Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  Meat, chicken, fish 8 oz. 2 oz.

  Rice 4 oz. 3 oz.

  Starches 16 oz. 6.5 oz.

  Beans 4 oz. 1 oz.9

  Turns out, when we say Castro “enslaved” Cuba we actually miss half the story—we actually downplay the issue. Turns out, the half-starved slaves on the ship Amistad ate better than Elián González does now. Remember that when you hear Eleanor Clift say, “To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S.”10 Remember that when you hear, “Socialism works. I think Cuba might prove that,” which is what Chevy Chase said on Earth Day 2000, after a guided tour of Castroland.11 Remember that when you hear Danny Glover blame the (easily avoidable, just buy the goods from Mexico) “unjust, unfair, and cruel” U.S. “embargo” rather than the Communist system for the poverty of Cuba.12 Remember that when you hear Jesse Jackson say, “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” as if the Cuban people have anything to viva Fidel and Che for.13 Remember that when you hear Steven Spielberg say, “Meeting Fidel Castro were the eight most important hours of my life.”14

  And my favorite Spielberg quote, “I personally feel that the Cuban embargo should be lifted. I do not see any reason for accepting old grudges being played out in the twenty-first century.”15 (Emphasis mine.) This from a man who specializes in making movies about American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust.

  Cuba’s stellar achievements in the field of health and nutrition saw Havana host the “Second Inter-American Conference on Pharmacy and Nutrition” in June 2003. The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences sponsored this farce and its president gave one of Castro’s apparatchiks “the highest decoration that the U.S. College gives to outstanding personalities and institutions in the field of pharmacy and nutrition.” (Emphasis mine.)

  Two months earlier, Castro’s police had rounded up more than a hundred “dissidents,” put them through sham trials, and shoved them into dungeons. Their combined sentences total 1,454 years. Cuban jails offer patients free electroshock treatment and a weight-loss nutritional regimen. Thirty-four of the prisoners were journalists and independent librarians. Their crimes ran the gamut from possessing George Orwell’s Animal Farm to accessing the Internet. The following month UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) awarded Castro’s Cuba its coveted International Literacy Award.

  A few months after that, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alice Walker—“I simply love Cuba and its people, including Fidel. He’s like a great redwood.”16—visited Havana for the 2004 International Book Fair. She crowed, “There is a direct correlation between the U.S. civil rights movement and Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution. . . . It’s important to stand with people who are struggling, because in the end we will win!”17

  She was referring, of course, to her hosts (the jailers), not the jailed. Walker’s hosts hold the record for the longest and most brutal incarceration of a black political prisoner in the twentieth century. His name is Eusebio Peñalver, and he served longer in Castro’s dungeons than Nelson Mandela served in South Africa’s.

  “Nigger!” taunted his all-white jailers between tortures. “Monkey! We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” snickered Castro’s goons as they threw him into solitary confinement. Might the Congressional Black Caucus or NAACP have a cross word for this regime—a white regime where today 80 percent of the political prisoners are black? Jesse Jackson doesn’t, of course. He calls Castro “the most honest and courageous politician I’ve ever met.” On Castro’s last visit to Harlem in 1996, amidst a delirious, deafening, foot-stomping chorus of “Viva Fidel!” and “Cuba si!” his host Charlie Rangel gave him a bear hug.

  Eusebio Peñalver spent thirty years in Castro’s dungeons and remained what Castroites call a plantado—a defiant one, an unbreakable one. “Stalin tortured,” wrote Arthur Koestler, “not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.” Solzhenitsyn noted that “The worst part of Communism is being forced to live a lie.” Peñalver refused to lie. He scorned any “reeducation” by his jailers. He knew it was they who desperately needed to be reeducated. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was the Communists who were the criminals. Danny Glover, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Kweisi Mfume (former president of the NAACP), Jesse Jackson, and Alice Walker have all toasted his torturer.

  “For months I was naked in a six-by-four cell,” Peñalver recalls. “That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.”

  Peñalver lives in Miami today. On May 20, 2003, to celebrate Cuba’s independence day, he met with President Bush in the White House. “Castro’s apologists,” Peñalver told me recently, “those who excuse or downplay his crimes—these people, be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious, whatever—they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant’s crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere.” Then Alice Walker, Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, Danny Glover, and Maxine Waters are accomplices in the bloody crimes of a regime where 82 percent of the prison population is black and exactly .08 percent of the ruling Communist Party is black.

  Some American blacks, however, have learned the truth about Cuba. “Cuban Communism should be wiped out!” said Anthony Garnet Bryant in 1980. “Cuban Communism is humanity’s vomit!”18

  Bryant, you see, was forced to live in Castroland, not just visit the place. In 1968, he hijacked a plane to Cuba to escape U.S. justice for several crimes. In 1980, after years of trying, and knowing he faced lengthy jail terms in the United States, he came home. “I’m deliriously happy to be back!” he beamed to U.S. magistrate Charlene Sorrentino in a Miami district court. She’d just sentenced him to a maximum security prison in Florida. “I’ve never seen a man smile so much in my life,” remarked Judge Sorrentino.19

  Happens all the time when people leave Cuba, Judge Sorrentino; they smile constantly, deliriously. Recall little Elián González—before Janet Reno ordered the raid that returned him to Castroland. Recall the scenes from the Mariel Boatlift. Sure, Anthony Bryant was entering a jail. But he’d just left a much ghastlier jail, Castro’s Cuba.

  “I’m living like a dog in Cuba!” That’s former Black Panther Garland Grant, who hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1971. “I just want to get back to the United States! Just open my cell door, and I’ll walk in! Here in Cuba the guards beat the shit outta me in jail, bashed out one of my eyes! They killed my buddy, just smashed his head against a wall, nothing to it, no inquiry, no nothing. Hell, these Communists can’t do anything more to me that they haven’t already done, except put a bullet in my head!”20

  An AP reporter secretly interviewed Grant in his Cuban cell in 1977. “There’s more racism here in Communist Cuba than in the worst parts of Mississippi! . . . Cuba ain’t what people think. I’d rather be in jail in the U.S. than free here!”21

  Both these black gentlemen found themselves in Castro’s jails shortly after entering Cuba. Seems they tried the same attitude and lingo with Castro’s cops as they had with American cops. A big no-no, they learned in very short order.

  Aside from using food as a weapon, the Communists don’t mind using real weapons to kill, maim, and torture opponents of the regime, even if they are in exile. Just as Stalin sent his goons to murder Trotsky (an assassin finally succeeded in planting an ice axe in Trotsky’s brain in Mexico City in 1940), so too have Castro’s goons hunted down exiled Cubans. Castro’s hit squads got Aldo Vera on his doorstep in Puerto Rico by machine-gunning him in the back. They got Rolando Masferrer by blowing him to shreds with a car bomb in his Hialeah garage. And they got José de la Torriente with a bullet through his heart as he slept on a recliner in his Miami living room. When physical assassination is problematic, though, Communists know they can turn to the Western press for cooperative character assassination. The liberal media loves leftist dictators, and Castro is no exception.

  Incidentally, after serving h
is twenty-year sentence in Mexico, Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, moved to Cuba. Castro personally appointed Mercader as Cuba’s inspector general of prisons. When Mercader died in Cuba, he was buried with honors for all the successes for which the prisons could take credit: 15,000 firing squad executions (five times as many as Pinochet, and mostly of workers and country folk) and 500,000 gulag inmates (mostly proletarians), in a county with no freedom of speech, no labor rights, political repression, and economic policies that have inflicted starvation and slavery on people who once enjoyed one of best standards of living in the Western Hemisphere. Yet how often does the liberal media condemn Castro, much less his sidekick Che, who proudly signed his name “Stalin II”? The Cowardly Léon of Havana has nothing to fear from the fawning Western press. The New York Times taught him that at the beginning.22

  One day in May 1959, Castro’s air force chief, Major Pedro Diaz Lanz, met with his lifelong friend and fellow pilot Eduardo Ferrer. “Eddy, sell your business. Tell your dad to sell his business. The Communists are taking Cuba over. The bastards will seize everything. I know it. I’m leaving for the U.S. soon. I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to tell the Americans and the world what’s going on here and start the fight against these Communists. Everybody seems asleep. But I’ve seen these Reds working behind the scenes.”23

  A week later, Diaz Lanz resigned his post, declaring publicly that Castro’s civilian government was a front for Soviet-trained Communists. Diaz Lanz bundled his wife and kids onto a small boat and escaped to Miami. Weeks later, Diaz Lanz appeared at a public hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). The date was July 14, 1959.

  Jay Sourwine [general counsel for the SISS]: Do you think Raul Castro is the strongest Communist in the Castro regime?

  Diaz Lanz: It’s Fidel himself. I am sure he’s the one who gives the orders and who decides everything.

  Sourwine: Is Castro friendly to the United States?

  Diaz Lanz: No.

  Sourwine: But Fidel Castro has said on many occasions that he is friendly to the United States. You are saying that this is not true?

  Diaz Lanz: He is lying.

  Sourwine: Have you yourself seen instances of anti-American propaganda in Cuba under the Castro regime?

  Diaz Lanz: Yes, sir.

  Sourwine: Give us an example.

  Diaz Lanz: Fidel Castro himself calls you “Yankee imperialists.” He’s always telling us we are going to have to fight the Americans—the Marines—and harping all the time on this theme. He wants war with the U.S.

  Sourwine: Have you seen any instances of anti-American propaganda in connection with the indoctrination schools?

  Diaz Lanz: Yes, sir.

  Sourwine: You know there are many who say that Fidel Castro is not himself a Communist, that he is simply a tool or a captive of the Communists.

  Diaz Lanz: I am completely sure that Fidel is a Communist.

  Sourwine: You are completely sure that Fidel Castro is what?

  Diaz Lanz: That Fidel Castro is a Communist. . . . Also, I’m prepared because the Communists have a well-known system of trying to destroy the reputations of anyone who disagrees with them.

  The Havana correspondent for the New York Times, Herbert Matthews, leaped to his typewriter and immediately wrote a front-page story against Major Diaz Lanz. “This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the word,” he wrote. “In Cuba there are no Communists in positions of control.” And for good measure: “The accusations of Major Pedro Diaz Lanz are rejected by everybody.” Then the character assassination: “Sources tell me that Major Diaz Lanz was removed from his office for incompetence, extravagance, and nepotism.”24

  But the piece de resistance was this: “Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist,” the New York Times’s star reporter continued, “ he’s decidedly anti-Communist.”

  Matthews had a long record of reporting favorably on Communists; he did it during the Spanish Civil War, playing up the Communists as “democrats,” agrarian reformers, the whole bit. But once the New York Times sounds her bugle, the rest of the media pack rush in behind her, from CBS News to the major national newspapers. “It’s an outrage that Congress should give a platform for a disaffected Cuban adventurer to denounce the Cuban revolution as Communist,” barked Walter Lippmann a few days later in the New York Herald Tribune. “It would be an even greater mistake even to intimate that Castro’s Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite,” Lippmann wrote a week later in the Washington Post. (Emphasis mine.) Lippmann’s 1958 Pulitzer Prize had noted “his distinction as a farsighted and incisive analyst of foreign policy.”

  The Atlanta Constitution yapped next. “Major Diaz Lanz is a simply a disgruntled soldier-of-fortune,” wrote its publisher and editor in chief, Ralph “Conscience of the South” McGill, who was in Havana schmoozing with Fidel and Raul. “Reliable sources tell me that Major Diaz Lanz has been involved in clandestine money-making activities. . . . Diaz left Cuba because he was involved in black marketing.” Ralph McGill would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize this same year for his “courage” in denouncing southern “intolerance and hatred.” In 1964, LBJ decorated McGill with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The desire for individual dignity and freedom is in the genes of all mankind,” proclaimed McGill during the solemn ceremony. But apparently he didn’t worry about Cubans in the kindly prison camp of Fidel Castro.

  There was no “alternative” media back then to keep the liberal media honest, but that brave little national weekly Human Events tried. Back on August 17, 1957, Human Events carried a prophetic article that read:Many on The Hill are beginning to say now: “We ought to be worrying more about the Communist menace in Latin America, on our very doorstep, than about Communism in the faraway Middle East.” What’s really behind the revolt led by Fidel Castro against the Cuban government, billed by the New York Times and the liberal press as a simple rebellion against dictatorship, comes into clearer focus from the following statement, obtained exclusively by the staff of Human Events from former United States ambassador to Cuba Spruille Braden. This retired American diplomat has long qualified as an expert not only on Cuba but also on all Latin America; having served in other posts south of the border, he has in recent years won recognition as a critical observer of the workings of the Communist apparatus in the Caribbean and South America.

  Mr. Braden says of Fidel Castro, leader of the fledgling Cuban revolt, that according to official documents he has seen, he is a fellow traveler, if not an official member, of the Communist Party and has been for a long time. He was a ringleader in the bloody uprising in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948, which occurred (and obviously was planned by the Kremlin) just at the time when the Pan-American Conference was being held in that capital, with no less a person than Secretary of State George C. Marshall present. The uprising was engineered and staged by Communists and the Colombia government and press subsequently published documentary evidence of Fidel Castro’s role as a leader in the rioting which virtually gutted the Colombian capital. The appearance of this Cuban at the head of the recent uprising in his own country stamps the insurrection as another part of the developing Communist pattern of such subversion throughout Latin America—although a number of thoroughly decent and patriotic Cubans have been misled into sympathizing with, and in some cases supporting, the Fidel Castro movement.

  This passage also appeared in Earl T. Smith’s book The Fourth Floor. Smith was the ambassador to Cuba from mid-1957 until Castro’s takeover in January 1959. He wrote the book to tell the truth about Castro’s assumption of power. Another American diplomat—and friend—had warned Smith before he went to Havana: “Be careful down there, Earl. You are assigned to Cuba to preside over the downfall of Batista. The decision has been made that Batista has to go.”

  The Caribbean desk was on the fourth floor of the State Department’s office building, hence the book’s title. The State Department bureaucrats fought conservative Republican Smith ever
y step of the way, not just ignoring but scoffing at his warnings about Castro’s Communism. “I feel I owe it to the American people to try to establish the fact that the Castro Communist revolution need never have occurred,” Smith wrote in the preface to his book.25 Smith wrote that Castro’s terrorists plotted to assassinate him. He also noted that Castro’s Communist ties dated back to the late 1940s and that Castro had a criminal record from his college days that included several gangster-style murders. He criticized the United States government for being naïve and slapping an embargo on the Batista government to help Fidel the Communist and his revolución. America’s previous ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, agreed with Smith about the Castro regime.

  But even more explosive was the revelation that the State Department’s chief of Caribbean affairs—who pressed the embargo against the Batista government—had been a Cuban Communist Party member in the 1930s. His name was William Wieland, but in the 1930s he had used the name Guillermo Arturo Montenegro and had been active in the Cuban Communist Party.26 He was also friends with—guess who?—Herbert Matthews of the New York Times.

  Now, back to the smear job on Diaz Lanz. The perfect proof that he was innocent of black marketeering was that he resigned from Castro’s government. As any serious student knows, in Cuba the best place for enriching yourself from black marketeering of everything from machine guns to cocaine is from within Castro’s regime. But more on that in the next chapter.