The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  Senator Dodd: “Did Herbert Matthews ever contact you while you were the Ambassador in Cuba?”

  Ambassador Gardner: “I made it possible actually for Herbert Matthews to go down and have this interview [with Castro], because he asked me.”

  That’s Arthur Gardner, the U.S. ambassador to Cuba at the time of Matthews’s early-1957 visit.

  Senator Dodd: “Yes. I wanted to ask you, about that. He [Herbert Matthews] did ask for assistance in arranging an interview with Castro? ”

  Mr. Gardner: “He did.”

  Senator Dodd: “And this was arranged?”

  Mr. Gardner: “Yes.”

  Senator Dodd: “How did you arrange it?”

  Mr. Gardner: “Only under the condition that when he came back he would tell me his reactions.”

  Senator Dodd: “Yes. But how could you arrange a meeting with Castro?”

  Mr. Gardner: “Well, I mean in those days Batista, said, ‘All right, if you think it won’t do any harm, it is all right,’ and he let him go down.”

  Mr. Gardner: “Senator, to be perfectly clear about this, the only thing I could do was help him [Matthews], so that he would have a pass to go down the island, so that he could make this trip [to interview Castro].”

  Senator Dodd: “I understand—whatever itwas that he thought you could do, he wanted you to do it to help him get there?”

  Mr. Gardner: “That is right.”

  Senator Dodd: “And in return for this he promised he would come back and tell you about this conversation with Castro?”

  Mr. Gardner: “That is right. And to this day I never have seen him.”

  Senator Dodd: “He never did return and never did tell you?”

  Mr. Gardner: “No. It was a big shock to me, as a matter of fact.”

  Senator Dodd: “Mr. Gardner, do you feel that Matthews’s account of his visit to Castro, as he wrote it up, had considerable influence on the American people with respect to favoring Castro?”2

  “Almost two years before Ambassador Gardner’s testimony, my father heard the same thing from some of his government contacts,” adds Manuel Marquez-Sterling, whose father Carlos was a Cuban senator at the time. “The last thing Batista wanted was Matthews, a famous New York Times reporter, killed and the killing pinned on his police or army—which is exactly the type of thing he suspected Castro’s people would pull off,” continues Marquez-Sterling. “And then naturally, the anti-Batista U.S. media would headline it everywhere. So Batista wanted to make sure Matthews got to into the Sierra safely, conducted his interview and returned safely.”3

  “Turns out he was wrong about Castro’s motives,” adds Marquez-Sterling. “At the time, Matthews was much more valuable to Castro as a courier and propagandist than as martyr. But the facts debunking the ‘perils’ of Matthews’s visit with Castro stand as a matter of historical record—though no one would ever know it from anywhere in the mainstream media, especially The New York Times.”

  In sum: Herbert Matthews was protected by a Batista police escort the entire route to his interviews with Fidel Castro. And this is all a matter of sworn testimony on the public record for over 50 years, and corroborated by one of Cuba’s most respected political figures of the time—an anti-Batistiano to boot. For the record, Anthony DePalma himself refers to Carlos Marquez-Sterling as “a respected politician.”

  By way of gratitude, shortly after the interviews, Herbert Matthews—instead of visiting with Ambassador Gardner to report on Fidel Castro as he’d promised—visited his State Deptartment cronies to urge that they fire (Republican) Arthur Gardner from his ambassadorial position, which they did.

  “In Cuba itself... I received no help at all from the Castro regime,” DePalma writes in his book’s acknowledgements, “despite my repeated requests and their repeated assurances that assistance would be forthcoming.”

  “No journalist gets a visa to do research in Cuba without very careful vetting by the regime’s intelligence services,” says Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons, for years the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba spy-catcher. So DePalma actually has many Castro-regime apparatchiks to thank. But let’s go ahead and indulge him; maybe he doesn’t have all their names.

  DRINKING A LIE

  A Cuban girl’s coming-of-age or “sweet-sixteen” party comes at fifteen. And during the 1950’s a Cuban teenybopper’s quinceanera (from “quince,” the Spanish word for fifteen) was easily the major event of her life, usually until her big fat Cuban wedding.

  Miriam Mata lived in a Havana suburb in 1957 (but wasn’t fat!); she had her coming-of-age party made all the more memorable when Castro’s July 26 movement, for whom The New York Times’ Herbert Matthews was faithfully serving as propagandist and courier, sent an RSVP in the form of a bomb threat.

  “Dozens of young girls would be crowded into our house on that day,” recalls Miriam. “My family was obviously frightened and I was obviously devastated. But most who knew how Castro’s people worked were not surprised in the least. In those days there weren’t many such people—and Herbert Matthews sure didn’t help matters.”

  Fifteen-year-old Miriam Mata’s birthday greetings in the form of a bomb threat were standard operating procedure for the organization that The New York TimesHerbert Matthews served as flack. Bombs were exploding all over Cuba at the time, especially in crowded public places. According to Herbert Matthews, the reign of terror in Cuba at the time came from the police—the people trying to stop the bombings!

  In February 1957, just as Matthews’s articles on Castro were headlining in The New York Times, Pablo Atilano, Placido Analisio and Urbino Jerez, all teenagers, were blown to pieces by a bomb placed by July 26 agents near a farm in the Sierra Maestra.4 These innocent boys were murdered a few miles from where Matthews had just conducted his famous first interview with the chief of this July 26 movement, whom he hailed a humanitarian hero.

  A few months later, Mercedes Diaz-Sanchez was blown to pieces by one of the dozens of bombs exploding throughout Havana at the time. The one that killed Mercedes was placed in a five & dime store.

  “Traitor to the July 26 Movement”—so read the sign attached to the bullet-riddled body of Daniel Sanchez Wood on a street-corner of Santiago, Cuba around the time of Matthews’s famous interview with Castro. The body of 23-year-old Alcides Wood had an identical sign when found just outside a cemetery in the Sierra Maestra region, with his skull shattered by gunshots.5

  And well before suicide bombers were cool—especially young female suicide bombers—the organization for which The New York Times served as unofficial press agency was putting them to use. “She always stressed that for one who dies many would rise,” reads the article in Cuba’s captive (literally) press from February 21, 2011. “On March 3, 1957 [a few weeks after Herbert Matthews’s famous interview with Fidel Castro] after her final exam July 26 agent Urselia Diaz Baez strapped a clock-bomb to her thigh and walked into a movie theater in Havana. The device seemed to be taking too long to detonate so she walked into the ladies’ restroom where it exploded.... Her name is registered among those heroic Cubans who fought for a better world.”

  For the sake of argument, let’s say that Herbert Matthews remained somehow oblivious to the terrorism of his clients of the time. Now here comes The New York Times’ Anthony DePalma, writing half a century later, in a book purportedly designed somehow to exculpate The New York Times from Matthews’s sponsorship of Castroite terror:

  “The [Castro group’s] bombs were usually placed where no tourist or Cuban civilian would be hurt.... and they were meant not to maim or kill,” he writes in his whitewashing of Herbert Matthews, published in 2006, called The Man Who Invented Fidel.

  But too many eyewitnesses to July 26 terror, living in the U.S. today, know better. Also, not all newspapers of the time took their cue from the famous New York Times. Many, as seen above, were actually reporting on a reign of terror then spreading in Cuba. Not that Mr. DePalma deigned to consult with any of these.

  �
�Batista’s goons,” on the other hand “killed an estimated 20,000” Cubans, according to this same book by The New York Times’ DePalma. This meme of 20,000 Cubans killed by Batista had originated in 1957 in an article written by Enrique De La Osa and published by Bohemia, Havana’s famous magazine. The statement quickly spread around the world. A half-century of refutations later, the lie is still parroted by The New York Times among many others in media and academic circles.

  Fox News’s Bob Beckel even picked up on it for his show, The Five, on September 5, 2011. “I still have my Che poster,” bragged Beckel. “Che helped Fidel Castro get rid of one of the biggest thugs and murdering bastards there ever was, and that was Batista in Cuba.”

  A special issue of Bohemia, published January 11, 1959, right after Castro’s seizure of power, carried an article by Enrique De La Osa, listing 898 dead, by name, on both sides of the seven-year-long anti-Batista rebellion. So the magazine’s own figure of 20,000 dead had exaggerated the truth more than twenty-fold, and had placed the blame for all those deaths on one side.

  The following year, Bohemia’s owner Miguel Angel Quevedo saw his magazine stolen by the Stalinist terrorists that he and his magazine had served as dutifully as had Herbert Matthews and The New York Times. Quevedo, a fervent Fidelista—many called him the Cuban Herbert Matthews—quickly scurried to Venezuela just ahead of a firing squad. The Cuban revolution was just starting to devour its own children, an appetite it would indulge more voraciously than had Lenin’s.

  In 1969, from Venezuela, Miguel Angel Quevedo confessed that it was he himself who had invented the statement about the 20,000 dead. He also confessed tremendous regret for hatching the lie and for how it had helped the propaganda campaign to put Fidel Castro in power. The regret for the calamity he helped bring upon Cuba was such that, right after signing the letter admitting to his lie, Miguel Angel Quevedo put a gun to his head and blew his brains out.6

  In the 55 years since the lie’s inception, a reporter for the world’s most prestigious newspaper, exhaustively researching Herbert Mathews’s reporting on Cuba, had ample sources from which to check its veracity. The lie was of such magnitude that it forced the liar to blow his brains out. Apparently The New York Times had no such scruple.

  In fairness, Miguel Angel Quevedo’s remorse stemmed from being forced to live with the consequences of his sponsorship. Herbert Matthews, Ed Murrow, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, Ted Turner, Andrea Mitchell, etc., on the other hand, visit Castro’s fiefdom, bask in the Stalinist regime’s red-carpet treatment in appreciation for their ongoing sponsorship, then scoot back to Georgetown or the Upper West side of Manhattan while sipping mojitos on the flight. It’s a no-brainer.

  Not that Herbert Matthews was alone in overlooking these matters. If the American public remained oblivious to the July 26 terrorism in the late 50’s, the Associated Press merits honorable mention. But the AP has an excellent excuse: its dispatches from Castro and Che’s war during 1957-58 in the Sierra, complete with rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, were actually written from a desk in Manhattan by July 26 agent Mario Llerena, who snickers this admission in his book, The Unsuspected Revolution. Llerena was also a frequent New York contact for none other than Herbert Matthews.

  MISSIONARY STYLE

  During his three visits to Cuba in 1957-58, Herbert Matthews did much more than report. To wit:

  In early 1958 Cuban quasi-dictator Batista, who had taken power in a virtually bloodless coup in 1952, agreed to allow elections the coming summer. A long-time and well-known political opponent of Batista’s looked likely to win. Cuban senator and University of Havana professor Dr. Carlos Marquez-Sterling had an impeccable record for honesty. He had helped draft the constitution of 1940 that Batista violated with his 1952 coup and that Castro would abolish with his in 1959. In fact mere days after Batista’s March io, 1952 coup Marquez-Sterling petitioned Cuba’s Supreme Court to declare Batista’s rule unconstitutional. He was anti-Batista when anti-Batistianismo wasn’t cool, five years before The New York Times made it so.

  Great, you might think. Here’s the perfect solution to Cuba’s problems of the time, or so it seemed if you took Herbert Matthews’s articles at face value. The ever-spiraling rebel terror and police counter-terror will finally cease. Batista will finally scoot. Peace, honesty and constitutionality will climb back into the Cuban saddle (more or less). So what’s to complain?

  Plenty, for Castro. In fact the prospect of Carlos Marquez-Sterling honestly replacing Batista sent Castro ballistic. Typically shrewd in these matters, Fidel Castro realized that with the fading of Cuba’s political crisis another item that would quickly fade would be his own political star. Enter his star-maker.

  “Herbert Matthews shows up at our door,” recalls Carlos Marquez-Sterling’s son, Manuel (today professor emeritus at Plymouth State University and author). “My father helped write Cuba’s constitution of 1940 and our ancestors had fought in every Cuban liberation movement for 200 years. My father, a long-time opponent of Batista, was widely regarded as the candidate most likely to win the elections scheduled shortly in Cuba. So of course he agrees to an interview with The New York Times’s Herbert Matthews.

  “A few days later, and without calling ahead, Matthews knocks on our door,” recalls Manuel. “He swaggers in with barely a greeting and quickly starts shoving Castro’s July 26 pamphlets in our face! Now this is a reporter for the famous New York Times, remember? My father was expecting an actual interview from a reporter for the most prestigious newspaper in the world at the time. But nothing like it ever materialized.

  “‘Why aren’t you backing Fidel Castro?’ Matthews arrogantly asked my father. ‘Why aren’t you backing Castro’s call for an election boycott and for a nationwide general strike?’ After his initial shock wore off, my father started losing his composure. We kept waiting for the interview, for his questions on Cuba’s elections and political prospects, etc. You’d really think a U.S. reporter, especially one constantly carping about democracy, would welcome the prospect of elections to replace the usurper Batista and hopefully solve Cuba’s problems. And here he was face to face with the candidate predicted to win, and with a lifetime of impeccable democratic credentials.

  “But no interview ever materialized,” recalls Manuel. “My father soon saw what Matthews was up to, which was certainly not what Matthews had claimed when requesting a visit. Herbert Matthews was simply on an errand as propagandist and courier for Fidel Castro. There’s no other way to put it—especially by those of us who were eyewitnesses to the process.

  “‘Mr. Matthews, you’re always denouncing U.S. meddling in Cuban politics,’ my father told Matthews. ‘And that’s exactly what you’re attempting here. Good day, sir.’ And we showed Mr. Herbert Matthews the door.”

  If this sounds harsh, Fidel Castro himself agrees with Marquez-Sterling, the Cuban he rightly recognized as the biggest obstacle to his dictatorial ambitions at the time. Castro at first tried to co-opt and neutralize Marquez-Sterling by using Herbert Matthews as his personal envoy. When this failed, “Castro sent his men to try and murder my father,” recalls Manuel. “A couple of times they came close. Needless to add, none of this was featured in The New York Times’s reporting of the time, or ever afterward.”

  “Without your help,” a beaming Fidel Castro said while nodding at Herbert Matthews during a visit to The New York Times’s offices in April 1959, almost exactly a year after he’d visited Marquez-Sterling, “and without the help of The New York Times, the revolution in Cuba would never have been.”

  A week earlier, in the Cuban embassy in Washington, a beaming Fidel Castro had ceremoniously pinned Herbert Matthews with a medal cast specially in his honor. “Sierra Maestra Press Mission,” read the glowing emblem. “To Our American Friend Herbert Matthews with Gratitude. Fidel Castro.”7

  When shown the door by sputtering Cuban senator, constitutionalist, Batista enemy and presidential candidate Dr. Carlos Marquez-Sterling, Herbert Matthews wa
s fresh from another meeting, this one with Cuba’s most powerful labor leader Eusebio Mujal, who headed Cuba’s AFL-CIO-affiliated CTC (Confederation of Cuban Workers). Here was another vital player on the Cuban political scene of the time, an ideal source for a New York Times reporter to interview, you might think. He was also another prime target for Castro to co-opt and neutralize, in order to derail the planned elections.

  Like many of Cuba’s labor leaders, Eusebio Mujal was an ex-Communist. He had joined Cuba’s Communist party almost upon its founding in 1925 by the Comintern’s Fabio Grobart, who immigrated to Cuba from Poland in 1921. Mujal then cut his teeth on Cuban communism while Stalin consolidated his rule in Russia. Mujal broke with the Party in the early 1930’s.

  So Mujal had seen and heard plenty. Obviously he’d graduated well past Communist Tactics 101. By 1958 he had few illusions about the Gods that failed him. So he knew who was behind Fidel Castro, and he knew most of them by name—first among them Fabio Grobart.

  Indeed, minutes into Matthews’s visit with him, Eusebio Mujal saw what Marquez-Sterling saw a bit later. This famous New York Times reporter was simply a courier and missionary for the closet (but not to Mujal) communist, Fidel Castro. Needless to add, Matthews was not on an interview mission with Mujal, any more than with Marquez-Sterling.

  Some background that explains these missions for Castro by Matthews: in August 1957 Castro’s July 26 movement had called for a national strike—and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The strike was completely ignored. Castro was declaring another strike for April 9, 1958. Hence the March 1958 call by his faithful New York Times courier Herbert Matthews on Cuba’s most powerful labor leader, shortly before his call on Marquez-Sterling.