grau, would be an obstacle to Castro’s ambitions.

  Sourwine: Who was Manolo Castro?

  Diaz-Balart: He was the president of the Federation of University Students at Havana University in 1947.

  Sourwine: Is he alive?

  Diaz-Balart: No. Fidel Castro murdered him in 1947, shortly after he tried to murder, but only wounded, Gomez.

  Sourwine: Did you know Fernandez Caral?

  Diaz-Balart: Yes, he was a sergeant of the Havana University police.

  Sourwine: Is he still alive?

  Diaz-Balart: No. Fidel Castro murdered him because he was pressing the investigation of Manolo Castro’s murder.

  Sourwine: Do you know Raul Castro?

  Diaz-Balart: Yes, sir. He’s Fidel Castro’s brother.

  Sourwine: Do you know if he is a Communist?

  Diaz-Balart: Raul Castro is a very well-trained Communist agent. As a young man he went to Prague for training.

  Sourwine: Do you recall giving us the names of two Russians whom you said arrived in Cuba in May 1959 to start labor agitation in Latin America?

  Diaz-Balart: One was Eremev Timofei and the other Ivan Arapov.

  And so on. Here is a Cuban who loves the United States, who was a distinguished pre-Castro senator, who was privy to vital information about Soviet penetration into Latin America, and who knew all about Castro—an absolutely ideal CIA asset, right?

  Wrong. The CIA repeatedly rebuffed Diaz-Balart. He was banned from political planning for the Bay of Pigs. He was even prohibited from joining the invasion force as a private citizen. He was willing to do anything to be involved, but the CIA said no. Worse than that, the INS started harassing him about his ability to stay in the United States.

  “You’ll have fun working with these guys,” chuckled a CIA officer to Howard Hunt, who was known as the only conservative in his CIA circles. “These Cuban guys are all way to the left, Howard, all socialists.”18

  Before the Bay of Pigs, Hunt was instructed to fashion Cuba’s government-in-exile and write a new, socialist constitution for post-Castro Cuba. Hunt, who was on good terms with hundreds of Cuban exiles, knew that Cuba already had a perfectly good constitution—the 1940 constitution that Batista violated and Castro abolished. But, Hunt lamented, “All the Cubans I was given to work with had originally backed Castro. I considered most of them shallow thinkers.”19

  The socialist ex-Fidelistas were a very touchy matter with Cuban exiles. Only months before, in Cuba, Fidelistas posing as born-again anti-Fidelistas had infiltrated and betrayed the biggest anti-Castro conspiracy yet mounted, known as the Trinidad or Trujillo conspiracy. Dozens were shot. Thousands were jailed.

  The traitors were Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo (present-day leader of a “pro-engagement,” “anti-embargo,” and pro-Democrat group in Miami called Cambio Cubano) and an American rebel named William Morgan (who ran afoul of Fidel and was executed by Castro’s firing squad a year and a half later). In 1959, Menoyo and Morgan were revolutionary “comandantes” who occupied stolen mansions, drove stolen cars, and used stolen servants.

  Herbert Matthews profiled Morgan in the New York Times. According to the top Cuba expert at the world’s top newspaper, the strapping thirty-two-year-old Ohioan now serving as a revolutionary “major” was a humanitarian hero and a hero from World War II, a former paratrooper who had fought in the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles. Morgan’s hometown Toledo Blade also took up his cause. The Blade reported that “Major” Morgan’s force numbered five thousand when the revolution began—yet the number of anti-Batista rebels on the entire island never exceeded a few hundred until the very last week of the “war,” when they quickly quintupled to about three thousand. Such was the ferocity of the anti-Batista war, according to the Blade, that “only three thousand of Morgan’s men survived the bitter fighting.” Of course, we know that there was a grand total of 182 dead during the two-year-long “war.”

  The press was wrong about another thing. William Morgan was an AWOL G.I. who had never served a single day in World War II and had never seen a minute of combat. He’d been stationed in Japan well after the war and had missed the Korean War because he’d been jugged in the stockade. Earlier, as a juvenile in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, he’d been arrested for armed robbery. After his court-martial and dishonorable discharge for escaping from the brig and stealing a guard’s pistol, Morgan served time for robbery in two U.S. federal prisons.20

  He was also a bigamist, having married a Cuban girl while his wife, still living in Ohio, was on his tail for child support for the two children he’d abandoned. In 1957, Cuba looked like a nice place for a guy like Morgan to hole up, Castro’s band was the ideal outfit to join, and the
New York Times was the ideal agency to spread Morgan’s bullshit.

  At any rate, Morgan and Menoyo, claiming they’d recently turned on Castro, joined the Trujillo conspiracy. Castro himself ordered this in order to set a trap. The rebellion was so named because Dominican president Rafael Trujillo was helping the anti-Castro rebels with arms, and some of them were exiled in the Dominican Republic. The rebellion was to start with two planeloads of armed Cuban exiles flying from the Dominican Republic to the town of Trinidad on Cuba’s southern coast.

  Interestingly, the ever friendly, cooperative, (and liberal) U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Phil Bonsal, got wind of the impending anti-Castro rebellion and immediately alerted Castro’s government.21 (No U.S. ambassador ever alerted the Batista regime about anti-government conspiracies to which the embassy was privy; indeed, many anti-Batista conspirators were actually given refuge at Guantánamo Bay.) Ambassador Bonsal believed that Morgan really was an anti-Castroite. Bonsal feared that Castro might mistakenly implicate the American embassy in the plot because Morgan was an American.

  As we’ll see later, Morgan, perennial delinquent though he was, finally did turn on Castro and died bravely—even heroically—in front of a Communist firing squad. But because of Morgan and Menoyo’s treachery, many anti-Castro Cubans at the time were leery of the arrepentidos (alleged ex-Castroites) the CIA seemed so eager to recruit.

  For its military invasion of Cuba, the CIA at first excluded Cuban exiles with a military background because Batista had dominated the military. But eventually, officers like Erneido Oliva, Hugo Sueiro, and many others passed the cut after a thorough screening by the CIA and State Department. To a man, the Cuban officers performed stupendously in combat and honorably in captivity. Some are soldiers to this day. Oliva is a brigadier general in the U.S. Army. Sueiro is a highly decorated Vietnam vet.

  After the Cuban exiles caught on, they coached people on how to pass the screenings. “The Cuban Junta,” dictated John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, for the post–Bay of Pigs government being built by the Best and Brightest, “will have a strong leftist orientation.”22

  It’s no wonder that Earl Smith says that CIA men were among the most obstinately and passionately Fidelista of his embassy’s staff. He mentioned that both in his Senate testimony in 1960 and in his 1962 book The Fourth Floor. Almost thirty years later, Tad Szculc confirmed the CIA’s early Castrophilia in his book Fidel: A Critical Portrait. Szulc, a Castro admirer himself and—yes—a New York Times reporter, shows that the CIA’s support for Castro went beyond sympathy. According to Szulc, CIA agent Robert Wiecha handed $50,000 to a representative of Castro’s July 26 Movement in 1958.23

  Not everyone in the CIA was pro-Castro; it was the higher-ups, the suits, who were. The CIA’s lower-level, hands-on military men—men like Grayston Lynch, Rip Robertson, Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Baker, and Wade Gray are revered among Cuban Americans to this day. Some of them have their names emblazoned in a place of honor at the Bay of Pigs monument in Miami. Walk through Miami’s Little Havana and you’ll find streets named after them. Mention these courageous men’s names at any Cuban American gathering and then cover your ears, because the vivas could shatter your eardrums. Cuban soil was consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.

  Not to be outdone by the stupid liberals in the CIA, there were plenty of—surprise!—stupid liberals in the State Department too. In 1957, the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner (a Republican) made the mistake of warning his State Department superiors: “I saw a manifesto that he (Castro) had printed in Mexico, which stated his principles, what he was going to do. He was going to take over the American industries, he was going to nationalize everything. That, to me, meant only one thing, that this man was a radical. Castro talked and acts like a Communist and should not be supported by the U.S. Fidel doesn’t carry a Communist Party card, but his brother Raul is a Communist, everybody knows it.... Yes, they [New York Times articles] built him [Castro] up to being the Robin Hood or the savior of the country. It did have a great effect.”24

  Along with their State Department cronies, the New York Times clamored to have Arthur Gardner replaced in 1957. John Foster Dulles acquiesced and replaced him with Republican Earl T. Smith, who made the same mistake. “Castro is a Marxist,” he told his State Department superiors after a few months at his post. Indeed, during his first week on the job, Smith got word that Castro’s people planned to murder him. “Castro gives indications of his Marxism in his writings and speeches. There’s no question that Communists control his movement. If he takes over, it will not be in the best interests of Cuba or of the United States.”25

  Smith was axed exactly a week after Castro took power. Cuba’s own liberal media had much to do with Smith’s axing. “Shame on Ambassador Smith!” wrote Miguel Angel Quevedo in his Bohemia magazine in January 1959. “Ambassador Smith is disfiguring the realities of the tragedy in order to disorient the State Department. Now that we are victorious, he should go and never return.” The cover of this January 1959 issue featured the young, bearded Castro himself with the caption, “Honor and Glory to the National Hero!” Ten months later, Bohemia magazine’s entire operation was confiscated by the National Hero’s thugs and Quevedo was scrambling into exile for his very life. His journalists had ranted at Batista for seven years. Now these wiseacres were scrambling too. Six years after his magazine was confiscated and turned into a Communist propaganda organ, Quevedo, living in exile in Caracas, Venezuela, put a revolver to his head and blew his brains all over his living room.

  Despite Gardner and Smith’s warnings, the State Department imposed an arms embargo on Batista’s government (and refused to ship arms it had already bought and paid for). Then Smith was instructed to tell Batista, “You no longer enjoy the support of the U.S. government.” Smith protested the order, but met with Batista and did his duty.

  The State Department actually gave Castro’s new government official recognition before Castro had even entered Havana. “We put Castro in power,” a bitter Smith said in Senate testimony two years later.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “WE FOUGHT WITH THE FURY OF CORNERED BEASTS”

  Castro’s rebels skirmished for barely two years; his rebels in arms numbered only four hundred in late 1958; and only 182 people died in Castro’s “war” (though thousands died afterwards to Castro’s firing squads).

  But for some reason, most people don’t know about a much bigger war that lasted for six years (1960–66), which killed 6,000 government troops, and which Raul Castro himself estimated involved 179 different bands of anti-Communist guerrillas and rebels, mostly rural, mostly peasant. All this happened on our very doorstep, eight jet minutes away. Cubans know it as the Escambray Rebellion.

  You see, friends, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s few military victories came not as guerrillas but against guerrillas, in the most brutal, cowardly, and disgusting type of anti-insurgency war—or really massacres. Who knows that one of the most protracted and brutal guerrilla wars in the Western Hemisphere was actually fought against Castro and Che by poorly armed, landless peasants in Cuba’s Escambray mountains? Collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine—but Cuba’s Kulaks had guns (a few at the beginning, anyway; the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal cut them off from American aid) and a willingness to fight.

  For the Escambray Rebellion, no Cuban reporters existed, only Castro government propagandists and eunuchs. (Norberto Fuentes comes to mind here.) And the foreign reporters who rushed to Castro’s press hut never turned up for this war, though it took Castro six years; tens of thousands of troops; scores of Russian advisers; squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters, and flame-throwers; and a massive “relocation” campaign to finally crush these incredibly valiant and resourceful freedom fighters. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” says one veteran from Miami.

  “Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn more than a hundred palm-thatche
d cottages on the edge of the Zapata swamps,” writes Paul Bethel. “The Guajiro occupants of the cottages were accused by the regime of feeding and giving comfort to counter-revolutionaries.”1

  “I’ll never forget it,” recalls Acelia Pacheco, who was a young girl at the time and was among the “relocated.” “The Communists would pull up and simply start yanking everyone out of the house at gunpoint, jamming them into trucks, into carts, even onto mules. I’ll never forget the sight of the little children, even babies, completely bewildered, crying, bawling, the looks on their dirty, tear-streaked little faces. The mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers—some crying, some shouting horrible curses at the Communists—all of us were dumped in concentration camps hundreds of miles away from our ancestral homes, with no food for days at a time. Most of the men were taken elsewhere and never seen again. . . . I lived through all that!”2

  “Twelve of us guerrillas might find ourselves surrounded by five thousand Communist troops,” recalls freedom fighter Guillermo Calzada. “We fought violent battles each and every day against these odds, without food, without water, without sleep.... I went thirteen days without eating. I had eight men with me for one battle and ended up the only survivor. We were in constant motion . . . Russian helicopters overhead strafing us. . . . Worst of all were our armaments. We didn’t have much. By 1963, the Escambray guerrilla who had a handful of bullets to his name considered himself damn lucky. We made every bullet count too, shooting the Communists well after we saw the whites of their eyes.”3