The Longest Romance (3 page)

“He [Fidel Castro] looked directly into my eyes!” the Martian reads from a member of this Congressional Black Caucus named Laura Richardson.

“It was quite a moment to behold! Fidel Castro was very engaging and very energetic,” he reads from yet another powerful U.S. lawmaker and Congressional Black Caucus member named Barbara Lee.

“He [Fidel Castro] is one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met!” the Martian reads from Emanuel Cleaver, the chairman of this powerful legislative group belonging to America's majority political party.

The Martian hurries back to the U.S. in 2011. He (or perhaps, by now, she) turns on the TV to find former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, acclaimed as the elder statesman of America's majority
political party, hugging Fidel Castro on a visit to Havana and gushing: “We greeted each other as old friends.”
³

On this same visit the Martian picks up a copy of
Newsweek
magazine, which happens to be choosing the “Best Countries in the World.” “If you were born today,” asks America's second-highest circulation weekly, “which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly mobile life?”

Intrigued, the Martian turns the page. “Ah!” he nods. “Why, of course!”
Newsweek
has crowned the citizens of Castro's Cuba among the world's luckiest people. Quality of life was the magazine's paramount issue in choosing Cuba among its “Best Countries in the World.” “In quality of life,” explains
Newsweek
, “Cuba outdoes its fellow middle-income countries.”
⁴

Among the panel of experts tasked with this daunting evaluation by America's second-biggest weekly journal were Nobel laureate and World Bank chief economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, working along with Byron Auguste and James Manyika of McKinsey & Co., ranked the most prestigious consulting firm in the world.

“How ‘bout that!” the Martian marvels. “That
New York Times
nailed it when I was here half a century ago. Looks like Castro indeed liberated and enriched Cubans. And he's still enamored of the U.S. Wow!
The New York Times
was right on the money—and right from the beginning!”

Besides living up to those ideas of liberty and democracy, besides ending dictatorships and fulfilling that promise of social justice, while abolishing Cuba's shameful near-feudalism, after providing that foretaste of human dignity, after eschewing the slightest animosity towards the U.S.—during, between or after these amazing accomplishments, did anyone notice Fidel Castro and his henchmen engaging in anything else during this past half-century?

And has anyone noticed those acclaimed as “the world's luckiest people” acting in any matter that might call into question their being so honored by
Newsweek
?

Here's a hint. In 27 years, between 200 and 300 people died while trying to breach the Berlin Wall. In twice that period, about 30 times that number—between 65,000 and 80,000 people, men, women, and children, entire families at a time—have died trying to escape from Castro's Cuba.
⁵

CHAPTER 2

Bill O'Reilly:
He [Fidel Castro] has murdered people
.
He's imprisoned people.... He's a killer. He's a killer. And you admire the guy?“”

 

Ted Turner: “
To my knowledge, that's never been proven....
I
admire certain things about him. He's trained a lot of doctors.
...”

(Fox News, December 2008)

 

“
There are no credible reports of disappearances
,
extrajudicial killings and torture in Cuba since the early 1960s, according to human rights groups.
”

(Anthony Boadle, Reuters Havana Bureau, December 2006)

 

“During the 1980s, one could still conceivably argue that Cuba's dictatorship was preferable to its US-backed counterparts in Chile
,
Argentina, Nicaragua or El Salvador
,
which went one step farther by murdering thousands of their citizens.” (The Sunday Times
,
August 2006)

F
orget for a second that none of the regimes denounced above by
The Sunday Times
abolished private property, free travel or free speech. None abolished free enterprise and mandated slave-era food rations for its subjects. None set up Stasi-mentored snitch
groups on every city block. Forget that far from being “U. S.-backed counterparts,” Pinochet's Chile and Somoza's Nicaragua had economic sanctions slapped on them by Jimmy Carter. Forget the peripheral ignorance; let's look at the central stupidity.

You long to believe otherwise, you grope for an extenuation, you hope you misread—but it's inescapable: The editorial staff of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers (
The Sunday Times
) seems unaware that Castro's regime killed people.
¹
And yet:

Fidel Castro's regime jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin's during the Great Terror and murdered more people (out of a population of 6.5 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler's regime murdered (out of a population of 65 million) in its first six.

If this sounds like typical hype from an embittered and overemotional exile with an axe to grind, let's consider some figures.

In his book
Against All Hope
, Armando Valladares—who suffered 22 years in Castro's prisons, forced-labor camps, and torture-chambers, then served under President Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission—reveals how at one point in 1961 Castro's
gulag
held 350,000 political prisoners. Freedom House estimates that half a million Cubans have passed through Castro's
gulag.
That's out of a Cuban population at the time of 6.5 million.

In her book
Gulag
, Anne Applebaum estimates that at any one time, two million people were incarcerated in Stalin's
gulag.
That was out of a Soviet population of 220 million.

Now punch your calculator ... see? It turns out that calling Castro a Stalinist (as will occur often in this book) slightly low-balls his repression. Fidel Castro jailed and tortured Cubans at a higher rate than Stalin jailed and tortured subjects of his Soviet empire.

The Black Book of Communism
, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy, much less of embittered
Cuban exiles) estimates that Castro's regime murdered 16,000 Cubans by firing squad, mostly during the 60's. Again, Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in those years. Given the U.S. population, a proportionate bloodbath would approach one million firing-squad murders.

I write murders because the term execution implies some form of judicial process. Che Guevara laid down this process one week after entering Havana. “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail,” he sneered. “We execute from revolutionary conviction.”

His boss Fidel Castro (a lawyer who abolished
habeas corpus
immediately upon assuming power) followed up: “Legal proof is impossible to obtain against war criminals. So we sentence them based on moral conviction.”

According to the Cuba Archive Project, headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Armando Lago, the Castro regime—with firing squads, prison tortures, forced-labor camps and drownings at sea—has caused an estimated 100,000 Cuban deaths.

According to the
Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War
, Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation.

France was nation of 42 million in 1940. Punching my calculator now reveals that Fidel Castro caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among the people he made among the luckiest in the world with free and exquisite health-care than the Nazis caused among the French they enslaved and tortured with the SS and Gestapo.

Many opponents of the Cuban regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture-chambers for a period three times as long in Castro's
gulag
as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin's (eight years). Several black Cubans suffered longer in Castro's prisons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa's (27 years). Surely you're familiar with Solzhenitsyn and Mandela. Now let's see if you recognize some of the Cuban ex-prisoners:

Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle (29 years), Antonio Lopez Munoz (28 years), Indasio Hernandez Pena (28 years), Alberto Fibla (28 years), Pastor Macuran (28 years), Roberto Martin Perez (28 years), Roberto Perdomo (28 years), Teodoro Gonzalez (28 years), Jose L. Pujals (27 years), Miguel Alvarez Cardentey (27 years), Eusebio Penalver (28 years).

No? None of these names rings a bell? And yet their suffering took place in a country only 90 miles from U.S. shores, in cells and torture-chambers off-limits to inspection by the Red Cross and Amnesty International, unlike apartheid South Africa's. An association of these Cuban heroes, representing 3,551 years in Castro's prisons and torture-chambers, resides in the U.S. today.

Shortly before his death in 2006, one of those ex-prisoners, Eusebio Penalver, granted this writer an interview. “For months I was naked in a six-by-four-foot cell,” recalled Eusebio. “That's four feet high, so you couldn't stand. But they never succeeded in branding me as common criminal, so I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.”
²

In light of this totalitarian secrecy by their torturers, these revelations would seem of immense interest and value. In fact most of the ex-prisoners reside in New York City and Miami, a short cab ride from most mainstream media studios. They'd be easy to contact for dramatic interviews, inspirational human-interest segments, etc.

Also note that all of the above suffered prison as long as or longer than Nelson Mandela. Ninety or more miles from U.S. shores, they suffered at the hands of a Stalinist regime that craved to nuke the U.S. But none has ever been featured in a U.S. mainstream media report. Apparently the media perceive no human-interest quotient for U.S. viewers in any of this.

Yet when Nelson Mandela, who suffered his prison term at the hands of a segregationist regime eight thousand miles away, first visited the U.S. in 1990, the media-watchdog group Accuracy in Media termed his tumultuous media coverage “Mandela Mania.”
“The hero of oppressed people everywhere!” hailed ABC. “A larger-than-life figure!” gushed CNN. “A virtual symbol of freedom!” crowed CBS. “His name has a mystical quality!” gushed Dan Rather. “A worldwide hero!” continued “Gunga Dan” Rather, who went on to compare Mandela to Mother Teresa.

Other reports compared Mandela to the Pope, Jesus Christ and Moses.
The New York Times
devoted 23 pages to laudatory articles on Saint Mandela in one single week. Ted Koppel hosted an ABC “Town Meeting” with Mandela where every question was sugar and spice and everything nice.
³

All the networks that were responsible for the tumultuous coverage of a South African political prisoner have been granted news bureaus in Havana by the regime that created the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history. But none of the latter has ever been featured in those networks' reporting.

Interestingly, at the very time of his adulatory U. S. media coverage, the U.S. State Department listed Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) as a terrorist organization. Today the U.S. State Department still lists Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

Moral: if you want U.S. mainstream-media encomiums, be a foreign terrorist rather than a Cuban-American victim of the terrorists who craved to nuke the U.S.

OK, let's try the names of some women political prisoners who were jailed and tortured for years and even decades by Fidel Castro's regime. This totalitarian horror, by the way, was utterly unknown in the Western Hemisphere until introduced by the man swooned over by Barbara Walters and Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer. Here's a handful of the thousands of ladies who suffered in Castro's prisons and torture chambers: Ana Rodriguez, Miriam Ortega, Isabel Tejera, Nelly Rojas, Olga Morgan, Maritza Lugo, Georgina Cid, Caridad Roque, Sara Del Toro, Mercedes Pena, Aida Diaz Morejon, Agata Villarquide, Alicia Del Busto, Albertina O'Farrill.

Again the names are all unfamiliar, right? Yet these ladies all live in the U.S. today, mostly minutes from mainstream media
studios. But no producer for Oprah or Joy Behar or Katie Couric, none from the Lifetime or Oxygen TV, much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for
Cosmo
or
Glamour
or
Redbook
or
Vogue
has bothered either. And for obvious reasons; “The Real Grandmaws of Miami” just doesn't interest Bravo TV.