And why did these men (and boys) fight? “I was a poor country bumpkin,” says Escambray hero Agapito Rivera from Miami today. “I didn’t have much, but I had hopes. I had aspirations. And I’d be damned if I’d go work like a damned slave on one of Castro and Che’s state farms. I planned on working hard—but on my own, for myself, getting my own land maybe. Then I saw Castro and the Communists stealing everything from everybody. They stole my hopes, my dreams . . . I had no choice.”4
Agapito Rivera had two brothers and nine cousins who took up arms in the anti-Castro freedom fight. He was the only survivor.
“A bunch of wimps. That’s right—wimps,” oinks Michael Moore about these men in his book Downsize This. “These Cuban exiles, for all their chest-thumping and terrorism, are really just a bunch of wimps. . . . They grabbed their assets and headed to Florida. . . . They came here, expecting us to fight their fight for them . . . these Cuban crybabies.”5
“I didn’t have anything Castro could possibly steal from me,” laughs Eusebio Peñalver from Miami today. “I was a country negro. No farm. No mansion, no sugar mill, no yacht, not even a car. None of that stuff—but goddammit, I had my freedom! My self-respect! Those Communist pigs wanted me to bow down before them like my great-grandparents who were slaves!”
Peñalver answered his would-be slavemasters with repeated blasts from an M-1 carbine. For almost two years he gave the Castro Communists holy hell with that carbine. “If the odds were only ten to one, we thought the battle a breeze,” he snorts. “Those Castro idiots came at us in waves, guess that’s how their Russian masters trained them. We Escambray rebels would shoot our way out of three or four encirclements by those imbeciles a week.... But we couldn’t go on—not without supplies. Surely we thought we’d get some from the Americans.... And we did, very early in the freedom fight. But it dried up. Hombre, we weren’t asking them to bleed and die for us. . . . But good grief, we did need arms and ammo. We had plenty of men who wanted to join the freedom fight with us. ‘Got any weapons?’ we’d ask. ‘No? Well then, let’s wait till we get some.’ ”
The wait was vain. The odds and strangulation of supplies finally took their toll and Peñalver was captured. He ended up serving longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela did in South Africa’s. But have you ever seen Peñalver featured at a UN, NAACP, or Congressional Black Caucus function? Peñalver is the longest serving black political prisoner of the twentieth century, yet our Castro-slobbering liberal media has made sure you’ve never even heard of him.
About a year into the Escambray Rebellion, who shows up in the area commanding government troops but the mighty Che Guevara himself. “And it couldn’t have come at a better time,” recalls a rebel. “We desperately needed some rest, some respite from the constant battles, to reorganize, try to resupply.”
With the mighty Che commanding their opponents, the rebels got exactly what they needed—and then some. “At first we couldn’t believe it,” recalls the rebel. “Che’s men simply lined up elbow to elbow, right out in the open like that, then swept through an area they thought held some rebels!”
Andy Jackson’s men never had such easy pickings against redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans. “We slaughtered them,” recalls the rebel. “Even against those outrageous odds, we were prevailing for a while. And we all got new arms and ammo—by taking them from dead Communists. It was great.”
But it was short-lived. “Guess even by Russian standards Che was hopeless, and soon he disappeared from the battle zone,” says the rebel. “We’d always heard that Fidel couldn’t stand Che. Castro was always sending Che off on little errands—to give one of his long, boring speeches at the United Nations, at some Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Africa, to the Punta del Este Conference in South America, anywhere, just to get that imbecile out of his hair for a while. Che’s personality grated on many Cubans. He was the typical haughty Argentine, but with nothing really to be haughty about. He was great at massacring defenseless men at La Cabana, but that’s about it.”
Here he laughs. “A couple of years ago, my grandson comes home with some book assigned to him in a college class, Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare. I could only laugh—and loudly! Years ago when I was younger, crazier, I might have stormed over to the school and given that professor a piece of my mind, maybe slapped the living shit out of him too. Nowadays I can only laugh—and at all those Che T-shirts and watches and movies. Just laugh, laugh, laugh. I guess it’s better this way.”
Many a peasant hut was torched, villages destroyed, and villagers summarily executed during the Escambray Rebellion. Might Platoon’s writer and director offer some insight into these butcheries? Why yes, actually. Oliver Stone has a long association with the butcher himself. “[Castro] is very warm and bright... a very driven man, a very moral man. He’s very concerned about his country. He’s selfless in that way.”6
Margarito Lanza Flores was another poor black Cuban. He reacted to the reinstitution of slavery in Cuba much like his brother in arms Eusebio Peñalver had, by raking the Communist enslavers with a Thompson machine gun. Soon Margarito was commanding a band of Escambray rebels himself, known as Capitan “El Negro” Tondique. His rebel band would pop up, blasting away, decimating Communist columns, and then vanish into the landscape. “El Negro” Tondique drove the Communists absolutely nuts7.
“The Castroites called us bandits,” snorts Tondique’s brother in arms Arcadio Peguero from Miami today. “In fact, we survived by relying on the support of thousands of small farmers in the Escambray.”8
That famous Maoist quote about how a guerrilla is a fish that swims and hides in the sea which is the people, etc., actually described these anti-Communist guerrillas to a T.
And the Communists knew it damn well. That’s what led to the massive and brutal relocation campaign, in which they ripped thousands of farmers from their ancestral homes and lands in the Escambray and shipped them to concentration camps hundreds of miles away.
This made things much easier for the gallant Reds. And one morning, after a ferocious firefight, Captain Tondique found himself completely surrounded by hundreds of Russian-armed troops in a sugarcane field. Naturally, the Castroites were too scared to go in after the legendary “El Negro.” So they set the canefield on fire from every corner and sat back. Tondique saw the flames closing in and knew how many hundreds of Communists he was up against that day, so he started digging into the ground and covered himself up with the dirt as the roaring flames passed over him. He lived but was burned horribly. The Reds swarmed in after the fire, spotted the horribly wounded Tondique (his face was a mass of huge black blisters, his hair scorched and matted to his head), and yanked him out.
They dragged him under a nearby bridge, stood him up, and prepared a firing squad. “Fuego!” bellowed the Communist commander, and “El Negro” was instantly on the ground—but scurrying away! He’d managed to hit the deck at the exact instant of the volley and it went over him. Tondique threw himself into the surrounding bushes and started to escape. “Get him!” shrieked the rattled Communist commander, Victor Dreke. “Get him! Don’t let him get away!” The Communists surrounded the grimacing, limping Tondique in the bushes and emptied several clips from their Czech machine guns into his charred and shattered body.9
Interesting postscript: On November 13, 2002, Tondique’s gallant murderer, Victor Dreke—a black himself but one who hired on at the Communist plantation as a guard and overseer—visited the United States as the guest of honor of Florida International University. Dreke was on a book tour, you see. He’d just written one detailing—among his other gallant Communist exploits—his massacre of Escambray peasants.
Zoila Aguila was a famous female guerrilla in the Escambray Rebellion (her moniker was “la Niña del Escambray”). After her family’s farm was stolen and several family members murdered, la Niña grabbed a tommy gun, rammed in a clip, and took to the hills. For a year she ran rings around the Reds. But trapped without supplies, she was finall
y run down. For decades, la Niña suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons, but she lives in Miami today. Seems to me that her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of “womyn’s studies,” for a Susan Sarandon role, for a little whooping up by Gloria Steinem, Dianne Feinstein, and Hillary herself. But whoever heard of la Niña?
Instead of la Niña, we got Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan feminist-Marxist who wrote the book I, Rigoberta Menchu, an autobiography chronicling the suffering of indigenous Guatemalans at the hands of Guatemala’s U.S.-backed military. The rotund Menchu (who resembles a well-tanned version of Bella Abzug) was showered with honorary doctorates from countless colleges, nominated as a United Nations “goodwill ambassador,” and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her book became required reading in practically every college and high school in the land.
But the book turned out to be a massive pile of baloney. This was exposed by—of all newspapers—the New York Times. One investigator, seeking to verify the book’s account of Menchu’s young brother dying of malnutrition, instead found the brother. But nothing changed for Menchu, nary an award or honor was rescinded. The Nobel Peace Prize stuck.
Menchu was a fraud. But in the Escambray Rebellion, thousands of bona fide peasant guerrillas vanished into unmarked graves, thousands of peasant families were driven from their modest homes at gunpoint and into concentration camps, and hundreds of battle-scarred veterans live in Miami today. But not one of them has received any of the attention or awards showered on Rigoberta Menchu—or Fidel Castro.
Why? Because, as liberal British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, “In all essentials Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.” (And Castro won that war big time. The Associated Press dispatches about Castro’s “war” against Batista were written by Castro’s own agent in New York, Mario Llerena. He admits this in his book The Unsuspected Revolution. National Review’s famous cartoon in 1960 showing a beaming Castro saying, “I got my job through the New York Times!” nailed it.
The Escambray rebels fought a real war against a real enemy. They’d hang the corpses of Castro soldiers with a sign: “Two Communist Russian lackeys dead for every Cuban patriot murdered.” When captured, they sneered and spit at the Castroites.
One brave guajiro (Cuban for redneck) named Blas Ortega, twenty-one years old at the time, captured a Castroite informer-murderer and strung the quivering little weasel up from a guava tree. Weeks later, after expending his last bullet, Ortega himself was captured by the Communists. He was given a typical Communist show trial. The judge asked him if it was true that he’d hanged a “comrade” with a rope.
Ortega responded with head bowed. “That happens to be true, your honor. But now, having had time to reflect upon it, I’ve decided on a different approach under different circumstances.”
The corpulent Castroite judge leaned forward. “I see.”
“You see, your honor,” Ortega resumed. “If I’d managed to get my hands on you, your honor, I’d have used a cable. No rope would hold your fat ass!”10
Blas Ortega was still laughing when minutes later he faced a firing squad. With him was another young rebel named Maro Borges. The Reds asked Borges if he had any last words.
“Why yes,” responded Borges. “Thanks so much for the opportunity to allow me to express myself at these last moments of my life, my dear companeros. I feel I must let my feelings be known about this sad fratricidal war that so horribly disfigures our noble nation. So here it is, companeros: I shit on your cowardly, thieving Communist revolution! And I use Fidel’s face to wipe my ass!”
The flustered firing squad quickly took aim. “Fuego!” yelled the enraged Castroite commander. Both young freedom fighters perished laughing.
Carlos Machado was lined up by a firing squad in Las Villas during the rebellion. “Are you going to crack?” they giggled while tying his hands.
“Glass cracks!” barked Carlos. “Men die standing!”
“Very well—fuego!”
Carlos was fifteen years old. His twin brother and father were killed with him.
For me, “family night” means a discount at a restaurant. In the Escambray Rebellion it meant half your family murdered by Castro’s death squads. The Milian family lost twelve men in the Cuban freedom fight. When Escambray hero Blas Tardio crumpled in front of a Castro firing squad in March 1965, he was the fifth of six brothers to die.11
Cuba was on fire that year, from tip to tip, and Castro’s firing squads were working overtime. At one point in 1961, one of every nineteen Cubans was a political prisoner.12 You probably didn’t know that. But the media has always ignored Castro’s atrocities, even when they had their press hut nearby.
The mass murders were there from the beginning. The place was a field outside the city of Santiago. The date was January 12, 1959. Castro had just entered Havana, and the United States had already blessed his regime with official diplomatic recognition.
Seventy-five men, their hands bound tightly behind them, stumbled through the field in the dark, prodded by bayonets. They could barely see each other—it was 3:30 a.m. with no moon. Most of the men cursed. Some prayed. After walking a hundred yards through the damp grass, they were poked and shoved into a rough line near a large vehicle.
Suddenly a line of army trucks snapped on their lights and the vehicle behind the men shone in the beams. It was a bulldozer. The beams also showed the ditch it had dug—fifty yards long and six feet deep, with a fresh mound of dirt behind it. Five men broke from the group and ran, but were quickly recaptured, bludgeoned with gun butts, and dragged back into line. Most of the men glared resolutely ahead.
A group of women near the trucks were convulsed in sobs, yelling, pleading, wiping tears with their skirts. Many clutched rosaries. Bearded soldiers taunted them and jabbed them with rifle butts, keeping them huddled together.
“Cuban mothers,” Fidel Castro had spoken into a phalanx of microphones the day before, “let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba’s problems without spilling a drop of blood. Cuban mothers, let me assure you, because of me, you will never have to cry.”13
Five more bearded soldiers stood in front of the trucks, nervously fidgeting with their machine guns. Their drunken commander stood off to the left, swaying, his head turning from the bulldozer and line of captives back to his machine gunners, then back again. Finally he nodded and raised his arm.
“Viva Cuba Libre!” The yell came from near the bulldozer, from the bound men glaring into the lights. The women erupted in anguished screams. The startled commander jerked his head, snarled something, and stamped his feet.
“Viva Cuba Libre!” Others picked it up. A chorus was starting from the entire line, even from the women. “Viva Cuba—”
“Fuego!” The enraged Castroite drunkard dropped his arm and the machine guns opened up, drowning the yells from the condemned men. Seventy-five bodies jerked violently and tumbled into the ditch. With the bodies still heaving and twitching and the blood pooling at the bottom of the ditch, the bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and started pushing the earth over them. Two of the women fainted. Others broke through the cordon of soldiers and ran hysterically toward the mangled bodies in the ditch, seeking a last glimpse before the dirt covered their husbands and sons forever. None of them had received a trial.
On that very day, the British newspaper The Observer reported: “Mr. Castro’s bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence.”
By the time Castro was cheered at Harvard Law School in April 1959, Mr. Castro’s firing squads had slaughtered 568 men and boys, some as young as fifteen.
By the time Norman Mailer (an opponent of capital punishment) was calling Castro “the greatest hero to appear in the Americas,” Fidel’s firing squads had piled up four thousand corpses.
&nb
sp; By 1975, when George McGovern (another opponent of capital punishment) was saying, “[Castro] is very shy and sensitive, I frankly liked him,” the bullet-riddled bodies of fourteen thousand Cubans lay in unmarked graves.14
Combine this bloodbath with the jailing of more political prisoners per capita than Stalin did (more, in fact, than any nation on earth), add the ghastly deaths of seventy-seven thousand desperate Cubans in the Florida straits, add forty-five years of totalitarian oppression, and what do you get?
You get the December 2003 edition of The Nation, where Arthur Miller (a longtime foe of capital punishment) describes Castro as “exciting, a person who could probably have had a career on the screen, and one who’d undoubtedly win an election in his country.”
“Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I’ve ever met! Viva Fidel!” That’s a beaming Jesse Jackson (who wrote an entire book against capital punishment), arm in arm with Castro on a visit to Havana in 1984.15
Early in the revolution, not everyone immediately got with Castro’s program, even among the Castroite legal team. Take a properly bearded and rebel-uniform-clad judge named Felix Pena. He presided over a famous trial in March 1959 of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary air force pilots. They were accused of “genocide” because of a few forays against Castro’s rebels in the mountains. Pena, the poor sap, had taken Castro’s prattle about his “humanist” and “democratic” revolution seriously.
So he applied the tenets of civilized jurisprudence and found the charge of “genocide” against the men absolutely preposterous. No evidence, no witnesses; none of these pilots had bombed civilians. Precious few had even bombed or strafed the rebels. And a third of those on trial were the planes’ mechanics. The aviators were acquitted.
Castro went on TV and screeched for a new trail against the “war criminals” and assembled a new judicial team with a new judge. (Almost six hundred army officers had already been murdered by firing squads on farcical charges, thousands more Cuban soldiers were in prison; now it was time to deal with the air corps.) The new judge dutifully found forty-five of the aviators (and even the mechanics) guilty and sentenced most of them to thirty years at hard labor.
Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant Page 12