A study by the late Armando M. Lago of the Cuba Archive, which is documenting all deaths from the Cuban revolution, found that during the entire year of 1957 Che Guevara’s guerrilla band suffered a total of 35 combat casualties. But 47 so-called deserters and informers were executed (murdered) during that year in the manner lovingly described by Che in his diaries.
On April 18, 1961 freedom-fighter Manel Menendez parachuted into the inferno of Soviet firepower known as the Bay of Pigs and ripped into the Communists to his very last bullet, like his entire band of freedom-fighting brothers who inflicted casualties of 20-to-1 against their Soviet-led and -armed enemies.
Castro rules today primarily for one reason: The knights of Camelot cut off the bullet-supply to Manel and his freedom-fighting band of brothers. During dinner with this author many years later, Manel described Che’s visit. “We’d all run out of ammo and been captured and herded into an enclosure,” he recalls. “And so here comes Che, strutting and sneering as usual. He strutted up and looked around with that famous sneer of his. Then he started snickering. Many of us were wounded, but one of our guys faced him down and said, ‘Well I guess you’ll send us all to the paredon [firing wall] now, right, Che?’
“No,” Che snapped. “No paredon. We’re gonna hang all of you, slowly! The firing squad’s too good for you.”
“I was standing close to Che at the time,” recalls Menendez, “and got a closeup of his face when he was talking. It was plain from the way his eyes lit up that the man was sick, mentally ill, a bona-fide sadist. Sure, most military commanders or wartime leaders—Patton, Chesty Puller, Winston Churchill, whatever—bad-mouth and taunt enemy soldiers. But that’s during combat, to get the troops fired up for the kill, etc. Here, the combat was over. We were uniformed adversaries, but completely disarmed.”
A Basque priest named Javier Arzuaga landed the traumatic duty of comforting many of Che’s murder victims. The Spanish priest happened to preside over the Havana parish that included the city’s La Cabana Fortress which Che, with his firing squads, converted into Cuba’s murder-central in January 1959. During his painful rounds father Arzuaga was shocked to find a 16-year-old boy named Ariel Lima among the condemned war-criminals. The priest described the boy as totally dazed, unaware of his surroundings, with his teeth constantly chattering. The other prisoners, though mostly certain of their fate, pleaded with Father Arzuaga to talk to somebody, anybody—even Che himself—about the kid. How could this boy possibly have been sentenced to death by firing squad by one of Che Guevara’s revolutionary tribunals?
Father Arzuaga managed to get an audience with Che where he pleaded the boy’s case. “So what’s the big deal?” Che snapped at the priest. “What’s was so special about the boy?”
“He’s only 16 for heaven’s sake,” responded the priest. “Besides, any mistake or injustice on the revolution’s part, it’s also politically unwise,” he tried to explain to the smirking Guevara. “What will the world think when they learn that the revolution is shooting 16-year-old boys as war criminals?”
“Quickly I realized my pleas were pointless,” recalls the priest. “The harder I pleaded for his compassion, the wider and crueler became Che’s famous sneer.”
“Fine. We’ll take it up at the Tribunal of Appeals,” Che said while dismissing the priest.
Came the appeals hearing and the death sentence was confirmed mechanically. In fact, Che added that the boy would be shot that very night. As they left the hearing, “Che was walking with his usual entourage when he noticed me,” recalls Father Arzuaga. “He smiled cynically and waved hello. I kept watching him as he walked back to his office, when I saw a distraught woman run in front of Che and throw herself on the ground.”
“That’s Ariel Lima’s mother,” one of his men told Che, who looked down at her.
“‘Woman,’ he sneered at her, go see that guy.’ And Che turned and pointed at me,” Father Arzuaga recalled. “Padre Javier Arzuaga is a master at consoling people,” Che chuckled. “Then he looked over at me, smiling widely. ‘She’s all yours, padre.’”
“I walked over and helped the devastated women from the ground,” said the priest. “‘Put yourself in God’s hands, senora,’” I told her. “‘Try and rise above this tragedy. God will help you learn to live without your son.’”
“That night Ariel Lima was still in a totally dazed condition as they tied him to the execution stake,” wrote Father Arzuaga, “totally unaware he was about to be murdered.”
“Fuego!” And the volley shattered Ariel’s quivering little body. Che was probably watching from his window, as was his custom. Che’s second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing squads at work.
“From that moment on I hated Che Guevara,” said the priest.17
The man featured in the above anecdotes (plucked from thousands of others as sickening), who relished the murder of the defenseless and who craved to ignite a worldwide nuclear war, became the international icon of flower-children and peace creeps. Who but Fidel Castro could have pulled off such a public relations con-job? As he stressed as early as 1955: “Propaganda is vital. Propaganda is the heart of our struggle.”
The Red Terror had come to Cuba. “Do not search for evidence,” Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinsky’s top lieutenant Martin Latsis instructed his hangmen in the Ukraine. “Simply ask him to what class he belongs, what are his origins, education, and profession. Those are the questions that should decide the fate of the accused.”18
Che Guevara often cheekily signed his early correspondence as “Stalin II.”
REQUIEM FOR A FLACK
An AP story from 2003 reported that on his visit to Cuba Steven Spielberg met with Cuban Jews, “who had dwindled from 15,000 before the revolution to 1,300 afterward.”
This dwindling, by the way, took place mainly over a three-year period, from about 1959 to 1962. In light of this, some people might get the impression that the dwindling might have had something to do with the imposition of Communism.
In other words, what Czar Nicholas failed to accomplish with 20 years of pogroms, President Castro pulled off in two years of his rule. He drove a higher percentage of Jews out of Cuba than Czar Nicholas drove from Russia and even Hafez Assad drove out of Syria. None of this prevents Shoah Foundation founder Stephen Spielberg from gushing about his dinner with Fidel Castro in 2003 as “the eight most important hours of my life.”19
In the interest of full disclosure: upon my publicizing this quote, Mr. Stephen Rivers, the Hollywood agent who had arranged Spielberg’s trip to Castro’s fiefdom, promptly notified me that Spielberg had uttered nothing of the sort. Therefore, he said, I should retract the statement from my writings.
Rivers, an independent and powerful publicist formerly with Creative Artists Agency, explained to me that Castro’s own media had concocted the Spielberg quote from thin air. So there was absolutely no truth to it.
To the high-rolling Mr. Rivers I replied: “Well, what you’re telling me actually makes my point better than any quote issuing from Spielberg.”
Indeed, my writings document that Fidel Castro is a master propagandist and that his KGB/Stasi-trained secret services specialize in obtaining many such statements from many such luminaries, voluntarily or often as a result of various forms of persuasion, i.e., blackmail.
So the proper and logical course of action, if Mr. Spielberg had indeed been swindled, would have been for Mr. Spielberg or his agent to make Fidel Castro’s treachery known publicly. After all, Mr. Spielberg supposedly was the aggrieved party here, and the damage (from what Mr. Rivers was telling me) had been inflicted maliciously by the secret services of a Stalinist regime.
But there is no record that Mr. Rivers, Mr. Spielberg or any of their spokespersons ever clarified this issue publicly; which didn’t surprise me then, and surprised me even less after Mr. Rivers’s June 2010 passing.
The late Mr. Stephen Rivers, who once worked as Tom Hayden’s pres
s secretary and Jane Fonda’s agent, had also arranged Cuban trips for Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, Benicio Del Toro, Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and Stephen Soderbergh, among many others who sought the invaluable collaboration of Castro’s propaganda ministry for their films. Essentially Rivers was Hollywood’s “go-to” guy when planning a visit to Fidel Castro’s fiefdom, a meeting with his communist functionaries, or even a coveted audience with the mass-murderer himself, as generously bequeathed to Spielberg.
Despite the notorious U.S. embargo against Cuba that we keep hearing and reading about in the media, and despite Cuba’s meticulous vetting of any applicant for a visa, Stephen Rivers managed to visit Castro’s island fiefdom more than two dozen times over the course of a few years. When Mr. Stephen Rivers passed away, his friends and clients poured forth the eulogies:
“Stephen Rivers was a man committed to the truth,” wrote Oliver Stone, “wanting the best for the United States, and digging away at the hypocrisy of so much of our political and media leadership.... I will miss him deeply.”20
But the most effusive eulogy was published in The Huffington Post by Margarita Alarcon.
THE HUFFINGTON POST AND DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL
“Stephen had been for the better part of the last years of his life an exemplary ‘Bridge’ between Cuba and the United States, but he didn’t just bridge Cuba and the US culturally, he also was very aware of the need for sovereignty and independence from imperial powers,” Miss Alarcon wrote. “When he gave a gift it wasn’t just a gesture of friendship it was always a gesture of solidarity with a cause.... May he rest in peace and may he know that I feel safe because I know he is on my side.” (emphases mine) 21
In other Huffington Post articles Margarita Alarcon denounced Senator Marco Rubio, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (chairwoman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs), Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and former U.S. president George W. Bush, all as “silly and insane.”
“Margarita Alarcon is a Havana-based media analyst,” innocuously informs The Huffington Post about one of their feature writers.
Margarita Alarcon is also a “Havana-based” columnist for Castro’s regime-run press, an official of Cuba’s Casa de las Americas, and the daughter of one of Fidel Castro’s longest-serving and most faithful ministers. Margarita’s father, Ricardo Alarcon, has functioned as Castro’s foreign minister, ambassador to the UN, and most recently as the president of Cuba’s “Parliament.” In 1983 a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer named Jesus Perez Mendez defected to the U.S. and revealed to the FBI that the Cuban DGI controls the Casa de las Americas.22
Let’s say that Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, The New York Post, had published comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s daughter, denouncing several U.S. legislators and a former U.S. president as “silly and insane”—and then innocently described this apparatchik for a sovereign terror-sponsor as a “columnist” and “Teheran-based news analyst.” Might the disclosure of her employment and pedigree merit media mention?
But for this very task, The Huffington Post deploys the daughter of the president of a terrorist-sponsor’s parliament. Nobody bats an eye—mostly, of course, because few people know the details. In 2000, during a major crackdown by the Bush administration against Cuban spying, Margarita’s father was denied a U.S. visa.
So shameless and relentless has been Ricardo Alarcon’s ass-kissing over the decades that Margarita’s father is often named a likely heir to Cuba’s Stalinist throne.
Unsurprisingly, Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban refugees, heads the list of legislators denounced in The Huffington Post by the loyal daughter of Fidel Castro’s most slavish cabin-boy. Margarita Alarcon’s columns usually appear just to the left of Fidel and Raul Castro’s official pronouncements. So in running her articles, The Huffington Post is essentially transcribing a Stalinist regime’s propaganda for the benefit of unsuspecting American readers.
From Margarita’s Huffington Post bio we do learn that “raised in New York City, Margarita has spent most of her adult life in Cuba. She has been traveling to the United States since her return home in the early 1980s.”
“Awwww, well isn’t that nice,” might react the typical Huffington Post reader. “She’s a world traveler, probably with a backpack, eager to expand her cultural horizons, like so much of her generation.... Awwww ”
In fact, her raising in New York occurred during her father’s lengthy stint as Fidel Castro’s ambassador to the UN. “Virtually every member of Cuba’s UN mission is an intelligence agent,” revealed Alcibiades Hidalgo, who defected to the U.S. in 2002 after serving as Raul Castro’s chief of staff and Cuba’s ambassador to the UN. In 2003, 14 of those UN-stationed Cuban spies were rooted out and booted from the U.S.
Interestingly, The Huffington Post’s bio on Margarita Alarcon discloses that “she has not been back [to the U.S.] since 2003.”
No reason to single out The Huffington Post, however. CBS has also run Margarita Alarcon’s articles, describing her innocuously as a writer for Havana’s Casa de las Americas. Castro’s intelligence services are widely touted as among the world’s best. So Margarita Alarcon is probably good at her job. But The Huffington Post and CBS (those noisy proponents of full disclosure by Republicans) could be more forthcoming about what that job is.
CHAPTER 14
Sickos! The Cuban Health-Care Hoax, Directed by Michael Moore
“Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free.... Health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.” (Peter Jennings, “World News Tonight,” April 3, 1989)
“Castro has brought great health-care to his country.” (Barbara Walters, ABC, October 11, 2002)
“Frankly, to be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami, and I’m not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously.” (Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on “The McLaughlin Group,” April 8, 2000)
“One of Cuba’s greatest prides is its health care-system. And, according to the World Health Organization, the country has much to boast about.” (PBS’s Ray Suarez reporting from Havana, December 22, 2010)
“Cuba could serve as a model for health-care reform in the United States.” (Morgan Neill, CNN, August 2009)
For more than a quarter-century, we have struggled unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for our people . .. but Cuba has superb systems of health-care and universal education.” (Jimmy Carter, University of Havana, May 14, 2002)
The voice on the phone sounded frantic, which surprised me. It was George Utset, pioneer Cuban-American blogger and a normally composed fellow. “ABC sold us out,” he sputtered. “We got the videos out and everything was going perfectly. But the regime gotword about them somehow. Now it looks like ABC wimped out.”
Years earlier the Castro regime had bestowed on ABC a coveted Havana bureau, its only bureau in Latin America outside of Mexico City. Most importantly, ABC employs Fidel Castro’s most famous and frequent interviewer, Barbara Walters.
“I asked them to give us [the 9/11 workers featured in Sicko] the same care they give their own Cuban citizens,” assures Michael Moore in his film. “No more, no less. And that’s exactly what they did.” Cubans watching it felt like retching. And some resolved that this outrageous lie would not stand. Hence the secret videos, the original pledge from ABC, and the desperate call from George.
The videos that so agitated my friend George had been snuck out of Cuba via the diplomatic pouch of an East European embassy to Mexico, and had then made their way to Miami where George held them at the time of his call. “Many Cubans took great risks to make them and get them out,” he reminded me. “Now it looks like it was all for nothing.”
As a reminder, the Cuban constitution prohibits private ownership of media or any independent exercise of journalism. Speech, print or video issuing from the island is perfectly permissible—so long as it “conforms to the aims of a socialist socie
ty.” “Enemy propaganda” and “unauthorized news” meet with severe penalties.
Michael Moore’s Sicko not only made Castro’s cut but was shown free throughout Cuba, as had been Moore’s Farenheit 9/11. This obvious partnership with the Castro regime enraged many Cuban dissidents and provoked the smuggled videos held by George Utset, about which he was calling me.
But amazingly, Michael Moore’s parroting of Castro’s claims in Sicko gagged even some in the mainstream U.S. media. An ABC producer had earlier been shocked by pictures smuggled out of genuine Cuban hospitals and posted on George Utset’s website, therealcuba.com. When he saw Sicko he was revolted by Moore’s shameless propagandizing. The revolted party (who requested that I not use his name here) is no “right-winger” or Cuban exile. He’s simply someone who takes his profession seriously.
So he decided to counter Sicko by using ABC’s Havana bureau to interview Cuban dissidents. These would then reveal the actual conditions in Cuba’s hospitals on an ABC special. When this producer ran the idea by ABC’s Havana bureau the folks there shuffled nervously, but reluctantly agreed. First, however, they’d naturally have to ask the Castro regime’s permission for such an interview.
The permission was not granted. Can you believe that? Thwarted by their own Havana bureau, the ABC producer enlisted some allies within the network. They resolved to get their hands on any evidence regarding genuine conditions in Cuba’s hospitals, and produce a blockbuster report about a topic much in the news at the time.
The Longest Romance Page 16
