The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  “We lived like kings in Cuba,” revealed Medellin cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials in the 80’s and 90’s. “Fidel made sure nobody bothered us.”1

  Also, there’s no mention by T.J. English as to how the Castroite nomenklatura, in cahoots with Colombia’s cocaine cowboys throughout the 70’s and 80’s, made multiple times the measly $13 million per year.

  In 1996 a federal prosecutor in south Florida told The Miami Herald. “The case we have against Fidel and Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in 1988.” Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba’s role in drug-smuggling into the U.S. The Clinton administration, hell-bent on cozying up to Castro, refused to press ahead with the case against the Castro brothers’ dope-trafficking.2

  The chumminess between Castro and the world’s richest, most murderous criminal organizations was showcased in 1981 when the Colombian Communist terrorist group M-19 kidnapped the daughter of one of Colombia’s most powerful cocaine capos, Fabio Ochoa. Balking at paying any ransom, the enraged Ochoa called together 200 other drug bosses from the Medellin area and explained that a showdown with this commie riff-raff was long overdue.3 So let’s settle this thing once and for all, he reasoned—much as Alejandro Sosa settled things with the uppity “little monkey” Tony Montana in the movie Scarface. “You wanna go to war! You wanna go to war! OK, I take you to war!”—as Scarface yelled shortly before the movie’s gory end.

  The fuse was burning down to such a war in Colombia when peacemaker Fidel Castro proffered his good offices. He brought together the two gangs of murderers and the problem was resolved amicably and without bloodshed (for each other) if expensively. The communist terrorists would start getting a cut of the cocaine-smuggling action for various services rendered to the cartel.4

  Castro, after all, had started partnering with drug-smugglers almost as soon as he landed in Cuba from Mexico in December 1956. The marijuana planters and dealers in Cuba’s remote Sierra Maestra were also enemies of Batista’s police and army. An alliance between them and the Castroite guerrillas made perfect sense, especially in view of Castro’s protection and promotion by the U.S. media, State Department and CIA. To these ragamuffin dope-smugglers, a partnership with Fidel Castro meant political protection, respectability and cachet similar to what the partnership with Don Corleone lent the sleazier Tattaglia and Barzini.

  “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s Caribbean Desk Chief from 1957 to 1960.5 “Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State were pro-Castro, except [Republican] Ambassador Earl T. Smith, boasted Robert Weicha, CIA operative in Santiago de Cuba between 1957 and 1959.6

  “Various agencies of the United States directly and indirectly aided the overthrow of the Batista government and brought into power Fidel Castro,” said Ambassador Smith, who served from 1957 to 1959.7

  Castro rebels were often provided sanctuary by the U.S. embassy in Havana and at Guantanamo Naval base, where they had also established a spy network for smuggling out arms. “Our cells in Guantanamo were very effective,” writes Cuban General Demetrio Montseny in his memoirs. “We had an intelligence network inside the base. In one memorable action in early 1958, we stole one dozen 61-mm mortars, a 30 caliber machine gun, and 12 Garand m-i’s.”

  The fruits of the Castro-brokered partnership between the cocaine cartel and M-19 burst into the news on November 6, 1985 when M-19 gunmen stormed the Colombian Supreme Court and murdered twelve, or half, of Colombia’s 24 Supreme Court justices. They also burned the U.S. extradition files on cartel boss Pablo Escobar.8

  “See?” Fidel Castro must have beamed. “I told you this would work out. A rollicking win-win!”

  In 1984 Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his drug-smuggling cohort Manuel Noriega, who facilitated his shipments’ layovers in Panana, had a falling-out over storage and transportation fees. It was Fidel Castro again who prevailed upon both parties to kiss and make up. They mediated and resolved the matter in no time. Castro’s coziness with both parties again patched up the criminal partnership. Castro’s own fiefdom, after all, was beginning to surpass Panama as a transit-point for Colombian cocaine. “The ideological sympathies [anti-Americanism] between my brother and Fidel Castro really came out when Pablo would travel to Cuba and visit with Fidel Castro,” said Pablo Escobar’s sister Alba during a recent radio interview in Miami.9

  In 1982 indicted swindler and drug-smuggler Robert Vesco holed up in Havana’s Marina Hemingway. Cuban intelligence defector Manuel De Buenza reported seeing him often aboard Fidel Castro’s yacht, the Yarama, always accompanied by Castro himself. Vesco died in Cuba on November 2007.

  On December 6, 1998, Colombian police seized seven-and-a-half tons of cocaine in the port city of Cartagena and discovered they were bound for Cuba, the pit-stop at the time for much of the cocaine bound for the U.S. The beaming Colombians proudly informed U.S. diplomats of the big bust. That it implicated Fidel Castro, the U.S.’s most implacable enemy, must have struck the Colombian police as particularly gratifying.

  But the deluded Colombians did not know that the Clinton administration was deep into courting Cuba at the time. So instead of trumpeting the Colombian coke bust the U.S. State Department pressured the Colombians into hushing up the bust’s Cuba connection.

  Upon learning the details of this cover-up, Congressman Dan Burton, then serving as Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, fired off a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “Sources close to the American embassy in Bogota have informed me that officials at the U.S. Embassy solicited silence from the Colombian National Police regarding a seven-and-a-half-ton cocaine seizure, destined for Cuba, because it could hurt our budding relationship with the Western Hemisphere’s only surviving dictator. It is only logical to conclude the reason there has been no official reaction from the State Department on the seizure is that State did not want the air of coddling a ruthless dictator to be muddied by allegations of drug trafficking.” Congressman Burton never received a reply.

  Needless to add, any similar cover-up, especially one involving such a trashing of the “Good Neighbor Policy” and such “Yankee bullying” of a Latin neighbor, would have normally delighted the media and liberals in general. Those Colombian police officials, the poor saps, were sure that by risking their lives in this case they were being exemplary “good neighbors.”

  That was one Colombian bust involving seven tons of cocaine bound for Cuba, by the way. One ton of cocaine has a wholesale price of about $10 million. Recall that the (generously) estimated combined gross for all Cuban casinos in 1958 was about $13 million per year in the dollars of the time. And you’re telling us, Mr. T.J. English, that organized crime “lost” Cuba to the Castro revolution?

  NOT YOUR FATHER’S MOBSTERS

  On Mother’s Day 2012 police near Monterrey, Mexico found the bodies of 43 men and six women along a highway. The bodies were headless and so badly hacked up that for most of them identification proved impossible. Two weeks earlier, 23 bodies had been displayed just across the U.S. border. Fourteen were decapitated and nine others—all badly battered and disfigured—hanged by the necks from an overpass. Fifty thousand people have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars in the past six years.10

  No director could credibly create a Godfather, Scarface or Goodfellas from the Mexican cartels. No brutal-but-likeable Tony Montanas or Mikey Corleones here. Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic best captured the blanket sleaze, treachery and horror of the (mostly for now) Mexican drug wars.

  “To a great extent,” Los Zetas “are the ones who have caused this spiral of violence in recent years,” according to Jorge Chabat, a Mexican expert on organized crime. The Zetas are dedicated to “kidnapping, extortion, people-trafhcking, collecting protection money, and murdering people,” while the Sinaloa cartel “is more traditional. They kill their rivals, but there is no evidence that they are involved in other types of c
rimes,” added Chabat.11

  “These Zetas want to be known as the meanest, most sadistic criminal organization in at least the Americas if not the world,” explains Professor George Grayson of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In December 2009, just across the Rio Grande from McCallen, Texas in Reynosa, Mexican cops found not human bodies but portions of bodies: severed heads, torsos and limbs, all badly mutilated and lying on a tarmac in splashes of drying blood. “See. Hear. Shut up, if you want to stay alive,” read a note written in blood on a crude billboard nearly.12

  In 2010 near Tamaulipas, just across the border from Texas’ Zapata County, Mexican police unearthed a mass grave containing the bodies of 58 men and 14 women. Most of the victims were not Mexicans but Central American migrants with no apparent links to the drug trade. They either refused to join the Zetas as couriers or refused to pay ransom for passage through their plaza (turf).13 You’d never guess it from the media, much less the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, much less Mexican officials, but Central Americans caught sneaking into Mexico greatly envy the treatment of Mexicans caught sneaking into the U.S. The shelters that house these hapless Central Americans in southern Mexico, according to the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde who ministers in one, have been infiltrated by Zetas, who mingle with the detainees to determine which are headed to the U.S. More importantly, the Zetas want to know which of these detainees have relatives in the U.S. These migrants then became valuable for kidnapping. Practice shows that their U.S.-based relatives are most cooperative with ransom for their kidnapped and tortured family-members.14

  More alarming to their mobster rivals, in 2010 the Zetas broke the “golden rule.” While driving from their temporary office at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Mexico City to a meeting in Monterrey, two U.S. ICE agents were ambushed and shot. One died and the other was badly wounded. “This always brings down too much heat,” lamented a Zeta rival.

  Unlike the mobsters who helped build a very few casinos in Havana, the Zetas recognize no “Untouchables.” The severed heads of Mexico’s Eliot Nesses often rot on pikes in the sun while their disemboweled bodies hang from bridges alongside those of the cartel’s snitches, rivals, and recalcitrant ransom-payers. “Plata o plomo” (“silver or lead”), Los Zetas cheekily call their “offers you can’t refuse” in extortion.

  Felipe Calderon hadn’t been sworn in as Mexican president for a week before he sent 40,000 federal troops to the Mexico-U.S. border. To give him credit, he didn’t promise a rose garden; “the conflict will intensify before it is brought under control,” he admitted at the time. Perhaps partly to blame for the intensification is the fact that most of Los Zetas’ officer corps are deserters from elite units of the Mexican armed forces.

  But this is no lateral career-move. The pay is much better on the Zetas’ side, as even some Mexican doctors have noticed. The Gulf cartel now employs doctors to supervise their torture and amputation sessions. An overzealous interrogation often leads to a victim dying too soon, and thus rendered useless. But under a doctor’s supervision the questioning can be expertly prolonged and the desired answers patiently extracted.

  “Many of Mexico’s existing drug cartels will kill their enemies and snitches, but not go out of their way to do it. The Zetas look forward to inflicting fear on their targets.” So says Professor George Grayson.15

  In 2009 retired Mexican general Enrique Tello Quinones was appointed to crack down on the rampant drug-trafficking by Los Zetas in the Cancun area of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, which is also home to about seven thousand Cubans. These aren’t exiles, however. They enjoy a form of dual nationality and can travel back and forth perfectly legally. Quinones had been on the job for all of a week when he and three associates were kidnapped, tortured and murdered. Some say he was closing in on the cartel’s political protection.16

  Among those arrested for the murder was a Cuban named Boris Del Valle, nephew of Cuba’s former and long-time minister of the interior Sergio del Valle. Boris is also a relative of Fidel Castro’s common-law wife, Dalia Del Valle. “El Boris,” as he was also known, had worked for decades as a Cuban G-2 (military intelligence) officer. No doubt his KGB-trained dad had helped his son’s impressive career-trajectory. At the time of his arrest Boris was serving officially as the security-assessor for Cancun’s mayor, Gregorio Sanchez, who himself was arrested the following year and charged with a string of crimes including money-laundering and trafficking in drugs and illegal immigrants—all in cahoots with Los Zetas.17

  Sanchez was running for governor of Mexico’s state of Quintana Roo (which includes Cancun and the Caribbean “Mexican Riviera”) at the time of his arrest. Among his campaign pledges was to root out drug-related corruption. His security-assessor’s arrest a year earlier had greatly “shocked” him.

  Also interesting, Gregorio Sanchez is married to a Cuban woman named Niurka Saliva, daughter of one of Cuba’s top intelligence (Ministry of the Interior) officials. According to police sources, Boris Del Valle worked closely with the Sanchez couple; he was the hands-on operative for the smuggling of drugs and humans into the U.S. with help from Los Zetas and a sophisticated visa-counterfeiting operation that had all the earmarks of Cuban DGI technology.18

  In brief, according to some of Mexico’s most diligent investigative reporters, Fidel Castro’s minion “El Boris” had set up his own police and military fiefdom in the Cancun area working handin-glove with Los Zetas. He also imported hundreds of fellow Castroite functionaries to staff his smuggling operation. Most of these Cuban agents entered Mexico under the guise of “cultural exchanges,” also a major initiative of the Obama State Department with Cuba.19

  At the time of Sanchez’s arrest, Mexican investigative reporter Raymundo Riva Palaci ran an article in Mexico’s prestigious El Financiero newspaper entitled, “Cuban Intelligence’s Penetration” of Cancun.

  In June 2010 the Mexican news organization SIPSE ran an investigative report saying: “The Cuban Mafia seeks to use our state as a trampoline [into the U.S.] for illegals.”

  And here, perhaps, we see why Fidel Castro loudly joined the liberal rants against Arizona’s SB 1070- “A brutal violation of human rights!” is how Governor Brewer’s law was denounced by the Stalinist dictator.

  Governor Brewer’s law probably stung the Castro regime hard—and right where it hurts most. The drug and human contraband—including Cubans, Russians, Chinese and perhaps Al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali terrorists—from their little Mexican fiefdom and way-station, courtesy of Gregorio Sanchez, his Castroite wife, his Castroite “security-assessor” and Los Zetas, were mostly bound for the U.S., with Arizona a probable entry-point.

  Connecting a few dots regarding the above-mentioned human contraband: on June 4, 2010 the New York Daily News reported that “Anthony Joseph Tracy, 35, was set free after pleading guilty to human-smuggling charges.... Tracy, a former informant to two U.S. intelligence agencies, was collared at JFK Airport last January. He copped to helping 272 Somalis illegally enter the U.S. from Kenya though Cuba. Tracy allegedly helped the Somalis get travel visas to Cuba. After traveling from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba, they then went to South America before entering the United States through the border in Mexico.” (emphasis mine)

  PIPELINE FOR TERRORISTS?

  The Border Patrol calls them OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) and The Department of Homeland Security, SIAs (Special Interest Aliens) . These are people from “Special Interest Nations” (Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan) caught trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico.

  In 2007 National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell confirmed to the El Paso Times that terrorists were definitely using the Mexican border to enter the U.S. “Coming up through the Mexican border is a path,” he said. “Now are they doing it in great numbers? No. Because we’re finding them and we’re identifying them and we’ve got watch lists and we’re keeping them at bay. There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them [the terrorists
].”

  Testifying before a congressional committee in 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed that some Hezbollah terrorists had crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. Then, for obvious security reasons, he clammed up. A year later Mueller told reporters that “we have had indications that leaders of other terrorist groups may be contemplating ... having persons come across assuming identities of others, and trying to get across the border. There is intelligence that indicates there have been discussions on that.”

  “Mexican drug cartels, including the Zetas, have infiltrated 276 U.S. cities and represent the nation’s most serious organized-crime threat;”20 this according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which somehow also declares our border “safe and secure.”

  In 2009 the U.S. DEA launched Operation Xcellerator, billed as a “nationwide takedown” of Mexican drug-traffickers. Taken down were more than 750 members of the Sinaloa cartel. The arrests were made from sea to shining sea, with many in Washington, D.C. itself, not far from DEA headquarters. In the process the DEA also seized 13 tons of cocaine, eight tons of marijuana, a ton of methamphetamine 149 motor vehicles, three planes, three boats and 169 weapons. On the Mexican side, the cartel’s arsenal included rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-mounted missiles and attack helicopters.

  These types of weapons didn’t come courtesy of Eric Holder’s “Fast and Furious.”

  “Several reports, citing U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence sources, document that Hezbollah operatives have provided weapons and explosives training to drug-trafficking organizations that operate along the U.S. border with Mexico”—this according to testimony by Roger Noriega, former U.S. ambassador to the OAS, to the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence on July 7, 2011. “But the U.S. and Mexican governments have declined to share information publicly on these cases.” Continued ambassador Noriega: “Our inquiries to at least one Mexican official about a specific arrest of a suspected Hezbollah operative in Mexico in June 2010 were met with the response, ‘Don’t ask about that.’”