The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  From San Francisco this official for the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to fuel bonfires with Orwell’s Animal Farm, and to jail librarians for stocking it, traveled to the New York Public Library where she lectured Americans on artistic freedom and the evils of censorship.

  When Cuban-American legislators including Senator Marco Rubio, House Committee on Foreign affairs chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Congressmen David Rivera and Mario Diaz-Balart protested this State Department feting of Raul Castro’s daughter, The Washington Post quickly rushed to the Stalinist regime’s defense. In an editorial the paper sniffed at “the absurd outcry from Cuban-American politicians, including members of Congress, bent out of shape that a visa was granted to Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban president Raul Castro and an advocate of gay and transgender rights. What are they so frightened of?”5

  The least laudatory term that can be found in the pages of The Washington Post for Al Sharpton, for instance, is “flamboyant.” There is no record in that paper’s pages of any “absurdity” or “getting bent out of shape” by this fine figure of an agitator.

  Actually few Cuba-watchers were surprised by the editorial. The Washington Post boasts a long history of affection for the Castro regime. Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media was an eyewitness to this warm relationship. Here we’ll turn over the floor to him:

  “When Laurence Stern, the national news editor of The Washington Post, passed away in 1979, Reed [Irvine, founder of Accuracy in Media] asked me to attend and observe his memorial service. I was astounded when a man identified as Teofilo Acosta was introduced and told the service: ‘I’m from Cuba. I am Marxist-Leninist. I am human. Larry Stern was my friend, one of my best friends. I loved him.’ Acosta was publicly known as a first secretary in the Cuban Interests Section that has been set up inside the Czech Embassy in Washington. In reality, he was a Cuban intelligence agent.”

  Kincaid then saw executive editor Ben Bradlee warmly greet the Cuban DGI officer and repeatedly call him by his first name. The London Daily Telegraph of September 3, 1979 quoted Teofilo Acosta boasting of “having a number of U.S. senators and congressmen in my pocket”6

  To say nothing of U.S. editors and reporters.

  If only President Micheletti had sent Manuel Zelaya to the firing squad, along with every Honduran who looked at him cross-eyed, then perhaps the U.S. State Department and media would treat him with the same deference they extend to Stalinist Cuba’s First Daughter.

  CNN SPINS HONDURAS

  During a week-long visit to Honduras immediately following Zelaya’s ouster, this writer found himself amidst hundreds of thousands of Hondurans demonstrating in the streets. Just the type of thing to get the media cameras rolling and the mikes shoved in front of demonstrators’ faces, wouldn’t you think?

  Hah! These demonstrations by hundreds of thousands in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa supported Zelaya’s ouster, you see. So there was no sign of the international mainstream media. A very common placard carried by the Honduran demonstrators read, “CNN, Why Don’t You Show This!” Others read, “CNN—The Chavez News Network.” Surely American Tea Partiers recognize the sentiment.

  In fact, up until this demonstration CNN had been running regular reports from Honduras by their local reporter, Krupskaia Alis. The blackout on the pro-Micheletti demonstrations was explained to me by Honduran officials. Ms. Alis, you see, had been an official of the Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime and was still married to a Sandinista official. But you will search CNN in utter vain for a clue to Ms. Alis’s political affiliations.

  Now when it came to Mariela Castro’s U.S. visit in 2012 CNN was on full alert; Christiane Amanpour smiled her way through a lengthy interview with Raul Castro’s daughter. While the diehard Communist denounced U.S. lawmakers of Cuban heritage as “Mafiosi” and Cuban dissidents as “liars, crooks and mercenaries,” Amanpour flashed cutesy family pics of the Castro family in the background.

  As it happened, concurrent with the Mariela-CNN lovefest a black Cuban dissident named Jorge Luis Garcia Perez was testifying about Castroite murder, torture and repression to a U.S. Senate subcommittee via teleconference. For his peaceful dissidence the regime represented by Mariela Castro had condemned Garcia Perez to the same term in Castro’s dungeons as Nelson Mandela had gotten in South Africa’s for planting bombs. You might think Garcia Perez’s testimony was newsworthy?

  Hah! Not a single U.S. network carried the Cuban dissident’s testimony. And right after his testimony he was arrested by Mariela Castro’s dad’s KGB-trained police, beaten comatose and again tossed in a jail cell.7 When Ann Coulter was asked on ABC’s “The View” if she had ever seen two women having sex, she replied: “Not since Katie Couric interviewed Hillary Clinton.” Christiane Amanpour’s interview of Mariela Castro came close to such a spectacle—while a black victim of Mariela’s lily-white family regime was being beaten and jailed for the crime of speaking truth to power.

  “We were convinced that Zelaya was scheming to turn your military base in Palmerola over to Chavez,” Honduran interim President Roberto Micheletti told this writer in June 2009. “We started getting suspicious when suddenly in mid-2008, and seemingly out of the blue, Zelaya declared that Honduras desperately needed another international airport.

  “‘What?’ we legislators asked ourselves, while looking at each other wide-eyed. Honduras’ airports are perfectly adequate for our needs, and everyone knew that.

  “‘That U.S. base in Palmerola would make a great location for that airport,’ Zelaya continued. ‘And Venezuela has promised to finance the project.’

  “‘Whoops!’ we all said. Then we started inquiring more closely, and got to the bottom of this scheme. Zelaya, we finally concluded, planned to boot out the U.S. military and convert this base, essentially, into a way-station for Chavez-FARC drug shipments to the U.S.”

  During the last 18 months of Zelaya’s term, 14 Venezuelan-registered planes crashed in Honduras. All carried cocaine or traces of the substance. During Micheletti’s interim presidency not one such plane was discovered. Note: those were only planes that crashed. Imagine the overall traffic Zelaya was facilitating through Honduras for his sugar-daddy Hugo Chavez and his drug-running partners, the FARC.

  Given a free hand to investigate by Micheletti, Honduran authorities quickly discovered nine clandestine airstrips in remote portions of the nation. “I’ve always been a friend and great admirer of the United States,” Micheletti stressed to this writer. “No legally elected president of Honduras will give the U.S. base in Honduras to Hugo Chavez, who is so closely allied with the soon-to-be nuclear-armed Iranian regime.”

  As mandated by the Honduran constitution, Roberto Micheletti resigned his interim presidency in January 2010—ceding his office to a political rival who had won it in a regularly-scheduled election.

  CHAPTER13

  Keep Your Pants On, Stephen Colbert. Che Wasn’t That Hot

  “Learn some history! The movie is Che. Go! Learn!” (Stephen Colbert while hosting Che leading man and producer Benicio Del Toro, July 1, 2009)

  “A great piece of work. This movie is based on history. It went to the source. If you own the poster and t shirt you owe it to yourself to go learn about the man.” (MSNBC’s Willie Geist while hosting Benicio Del Toro, January 6, 2009)

  “I still have my Che Guevara poster. Che Guevara was a freedom fighter.” (Bob Beckel, Fox News, September 5, 2011)

  While accepting the “best actor” award at the Cannes Film Festival for his role as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s movie Che, Benicio Del Toro gushed: “I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!” As the crowd erupted in a thunderous ovation, he continued: “I wouldn’t be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you’ll have to pay your respects to the man!” In a flurry of subsequent interviews in Europe, Del Toro equated Che Guevara with Jesus Christ and again told a Spanish interviewer, “Ideologically I feel very close to Che.”1

/>   “Dammit, this guy is cool” is the title of an interview with Del Toro in The Guardian. As a teen, he said, “I hear of this guy, and he’s got a cool name. Che Guevara!” Years later, doing film-work in Mexico, “I went to a library and I was looking at books, and I came across a picture .... I thought, ‘Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!’”2

  Right here Benicio Del Toro, who fulfilled an obvious fantasy by starring as Che Guevara in the four-and-a-half-hour movie he also co-produced, probably revealed the inspiration (and daunting intellectual exertion) of most Che fans worldwide, including Beckel and Colbert. It wasn’t enough that Stephen Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro produced what even The New York Times recognized as an “epic hagiography” of the Stalinist who co-founded a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror; murdered more Cubans than Hitler murdered Germans during the Night of Long Knives; craved to incite a worldwide nuclear war; and in the process converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe into a pesthole that repels Haitians.

  No, this wasn’t enough for them. In addition, upon the hagiography’s screening by the American Film Institute at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 2008, the families of the thousands of Che Guevara’s murder victims were gratuitously and cheekily insulted. “Che Guevara is a hugely controversial figure,” laughed Lou Diamond Phillips, who played the role of Bolivian Communist party leader Mario Monje. The cameras in front of Grauman’s then turned to “Che” himself, Benicio Del Toro, who snickered along with Phillips, “I don’t know how this film is gonna go over in Miami”—then smirked with co-star Joaquim de Almeida while cackles from the cast erupted in the background.

  And all this in Hollywood, the world capital of sensitivity-training, where an offhand quip about a black or a gay, about slavery or lynching can end a career; where “bullying” can take the form of prolonged eye-contact or a sneer; but where, apparently, public laughter and open ridicule of at the grief of thousands of Cuban-Americans, whose loved ones were murdered, passes for humor.

  Miami, as you might guess, is home to most of the wives, mothers, daughters, sons and brothers of the thousands of defenseless men—and boys and even some women—murdered by the regime Che Guevara co-founded.

  Most of the Cubans Che murdered, he murdered because he claimed they were affiliated with the U.S. (“Batista, America’s Boy,” “CIA mercenaries,” etc.) In fact probably 90 per cent of the men, boys and women his regime murdered had no affiliation whatsoever with Batista. The vast majority had actually fought against the Batista regime—but as non-communists.

  So actually the thousands of murdered and tortured Cubans were more a form of collateral damage as Che Guevara craved to get his cowardly hands on his true hate-obsession: Americans, the very people crowding Grauman’s, snickering and cackling.

  “The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” raved the terrorist whom Soderbergh and Del Toro glorified and who got a standing ovation in Hollywood with both Robert Redford’s The Motorcycle Diaries and Soderbergh’s Che. “Against those hyenas [Americans] there is no option but extermination! The [American] imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! We must keep our hatred [against the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysm! If the [Soviet] nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S., including New York City.”

  As usual, most of the people Che Guevara craved to incinerate viewed protests against the Che movie as a quaint and silly obsession by hyper-sensitive, loudmouthed and even ungrateful Cuban-Americans. The film’s reception in Castro’s Cuba was vastly different from the one in Miami—but similar to the one in Hollywood.

  “THUMBS UP IN CUBA”

  “‘Che’ film gets thumbs up in Cuba,” ran the headline from CNN’s Havana Bureau on December 8. 2009. Benicio Del Toro was in the Cuban capital at the Havana Film Festival that week, presenting the movie he co-produced. “Che the movie met Che the myth in Cuba this weekend,” started the CNN report, “and the lengthy biopic of the Argentinean revolutionary won acclaim from among those who know his story best.”

  Indeed, but the acclaim came because “those who know his story best”—Castro and his Stalinist henchmen, the film’s chief mentors and veritable co-producers—saw that their directives had been followed slavishly; that Che’s actual story was completely absent from the movie. This, of course, seemed lost on CNN, the first network to be bestowed a Havana bureau by the film’s co-producers.

  Del Toro and Soderbergh’s movie provides no hint of any of the above, while proving that the Castro regime has lost none of its touch at co-opting the foreign media and Hollywood. “This is Cuban history,” gushed Del Toro at his Havana press conference. “There’s an audience in here that that could be the biggest critics and the most knowledgeable critics of the historical accuracy of the film.”

  Yes, but if any these dared criticize the historical accuracy of the film they’d likely find themselves in a Cuban jail-cell or torture-chamber. The difference is often academic.

  As seems mandatory when any scholar, author or documentarian researches Cuban history, only the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist regime qualifies as a reliable source.

  Che was billed as the highlight of the 2009 Havana Film Festival. The Stalinist regime rolled out the red carpet for their honored guest and A+ pupil, Benicio Del Toro. “It’s a privilege to be here!” gushed Del Toro to his Castroite hosts. “I’m grateful that the Cuban people can see this movie!”3

  And why shouldn’t Castro’s subjects be allowed to view this movie? Weren’t Stalin’s subjects allowed to watch The Battleship Potemkin? Weren’t Hitler’s subjects allowed to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will? Both were produced at the direction of the propaganda ministries of totalitarian regimes—as was Soderbergh’s and Del Toro’s Che.

  The screenplay was based on Che Guevara’s diaries as published by Cuba’s propaganda ministry with the foreword written by Fidel Castro himself. The film includes several Communist Cuban actors; the other Latin American actors spent months in Havana being prepped by for their roles by official Cubans.

  A proclamation from Castro’s own press dated December 7, 2008 actually boasts of their role. “Actor Benicio Del Toro presented the film [at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater] as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute for its assistance during the shooting of the film, which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba.” (emphasis added) The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) is an arm of Cuba’s KGB-founded propaganda ministry, as revealed by Cuban defector Jesus Perez Mendez.4

  An obsession among all involved with making the 271-minute Che hagiography was said to be “historical accuracy.” Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie, Che, about the life of revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, couldn’t be attacked—at least on a factual level. “I didn’t mind someone saying, ‘Well, your take on him, I don’t really like’, or ‘You’ve left these things out and included these things’. That’s fine,” Soderbergh said. “What I didn’t want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, ‘That never happened.’”5

  Well, Mr Soderbergh and CNN, pull up a chair.

  HISTORICAL ACCURACY

  Let’s forget the film’s omissions, namely, the only successes in Che’s life: the mass murders of defenseless men and boys. Let’s instead focus on this shoot-‘em-up war movie’s battle scenes, with their attendant dialogues, and compare them to the historical record as published outside Cuba.

  For starters, the only guerrilla war on Cuban soil during the 20th century was fought not by Fidel and Che, but against Fidel and Che.

  After the glorious victory, some of the Castroite guerrillas explained the harrowing battlefield exploits so expertly dramatized by Soderbergh to Paul Bethel, who served as U.S. press attaché in Cuba’s U.S. Embassy in 1959. Paul Bethel: “Che Guevara’s column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camaguey where I worked
. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista’s military commander in the city. The package contained $100,000 with a note. Guevara’s men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops.”6

  According to Bethel, the U.S. embassy had been highly skeptical about all the battlefield bloodshed and heroics reported in The New York Times and investigated. They ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what The New York Times called a “bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles.”

  They found that in the Cuban countryside, in those two years of ferocious battles, the total casualties for both sides actually ran to 182. The famous “Battle of Santa Clara,” which Soderbergh depicts as a Caribbean Stalingrad, claimed about nine casualties total—for both sides.

  He’s lauded as the century’s most celebrated guerrilla fighter but he barely fought in anything properly describable as a guerrilla war. “The guerrilla war in Cuba was notable for the marked lack of military skills or offensive spirit in the soldiers of either side.” That’s not a Cuban exile with an axe to grind. It’s military historian Arthur Campbell in his authoritative Guerrillas: A History and Analysis. “The Fidelistas were completely lacking in the basic military arts or in any experience of fighting.”

  “In all essentials Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.” That’s no right-wing Miami Cuban; it’s British historian Paul Johnson, who initially sympathized with the Castro-Che regime.

  Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro, obsessively wary of lapsing into the slightest historical inaccuracy, relied on the Castro regime as their principal source—and made a shoot-’em-up war movie!