“Why did Elian’s mother leave Cuba? What was she escaping? By all accounts this young woman was living the good life.” (NBC’s Jim Avila, April 2000)
“[Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin] was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” (The Washington Post, June 18th 2007)
“Only minutes after my arrival at the Hotel Riviera in Havana, I was told to be in his office within 15 minutes,” wrote Barbara Walters about her first interview with Fidel Castro in May 1977. “There I found a very courtly, somewhat portly Fidel Castro. He apologized for making me wait for two years and said that now he wanted to cooperate. Castro suggested that he personally escort us on a visit to other parts of the country, and he gave me the choice of places. I selected the Bay of Pigs and the Sierra Maestra ...
“On Wednesday, Castro himself came to our hotel to pick us up.... Then, driving a Russian-made jeep, he took us to the Bay of Pigs, where we boarded an armed patrol boat. We thus became, according to Castro, the first Americans to cross the Bay of Pigs since the U.S.-supported invasion there in 1961.”1
Barbara Walters’s crossing of the Bay of Pigs was probably more than a historical sightseeing junket. On the other side and near the mouth of the bay sits Castro’s personal island, Cayo Piedra, that houses his luxurious getaway chateau. According to defectors, Fidel Castro, when younger, often repaired to this remote, luxurious villa for spear-fishing, among other recreational pursuits.
Juan Reynaldo Sanchez, a lieutenant colonel in Cuba’s armed forces who spent 17 years as Fidel Castro’s bodyguard/valet, had just been promoted to the position when Barbara Walters visited Cuba for her first interview with the Stalinist dictator in May 1977. Sanchez defected to the U.S. in 2008 and explained to this writer how he was part of the Castroite entourage that accompanied Ms. Walters and Fidel to the latter’s island chateau. Ms Walters does mention that:
“We stopped at a little island for a picnic lunch of grilled fish and pineapple. During which Castro swapped fish stories with the ABC crew. It was here that we taped our first but brief and candid interview with him.”2
And speaking of candidness, when in her bookAudition Barbara Walters confessed to an adulterous affair with Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, Oprah Winfrey asked if she had been in love at the time.
“I was certainly . . . I don’t know . . . I was certainly infatuated,” answered Walters.
“Infatuated?” asked Oprah.
“I was certainly involved,” Walters says. “He was brilliant. He was exciting!”
“His personal magnetism is powerful. His presence is still commanding!” panted Barbara Walters about her 2002 interview with the hemisphere’s top torturer of women.
Argentinian journalist Juan Gasparini in his Spanish-language book Mujeres de dictadores (“Women of Dictators”) writes: “It is widely supposed that Fidel Castro had several amorous adventures with the North American reporter Barbara Walters who twice visited Cuba to interview him. It is said that she later visited Cuba more discretely for private visits.”
Did her journalistic sisters envy Ms. Walters? “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly, even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” squealed NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, after her interview with the dictator who established prisons for the serial torture of women.
And as earlier mentioned, during the Manhattan elite’s lovefest for Fidel Castro in 1996, Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the serial murderer’s presence that she lost control, rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on his bearded cheek.
This phenomenon is not exactly unknown to psychologists, especially those who specialize in studying rapists, torturers and killers of women. From Charles Manson to Richard Ramirez, from the Son of Sam to O.J. Simpson, all these psychopaths—while in prison and especially on death row—have been swamped with love-letters and marriage proposals from women.
But most people don’t associate Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer with deranged meth-addicts.
When in a 2002 interview Fidel Castro told Barbara Walters that Cuba is “to be not only the most just society in the world but the most cultivated,” Barbara Walters (whose ABC profile tells us that she “tackles the tough issues”) responded with such punchy rebuttals as, “Cuba has very high literacy and you have brought great health to your country.”3
CASTRO’S CHAMBERS FOR WOMEN
On the way to Fidel Castro’s love-shack at the mouth of the Bay of Pigs, feminist icon Barbara Walters passed several prisons and torture-chambers crammed to suffocation with women political prisoners, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown in our hemisphere until her “magnetic” Cuban escort took power.
When transferring them from cell to cell, communist prison guards had to drag many of these women around like dead animals. The women prisoners were simply incapable of walking. The constant beatings had incapacitated many of them. The excrement and menstrual fluid caked to their legs and bare feet made it more difficult still. Some of the cells, called “tapiadas” or stoppages, were barely big enough to stand and walk in and were completely sealed except for a few tiny air-holes. The women were confined completely underground in total darkness and suffocating heat for weeks at a time. These were tombs by any other name, except that their occupants were still alive, if barely and if only by ultra-human perseverance.
“Chirri was just a kid,” recalled prisoner Ana Lazaro Rodriguez about one of her cellmates, “barely 18. Tiny, blonde and beautiful, she should have been going to high-school dances. Instead, because her father had been involved in a plot against Castro, she was squatting in a dark filthy cell, wallowing in menstrual blood and shit.”4
Jailing, torturing and murdering people (particularly females) for the crime of being related to “enemies of the revolution,” by the way, comes straight from the Bolshevik playbook. The practice was started by the Soviet Cheka and greatly expanded upon by Stalin during the Great Terror. The Soviet Union’s Cuban satraps adopted the practice with genuine gusto.
Not that at 18 Chirri was among the youngest victims of Castroism. “Mommy—MOMMY?—AY!—NO!” Ana Rodriguez recalls the shrieks of pain and horror coming from a nearby torture-chamber. “Up and down the corridor the women prisoners started pounding things—anything!—on cell bars and shouting desperate threats!” she recalls. “But the only reply was the little girl’s piercing sobs.”
“She’s a little girl!” Ana yelled at a nearby prison guard. “How can you let this happen?” Then, Ana Rodriguez recalled, “Slowly and deliberately the guard turned her back and walked away.”5
The victim had been a 13-year-old girl raised in a Havana Catholic orphanage named Casa de Beneficiencia y Maternidad (“House of Charity and Maternity”), founded in 1705. Castroite commisars, perfectly mimicking their Bolshevik mentors, had taken over the orphanage and begun hectoring the girls on how the nuns who had been raised them were actually witches preparing to sell them into prostitution. Many of the barely-pubescent girls broke a blackboard and some desks in protest against the Bolsheviks insulting the only home and motherhood they’d ever known.
So the Soviet-mentored Castroite police yanked the little girls from the orphanage, hauled them down to the women’s prison and threw them into cells with common prisoners. In his Gulag Archipelago Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes about the tacit alliance always evident between Communist jailers and common prisoners, most of whom had been hapless victims of capitalism, after all.
In the case witnessed by Ana Rodriguez, the little girl was thrown in with “Sappho,” a notorious lesbian with a multi-scarred face who was in jail for murder. “It was another half-hour before the little girl’s screams finally ended,” writes Ana.
When Ana Rodriguez and thousands of women political prisoners emerged from their cells, into the dark corridors of their fetid, steaming, roach- and rat-infested prisons, their eyes blazed in pai
n even from that feeble light. They staggered and fell, shielding their eyes with their filthy hands, though many had their eyelids almost swollen shut from hundreds of mosquito bites. “One of our games was slapping our hands in front of our faces,” recalled Rodriguez, “then counting how many mosquitoes we killed. My record was almost a hundred.”
In time-honored Bolshevik practice, to these physical tortures were added mental ones. One of the women’s prisons was located only a few miles from La Cabana, Havana’s firing squad-central. With the right wind direction, the frequent firing-squad volleys would reach the women prisoners, many of whom had male relatives in La Cabana. The guards took advantage of this to appear in the hallways and howl maliciously at the despairing, rat-bitten women. “Heard that? Heard it!” they cackled. “We just shot your husband!” Or son or dad or granddad or uncle.
According to Dora Delgado, who suffered more than a decade in Castro’s torture-chambers, having to hear the firing-squad volleys that murdered their loved ones is what finally drove many of Castro’s brutalized women prisoners over the edge to suicidal despair.
“They started by beating us with twisted coils of electric cable,” recalls another former political prisoner, Ezperanza Pena, from exile today. She’s recalling prison ordeals which occurred a few short miles from where Andrea Mitchell and Maria Shriver smilingly interviewed her jailer. “I remember young Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”6
“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls Manuela Calvo from exile today. “But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us on the floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved ones screamed helplessly.”
“When female guards couldn’t handle us, male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teenage girls beaten savagely, their bones broken, their mouths bleeding,” recalled Polita Grau.7
You’ll please excuse these Cuban ladies if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as a trifle overblown. They’re still awaiting that call from the producers of The History Channel, Oxygen or “The View.” But they probably understand how “The Real Grandmaws of Miami” just doesn’t click with Bravo TV.
“Anything that I and my friends might have experienced is nothing—nothing—compared with what some of the men in this room went through.” The statement came from presidential candidate John McCain during a campaign stop in Miami in October 2008. The Republican candidate was the guest of Bay of Pigs veterans and former Cuban political prisoners. “I’m introducing a man who suffered the prisons, as I did,” said Roberto Martin-Perez, who introduced McCain on the podium. “This honor that’s been conferred upon me is not only mine but the thousands of victims who have suffered because of this terrible doctrine, communism.”8
Mr. Martin-Perez suffered 28 years in Castro’s prisons and torture-chambers. Indeed, he probably qualifies as the longest-suffering political prisoner alive today in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps the world—not that you’d know this from any media coverage. Even at age 23, Martin-Perez was known among his communist captors and prison guards as el cojonudo (“the ballsy one”). “One day I’d gotten particularly smart-mouthed, I guess,” he remembers. “So they dragged me down to the torture cell and hung me by my wrists behind my back, with my feet exactly an inch from the floor. I could touch it with my tippy-toes now and then. They had the elevation exactly right. They hung me there for 17 days—exactly 17. I still remember it well.”9
Martin-Perez emerged from his prison ordeal, which included more than a decade in solitary confinement, with scars from multiple beatings along with six bullet-wounds, one of which destroyed a testicle. After his first eight years of Castroite prison and torture, Martin-Perez was being moved from one KGB-designed prison to another. During the transfer he was briefly thrown into one of the cells in the women’s prisons, where he noticed a crude cross scratched on a cell wall with some notes underneath.
He moved in for a closer look in the dim light and read: “Can God really exist?” The note was surrounded by hundreds of women’s names. “The total darkness, the stench of excrement, the rats, mosquitoes and roaches all around me caused me to drop on my knees and weep uncontrollably,” he recalls. “And for the first time and last time I myself also doubted His existence! After eight years in Castro’s prisons, I couldn’t imagine that there was anything about Castroite repression and inhumanity that was foreign to me,” he recalls. “But I was wrong.”10
The cell that confined young Cuban women in conditions that convulsed in sobs one of the toughest men alive today was a short distance from where Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful! ... But children kiss you. People shout. ‘Fidel! Fidel!’ You are a legend!”11
“Cuban women political prisoners deserve a monument to be built in their name once Cuba is free,” said Mario Chanes de Armas. “They too, before and now, were beaten and tortured in prison.” The late Mario Chanes de Armas suffered 30 years in Castro’s prisons and torture-chambers. Far from a “Batistiano war criminal” as the media mostly describe early victims of Castroism, Chanes had been a Castro ally.12
From the Moncada attack on July 26, 1953, to the landing of the Granma in December 1956, to Batista’s flight on New Year’s Day 1959, Chanes had fought alongside Castro and against Batista, having being jailed alongside Castro from 1953 to 1955. In 1961 Chanes turned in rebellion against the obvious Stalinization of Cuba by his former partner and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Until his death in 2007 in a Miami nursing home, Chanes stood as the longest-suffering political prisoner in the world. Alas, The History Channel was not interested in his story, any more than were any of the other media outlets that created “Mandela Mania” upon that South African prisoner’s release eight thousand miles away.
Over the decades Fidel Castro’s regime has jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown not just in Cuba but in the Western Hemisphere, until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer took power. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.
Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006, The Washington Post gushed that “she was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, until 1959 Cuba’s “glass ceiling” mainly kept women out of prison for political offenses.
This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life for Cuban women” as trumpeted by The Washington Post also somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth—this according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.
Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee from The Washington Post’s dutifully-transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from the same.
“Why did Elian’s mother leave Cuba? What was she escaping? By all accounts this young woman was living the good life.” Or so said NBC’s Jim Avila in April 2000.
CHAPTER 18
Dan Rather on Castro: “This Is Cuba’s Elvis!”
“The truth will always be known because there are always brave reporters, like you and Herbert Matthews, who will always risk your lives for seeking the truth!” (Fidel Castro to CBS’s Bob Taber, 1957)
“Castro could have easily been Cuba’s Elvis. He’s very popular in Cuba. And the adulation
for him seems genuine.” (Dan Rather, 1978)
“From these mountains, Castro’s guerrilla army took a dream and gave it life.” (Dan Rather in Cuba, 1996)
Two months after Herbert Matthews’s visit to Cuba, CBS dispatched anchorman Robert Taber and a camera-crew to Castro’s camp in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. After his death-defying odyssey to Castro’s camp (see the earlier adventure of Herbert Matthews), Taber emerged from Cuba’s hills with a long reel and tape of sight and sound that his editor and producer, the late Don Hewitt, fashioned into a 30-minute Castro snow-job. Entitled “Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters,” it aired on May 19, 1957. Fully half of the report consisted of Fidel Castro facing the camera and announcing his plans for Cuba. No rebuttal was heard on this blockbuster investigative report.
Two years later, while Castro’s firing-squads murdered hundreds of Cubans per week, Don Hewitt was again on duty. This time he was producer of Edward Murrow’s CBS show“See It Now,” which on February 6, 1959 featured an interview with Castro. By this time Castro had abolished habeas corpus, had filled Cuba’s jails with five times the number of political prisoners as under Batista, and was killing hundreds without due process. Surely he would be pressed on those human-rights issues by the celebrated scourge of Sen. Joe McCarthy.
“That’s a very cute puppy, Fidelito,” Murrow cooed to Castro’s son, who skipped merrily on camera at their “home” in the Havana Hilton and plopped the dog on the lap of his loving and pajama-clad papa. “When will you visit us again?” an uncharacteristically smiling Murrow asked a very uncharacteristically smiling Fidel. “And will that be with the beard or without the beard?” In this broadcast, CBS did not raise a single issue of substance.1
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