The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  The corpses were retrieved by Cuban guards on boats, with the same kinds of gaff hooks the lucky contestants in the regime-sponsored “Hemingway Fishing Festival” were using in nearby waters to yank thrashing tunas and marlins aboard their Cuba-registered yachts.

  In September 2011 Spanish medical examiners found that stowaway Adonis G.B.’s throat had been crushed. He probably died on takeoff, meaning he died more quickly and painlessly than the tens of thousands of others who perished while running from Cuba’s free and fabulous health-care.

  It was a different story for the tens of thousands of dead Cuban rafters. Most of these desperate rafters probably died like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Others perished gasping and choking after their arms and legs had finally given out and they had gulped that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect Storm. Still others were eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks, much like Captain Quint in Jaws. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we’ve seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don’t dally at a meal.

  “In space no one can hear you scream,” says the ad for the original Alien. Same is true for the middle of the Florida Straits; except, of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rush in and water froth in white, then red, they hear the screams all too clearly. Elian Gonzalez might know.

  All during the decades coinciding with Castro’s rule, the Coast Guard has documented hundreds of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more “politically incorrect,” we’d have no end of books, movies, documentaries, TV interviews, survival-story specials, etc. We’d never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this Caribbean holocaust are the Left’s premier pin-up boys.

  So what’s the alternative if you can’t flee Cuba, among “the Best Countries in the World” according to Tina Brown’s Newsweek and a “happy island” according to The New York Times?

  Well, in 1986, Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand—double Latin America’s average, triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15 to 48. At that point, the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.4

  But apparently they did not faze Newsweek.

  During the summer of 1961, as the Berlin Wall went up, Miami’s Cuban Refugee Center started keeping records of the refugee wave then setting out from Herbert Matthews’s “happy island.” By late 1964 they recorded 1,002 boats and rafts of various types carrying more than 10,000 bedraggled Cubans to Florida. Approximately 800 of these craft were first spotted in mid-passage by the Coast Guard’s two Grumman Albatross planes patrolling the Straits. These then notified the U.S. Coast Guard, who escorted the escapee crafts to U.S. shores.

  Too often, however, upon being alerted and guided by their airborne colleagues, the cutter would pull up to an empty boat or one filled with corpses. At the time, the Cuban Refugee Center and the U.S. Coast Guard estimated that, for every Cuban who made it to the U.S., three died—by drowning, exposure, sharks or bullets. The odds were well known in Cuba. And still they came.5

  Arturo Cobo, who runs a refugee center in Key West (Hogar de Transito para los Refugiados Cubanos), says the number of dead freedom-seekers tops the 70,000 figure often cited. “Word eventually reached Cuba that our group was helping rafters here in Key West,” says Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran. “So there came a point in the 80’s when we started getting calls from Cuba saying so and so just left on a raft from such and such a place. Can you please notify us when they reach the U.S.?”

  “Usually my heartbreaking notification to the Cuban relatives came a few weeks later,” says Cobo, “meaning that that no people by those names had ever been rescued or processed. The vast majority never reached the U.S. At first it was an informal tally. But finally I began posting the names and the dates of their departure from Cuba on a wall and running them against the names of those who we rescued at sea or helped and processed when they somehow made it to land. My informal study showed that right around three-quarters of the freedom-seekers never made landfall. And many who did we had to rush to local hospitals—dehydration, sunburn, dementia, all of that for sure, but also add gunshot wounds from Castro’s police, shark attacks, etc. I well remember processing Ivette Molina who arrived horribly sunburnt, delirious and dehydrated. She had several bullet wounds and was also pregnant. Why does the world ignore this? I still wake up often in the middle of the night and find it impossible to sleep.

  “That cemetery-without-crosses as we started calling it is a huge one. And this holocaust is still being denied—not by a few nutcases as in the one during WWII, but by most of the world.”6

  Landfall itself doesn’t always ensure survival. On May 15, 1997 a Brothers to the Rescue flight-crew noticed people waving frantically from tiny key called Dog Rock in the southernmost Bahamas. Following their standard rescue pattern, the crew banked, came in on a lower pass and dropped water, food and a radio.

  In minutes the plane’s radio crackled with the news from below that the family of six rafters had languished on that blazing rock for 17 days. Three of them were still alive. The Brothers notified the Bahamian Coast Guard which arrived on a windless day to find a dreadful stench hovering over the little rock island. Two of the freedom-seekers had perished days before and been crudely buried under rocks, the only burial possible. One was a four-year-old moppet named Camila Martinez Rodriguez, the other a 13-year-old girl named Adianet Tamayo Rodriguez. The captain of the tiny raft, 26-year-old Leonin Rivas, had also perished. The Cuban American National Foundation recovered the bodies and gave them a proper burial in Miami. The three survivors were granted asylum in the U.S.

  “Multiply that horror hundreds of times,” says Arturo Cobo, “and you’ll get an idea of what many of us witnessed from Key West during the 90’s. And it’s still going on today, though mercifully more infrequently.”

  During the first five months of 2012 the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted close to one thousand Cubans at sea. These were all shuttled back to Cuba, as mandated by U.S. law.

  CASTRO’S WALL

  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Who can forget the famous line? In fact most people forgot it shortly after President Reagan detonated the words at the Brandenberg Gate in June 1987. At the time they got little press-play, and what they got was mostly negative. President Reagan’s own advisors, Colin Powell and Howard Baker, denounced as “unpresidential” and “extremist” the proclamation that would become President Reagan’s most admired and famous.

  It was only in November 1989, as the wall was finally torn down, that Reagan’s proclamation was recalled, dusted off, and festooned with the fame now almost universal—at least among conservatives.

  The people of the Free World were thrilled en masse when the wall finally came down. To lay eyes on the Berlin Wall provoked shame and horror. Here was stark and perfect proof of what divided the world. No amount of paint or plaster to pretty it up could disguise what it was doing. Reagan saw it and outspokenly called it by its name-diplomatic peck-sniffs be damned.

  And two years later Mr. Gorbachev complied, to much acclaim worldwide, though his compliance may have been unwitting.

  Down in Cuba at this very time, Raul Castro was warning: “If any Gorbachev raises his head around here, we’ll promptly chop it off! We would rather see Cuba sink into the ocean, like Atlantis, before we see the corrupting forces of capitalism prevail!”7 Raul Castro’s boasts came safely from behind a Communist barrier that had murdered (by the lowest estimate) more than 20 times the number of innocents as the one Gorbachev had been petitioned to tear down.

  At the time of Raul Castro’s characteristically bloodthirsty boast and during the wholesale murder by his military of hundreds of Cubans for the crime of voting wit
h their feet (and paddles) against him, thousands of tourists from Western Europe, including many from West Germany, were already pouring into Castro’s island fiefdom.

  Every Mark, Lira, Pound, Franc and Schilling of their expenditures landed in the pocket of the Soviet-trained outfit which owned and operated the Soviet helicopters and gunships that helped fill the cemetery-without-crosses where 20 times as many freedom-seeking Cubans were buried as freedom-seeking Germans lay in all of Berlin’s cemeteries. And machine-gun bullets kill relatively quickly compared to sunburn, dehydration and tiger sharks.

  Upon the Soviet Union’s collapse, and in the nick of time, the overlords in this Caribbean outpost of the Evil Empire had a lifeline thrown to them—and they clutched it eagerly. This financial lifeline for Cuban Stalinism was thrown in large part by European witnesses to the Holocaust, gulag and Cold War. Starting in 1991 and continuing to throng the island today, free-spending tourists from Europe have swarmed to Castro’s rescue. Which brings us to the military-tourism complex.

  CUBA’S MILITARY-TOURISM COMPLEX

  The only income-producing activity properly describable as an industry in Cuba is tourism. And the Cuban military owns Cuba’s tourist industry almost lock, stock and barrel. So the only outfit in Cuba with guns is also the richest, thanks in large part to people who shuddered and grimaced at the Berlin Wall.

  Castro’s Cuba is a military dictatorship in the most genuine sense of the term. Raul Castro and his military cronies have been running Cuba for more than two decades and doing quite well in the process. Of the 19 members of Cuba’s Politburo, nine are military men. That is more than was the case for the typical Soviet-bloc nation, and more than for the Soviet Union itself.

  A Castro-regime bureau known as GAESA (Grupo de Administracion Empresarial S.A) does much of this running. It controls 300 different companies or state agencies, which often operate in partnership with minority-owning foreign investors. Among GAESA’s subsidiaries are Gaviota S.A., which runs the island’s tourist industry; hotels, restaurants, car-rentals and nightclubs; and TRD-Caribe S.A., which runs all retail operations. In brief GAESA controls virtually every economic transaction in Cuba, making it by far the most powerful company in Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom.

  Gaviota also owns the domestic airline, Aerogaviota, which uses Cuban air-force pilots flying refurbished Soviet transport airplanes. The U.S. Army’s Military Review describes Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and its GAESA operation as “one of the most entrepreneurial, corporate conglomerates in the Americas.”

  In a November 18, 2010 hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Committee debating the (so-called) U.S. travel ban to Cuba, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Simmons, a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba specialist, explained the issue in detail. He showed how Raul Castro’s military owns virtually every corporation involved in Cuba’s tourism industry, which in turn is the regime’s top money-maker.

  The Cuban military’s Gaviota tourism group is a corporate umbrella encompassing: Aerogaviota SA (airlines), Almest SA Hoteles Gaviota (hotels), Gaviota Tour (bus touring company), Marinas Gaviota (marinas), Tiendas Gaviota (tourist souvenir stores, restaurants) and Parques Naturales Gaviota (national parks, museums).

  The presentation also revealed something that goes a long way towards explaining Raul Castro’s confident entrenchment and recent brazen murder of dissidents. Last year Cuba enjoyed record tourism revenues: 2.7 million tourists leaving almost $3 billion in military-regime coffers, and precious little to other sectors of society, owing to the regime’s tourist apartheid, where Cubans (especially darker-skinned ones) are strictly segregated by billy club and at gun-point from tourist areas, except as waiters, maids, bellhops, shoe-shine boys, masseuses, etc.

  With this tourist-revenue windfall going on for almost two decades, Cuba’s ruling military robber-barons are making a killing. Why would they voluntarily upset their own apple-carts by democratizing the system and opening it to competitors?

  As GAESA’s chief executive officer we find Raul Castro’s son-in-law, Maj. Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Callejas. Lately—and seemingly out of the blue—one of the U.S. media’s most-beloved and oft-quoted experts on U.S.-Cuban relations is a lecturer on Latin American politics at the University of Denver named Arturo Lopez-Levy (Callejas), who happens to be Maj. Luis Alberto’s cousin.

  In 2005, Arturo Lopez-Levy (Callejas) received the Leonard Marks Essay Award of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He has also been a fellow of the Inter-American Dialogue and the (Jimmy) Carter Center. Let the issue of U.S.-Cuba relations blip on the media radar nowadays and, given his supposed expertise on Cuban matters, The New York Times almost immediately reaches out to Arturo Lopez-Levy, Raul Castro’s nephew-in-law—not that anyone would guess it anywhere in his media bio.

  “Mr. Lopez-Levy is a former secretary of the B’Nai B’rith Lodge in Cuba.” That’s how The New York Times introduced him in a story of March 2012. “A Cuban-born academic who left the island ten years ago and lectures at the University of Denver,” is how The New York Times described its valued source in another article three weeks later.

  “Arturo Lopez Levy is Ph.D. candidate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies of the University of Denver, Colorado,” is how CNN summarizes its frequent contributor.

  Professor Arturo Lopez-Callejas’s media-soundbites, lectures, articles, papers and speeches all stress a common theme: namely, that the U.S. should allow unfettered travel to Cuba. “Canadian respect for the human right to travel, as it is defined in the Universal Declaration, is a model to be emulated by the United States.”

  Despite the general fetish to consult and quote him, no mainstream media outlet has ever mentioned Arturo Lopez-Callejas’s kinship with Cuba’s dictator, much less his closer kinship with the Cuban dictator’s son-in-law, much less this son-in-law’s position as chief of the Castro regime’s business monopoly over Cuba’s tourist industry.

  In brief: the head of Castro’s tourist industry, through the good offices of the mainstream U.S. media, has his cousin constantly lobbying for more U.S. travel to Cuba. And the U.S. public for the most part remains utterly oblivious to his background and possible motives, much less to what tourism in Cuba might mean to the Cuban people’s prospects for freedom.

  “We don’t need no stinkin’ registration with the U.S. Justice Department as agents of a foreign government!” could well be the chuckle of Castro’s U.S. agents; and for going on half a century now.

  JUVENILE VICTIMS

  A 17-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine-gunned to death for the same crime the same year. Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro’s police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had sought asylum, and clubbed him to death with rifle-butts.8

  Yes, behind those statistics lie people, often children. Carlos Anaya was three on July 13, 1994 when Castro’s Coast Guard rammed and sank the escaping tugboat that held his mother and 70 other desperate Cubans. His boatmate Yisel Alvarez was four. Helen Martinez was six months old. Forty-three Cubans drowned, II of them children. Fidel Castro personally decorated the boat captain responsible for the ramming, sinking and drownings. The premeditated Castroite atrocity and deafening media silence outraged even Ted Koppel.

  “Three and a half years ago, in the summer of 1994, something terrible happened out there, seven or eight miles out at sea, off the northern coast of Cuba,” he broadcast from Miami on ABC’s “Nightline,” January 20, 1998. “It was an incident that went all but unnoticed in the U.S. media. The Cuban-American community protested but they protest a lot and, as I say, we in the mainstream media all but ignored it.”

  And they’re still ignoring it. Cubans had the misfortune of being born on a picturesque island. “The most gorgeous land human eyes have ever seen,” Columbus is fabled to have said when he first
saw it. Location, location, location, as real-estate folks say. Flying or boating into Cuba, then sipping mojitos along its beaches while gazing north just doesn’t provoke the same emotions as sipping Schnapps in a cafe near the Brandenburg Gate and gazing east.

  The mojito goes down smoothly, the Cohiba smoke curls languidly through the air, the salsa music pulses in the background, the mulatto prostitutes beckon. Unlike the vista in Berlin, the panorama in Cuba gives no hint of anything like the barbed wire and machine-gunners of the murderous Wall, portions of which remain for the very purpose of reminding tourists of the recent horror.

  Very few visitors to Cuba conjure how those gorgeous emerald, blue and cobalt waters reap the name of “cemetery without crosses.” It’s a Cuban thing, apparently.

  “I HATE THE SEA”

  “I Hate the Sea” is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It’s about the young men Rafael met on the beach west of Havana. Some were building a raft while another stood off by himself at the edge of the waves and stared out to sea. “It incarcerates us worse than prison bars,” fumes the loner as he curses and spits into a receding wave along the shoreline.

  Mankind has always been drawn to the sea. For most of us the sea soothes, attracts, infatuates. The most expensive real estate always faces the sea. “Water is everywhere a protection, like a moat,” writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger.” As a species we love it.”

  Yet Cubans now hate it. Che was right. The Cuban revolution indeed created a “New Man”—but one more psychologically crippled than even Che imagined. In Cuba, Castro and Che’s totalitarian dream gave rise to a psychic cripple beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: the first people in the history of the species to hate the sea.