Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  “After a taping session, Craig would call Dan over, give him some more precise instructions, exchange some papers with him. Then Dan would come back on the set and ask those. It was obvious that Dan Rather and Gregory Craig were on very friendly terms. . . . Craig was acting like a movie director, too. He didn’t like the way Juan Miguel’s voice was coming across in the English translation. ‘Not enough drama,’ Craig said. So they went out and got a bona fide dramatic actor to translate and mouth his responses.... It was obvious to me that Juan Miguel was under a lot of stress. You could see it in his face. He never looked at ease. He was never alone, always accompanied by Cuban Interest Section people they called ‘bodyguards’ or by Gregory Craig himself. My father was a newsman in Cuba. So the whole thing, the elaborate deception of this show, shocked me tremendously when I saw the end product.”

  NBC’s Jim Avila added to the media’s deception: “Why did she [Elián’s mother] do it? What was she escaping? By all accounts this quiet, serious young woman, who loved to dance the salsa, was living the good life. . . . An extended family destroyed by a mother’s decision to start a new life in a new country, a decision that now leaves a little boy estranged from his father and forever separated from her.”6 (Emphasis mine.)

  Hey, at least he didn’t blame the United States. No, Avila blamed Elián’s mother, who gave her life so her son could live in freedom.

  CBS’s Byron Pitts went back to the more familiar villains. “Six weeks ago this community [Miami Cubans] embraced a boy who had watched his mother die at sea. Tonight there is fear that the embrace has become a choke hold.”7

  ABC’s John Quinones seconded Pitts. “It seems like such a contradiction that Cubans, who profess a love of family and respect for the bond between father and son, would be so willing to separate Elián from his father. . . . It’s a community with very little tolerance for those who might disagree.”8

  Bryant Gumbel pointed the finger at the real enemy: “Cuban Americans . . . have been quick to point fingers at Castro for exploiting the little boy. Are their actions any less reprehensible?” He referred to Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s support for Elián’s staying in the United States as “pretty disgusting.”9

  Time magazine’s Tim Padgett relied on the classic stereotype: Those Miami Cubans were “a privileged, imperious elite who set themselves up as a suffering people, as martyred as black slaves and Holocaust Jews, but ever ready to jump on expensive speedboats to reclaim huge family estates the moment the old Communist dictator stops breathing.”10

  Alexander Cockburn published a gem in New York Press, writing, “There is a sound case to be made for dropping a tactical nuclear weapon on the Cuban section of Miami. The move would be applauded heartily by most Americans. Alas, Operation Good Riddance would require the sort of political courage sadly lacking in Washington these days.” Okay, okay, so the Stalinist Cockburn was joshing. But can you imagine his writing a similar comment about, say, east Los Angeles or Harlem?

  The New York Times’s incomparable Thomas Friedman was not to be outdone. “I think the American public really got a taste of the degree to which not only Elián had been, in my view, kidnapped by these people [Miami Cubans], but American policy on Cuba has been kidnapped by a very active, vociferous minority.” Then this fervent civil libertarian brightened up. “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elián González warmed my heart.”11

  Why did Janet Reno’s raiders break in with guns, knocking people to the ground? Clinton’s people acted on Castro’s advice. Fidel offered the Clinton administration vital intelligence. His agents in Miami described Lazaro González’s home as a veritable armory.12 Like the liberal media, the Clinton administration trusted Castro’s Communist spies more than it trusted ethnic Cuban citizens of the United States. To me, a Justice Department that relies on intelligence from Fidel Castro is a hundred times more dangerous and stupid than its law enforcement officers who might occasionally descend to brutality.

  “It is brutal, it is monstrous, it is as mad or bad as anyone can call it.” Thus did G. K. Chesterton define Communism in 1919. Chesterton, as usual, was right. Communism started as a monster and grew into a homicidal beast. And President Clinton and Janet Reno handed that beast a helpless child as a toy.

  EPILOGUE

  COMING TO AMERICA

  When Cubans landed in America’s lap by the hundreds of thousands, the potential for trouble was enormous. Cubans landed in the South as excitable, foreign-tongued, octopus-eating strangers. They applied for jobs, worked and sometimes lived right next door, and filled the pews of Catholic churches.

  My family landed in New Orleans—deepest, darkest Dixie, red-state America with a vengeance. The city then hosted a huge NASA project that attracted blue-collar workers from surrounding Southern states: Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi.

  We know what liberals think about these people. They’re the backwoods haters and bigots who gunned down Peter Fonda in the film Easy Rider and hatched the plot to assassinate the president in Oliver Stone’s ludicrous movie JFK. The South, liberals like to think, is a racist place.

  My father was a political prisoner in La Cabana’s dungeons when we arrived in Louisiana. He listened to the gallant Che’s firing squads every dawn, wondering when his turn would come. My mother wondered too. They had two nephews—Bay of Pigs veterans—who were under a death sentence. But my mother didn’t have to indulge in despair (and most residents of Little Havana can relate stories ten times as hair-raising and heartbreaking). She was alone in a strange country. She was penniless, friendless, and had three kids to somehow feed, shelter, and school.

  A knock on the door in those early days—as we settled into our humble apartment—wasn’t exactly comforting. But the knock came from Mrs. Jeffrey, our new next-door neighbor. She had a bleached blonde bouffant and big smile, and she was carrying a basket of fried chicken. Mr. Jeffrey was there too. He offered to help translate a job application my mother had.

  The Jeffreys were originally from Texas. They did everything they could to help us. A few days later, she took my mother shopping. The next day she consoled her when my mother broke down crying. Mr. Jeffrey was a World War II and Korea veteran. He knew some Spanish, and I’ll never forget him sitting next to my grandfather. He apologized, in his heavy Texas twang, for what had happened at the Bay of Pigs—as if it were his doing, as if he hadn’t done enough for others’ freedom already.

  The next day, there was another knock on the door. It was our upstairs neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Simpson. They invited us over—in their hilarious (to us) Southern drawl—to share in that mountain of chicken and burgers they were scorching on the barbeque. The Simpsons hailed from Birmingham, Alabama. To Hollywood and PBS, that’s the land of Bull Connor and fire hoses and nothing more. But the next day Mrs. Simpson knocked again and offered to drive us to school (we all spoke Spanish, but we learned English in two months because there was no bilingual education in those days). She’d also turn up holding a shopping bag full of clothes outgrown by the Simpson children. They were for us.

  The next day, here came Mrs. Boudreaux from across the street. She was a native Louisianan, perpetually cheerful. She brought a big pot of gumbo and a phone number of a friend who might have a job for Grandad and—gracias a Dios!—speaks a little Spanish

  Here we were in the very gizzard of the “bigoted” and “hate-filled” South, and our Southern neighbors turned up every day to help us out. Later, when we moved to the suburbs, another family became even more special. Years before, the lady of the house had worked at a local plant riveting the hulls on the famous Higgins boats. Eisenhower called them “the boats that won World War II.” One such boat carried her fiancé to shore at Casablanca, another took him to Salerno, and yet another took him to Omaha Beach, where a burst from a German machine gun riddled his legs. Almost forty
years later, I watched him limping up the aisle, grimacing slightly with each step. Then he broke into a huge smile while handing me his daughter as a bride.

  As one whose family was almost suffocated by their generosity, I’m here to tell you that the arms of Dixie opened damn wide for these foreigners. My family landed in the South, but I’ve heard compatriots relate similar stories about everywhere in America, literally “from sea to shining sea.”

  Nobody called the Americans who welcomed us “the greatest generation” back then. But thousands of destitute Cubans knew them (and still remember them) as “el pueblo que nos abrio los brazos” (the people who opened their arms to us). We love America, and we look forward to the day when Cuba can enjoy the freedom that we’ve found from Miami to New Orleans to Los Angeles to New York. Viva America! Viva Cuba Libre!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people helped me with this book, but let me begin with New York talk-radio legend Barry Farber. “You gotta write that book, Humberto!” (This started almost five years ago.) “America needs to hear this stuff!—and they need to hear it in English, and especially in your English! Better yet, they want to hear this stuff. I hear their excited response when we discuss these things on my radio show. People are fascinated . This is all news! History may be ‘bunk,’ as Henry Ford claimed. But Cuba’s history under Castro’s murderous reign, his threats against our nation—all that isn’t really ‘history’ to most U.S. citizens. They’ve never heard it before. Our media shuns it all. So it sounds like a late-breaking story!”

  It’s not like Barry himself is unknowledgeable in these matters. In January 1959, when Castro rolled into Havana atop a tank (which had never fired a shot, by the way) declaring, “I’m a democrat! I’m a humanist! A Christian! I hate Communism! I hate dictatorships! Cuban people, you have my solemn word!” Barry was in Havana as a reporter for NBC radio. He was the first American newsman to interview Che Guevara.

  Barry persisted. “Humberto! If ever the overused ‘untold story’ term would fit a book, it’s for one you’d write about the Cuban revolution—the things we discuss on my show—and now we’ve got all this Che Guevara stuff, movies, watches, shirts, for heavens sake! Get cracking, will ya?”

  Well, here it is. The information and insights in these pages didn’t just bubble up in my head spontaneously. Word got out and a throng of friends, family members, and acquaintances—some are bona fide scholars, many more are participants with firsthand roles in the Cuban drama—all rushed in to help me. A deluge of information, anecdotes, recollections, and insights rolled in.

  After each session, the source usually had a friend or cousin or in-law with even more of the same, far more than I could ever put in the book. “Pues claro, chico! Fulano would be happy to help! He knew (Fidel, or Che, or Raul, or Vilma, or Celia, or Cubela, or Camilo, or Batista, or Pedraza, or Masferrer) personally. He was (in the Sierra, or at Moncada, or at the Isle of Pines prison, or at Playa Giron, or in the Escambray, or in the presidential palace, or in Angola).” Then my host looks at his watch. “Ah! Fulano is probably taking his siesta right now, but here’s his phone! Give him a call tonight! He’d love to talk!”

  Then the same process with Fulano. (If it sounds like I’m complaining, please perish the thought. I’ve rarely learned as much and so enjoyably.)

  The thing kept growing. Every bit of this deluge of info surprised me, fascinated me, enraged me, moved me—I simply had to put it all down. Though I specialized in Cuba while earning my master’s degree in Latin American studies at Tulane University, I had no intention of writing a textbook. Most of the information cascading in was much too juicy to fit a textbook’s soporific format.

  Anyway, here’s a (probably partial) list of my aides in this project. Besides spewing forth a ton of useful information himself, Miguel Uría, who was present at many Castro-Che meetings in the early days, who plunged into the anti-Castro fight from week one, who fought at the Bay of Pigs, who was a former Castro political prisoner, and who nowadays edits the superb electronic magazine Guaracabuya, Amigos del Pais—this very busy man also assumed the role of my hunting guide, pointing me here and there to the best sources in the vast and tangled field.

  Carlos Bringuier was press spokesman in the early 1960s for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, a group one CIA analyst called “the most militant and deeply motivated of all the Cuban exile organizations seeking to oust Castro.” Carlos was also the man who outed Lee Harvey Oswald (and was almost deported back to Castro’s Cuba for the impropriety) in August 1963 (observe the date closely). Carlos Bringuier had his own two books, Red Friday and Operacion Judas, to offer me, then provided ten times as much info and insights in interviews.

  What with keeping our taxes low, our nation strong and safe, and our hard-earned tax dollars away from Castro’s thieving and bloody paws, you’d think Republican congressmen Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart might have enough on their hands. Well, they also found time to help me—but always on their time, not their constituents’ time, please note!

  Soon they had me in touch with their father, former Cuban senator Raphael Diaz-Balart. The senior Diaz-Balart, while recounting his relationship with the young Fidel Castro and his grapplings with U.S. State Department and CIA wizards and soothsayers, had me rapt with fascination—and convulsed with mirth. That we could all be as healthy, mentally sharp, and downright exuberant when late septuagenarians as Señor Raphael Diaz-Balart. Indeed, Señor Diaz-Balart contrasts most dramatically in these departments with his former brother-in-law, Fidel Castro.

  Both for your sake, dear reader, and mine, I did my damnedest to avoid professional academics for this book. When one appeared, his arms bulging with reams of his highfalutin and always unreadable hooey, his mouth primed to spew forth the usual geyser of idiocies, I ducked into the nearest bushes. I scurried into restrooms and clambered atop a seat in a stall. If he caught me in person at home, I feigned contagious maladies.

  So you can imagine my shock when I learned that Victor Triay, Juan Clark, Marta Pelaez, Manuel Márquez-Sterling, and Armando Lago all qualify as professors, yet they talk a normal language, engage a listener, and use examples of everyday situations and everyday people! Even crazier: They laugh! Crazier still, they make their guest laugh! Crazier even still, their knowledge is vast and penetrating—and avoids the asinine platitudes and stultifying political correctness that defines their profession. Somehow, these Cuban Americans’ professional training and daily labors have left their critical and intellectual faculties (and even their senses of humor) unatrophied. They all contributed important material to this book.

  If someone has written more exhaustively or authoritatively about the Cuban people’s armed resistance to Castro-Communism than Enrique Encinosa, I’ve somehow missed him, as have most Cuban Americans. Enrique’s help in this project with his books, films, and insights has been enormous. I owe him big time (and not just for postage).

  Enrique Ros is the ultimate source on the anti-Castro fight from Florida and has punched more holes in Camelot’s hot air balloon than anyone. Señor Ros’s daughter, Republican representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, continues the fight for Cuban freedom and American security (don’t forget, these are one and the same) from Congress today.

  To understand—to really get at the bottom of—Castro’s recent shenanigans, you simply have to read Dr. Ernesto Betancourt’s column in El Nuevo Herald. Dr. Betancourt served briefly in Castro’s first government. Today he’s a researcher for, and the voice of, Radio Martí. Dr. Betancourt made all of his research, all of his insights, all of his well-informed speculations available to me. He was a tremendous help with this project.

  Nestor Carbonnel might have enlightened me enough with his superb book, And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba. But no, he persisted in helping by answering my every inquiry about the early years of the U.S.-Castro face-off—motives, ploys, personalities, the behind-the-scenes jockeying and skullduggery. Mr. Carbonnel was neck-deep in it himse
lf, and he shared his experiences and insights generously. He was a godsend for this project.

  In Stalin’s Russia it was GULAG. In Castro’s Cuba UMAP stood for the same. Emilio Izquierdo can tell you about them. At age eighteen he was rounded up at Russian machine gun–point and herded into the barbed wire camps. His crime? “Active in Catholic associations” read the Castroite document. Emilio heads the Former UMAP Prisoners Association in Miami today. I was fortunate to have Emilio as a source and inspiration for this project.

  Eusebio Peñalver, Angel de Fana, Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, and Mario Chanes de Armas all served longer in Castro’s gulag than Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s. In fact, they were imprisoned three times as long. These men represent the longest-serving political prisoners of the century. They could have easily escaped such lengthy suffering by playing Castro’s little game, by agreeing to “rehabilitation” classes, by wearing the uniforms of common prisoners. Castro made the offer often.

  Castro got his answer as swiftly and as clearly as the German commander who surrounded Bastogne got his. “It sounds strange, but no man in Cuba is as free as a political prisoner in rebellion,” says longtime Castro political prisoner Francisco Chappi. “We were tortured, we were starved. But we lived in total defiance.”

  “Inside of our souls we were free,” says another former political prisoner named Sergio Carrillo, a paratrooper at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and a Catholic priest in America today. “We refused to commit spiritual suicide,” Father Carillo stresses.