Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FIDEL AS BUSINESS PARTNER

  Politicians who hail the business prospects of trading with Castroite Cuba forget that Fidel didn’t just defraud U.S. stockholders, and he didn’t just steal millions of dollars in American assets. He stole billions of dollars from American businesses: $1.8 billion from a total of 5,911 different companies, to be precise. Fidel pulled off the biggest such heist in history. He didn’t obfuscate the matter, either. He crowed about it gleefully, then boasted that he’d never repay it—and hasn’t, not a penny.

  Castro doesn’t pay debts, either. In 2001, the United States International Trade Commission Report said, “Cuba stopped payment on all its foreign commercial and bilateral debt with non-socialist countries in 1986.” Reuters reported in June 2001, “Debt talks between Cuba and the Paris Club of European creditor nations are on hold.... On the table was $3.8 billion of official debt to Paris Club members, part of a much larger debt Cuba ran up through the 1980s, until it began to default on payments and then stopped talking with creditors.”

  And remember, back then Cuba was getting $5 billion a year from the Soviet sugar daddy. So what happened to that debt, you ask? Well, Fidel repudiated it, too, about $50 billion worth. “Soviet Union?” he frowns. “What Soviet Union? Where is this Soviet Union?” No country by that name anymore, right? So how can he owe it any money? No problema.

  Nelson Mandela’s South Africa stepped in to offer comradely assistance to Fidel, and here are the results of that shrewd move: “Cuba’s efforts to attract more investment from South Africa are being frustrated by the island nation’s failure to pay a $13 million debt. South African Trade and Industry Ministry is wary of exposing itself to the Cuban risk until the debt is settled.”1 Mexico got bit too. Last year, Mexico’s Bancomex, trying to recoup its ghastly losses from financing trade with Cuba, froze Cuban assets in three countries.

  But some people never learn. The Houston Business Chronicle calls Castro’s Cuba “a great new marketplace.” I recently read a report from the head of Mississippi’s recent trade delegation to Cuba. He gushed that they’d “had a chance to meet Cuba’s business community.” Problem is, Cuba has no business community—it’s been the government since Castro took over. In fact, in recent years, the small number of private enterprises has actually shrunk. According to Moody’s Investors Service, July 2002: “Recent Cuban government actions indicate that official attitudes toward economic reform may have soured.... Increased obstacles to private sector activities and restrictions to foreign direct investments reveal heightened concerns about the loss of political control inherent in the economic reform process.”

  But still they come. So many American businessmen come knocking and displaying their wares that Castro finally threw them a party. In July 2002, Cuba’s Communist Party put on a rollicking Fourth of July bash at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. The festivities were “in honor of the noble American people on the anniversary of their independence,” proclaimed Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper, Granma. Fidel himself declared, “The cultural, spiritual, and moral legacy of the American people is also the heritage of Cuba and of the Cuban people!” And a choral group sang “Old Man River.”

  Wow. What happened to the United States as “a vulture preying on humanity” (circa 1960), or the United States as “the cancer of humanity” (circa 1968), or “We will bring America to her knees” (in Iran in 2001), or “worse than Hitler’s Germany” (a Castroite staple for forty years). What a difference a few years—and going bankrupt—make. The sugar daddy Soviet Union is gone and Cuba’s credit rating is now rated below Somalia by Moody’s and below Haiti by Dun & Bradstreet. Another sign of Cuba’s desperation is that Havana recently topped Bangkok as “child-sex capital of the world.”

  Today Castro has to pay cash for American products. But he and American companies are hoping to cozy up so he can get credit—guaranteed by American taxpayers through the Export-Import Bank. No risk to Castro and American businesses, only to you and me.

  In the meantime, trade delegations visit Havana to chum it up with the murderers of Americans. Thousands of businessmen attended the U.S. Food & Agribusiness Exhibition at Havana’s Palacio de las Con-venciones on September 26–30, 2002. Among the dignitaries they might have met was Cuba’s “minister of education,” Fernando Vecino Alegret.

  The book Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961–1973 provides some interesting biographical details on Alegret. During the Vietnam War, the Communists ran a “Cuba Project” at the Cu Loc POW camp (also known as “The Zoo”) on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. The “Cuba Project” was a Josef Mengele–type experiment run by Castroite Cubans to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human can endure before cracking. The North Vietnamese never asked the Castroites for advice on combat, only on torture.

  For their experiment, the Cubans chose twenty American POWs—mostly Navy fliers. One died: Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil, a Navy F-105 pilot. His death came slowly, in agonizing stages, under torture. His torturer, nicknamed “Fidel,” was identified in congressional hearings (and in the Miami Herald in 1999) with great probability as Cuba’s minister of education, Fernando Vecino Alegret.

  “The difference between the Vietnamese and ‘Fidel,’ ” testified fellow POW Captain Ray Vohden, “was that more or less, once the Vietnamese got what they wanted, they let up, at least for a while. Not so with ‘Fidel.’ . . . ‘I’ll show him,’ ‘Fidel’ said to me. ‘I’ll make him [Cobeil] so happy to bow down when I finish with him, he’ll come crying to me on his knees begging me to let him surrender.’” Vohden continued, “When I saw ‘Fidel’ with the fan belt I was surprised, because up to that time I had never heard of anyone getting hit like that. Slaps, punches, straps, manacles, ropes, yes. But ‘Fidel’ was going to show the Vietnamese a new trick.... Earl Cobeil had resisted ‘Fidel’ to the maximum. Now I could hear the thud of the belt falling on Cobeil’s body again and again, as ‘Fidel’ screamed, ‘You son of a beech, you fooker, you are cheating me. I will show you. I will show you.’ I could hear the thud of the belt falling on Earl Cobeil’s body again and again. I almost threw up each time I heard the belt hit Earl’s body. I didn’t think any human could endure such a thing. The guards all stood around laughing and yelling in Vietnamese. It had been far easier for me to endure the straps myself than to have to go through this.

  “They [the North Vietnamese] tortured to obtain military information or a political statement, they punished us for breaking their rules ... but rarely tortured indefinitely just for the sake of torture. Eventually, they always let up. . . . However, ‘Fidel’ unmercifully beat a mentally defenseless, sick man to death.”2

  “Earl Cobeil was a complete physical disaster when we saw him,” testified another fellow POW, Colonel Jack Bomar. “He had been tortured for days and days and days. I went down to clean him up. When ‘Fidel’ dragged us down there, he said, ‘Clean him up, and if anything happens to this man, you, Bomar, are responsible.’ Then he hit Cobeil right in the face, knocked him down again. His hands were almost severed from the manacles. He had bamboo in his shins. All kinds of welts up and down all over; his face was bloody. He was a complete mess. They brought him into the room and as far as we could tell, Captain Cobeil was totally mentally out of it. He did not know where he was. I don’t think he knew where he had been or where he was going. He was just there. Then ‘Fidel’ began to beat him with a fan belt.... When he lost his temper, he was a complete madman. He would get red in the face; he just exploded with rage. So if you refused to bow to him like Cobeil refused to do . . . his temper just went out of control.”

  “Fidel’s” monthlong beatings of another U.S. POW named Jim Kasler were “among the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi,” according to Honor Bound. “Fidel” flogged Kasler “until his buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds, and at the end he was in a semi-coma.”3

  That bowing down—not just murdering Americans,
but humiliating them in the process—is a Castroite hang-up.

  “Kneel and beg for your life!” they taunted William Morgan as this American citizen was bound in front of a Castro firing squad on March 11, 1961. Both Fidel and Raul were in attendance. Morgan simply glowered back. An eyewitness, John Martino, says Morgan had walked to the execution stake singing “As the Caissons Go Marching.”

  “I kneel for no man!” Morgan finally shouted back.

  “Very well, Meester Weel-yam Morgan.” His executioners were aiming low, on purpose. “Fuego!”

  The first volley shattered Morgan’s knees. “See, Meester Morgan? We made you kneel, didn’t we?”

  Four more bullets slammed into Morgan, all very carefully aimed to miss vitals. They slammed into his shoulders. They slammed into his legs. He winced with every blast. Long minutes passed. Finally one of Fidel’s executioners walked up and emptied a tommy gun clip into Morgan’s back.4

  These are the sort of people America’s businessmen want to do business with.

  Jimmy Carter tried the “be nice to Castro and he’ll be nice back” approach by lifting the travel ban to Cuba in March 1977. Castro reciprocated by sending thousands of Cuban troops to Africa (where they used poison gas, sarin to be precise). He also sent thousands of psychopaths, killers, and perverts to America in the Mariel Boatlift. Thanks, Fidel!

  Even earlier, in 1975, Gerald Ford (under Kissinger’s influence) had relaxed the embargo. He allowed foreign branches and subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade freely with Cuba and persuaded the Organization of American States to lift its sanctions. Castro reciprocated by starting his African invasion and by trying to assassinate Ford.

  You read right. On March 19, 1976, the Los Angles Times ran the headline “Cuban Link to Death Plot Probed.” Both Republican candidates of the day, President Ford and Ronald Reagan, were to be taken out during the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. The Emiliano Zapata Unit, a radical Bay Area terrorist group, would make the hits. When nabbed, one of the would-be assassins, Gregg Daniel Adornetto, sang about the Cuban connection. Their Cuban intelligence officer was Andres Gomez. Adornetto had met him years earlier when he’d traveled to Cuba for training and funding as a member of the Weather Underground.

  Even President Ronald Reagan explored a deal with Castro, early in his first term. Alexander Haig met personally with Cuba’s vice president, Carlos R. Rodriguez, in Mexico City. Then diplomatic wiz General Vernon Walters went to Havana for a meeting with the Maximum Leader himself. The thing came to nothing, because Walters had Castro’s number. He reported that Castro was hell-bent on exporting revolution to Grenada and Central America. Reagan reimposed the travel ban, and within a year he booted Castro’s troops out of Grenada. Reagan’s support for anti-Communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua rolled back Castro’s Marxist allies.

  But during the Clinton administration it was time to play nice again. In 1993, Mobile, Alabama, became a “sister city” with Havana. Representatives of the two cities found ways to spend all sorts of American tax dollars on “get to know you” bashes. But the Cuban official who had so charmed Mobile during these years of “engagement” was unavailable to attend the ten-year celebratory bash for the sister cities. What happened?

  Well, Oscar Redondo is his name, and he’d been fingered by the FBI and deported for espionage.5 Even better, Castro defector Juan Vives tells us that Cuba’s intelligence agency makes a point of taping the nighttime cavortings of “friends” who visit Cuba on such cultural exchanges. Vives says Gabriel García Márquez, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Jack Nicholson are among those recorded.6 All you visiting trade delegations should be sure to smile at those chandeliers and sprinkler heads in your posh Havana hotel rooms.

  The idea that American tourists will show Cuba’s poor huddled masses what capitalism provides; what they’re being denied; the idea that American “engagement,” travel, and trade will undermine Castro’s regime—all that is humbug.

  Don’t you think Cubans know perfectly well that they’re poor and oppressed? Tens of thousands of them talk and visit with their American relatives weekly; when they brave storms and tiger sharks on floating chunks of Styrofoam, they don’t do it for a thrill, like the yuppies in Outside magazine—seventy-seven thousand Cubans have died making the attempt.7 Some 1.3 million tourists from free countries visited Cuba in 2002. Millions have been visiting for decades. Has it made a dime’s bit of difference in any Castroite policy? Has it improved the lot of ordinary Cubans?

  Like the European and Canadian tourists (and the roughly two hundred thousand Americans who went in 2003), any new flood of American tourists will stay in fancy hotels, dine in fancy restaurants, and rarely meet an ordinary Cuban. Every dollar they spend will be with a business owned and run by Castro’s military.

  It can’t be said often enough: Castro’s cold war is not over. “The much bigger war against America is my destiny.” Castro wrote that in 1958, right before his “rebels” kidnapped fifty U.S. military personnel from Guantánamo.

  In November 2003, the UPI reported on Castro’s star pupil and current lifeline, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Chavez was caught providing funds and false passports to al Qaeda operatives. A week later, FOX News quoted North Korea’s highest-ranking defector on the presence of North Korean weapons in Cuba.8

  Liberals accuse Cuban Americans of being “blinded by emotion,” of being “unable to see reason” with regard to Castro. But our posture is the empirical one—the one based on firsthand experience with the Lider Maximo and on the evidence. Our approach is based on what José Ortega y Gasset called “the Science of Man”—history.

  “Private trade, self-employment, private industry, or anything like it will have NO future in this country!” That’s what Castro shrieked into the microphones twenty years ago.9

  “We will not change Cuba’s political system or Cuba’s economic system! We will accept no conditions for trade with the U.S.!” That’s Castro in 2002.10

  Castroland has the highest incarceration rate and the lowest press and economic freedom indexes on Earth, right alongside its ally North Korea. The Castroites are very vigilant against the slightest crack in the system. Castro himself warned Mikhail Gorbachev that his dabbling with glasnost and perestroika was a folly that would doom both socialism and Gorbachev. He warned Daniel Ortega that allowing elections in Nicaragua would doom him. He was precisely right on both counts.

  Liberals love to point at Cuban dissident and embargo opponent Osvaldo Paya. But they never point to the many Cuban dissidents who support the embargo—who in fact want it tightened. These dissidents (like Oscar Biscet and Marta Beatriz Roque) find themselves rotting in Castro’s dungeons. Denounce the embargo from Cuba (like Paya) and your utterings will find themselves splashed throughout the Western press. You’ll even be allowed to travel abroad to receive awards and kudos. Support the embargo, and you face the Castroite billy clubs.

  Alcibiades Hidalgo was Cuban defense minister Raul Castro’s chief of staff for over a decade. In 2001, he defected to the United States. “Lifting the travel ban would be a gift for Fidel and Raul,” he told the Washington Post in an interview.

  Castro doesn’t deserve any gifts from us.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FIDEL’S USEFUL IDIOTS

  The idiocies and gaffes by Western elites about Castro and Cuba would defy belief if they weren’t by now predictable. Take Vanessa Redgrave. A few years ago, she remarked in an interview that Fidel was “good friends” with legendary Cuban patriot and poet José Martí. Only problem was that Martí died in a battle against the Spanish in 1895.

  Take director Sydney Pollack and actor Robert Redford. In their movie Havana, they cast Fulgencio Batista as looking like an America businessman, with hair and eyes the same hue as Redford’s. Cuban exile, novelist, and Cervantes Prize winner Guillermo Cabrera Infante later bumped into the famous Hollywood director, who turned red-faced with shock and embarrassment when a laughing Cabrera had to i
nform him that Batista was black.1

  Both Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola (Godfather II) spent millions to achieve a realistic, historically accurate portrayal of the Havana of New Year’s 1958, when Batista fled and Castro’s rebels entered. To show the tumult and frenzied mobs, the crowds looting, the utter mayhem, they hired more extras than Mel Gibson in Braveheart or Ridley Scott in Gladiator. However, Havana was deathly quiet that night, the streets empty. Not one reviewer or major media source pointed out these astounding gaffes.

  Part of the trouble is the “furious ignorance,” as Guillermo Cabrera Infante calls it, about a nation that’s been in the headlines for more than forty years. And part of it is double standards—like when the Spanish government honored Fidel Castro with honorary citizenship the very week it served indictment papers for murder against Augusto Pinochet.

  Why not serve indictment papers to Fidel? Fidel has plotted cowardly murders his entire life. Even in high school Fidel got into an argument over a debt (he was always a deadbeat) with a schoolmate named Ramon Mestre, who pounded him like a gong. Fidel cried uncle and slunk away, whimpering that he’d go fetch the money he owed Mestre. Instead he came back with a cocked pistol, hoping to surprise and murder the unarmed Mestre, who’d already gone home. A bit later Fidel was fingered for two murders while attending the University of Havana. Both involved ambushes where the victim was shot in the back. Shortly after Fidel got to Havana, on January 6, 1959, he ordered his goons to arrest Ramon Mestre, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in fifteen years. Mestre ended up serving twenty years in horrible dungeons. 2

  Find old pictures of Fidel as a “guerrilla” in the Sierra Maestre and you’ll notice his favorite weapon was a scoped rifle. He never had to get anywhere near a Batista soldier. Indeed, he’d start every “battle” (puerile little skirmishes) by firing off a shot in the distance. Then he’d let his “guerrillas” do the actual “fighting” (usually murdering unsuspecting soldiers in their bunks, terrorizing unarmed peasants, and rustling cows). While his men engaged in their murder and banditry, Fidel would scurry back to camp to talk to reporters.