The Longest Romance (29 page)

“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.”
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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.”
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And speaking of candidness, when in her book
Audition
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 pain 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.”
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“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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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