Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  Judge Felix Pena, by the way, was found in his office with a bullet through his head a few days later. And a few months after that, the judge who had condemned the airmen to prison (rather than the firing squad, as recommended by Castro), was himself found dead.

  Sound like justice? Well, in 1959, the very year this crime took place, Harvard Law School hosted Fidel, and the Harvardites were not disappointed. “Castro Visit Triumphant,” headlined Harvard’s Law School Forum for April 30, 1959. “The audience got what it wanted—the chance of seeing the Cuban hero in person.” The adoring crowd gave him a tumultuous reception. Fidel Castro (a white Spanish millionaire’s son and Havana law school graduate who overthrew a black cane-cutter) was hailed as a man of the people.

  Alas, this humble man of the people had actually applied to Harvard Law School in 1948. This was brought to light by Harvard’s dean at the time, McGeorge Bundy.

  Caught up in the exuberance of the event, Bundy declared that Harvard was ready to make amends for its mistake in 1948. “I’ve decided to admit him!” he proclaimed.16

  Bundy’s quip brought the house down. He triumphantly hoisted the arm of a dictator whose chief prosecutor Che Guevara declared, “To execute a man we don’t need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”

  One wiseacre at the Harvard lovefest brought up Castro’s record of executions and questionable legal procedures.

  “Only the worst of the war criminals have been shot,” Castro replied. “And don’t forget, Cuba’s is the only majority revolution in Latin America in recent years.”

  The same smartass asked about the “retrial” of the acquitted aviators.

  “If the defendant has a right to appeal,” retorted Castro, “then so do the people!”17

  Castro, whose “courts” declared, “Proof is secondary. We execute from revolutionary conviction!” could barely keep up with the invitations from the world’s most prestigious universities. He’d already been acclaimed at Yale and Princeton, where jubilant upperclassmen hoisted the mass-assassin and abolisher of habeas corpus on their shoulders. “A riotous welcome,” crowed Princeton’s student paper. “A festive, crazy atmosphere, bubbling with enthusiasm.” He had received similar receptions at the National Press Club, at the Overseas Press Club, at the United Nations, and in Central Park.

  Cuba’s true freedom fighters never got that reception.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OPERATION CUBAN FREEDOM—NOT!

  “Freedom is our goal,” roared Pepe San Roman to the men he commanded. “Cuba is our cause. God is on our side. On to victory!”1

  Fifteen hundred men crowded before San Roman at their Guatemalan training camps that day. The next day they’d embark for a port in Nicaragua, the following day for a landing site in Cuba called Bahia de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. Their outfit was known as Brigada 2506, and at their commander’s address the men erupted in cheers.

  Every man in Brigada 2506 was a volunteer. They included men from every social stratum and race in Cuba—from sugarcane planters to sugarcane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs, and everything in between; some were family men, some were teenagers. Only a hundred of these volunteers had military backgrounds, but their gung-ho attitude impressed their American trainers, who were veterans of Omaha Beach, Bastogne, Corregidor, Inchon, and Iwo Jima.

  Only two days later, one of these men, air chief Reid Doster, learned that the Kennedy administration had canceled the scheduled airstrikes. “What? Are they nuts? There goes the whole f—ing war!”2

  First off, the administration’s Best and Brightest nixed the original landing site at Trinidad. This coastal town a hundred miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment. Rebellions had started there three months after Castro’s takeover in January 1959. Also, the nearby Escambray mountains crawled with anti-Communist guerrillas who would join the invaders, and the local militia were known to be disloyal to the Reds. A concentration camp holding six thousand anti-Communist prisoners was located right outside Trinidad. The planned invasion supplies included weapons for them. Just as important, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the Brigada’s air force.

  But landing in a populated area like Trinidad was deemed “too noisy” by the New Frontiersmen. They had a fetish about hiding America’s role in the invasion. So, back to the drawing board for the planners—who returned with a landing site at the Bay of Pigs, a desolate swamp. This was worse from a military standpoint but had a good chance of success—given total air superiority and the complete obliteration of Castro’s air force. This was stressed by the military and CIA planners, just as it’s stressed here by me.

  JFK’s civilian wizards further demanded that the invasion take place at night. (That way nobody would notice it, you see.) The military planners gaped. From Operation Torch in North Africa through Normandy through Saipan and Okinawa through Inchon—nothing like this had ever been attempted. All those took place at dawn.

  No matter. The Knights of Camelot had spoken.

  Amazingly, the initial landing went fairly well. The beachhead and an airstrip were secured in the first few hours. Castro’s soldiers were falling back, others surrendering, many others switching sides. “So many were surrendering I was actually worried!” says my cousin Alberto “Pilo” Fontova. “Heck, man, there’s five or six of us guarding five or six dozen Castro troops! I kept thinking, ‘What if these guys decide to turn on us?’ ”

  Fidel and Che got the news and panicked. Castro blabbed insane and contradictory orders to all and sundry. First he rushed to a sugar mill near the invasion site where his troops were massing and where his orders spread further confusion, and then he rushed three hundred miles east to Pinar del Rio, where, he assured everyone, the “real” invasion was coming. He could tell from a huge fleet massing just offshore. He wasn’t falling for that little feint at the Bay of Pigs. So he ordered the masterful Che Guevara to dig in there with thousands of troops and brace for the Yankee attack.

  “Seguro, mi Comandante!” Che saluted and spent three days there, three hundred miles from the battle, without firing a shot. Just offshore from him were a few rowboats packed with Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors, and tape recorders: the CIA ruse. Che and his soldiers lucked out. Almost fifty thousand of their comrades were falling like flies at Giron. The Red tank columns and massed infantry reeled and staggered from the tiny Brigada’s massed firepower. The lethal fury of the Brigadista attack had the Reds thinking they faced twenty to thirty thousand “Yankee mercenaries.”

  Their foes were actually a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered almost forty to one, with the amazing Erneido Oliva as second in command. But no amount of heroism and pluck could offset those odds without air cover.

  Soon some planes roared overhead. The Brigadistas on the beach waved and cheered, until they looked closer and then were rocked from a massive blast in the bay behind them. A huge mushroom cloud rose. “Holy shit!” one gasped. “Fidel’s got the A-bomb too?” No, not yet, but he had jet rockets hitting a ship laden with ten days’ worth of ammo. The Brigada had expected that their air support would obliterate Castro’s air force. Instead, Castro’s air force obliterated the Brigada’s ammo ships and control center. Eighty percent of the pre-invasion sorties to be flown by the Brigada planes from Nicaragua were canceled at the last moment by JFK. These airstrikes were—you guessed it—“too noisy.”

  Now the Brigada’s lumbering B-26s provided rollicking sport for Castro’s T-33 jets, and its troops and supplies even more. Castro had total control of the skies, and it was a turkey shoot. Fifty thousand Communist troops were massing for the counterattack. Squadrons of Soviet tanks were revving their engines, under orders from a Soviet commander.

  All these forces were aiming at the abandoned Brigadistas, 1,400 of them, who had no hope of reinfo
rcement or air cover. CIA man Grayston Lynch knew about the canceled airstrikes by now and figured the men were doomed. “If things get really rough,” he radioed Commander Pepe San Roman, “we can come in and evacuate you.”

  “We will not be evacuated!” San Roman roared back to Lynch. “We came here to fight! Let it end here!”

  The Brigadistas dug in deeper, counted their meager ammo, and tried to treat their wounded comrades. Things looked grim. But stationed only thirty miles off the Cuban coast was the carrier Essex. Dozens of deadly Skyhawk jets were on deck and primed for action. Their pilots were banging their fists, kicking bulkheads, and screaming against the sellout of their Cuban freedom-fighting brothers on that heroic beachhead. They pilots knew they could clean up Castro’s entire air force with a few cannon bursts, obliterate his troop columns with a few bombing and strafing runs, and be back on deck in time for breakfast.

  If the Brigada’s own air force was allowed to fly, it could follow up with sorties against Castro’s infantry and tank columns blundering down the only three roads to the beachhead. These roads were elevated over the surrounding swamp and completely open. The Brigada’s B-26s would slaughter anything on them—Castro’s very own “Highway of Death.”

  From that mission the Brigada’s planes would refuel, rearm, and move on to hammer any more troops coming down Cuba’s central highway from Havana. More defeats, more defections. The tide would turn. Cuba would be free.

  The pleas made it to Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke in Washington, D.C., who conveyed them in person to his commander in chief. John F. Kennedy was in a white tux and tails that fateful night of April 18, 1961, having just emerged from an elegant Beltway ball. For the closing act of the glittering occasion, Jackie and her charming beau had spun around the dance floor to the claps and coos of the delighted guests. In the new president’s honor, the band had struck up the Broadway smash “Mr. Wonderful.”

  “Two planes, Mr. President!” sputtered Admiral Burke. The fighting admiral was livid, pleading for permission to allow just two of his jets to blaze off the carrier deck and support the desperately embattled Brigada.

  “Burke, we can’t get involved in this,” replied Mr. Wonderful.

  “Goddammit, Mr. President! We are involved. There is no way we can hide it. We are involved!”3

  Interesting match here: In one corner, the man who blasted half the Imperial Japanese fleet to fiery rubble and sent it to the bottom of the Pacific at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In the other, the man who managed to get his PT boat karate-chopped in half by a Japanese destroyer, a feat of nautical ingenuity that still has naval men scratching their heads—and one that almost got him court-martialed. Only some heavy political pressure saved Mr. Wonderful in 1944. Politics prevailed again that night in April 1961. JFK refused to help the freedom fighters. The election was over, you see.

  So all those jets with their rockets and cannons, those destroyers brimming with artillery, those ace Navy pilots champing at the bit for action—all this was hogtied by strict orders from the commander in chief.

  By the second day, almost half of the suicidally brave Cuban exile pilots had met a fiery death from Castro’s jets. This was too much for their enraged American trainers at the base in Nicaragua. “We were so closely associated with the Cuban aircrews that we felt a real sense of responsibility,” said Lt. Colonel Joe Shannon. “We felt a strong dedication to their cause. Now was time to show our friends how strongly we felt.”4

  Four of these trainers, Thomas “Pete” Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Baker, and Wade Gray, suited up, gunned the engines, and joined the fight. These weren’t pampered Ivy Leaguers. They were Alabama Air Guard officers, men with archaic notions of loyalty and honor. They knew the odds. They went anyway. All four died on that first mission. They now have streets named after them in Little Havana. The remains of one of them were recently returned from Cuba and given an honorable burial in Birmingham. None of the administration’s Best and Brightest were on hand to comfort the surviving family members. Several Cuban American families were.

  Amazingly, at the Bay of Pigs, JFK did permit some Essex planes over the beachhead, but only to “observe” the slaughter; every request to engage the enemy was denied. In Peter Wyden’s book Bay of Pigs, he reports that these Navy pilots admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed on the Essex; some slammed their helmets on the deck and broke down completely. Navy airman Mike Griffin landed his jet on the Essex and walked up to the bridge to make a report “with tears streaming down his cheeks.... He was so angry and upset that it took a few minutes before he could utter a word,” reported his commander.5

  “I wanted to resign from the Navy,” said Captain Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the fleet off the beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.6

  So what on earth were they there for? To take pictures, it turned out. That’s all JFK authorized. “And boy,” recalls freedom fighter Juan Clark, who was in the thick of the fighting, “you shoulda seen the Communists respond when those jets flew over! They all stopped shooting ! Even the artillery bombardment stopped—and boy, was that nice!”

  When Cuban prison guards heard about the “Yankee invasion,” they suddenly made nice with the political prisoners. But it was all temporary—and it was only the reaction of Cubans who didn’t plan on scramming to the Soviet Union.

  The political prisoners gaped as army trucks pulled up and unloaded crate after crate of dynamite and other explosives. Soon the Communists were digging under the prison buildings and wiring the explosives. “We had the impression of sleeping over a powder keg,” recalls prisoner Chanes de Armas. “There were some men whose nerves couldn’t stand the torture and were permanently damaged.... It was horrible to think that from one minute to the next we could be killed in an explosion.” 7

  At the time, ten thousand prisoners were crammed into the Modelo prison at the Isle of Pines. Castro was planning to blow them all up should the tide of battle turn against him. Remember, Hitler ordered the same thing in Paris when the going got rough for him. It never came off, because General Dietrich von Choltitz refused to carry out the order.

  Some say Castro still plans to go out with a bang (and mass murder.) “Castro plans a götterdämmerung.” That’s Colonel Alvaro Prendes, former vice chief of the Cuban air force, after defecting in 1994. “The doomsday plan is codenamed Lucero [Lucifer]. If his regime becomes seriously threatened by an invasion or internal upheaval, dissidents will be rounded up and herded into tunnels beneath Havana to be exterminated with poison gas.”8 No wonder Oliver Stone says, “Castro is a very moral man, very humane.”

  We call them “men,” but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was sixteen years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro’s Stalin tanks point-blank. At ten yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering beast and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe.

  Gilberto Hernandez was seventeen when a round from a Czech burp gun put out his eye. Castro’s troops were swarming in, but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour until the Reds finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.

  By then the invaders sensed they’d been abandoned. Ammo was almost gone. Two days of shooting and reloading without sleep, food, or water were taking their toll. Many were hallucinating. That’s when Castro’s Soviet howitzers opened up, huge 122 mm ones, four batteries’ worth. They pounded two thousand rounds into the Brigada’s ranks over a four-hour period. “It sounded like the end of the world,” one said later.

  “Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” wrote Haynes Johnson. By now the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst, and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. So their commander had to scream.

  “There is no retreat, carajo!” Erneido Oliva, second in command, stood and bellowed. “We s
tand and fight!” And so they did. Right after the deadly shower of Soviet shells, more Stalin tanks rumbled up. A boy named Barberito rushed up to the first one and blasted it repeatedly with his recoilless rifle. The tank was barely dented but its rattled occupants opened the hatch and surrendered. In fact, they insisted on shaking hands with their pubescent captor, who was felled an hour later by a machine gun burst to his valiant little heart.

  On another front, CIA man Grayston Lynch was talking with commander Pepe San Roman from his command post offshore. Lynch urged, “Hold on, Pepe! We’re coming in. If we have to, we can evacuate.”

  “We don’t want evacuation!” San Roman bellowed. “We came here to fight! We want more ammo! We want planes! For us, this ends here!”

  Castro had fifty thousand men around the beachhead now. Oliva had one tank manned by teenager Jorge Alvarez and another by José Fajardo, who had left a wife and four-year-old daughter in Miami to volunteer for the freedom fight. The little girl would later be known as Gloria Estefan. Alvarez and Fajardo had already knocked out several massive Russian Stalins and T—34s. They only had two rounds of ammo left. Gloria’s dad aimed and knocked out another tank. Then his own tank was blasted.

  “Dammit!” thought Erneido Oliva as he saw the explosion and flames. But Gloria’s old man opened the hatch and somehow clambered out, with his clothes on fire. He looked around, saw his commander, saluted, and started rushing up for further orders. “José collapsed midway to me,” recalls Oliva. “He was horribly wounded. His face and half his body were a mass of blood—but José wanted to keep fighting! That’s the real untold story about the Bay of Pigs!” Oliva stresses. “The heroism of our men, the fanaticism and professionalism these—mostly civilian volunteers with less than a month’s training—displayed in combat. I was a professional military man, they mostly weren’t. And I’ll tell you, my men’s heroism left me speechless—does to this day.”