“Well, a week later I get a call from Lara, the Cuban consul in Argentina,” said Bringuier. “‘Where’s Eusebio Mujal?’ asks Lara. ‘Have you seen him? Tell him to be careful. Two men from Uruguay were here yesterday looking for him. I overheard their conversation.... I know this sounds crazy, but I’m pretty sure I overheard them sounding like they were out to kill him.’”
Cuban consul Lara, let’s keep in mind, was in a weird spot at the time. He was a career Cuban foreign-service official. He’d been ambassador to Argentina under the Batista government, so he was still on the job in early 1959. The Comintern’s hit-men had apparently been tipped off to Mujal’s whereabouts by Castro. And assuming that the Cuban consul in Argentina must be a Castro-regime apparatchik, the hit-men were not as discreet as normal in their conversations.
“Where is Eusebio Mujal?” Fidel Castro shrieked during a speech in Santa Clara, Cuba that very week, almost as if to confirm Mujal’s fears. “All I can say is that those who have not yet fallen will soon face the firing squad!”
“¿Donde Esta Mujal?” (Where is Mujal?) asked Cuba’s Castroite paper of the time, Prensa Libre, in a headline some weeks later. “I was back in Cuba by then,” recalls Carlos Bringuier. “But I sure wasn’t telling.”
Successful hit-men also found a warm welcome in Castro’s Cuba. In 1961, promptly upon completing his prison sentence in Mexico, Trotsky’s ax-murderer Ramon Mercader found his way to Cuba, where he became a bosom-buddy of his longtime fan Che Guevara, then serving as Cuba’s minister of industries. In that capacity Che anointed Ramon Mercader as Cuba’s inspector of prisons. Quite fittingly, in 1961, Castro’s prisons held about the same number of political prisoners per capita as Mercader’s boss (and Che’s idol) Stalin’s had held in 1936. But “Cuba is now a happy island,” assured The New York Times’ Herbert Matthews.
Granted, in this age of “Occupy” movements where union officials march behind Communist Party placards and shoulder to shoulder with their card-carrying bearers, the notion of labor leaders on a Communist Party hit-list sounds odd. But three or four decades ago this was common practice, as Eusebio Mujal’s American friend and associate George Meany would have willingly and gruffly explained.
CHAPTER 8
Papa Hemingway Admires Death in the Cuban Afternoon
Herbert Matthews was “the only person absolutely qualified to write about Cuba,” according to his friend and frequent host in Cuba, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.1
As for the famous novelist—according to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev, “the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name Argo’ in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London.” This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale University Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society).
“Castro’s revolution,” Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is very pure and beautiful. I’m encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time.” Papa’s sometime friend John Dos Passos said Hemingway “had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into.”2
“Cuban mothers, let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba’s problems without spilling a drop of blood.” Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones upon entering Havana on January 8, 1959. As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued: “Cuban mothers, let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry.”
Indeed, Hemingway saw behind these pretensions of love, charity and humanism—quite literally.
Some background: as commander of Havana’s La Cabana prison and execution yard in the early months of the revolution, Che Guevara often coached his firing squads in person, then rushed up to shatter the skull of the convulsed man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution-yard, Che consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. His second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out to better view his darling firing squads at work, often in the company of distinguished friends. Havana resident Ernest Hemingway was one of these.
Accounts of “Papa” Hemingway’s presence at these massacres comes courtesy of Hemingway’s own friend, the late George Plimpton (not exactly a right-wing Cuban exile) who worked as editor of The Paris Review (not exactly a McCarthyite scandal-sheet).
In 1958 George Plimpton interviewed Hemingway in Cuba for one of The Paris Review’s most famous pieces. They became friends, and the following year Hemingway again invited Plimpton down to his Finca Vigia just outside Havana. During the 1990’s, an editor at The Paris Review related how this highbrow publication passed on an option to serialize the manuscript that became Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries—and revealed “Papa’s” unwitting role in the rejection.
“I took the paper-clipped excerpt upstairs to the Boss [Plimpton],” writes James Scott Linville, “flopped down in the chair to the side of his desk ... and said I had something strange and good. As I started to tell him about it, his smile faded. I stopped my pitch and said, ‘Boss, what’s the matter?’”
“James, I’m sorry,” Linville recalls Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him and he said, “Years ago, after we’d done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution. ‘There’s something you should see,’” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.
Linville carried on, paraphrasing Plimpton’s account. “They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town. They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they’d been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew, the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners.
“The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.
“I said to George something to the effect of, ‘Oh, my God.’
“Then I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ I’m not sure why I didn’t.
“‘Did you ever write about this?’” Linville asked his boss Plimpton.
“‘No.’
“‘Why not?’
“‘He looked uncomfortable and shrugged.
“‘In the 20 years I knew George, it was the only time he refused to look at a piece of writing,” continues Linville. “It was unusual for George to talk about politics.... But still I didn’t quite believe him. Quite simply, I’d never heard a word about such executions,” concludes Linville.3
And there’s the money quote.
Over the years The Paris Review has featured the works of literary luminaries William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, V. S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, among many others. In the words of one critic, the magazine is “one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.” So up until the mid-1990’s the ultra-educated editor of a magazine catering to the ultra-educated had no idea that Castro’s regime had executed people. And he learned about a few of those executions only by a fluke.
“A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels,” said Hemingway in that very Paris Review interview with George Plimpton. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
So was Hemingway duped by Castroism? Did his shit-detector malfunction? Or was it on high alert? Few people, after all, had such access to Castroism’s crime scenes. And the KGB, while certainly appreciating the work of dupes and useful idiots, was not known to sign them on (openly).
The Cuba Archive estimates that by the end of that year 2,000 Cubans had been murdered in the manner Ernest Hemingway loved to watch from his picnic chair while sipping
mojitos. Significantly, both Hemingway and Plimpton passed on writing about any of those deaths in the afternoon—and morning and midnight. Augusto Pinochet’s regime, needless to add, would never have gotten off so easily.
I guess “left-wing death squads” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as the other Latin American type, so often and reflexively condemned by literati. That the Cuba Archive Project has already documented (by name) almost triple the number of murdered and “disappeared” by Castro and Che Guevara’s death-squads as the estimate of those disappeared by Pinochet’s just doesn’t register among the enlightened. George Plimpton’s deputy editor provided the perfect example. It’s worth quoting him again: “I didn’t quite believe him. Quite simply, I’d never heard a word about such executions.”
According to the internationally acclaimed Black Book of Communism, 16,000 executions took place 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Cuba swarmed with foreign reporters and Hollywood producers.
But in Linville’s defense, and assuming he relied on the mainstream media for news and history, where would he have heard of them?
ENTER I.F. STONE
By 1964, with the egg on his face crusting into a thick layer, even The New York Times began rejecting Herbert Matthews’s Cuba articles, whereupon I.F. Stone stepped up to the plate, citing Matthews’s “outstanding history of reporting” on Cuba. “Report on Cuba The New York Times Was Afraid to Print,” he titled a Matthews article of February 1964 in his I.F. Stone’s Weekly. “Fidel Castro is one of the most extraordinary men of our age,” the article starts. “The U.S. has paid heavily for a shocking underestimation of his intelligence and abilities.”
Declassified Soviet documents expose I.F Stone as a full-fledged KGB agent from 1936 to 1939 and a desultory “agent of influence” for the rest of his life. This was again shown by declassified KGB documents in a book published by Yale University Press, not exactly a propaganda arm for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Does anyone else notice some commonalities among Herbert Matthews’s friends and champions?
CHAPTER 9
Castro’s “Revolution of Youth” —Imprisoning the Young
“Castro’s is a revolution of youth.” (Herbert Matthews)1
The notion of Castro’s Cuba as a stiflingly Stalinist nation never quite caught on among the enlightened. Instead the island often inspires hazy visions of a vast commune, rock-fest or Occupy encampment, studded with free health clinics and with Wavy Gravy handing out love-beads at the entrance. The regime was founded by beatniks, after all. In 1960 Jean-Paul Sartre hailed Cuba’s Stalinist rulers as “les enfants au pouvoir” (the children in power). A few months earlier Fidel Castro spoke at Harvard on the same bill as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. And ever since then, long-haired Che Guevara has reigned worldwide as top icon of youthful rebellion.
“They saw in him,” writes Camelot court scribe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system.....”2
In fact the brain-shackled robot Fidel Castro and Che Guevara tried to create with their firing squads, forced-labor camps and Stalinist indoctrination makes the Eisenhower era’s Organization Man look like a combination of Jimi Hendrix and Jack Kerouac.
“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!” declared Che Guevara in a famous speech in 1961. “The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible,” commanded this icon of flower-children. “Instead the young must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”3
Youth, wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass.” Those who chose their own path (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-imperialist rock‘n’ roll) were denounced as worthless delinquents and herded into forced-labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point. In a famous speech, Che even vowed “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals,” he raved.4
And if the Eisenhower era’s Organization Man often brought some of his work home, the Castroites sought to outdo him a thousand-fold. “Our revolutionaries,” Che Guevara wrote in his “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” “have children who with their first faltering words do not learn to call their father; wives who must be part of the general sacrifice necessary to carry the revolution to its destination. Their circle of friends is strictly limited to the circle of revolutionary companions. There is no life outside the revolution. A father who devotes himself to the revolution cannot be distracted by the thought of what his child needs, of his worn shoes, of the basic necessities which his family may lack.”
Castro, said Camelot scribe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had “summoned a dozen friends and overturned a government of wicked old men.”
THE YOUNG AND THE FEARLESS
“I’m going back to Cuba to kill Che Guevara!” snarled Jose Castano (then 17) to fellow paratrooper Manel Menendez (then 23). These youths were then in Guatemala, training as members of Brigade 2506 for what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.5
Che Guevara had personally tortured and murdered Jose’s father two years earlier. Needless to add, Jose Castano, Sr. had been completely defenseless at the time. To Jose’s 16-year-old son, Che Guevara—twice his age at the time—was a very wicked old man.
Herbert Matthews had declared that “Castro’s is a revolution of youth” at around the time Jose, Manel and hundreds of other Cuban youths were training to overthrow Castro. “If a label must be given he is a pre-scientific Utopian socialist, not a Marxist.”
The average age of the thousands of men murdered by firing squad during this overturning of wicked old men was probably about 25. During a two-week period in August 1964, 477 men were murdered by Castro’s firing squads. Not a single victim had been affiliated with the wicked Batista regime. Most, in fact, had fought it. Many, perhaps most, of the murdered men were younger than Castro and Che by a decade and had been early members of Castro’s own rebel army and government.6
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when a volley from Castro’s firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father crumpled beside Carlos from the same volley and tumbled into the same mass grave. Felicito Acosta, Lorenzo Espino, Justo Garcia Jr., Efrain Brizuelas and Jesus Carrillo were all 16 when they died by Soviet-armed firing squad in the same area. Lorentino Pelaez Jr., Tito Sardinas and Juan Blanco were 17. Emeterio Rodriguez and Ruben Acosta were 15. Antonio Ruiz Acosta and Luis Gonzalezwere each 14 when the Castroite volley tumbled them into a mass grave.7
These Cuban teenagers (along with thousands of others) had joined their fathers, uncles and cousins to resist the plans of Soviet advisors three and four times their age to steal their families’ small farms and build a Stalinist kolkhoz.
Jose Ramon Cruz was four years old when Castro and Che marched into Havana in 1959. As a teenager he took to writing mildly ribald graffiti on some of the walks of his home town of Camaguey. Unfortunately his brand of humor was completely lost on Castro’s Stasi-tutored police, who repeatedly jailed and beat him. In 1971 Jose organized a public protest against his revolutionary treatment. Castro’s police quickly showed up, and this time they shot him to death. The beloved teenagers’ funeral was a crowded, noisy event that required Castro’s Soviet T-34 and Stalin tanks to rumble into the area, quell the hooliganism and restore order. A mini-Budapest in the tropics.
Among Jose Castano and Manel Menendez’s band of brothers in Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs invasion was 16-year-old Felipe Rodon, who on April 17th, 1961 grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face point-blank one of Castro’s Soviet tanks on the bloody Bay of Pigs beachhead. At 10 yards Felipe fired at the clanking monster and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and the Soviet tank, sent to Cuba by the fat and wicked old men in the Kremlin, rolled over little Felipe.
Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp-gun put out his eye on that same beachead. Castro troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour until the S
oviet-trained Castroites finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.
When he hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Jose Antonio San Roman, the commander of Brigade 2506, was 27 years old. His second-in-command, Erneido Oliva, was 27. The political delegate of the exiles’ provisional government, Manuel Artime, was 28.
Among the leaders of the anti-Castro Cuban underground of the time were Rogelio Gonzalez, Alberto Tapia, and Virgilio Campaneria. None was older than 26 in 1961 when murdered by Soviet-armed firing squads. Seventeen other college kids were murdered by Castro and Che’s firing squads that week in early 1961. Far from belonging to Batista’s “wicked old men,” all these youngsters had fought against the Batista regime. In utter vain will you search for any mention of this by The New York Times or the media in general.
As for foreign commentators on the Cuban revolution, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., et al., weren’t merely wrong; they were smugly propounding the very opposite of the truth. Cuban “children” were in positions of power all right, but as armed opponents of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. These youngsters were also paying for their bravery with their lives—and by the thousands. The ones captured stood tall, proud, defiant and silent through ghastly torture by Castro’s secret police, then being tutored by wicked old men from the Kremlin (KGB). But the Cuban kids went to their deaths before Castro’s firing squads while defiantly yelling “Down with Communism!”
“The defiant yells of ‘Down with Communism!’ made the walls of La Cabana prison tremble,” recalls an eyewitness to these firing-squad massacres, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro’s prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission. Valladares himself was 21 when jailed for the counterrevolutionary crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. During Cuba’s “reign of terror”—Batista’s dictatorial rule, according to Herbert Matthews—such a crime would have elicited mere chuckles from those wicked old men.
The Longest Romance Page 9