The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  Every night during the week that Murrow interviewed him, Castro and company repaired to their respective stolen mansions and met with Soviet GRU agents to advance the Stalinization of Cuba. That February of 1959, Murrow was fresh from a harangue to the Radio and Television News Directors Association of America, in which he blasted the television industry for “being used to delude” the public.

  By April 16, 2000 most people with eyes, ears and functioning brains had noticed that, for going on 40 years, practically everything CBS had broadcast regarding Castro was indeed delusional. (During an interview with Castro in 1978, for instance, Dan Rather had referred to his host as “Cuba’s own Elvis!”) But it was on that April date that Don Hewitt’s brainchild, “60 Minutes,” truly went the extra mile for Castro, featuring a Dan Rather interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father. America saw a bewildered and heartsick father simply pleading to be allowed to have his motherless son accompany him back to Cuba, his cherished homeland. How could anyone oppose this? How could simple decency and common sense allow for anything else?

  “Did you cry?” the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the bereaved father during the “60 Minutes” drama. “A father never runs out of tears,” Juan (actually, the voice of Juan’s drama-school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the “60 Minutes” prime-time audience could hardly contain its own sniffles.

  Here’s what America didn’t see.

  “Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian’s father during that ‘60 Minutes’ interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig,” recalls Pedro Porro, who served as Rather’s in-studio translator during the taping of the famous interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro’s earpiece and Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian’s heavily-guarded father. “Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro security-agents the entire time he was in the studio with Rather and Craig.”2

  Officially Craig served as attorney for Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. The humble Cuban worked as a hotel doorman in a nation where the average monthly salary is $16. The high-rolling Gregory Craig, a Clinton crony, worked for an elite Washington law-firm, Williams & Connolly, one of America’s priciest.

  Upon accepting the case, Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Craig’s remuneration, we learned shortly after his return, came from a “voluntary fund” set up by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and administered by the National Council of Churches. The same reporters and pundits, who routinely snicker through any statement by a Republican, reported this item with a straight face.

  In an interview with Tim Russert on June 6, 2000, Gregory Craig explained his motivation for accepting the case: “What I want to do is to set Juan Miguel free. I want the father to make a decision uncoerced from Havana, uncoerced from Miami, uncoerced by the press, independently and freely to make a decision where and how he wants to raise his family. That’s all I’m concerned about.”

  Unfortunately for Mr. Craig, we have an eyewitness to this non-coercion: Pedro Porro, who saw the taping of Dan Rather’s interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez. “Gregory Craig led the Juan Miguel-Cuban-security entourage into the studio, then presided over the interview like a movie director,” says Mr Porro. “It was obvious that Gregory Craig and Rather where on very friendly terms. They were joshing and bantering back and forth, as Juan Miguel sat there petrified. Craig was stage-managing the whole thing. The taping would stop and he’d walk over to Dan, hand him a little slip of paper and say something into his ear. Then Rather would read straight from the paper.

  “Juan Miguel was never completely alone,” continues Porro. “He never smiled. His eyes kept shifting back and forth. It was obvious to me that he was under coercion. He was always surrounded by security agents from the Cuban Interests Section, as they called it. When these agents left him alone for a few seconds, Gregory Craig himself would be hovering over Juan Miguel.

  “At one point Craig stopped the taping almost yelling ‘Cut!’ I was confused for a moment,” recalls Mr. Porro, “until Craig complained that Juan Miguel’s answers were not coming across from his translator with ‘sufficient emotion.’ So Dan Rather shut everything down for a while and some of the crew drove to a drama school in New York. They hired a dramatic actor to act as a translator, and brought him back.”

  Okay, roll ‘em!

  “I probably should have walked out,” said Porro. “But I’d been hired by CBS in good faith and I didn’t know exactly how the interview would be edited—how it would come across on the screen. I might’ve known, but you never know how these things play out until you actually see them.”3

  A week later Janet Reno’s INS storm-troopers maced, kicked, stomped, gun-butted and tear-gassed their way into Lazaro Gonzalez’s Miami house, wrenched a bawling six-year-old child from his family at gunpoint, and bundled him off to a Stalinist nation, almost certainly against his father’s true wishes. They left 102 people injured, some seriously. Many of the injured were ladies who had brandished dangerous weapons. These weapons were rosaries.

  No “60 Minutes” investigative report on that, however.

  So, in effect, the man who served (however briefly) as Obama’s chief White House counsel had earlier agreed to function as a fully deputized agent for a Stalinist regime and had arranged for Castro’s kidnapping to be smoke-screened by his chums at CBS.

  The New York Times’ incomparable Thomas Friedman could not contain himself: “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon ... warmed my heart.” Imagine getting the staff of a major TV network to act as unpaid aides, consultants, props and publicists for your case—and in prime time to boot. To top it off, Gregory Craig worked for the law firm Williams & Connolly that also, at the time, represented CBS.

  When Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba to confer with “The Maximum Leader” (translates almost exactly to Fuhrer in German), Craig told Castro that to manage Elian’s extrication he would need Juan Miguel in the U.S. According to most accounts, Castro balked at this. No plantation-owner likes his slaves traveling outside his plantation. Plus, Castro was no doubt privy to Juan Miguel’s early communications with his Miami cousins, whom Juan Miguel thanked profusely and told he’d be making his own escape to join Elian.

  In December 2011, “60 Minutes” featured another in its long line of joint CBS-Castro productions. This time Anderson Cooper and his production crew partnered with the Stalinist regime’s Center for Marine Studies for a propaganda piece on the marvels of Cuban coral-reef conservation. The co-host of the CBS show and conduit for this fruitful communist infomercial was Dr. David Guggenheim, senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation in Washington, D.C., who chairs its “Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program.” Dr Guggenheim toasts himself as a “Cubaphile” and toasts Castro’s fiefdom (which he has visited more than 40 times in recent years) as a “magical place.”

  Needless to reiterate, such a gold-plated visa is not handed out haphazardly by the Castro regime. Nor is such a welcome-mat and red carpet rolled out randomly.

  During the filming of Anderson Cooper’s special, the country Dr. Guggenheim calls a “magical place” was immersed in three days of official mourning for Korea’s Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-Il, as decreed by Cuba’s Stalinist dictator Raul Castro. When Fidel Castro visited North Korea in 1986 his paeans to his hosts had sounded much like Guggenheim’s. “I was astounded by the magnificent achievements of the heroic Korean people,” wrote Castro. “There wasn’t a single topic I could not discuss with my illustrious host [Kim Il-Sung].”

  Che Guevara’s worldwide diplomatic tour in 1960 included North Korea, which stole his heart. “North Korea is a model to which revolutionary Cuba should aspire,” he proclaimed upon returning to Havana. Then he promptly put his aspiration into action by setting up a huge prison-camp at Guanahacabibes in westernmost Cuba. This barbed-wire enclosure, with machine-gun towers at the corners an
d forced labor in the broiling sun beneath Soviet bayonets, was set up specifically to house “lazy youths” and “delinquents,” with whom it was quickly crammed to the point of suffocation.

  After surfacing from their scuba-dive at the “Gardens of the Queen” reef off southern Cuba, Cooper and Guggenheim rhapsodized for the CBS cameras.

  Guggenheim: “The corals are healthy. The fish are healthy and abundant. There are predators here, large sharks. It’s the way these ecosystems really should look.”

  Anderson Cooper: “You’re saying this is like a time capsule, almost?”

  Guggenheim: “It’s a living time-machine. And it’s a really incredible opportunity to learn from.”

  Cooper: “So something here holds the key to figuring out how to save other reefs and bring them back.”

  Guggenheim: “It’s because this ecosystem is being protected. It’s got a leg up on other ecosystems around the world that are being heavily fished.”4 Yes, amazing how that works when you convert free citizens of a nation with a higher per-capita income and car ownership than half of Europe, who enjoyed the third-highest protein consumption in Latin America, into penurious half-starved serfs. In pre-Castro Cuba the abundant lobster, grouper and snapper that so enchanted Cooper and Guggenheim on their scuba-dive served as dietary mainstays of the humblest Cubans, who owned boats and fishing-gear and were perfectly free to use them at every whim and consume their catch. For Cuban landlubbers, pre-Castro groceries stocked seafood in abundance. Now these delicacies are reserved mostly for tourists, regime apparatchiks and valued foreign propagandists. Catching and eating a lobster can land a Castro subject in jail. And owning even a dinghy is the stuff of dreams, of escape.

  “In 1996 the government of Fidel Castro, a diver himself, made this area one of the largest marine preserves in the Caribbean. Almost all commercial fishing was banned,” explained a smug Cooper to his “60 Minutes” audience.

  Yes, amazing how that works in Stalinist Cuba: “Ah! Think I’ll decree my favorite diving and fishing site a preserve that prohibits my subjects from doing there what I do,” brainstorms the Maximum Leader (translates into German almost precisely as Fuhrer). One fine afternoon, he presents it to his parliament. “Now, do I hear any objections? No? OK, going once, going twice—the motion passes!”

  There’s just something about running a KGB-tutored Stalinist regime that encourages this type of instant and gung-ho team-playing by legislators. Many among the tens of thousands of Castro’s prison, torture and firing-squad victims were his former comrades, onetime regime officials. Unlike food, clothing, shelter, feminine napkins and toilet paper, one thing there’s never any shortage of in Stalinist Cuba is the rubber-stamp.

  Apartheid South Africa, by the way, did a bang-up job of wildlife conservation. The segregationist governments set up many national parks and nature-preserves where vigilant police kept poaching to a minimum. When apartheid ended and South Africa’s black population was enfranchised, poaching grew rampant, with the populations of many endangered species (rhinos in particular) plummeting.

  But extolling apartheid South Africa’s conservation consciousness was not much done by the global mainstream media. Apparently, in the view of enlightened opinion worldwide, the vileness of that government’s segregationist policies negated the virtue of its conservation policies. If only Stalinist policies were regarded similarly by enlightened opinion worldwide. If only a totalitarian Cuban regime that jailed and murdered political prisoners, at ten times the rate of an authoritarian South African regime, provoked a tiny fraction of the revulsion that the latter regime produced among the enlightened of the globe.

  On his website, Dr. Guggenheim hails Cuba’s protection of sea turtles: “The project also includes a comprehensive sea-turtle research and conservation component focused at Cuba’s westernmost point, Guanahacabibes. Through strong community involvement and education, it has dramatically reduced turtle-poaching.” (my emphasis)

  And how! Just ask the former inmates of Che Guevara’s forced-labor camp nearby. That sort of incentive-program will easily engender community involvement.

  Endnotes

  Preface: The Connections You Don’t See

  1 Georgie Ann Geyer, Guerrilla Prince, Little Brown, 1991, p. 171

  2 Antonio Rafael De la Cova, The Moncada Attack: Birth of the Cuban Revolution, University of South Carolina Press, p. 239

  3 Castro Speech Data Base, Latin American Network Information Center, University of Texas at Austin

  4 Ibid.

  5 Humberto Fontova, Exposing the Real Che Guevara, Sentinel, 2007, p. 70

  6 Carlos Alberto Montaner, “Castro and the JFK Assassination,” The Miami Herald, May 28, 2012

  7 Kenneth Timmerman, “More Cuban Spies Lurking In U.S.,” Newsmax, May 19, 2007

  8 Yuri Bezmenov, interview with Edward Griffin, American Media, 1984

  9 Nicholas Horrock, “FBI Asserts Cuba Aided Weathermen,” The New York Times, October 9, 1977

  10 Chris Simmons, “The Communist Roots of a ‘Cuba Expert,’” Cuba Confidential weblog, May 24, 2012

  11 Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives: In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen,” The New York Times, September 11, 2001

  12 Larry Grathwohl, interview with the author

  13 Ibid..

  14 Ibid.

  1. The Golden Anniversary: A Half-Century of Loyal Service

  1 Trevor Armbrister, “Fawning Over Fidel,” Reader’s Digest, May 1996

  2 Andrew Malcom, “Fidel Castro to Congressional Black Caucus members: ‘How can we help President Obama?’” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2009

  3 Humberto Fontova, “Jimmy Carter Does Havana,” The Washington Times, April 6, 2011

  4 Rana Foroohar, “How We Ranked the World,” Newsweek, August 10, 2010

  5 Frances Robles, “Castro’s Victims,” The Miami Herald, December 31, 2007

  2. Communist Omelet: The Unreported Cost in Life and Treasure

  1 “Historians Have Absolved Fidel Castro,” Newsmax.com, August 15, 2006

  2 Eusebio Penalver, interview with the author

  3 Irvine, “Mandela Mania,” Accuracy in Media, July 1990

  4 Juan Tamayo, “Suicide Epidemic Exists Under Castro,” The Miami Herald, June 18, 1998

  5 Ninoska Perez Castellon, “Serenading a Wicked Friend,” The Miami Herald, February 21, 2002

  6 Andres Suarez, Cuba, Castroism and Communism, 1959-1966, MIT Press, 1967

  7 Yosvani Anzardo Hernandez, “Una haitiana en Cuba,” http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y09/agosto09/06_C_3.html

  8 Alberto Bustamante, “Notas y Estadisticas Sobre Los Grupos Etnicos en Cuba,” Revista Herencia, Volume 10, 2004

  9 Mario Lazo, Dagger in the Heart; American Policy Failures in Cuba, Funk &Wagnalls, 1968

  10 Andres Suarez, Cuba, Castroism and Communism, 1959-1966, MIT Press, 1967

  11 Jeffrey Goldberg, “America’s Absurd and Self-Defeating Cuba Policy,” The Atlantic, September 16, 2010

  12 Pablo Neruda, “Saludo a Batista,” El Siglo, November 27, 1944

  13 Lorraine Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia, and the Cold War, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997

  14 Julio Alvarado, La Aventura Cubana, Artes Graficas y Ediciones, 1977

  15 Ibid.

  3. The “World’s Luckiest People,” or So Says Newsweek

  1 Javier Barroso, “Un Joven Muere en el Tren de Aterrizaje de un Vuelo de Cuba,” El Pais (Madrid), July 14, 2011

  2 Wilfredo Cancio Isla, “Solo Dos Cubanos Han Logrado Sobrevivir a Fugas Clandestinas en Aviones Desde la Isla,” cafefuerte.com, July 13, 2011

  3 Christopher Marquis and David Hancock, “U.S. Rips Extreme Cruelty, Protests 3 Killings Near Base,” The Miami Herald, July 7, 1993

  4 Juan Tamayo, “Suicide Epidemic Exists Under Castro,” The Miami Herald, June 18, 1998

  5 Mario Lazo, Dagger in the Heart; American Policy Failures
in Cuba, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968, p. 397

  6 Arturo Cobo, interview with the author

  7 Granma, July 6, 1989; see also Enrique Encinosa, Unvanquished: Cuba’s Resistance to Fidel Castro, Pureplay Press, 2004.

  8 Maria Werlau & Armando Lago, Cuba Archive Truth and Memory Project

  9 Ronald Bergan, Francis Ford Coppola, Close Up: The Making of His Movies, Thunder Mouth Press, 1993, p. 530

  4. Here Come the Sharks. Where’s the Discovery Channel?

  1 Matt Lawrence, interview with the author

  2 Diana Nyad, “Sharks Need Our Help,” CNN, July 28, 2011

  3 Diana Nyad, “Cuba on Independence Day,” The Huffington Post, July 5, 2012

  4 Timothy Smith, “Cuban Aims for Big Escapes in Ring,” The New York Times, May 28, 1998

  5 G. Fernandez and M.A. Menendez, “Castro Graba Intimidades deVisitantes,” March 12, 2001, http://www.autentico.org/oa09669.php

  5. The Discovery Channel Spins the Missile Crisis

  1 Sergei Khrushchev, “How My Father and President Kennedy Saved The World: The Cuban Missile Crisis as Seen From the Kremlin,” American Heritage, October 2002

  2 Che Guevara to Sam Russell, London Daily Worker, November 1962

  3 Khrushchev, Op. cit.

  4 Elliott Abrams to Antonio De la Cova, May 27, 1993

  6. Castro’s Running-Dogs: Herbert Matthews and The New York Times

  1 Anthony DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel, Perseus Book Group. 2006, pp 74-75

  2 Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty Sixth Congress, Second Session, Part 9, August 27, 30, 1960

  3 Manuel Marquez-Sterling, interview with the author

  4 Bohemia magazine, Havana, February 27, 1957