Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  “The Cuba of Fidel Castro today is free from terror.” That’s blonde bombshell Dickey Chapelle in (surprisingly) Reader’s Digest, April 1959.

  Five hundred and sixty-two men had been riddled by firing squads without trial by this time. Habeas corpus had been abolished. And Cuban jails held five times the number of political prisoners as they had under Fulgencio Batista. For the first time in Cuba’s history, many of the prisoners were women. Their crime? Having been wives, daughters, and mothers of the executed men. Most of these were of humble background, many black.

  “Civil liberties have been restored in Cuba and corruption seems to be drying up. These are large steps forward, and they were made against fearful odds,” continued Chapelle’s story.

  “Dickey Chapelle would always bring back the facts,” said Bill Garrett, one of Chapelle’s editors. “No matter how long it would take. Dickey would stick with a story.”

  I searched in vain for any updates from La Chapelle regarding Cuba. But a movie on the life of this pioneering feminist journalist is in the works, with Jennifer Aniston in the leading role and Brad Pitt as her love interest. I’ll be sure to check it for “facts.”

  It’s not just the media. Politicians have been suckers too. “I think that Fidel Castro is a good young man.” That’s former president Harry Truman, quoted in the Washington Post on July 31, 1959. “He seems to want to do the right thing for the Cuban people, and we ought to extend our sympathy and help him to do what is right for them.” Give ’em Hell Harry was probably relying on the rosy media reports when he came to that conclusion. President Eisenhower himself seemed swayed. At a press conference, he said, “Now such things [branding Castro a Communist] are charged, but they are not easy to prove. The United States government has made no such charges.”1 But Eisenhower later wised up.

  The trouble was that it was hard for anti-Castro voices to be heard through all the liberal praises of Castro. Have you ever heard of Guillermo Belt? Probably not. He was a retired Cuban diplomat who warned the United States in 1958, “If the Castros come into power, there will be a bloodbath in Cuba.” Belt was desperate to undo the U.S. State Department’s Castrophilia. “A social revolution will take place in Cuba,” he continued. “The Communists will control the government of Cuba.”2

  The plain fact about Castro is that Castro was a terrorist before terrorism was cool. He started way back in April 1948, when he was part of the Communist-led riots that rocked Bogotá, Colombia. The Communist-led mobs went berserk, looting, burning, and killing more than five thousand people. That riot lit a ten-year-long civil war called “La Violencia.” By 1958, 100,000 Colombians had been massacred. And Castro—still a student at the University of Havana in 1948—was there at the beginning, earning his revolutionary credentials.

  Those credentials include an admiration of Hitler. Cuba’s Lider Maximo has always shamelessly aped the German Führer. Mein Kampf was among Castro’s favorite books in college. The very title of Castro’s manifesto, History Will Absolve Me, comes almost word for word from Hitler’s famous courtroom defense for his Rathaus Putsch in 1924. “You may pronounce us guilty,” declared Hitler at his trial. “But the goddess of the eternal court of history will absolve us.”

  “Condemn me. It doesn’t matter,” declared Castro to the packed courtroom in 1953 during his own trial (for a putsch of sorts, his guerrilla attack on the Moncada barracks—a miserable military failure—that led to his arrest). “History will absolve me!”3

  Heck, even Castro’s official title, Lider Maximo, copies Hitler’s Führer (leader). Except, typical for Castro, he had to one-up even Hitler. He had to throw in that “Maximum” bit, similar to Francisco Franco with his “Generalissimo” (the most general), to distinguish himself from mere chump generals like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar. Castro had to distinguish himself from chump “leaders” like Hitler too.

  Another trait Hitler shared with his Cuban understudy was this: “Adolf Hitler never converses. He preaches and blusters, treating every utterance as revealed religion from on high. There’s no getting a word in when he starts.” That’s historian John Toland quoting an early Hitler intimate. That description also suits Castro to a T. Ask anyone who’s known him.

  “When Fidel got going, Che Guevara himself would shrink up in a corner like a whimpering little puppy,” says early revolutionary acquaintance Miguel Uría. “Especially when Fidel started insulting Che. It was embarrassing. You never heard such cursing, such savage abuse. I almost felt sorry for that Argentine assassin, jackass—and as became increasingly evident—wimp.”

  Early on in his career as a revolutionary and terrorist, Castro targeted Americans, even before his Cuban revolution stole $2 billion in U.S. property and riddled dozens of Americans with bullets from firing squads—after having tortured them, of course. In 1958, Castro’s July 26 Movement kidnapped fifty Americans near America’s Guantánamo naval base. Most were Marines and Navy men on leave. A few were civilian workers from a U.S. mining company headquartered nearby. They were on a bus, bound for a weekend’s rest and relaxation, when Raul Castro and a band of his guerrillas hijacked them at gunpoint. Raul dictated that the American hostages be employed as human shields. The government of Cuban Presidente Fulgencio Batista was waging a desultory (half-assed) campaign against the Castroite guerrillas. Now, because it feared an errant bomb or bullet might hit an American, Batista ordered a complete cease-fire in the area, which of course helped the Castroites, who received more illicit arms shipments unhindered.

  Events on the other side of the globe freed the American hostages. In Lebanon that summer there was a crisis. Militant Sunni Muslims (sound familiar?) threatened violence against the elected (but Christian and pro-Western) president of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun. President Eisenhower dispatched five thousand Marines and the crisis abated. The very week our Marines were splashing onshore in Lebanon, Castro released his American hostages—coincidence, no doubt.

  The Castroites are old hands at another form of terrorism: hijackings. Three months after kidnapping Americans on leave, Castro’s rebels hijacked a Cubana Airlines prop-jet bound for the United States and tried to force it down near Raul’s guerrilla headquarters in Cuba’s Oriente province. The terrorists were idiots who couldn’t recognize that the landing strip was too short. The plane crashed, leaving few survivors. Keep in mind that in 1958 “plane hijacking” was unheard of. Once again, Castro was leading the way when it came to terrorism.

  And of course, what would terrorism be without bombs? In November 1958, Castro’s thugs set one hundred bombs to explode in Havana (La noche de las 100 bombas). These were small bombs, like the three in those hotels in 1997. Castro’s point was to make noise, shake up Batista’s position, provoke his undisciplined police to brutal reprisals. Much mayhem, much damage to property, and a few wounded and five or six dead. Castro was a “rebel” at the time and still playing the “good cop” to Batista’s “bad cop.” So his goal wasn’t to mass-murder Cubans, like he wanted to mass-murder Americans later in Manhattan. Castro’s rebel group, at the time, had nothing to gain from the mass-murder of Cuban civilians.

  Castro was deeply involved in bomb plots before he planned to murder women and children doing their Christmas shopping in New York in 1962. And he was hoping to do worse. Declassified Soviet documents—and Nikita Khrushchev’s own memoirs—show that Castro pleaded with Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.

  On October 27, Castro sent a coded telegram to Khrushchev. “We have solid intelligence that the U.S. attack is coming within twenty-four to seventy-two hours,” he lied. “Strike first. It’s an act of self-defense—there is no other solution.”4 But while Castro was calling for a massive nuclear strike against the United States and vowing to fight “the Yankee invaders to the last man!” the Soviet ambassador to Cuba during the missile crisis, Alexander Alexeyev, reports that a “fearful” Castro made reservations with him for a first-class seat in the Soviet embassy’s
bomb shelter.

  Some think Castro’s itchy trigger finger was a bigger factor in Khrushchev’s decision to yank Russian missiles from Cuba than was Kennedy’s so-called blockade.5 Fifty-five ships breached the blockade. Exactly one ship was boarded—and it was a U.S.-built ship, Panamanian owned, with Lebanese registry, and under Soviet charter. JFK, micro-manager par excellence, selected the ship himself. He wanted to demonstrate “our resolve.” It carried burlap bags.

  When Khrushchev took away the missiles, Castro went crazy: kicking walls, smashing glasses, and breaking windows and mirrors. The reason for Castro’s fit was revealed the following month by his sidekick and Burlington Industries’ charming T-shirt icon, Che Guevara. “If the missiles had remained,” the campus poster boy and vodka salesman told the London Daily Worker in November 1962, “we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”6 (Che iconography on T-shirts and posters remains very popular, especially among peace activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators.)

  Instead of killing millions, Castro had managed to kill only one Yankee during the crisis. According to Carlos Franqui, a former member of Castro’s inner circle, Castro pressed the button launching the missile that shot down our U-2, killing Major Rudolph Anderson.

  We all know the Beltway and Hollywood version of those “thirteen days” of the Cuban missile crisis. “This was American leadership unsurpassed in the responsible management of power,” writes Camelot court scribe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “A combination of toughness, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated that it dazzled the world.”7 “The most dangerous crisis the world has ever seen,” gasped JFK’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk.8 “[JFK] combined deliberation with planning, toughness with flexibility and coercion.”9

  “President Kennedy acted majesterially during those critical thirteen days . . . and demonstrated a comprehension exceptionally rare in the presidency....The U.S. and her young president were considered by people who love liberty as defenders of the free world,” gushed Hugh Sidey.10

  JFK himself pronounced: “We cut their balls off.”11

  Fortunately for us (and for mankind), the Knights of Camelot had been in charge. Their memoirs and the accounts of their court scribes and media toadies leave absolutely no doubt. Camelot’s brilliance, perspicacity, leadership, resolution, and cojones saved the day, easing us back from the precipice of doom. “We resolved mankind’s biggest crisis,” beamed JFK.

  Complete bullshit, I’m afraid.

  “We’ve been had!” yelled Navy chief of staff George Anderson on October 26, 1962. He’d just been informed that JFK had “solved” the missile crisis. Admiral Anderson was in charge of the naval “blockade” against Cuba.12

  “The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!” bellowed Air Force chief of staff Curtis Lemay, whacking his fist on his desk.13

  “We missed the big boat,” said General Maxwell Taylor after learning the details of the deal with Khrushchev.

  “Kennedy first goofed an invasion, paid tribute to Castro . . . then gave the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard,” said Richard Nixon.14

  “We locked Castro and Communism into Latin America and threw away the key to their removal,” said a shocked Barry Goldwater at the time.15

  Democratic elder statesman Dean Acheson concluded, “This nation lacks leadership.” Acheson was present at all the tense and momentous meetings conducted by the Knights of Camelot. “The meetings were repetitive and without direction,” Acheson said. “Most members of Kennedy’s team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The Ex-Comm [National Security Council Executive Committee] sessions were a waste of time.”16

  Our nuclear superiority over the Soviets was so overwhelming at the time, five thousand nuclear warheads against the Soviets’ three hundred, that General Maxwell Taylor, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, admitted in 1982: “Never did I have even the slightest preoccupation that there existed even the slightest possibility that nuclear war could result from that confrontation.”17 (Emphasis mine.)

  Even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. confessed in 1982, “Looking back on it, it seems to me we greatly exaggerated the risk of war in October 1962.” In 1987, JFK’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, agreed. “With proper retrospection, I don’t think the pressure was as great as the president thought at the time.”18

  Nikita Khrushchev wrote: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba—for a country eleven thousand miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along. Security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today, the U.S. has complied with her promise to not interfere with Castro and to not allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. [Emphasis mine.] After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.”19

  Recently declassified Soviet documents also reveal this conversation between Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Kennedy told Dobrynin, “We can’t say anything public about this agreement.... It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.”20

  “It’s a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy,” wrote Alexander Haig years later. “The legend of the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy’s men paid a handsome political dividend. But so much that happened was obscured by stage-management designed to divert public attention from embarrassing facts. . . . The Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas.” 21

  So much for Camelot’s diplomatic triumph, about which Fidel Castro boasted, “Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said.... Perhaps one day they’ll be made public.”22 Not by the Camelot gang.

  On the fortieth anniversary of the missile crisis (October 2002), former defense secretary Robert McNamara, Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, and an elderly contingent of more of the “Best and Brightest” went to Havana for a “workshop” that included Russian officials. Throughout the entire media gala, there was not a single word about Castro’s lust to press the nuclear button against the United States. Instead, we saw a smiling Robert McNamara hailing his charming host as a “great statesman” for his conduct during the crisis.

  Kennedy’s secret deal with Khrushchev forbade any liberation of Cuba, not just by the United States but by any group or nation in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, it became the responsibility of the United States to prevent any such liberation attempts. The Best and Brightest not only pulled the rug out from under Cuba’s freedom fighters, they also sanctioned the stationing of forty thousand Soviet troops and KGB goons in Cuba. The Soviets were already aiding Castro’s butchery of these freedom fighters.

  The United States Coast Guard and even the British Royal Navy (when Cuban freedom fighters moved to the Bahamas) shielded Castro from freedom fighters in exile. In the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, the Coast Guard and Royal Navy were arresting and disarming the very exiles the CIA had been training and arming the month before.

  In other words, Fidel Castro, that “brave and plucky underdog” who, according to his liberal groupies, practices “Machismo-Leninismo,” in fact has survived all these years by hiding behind the skirts of the three most powerful nations on earth: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. So after October 28, 1962, Castro enjoyed a new status of Mutually Assured Protection. And Cuban exiles willing to fight for freedom were suddenly rounded up for “violating U.S. neutrality laws.” Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others “quarantined” and prevented from leaving Dade County, Florida. The Florida Coast Guard got twelve new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmo
lested.23

  The Cuban freedom fighters were betrayed by the Kennedy administration. On Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s direct orders, scores of Cuban exiles had been infiltrated back into Cuba as part of Operation Mongoose to gather intelligence on the Castro regime.

  “I’m really disappointed with the CIA,” Bobby Kennedy had yelled at Miami CIA station chief William Harvey just weeks before the Cuban missile crisis. “We don’t even know what’s going on in Cuba. Let’s get some men in there.”24 Hundreds of Cubans in exile immediately volunteered for the near-suicidal missions—despite having earlier been betrayed at the Bay of Pigs by this very same administration.

  CIA officer Richard Helms was in on the meetings with Bobby Kennedy. “These Cuban boys are wondering what our goals are,” Helms told the young attorney general. “They’re perfectly willing to risk their lives on infiltration missions they consider sensible. And to them sensible means actions that will contribute to their homeland’s liberation. But they’re starting to wonder if we’re serious about helping them free their homeland.” Kennedy immediately changed the subject.25

  “I told my men that, in my opinion, Kennedy’s people had no serious plans to overthrow Castro.” That’s what the head of a major anti-Castro group working with the CIA at the time in south Florida said. “I didn’t want to mislead those young men. I simply couldn’t do that. They were brave, highly motivated, and risking their lives on these missions. I told them Kennedy’s people were using us mainly for intelligence-gathering. If they felt comfortable with that, then fine.”26

  Many did. They were looking at certain torture and firing squads if they were captured. The casualty rates for their teams ran to 70 percent. But they continued infiltrating Cuba at Camelot’s behest. Among the hair-raising intelligence they radioed or carried back was information—the first information America had—on the Soviet nuclear missiles that were being planted in Cuba. The Best and Brightest, however, scoffed at the reports delivered by these brave young men.