The Longest Romance (6 page)

At the time of Raul Castro's characteristically bloodthirsty boast and during the wholesale murder by his military of hundreds of Cubans for the crime of voting with their feet (and paddles) against him, thousands of tourists from Western Europe, including many from West Germany, were already pouring into Castro's island fiefdom.

Every Mark, Lira, Pound, Franc and Schilling of their expenditures landed in the pocket of the Soviet-trained outfit which owned and operated the Soviet helicopters and gunships that helped fill the cemetery-without-crosses where 20 times as many freedom-seeking Cubans were buried as freedom-seeking Germans lay in all of Berlin's cemeteries. And machine-gun bullets kill relatively quickly compared to sunburn, dehydration and tiger sharks.

Upon the Soviet Union's collapse, and in the nick of time, the overlords in this Caribbean outpost of the Evil Empire had a lifeline thrown to them—and they clutched it eagerly. This financial lifeline for Cuban Stalinism was thrown in large part by European witnesses to the Holocaust,
gulag
and Cold War. Starting in 1991 and continuing to throng the island today, free-spending tourists from Europe have swarmed to Castro's rescue. Which brings us to the military-tourism complex.

The only income-producing activity properly describable as an industry in Cuba is tourism. And the Cuban military owns Cuba's tourist industry almost lock, stock and barrel. So the only outfit in Cuba with guns is also the richest, thanks in large part to people who shuddered and grimaced at the Berlin Wall.

Castro's Cuba is a military dictatorship in the most genuine sense of the term. Raul Castro and his military cronies have been running Cuba for more than two decades and doing quite well in the process. Of the 19 members of Cuba's
Politburo
, nine are military men. That is more than was the case for the typical Soviet-bloc nation, and more than for the Soviet Union itself.

A Castro-regime bureau known as GAESA (
Grupo de Administracion Empresarial S.A
) does much of this running. It controls 300 different companies or state agencies, which often operate in partnership with minority-owning foreign investors. Among GAESA's subsidiaries are Gaviota S.A., which runs the island's tourist industry; hotels, restaurants, car-rentals and nightclubs; and TRD-Caribe S.A., which runs all retail operations. In brief GAESA controls virtually every economic transaction in Cuba, making it by far the most powerful company in Castro's Stalinist fiefdom.

Gaviota also owns the domestic airline, Aerogaviota, which uses Cuban air-force pilots flying refurbished Soviet transport airplanes. The U.S. Army's
Military Review
describes Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces and its GAESA operation as “one of the most entrepreneurial, corporate conglomerates in the Americas.”

In a November 18, 2010 hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Committee debating the (so-called) U.S. travel ban to Cuba, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Simmons, a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba specialist, explained the issue in detail. He showed how Raul Castro's military owns virtually every
corporation involved in Cuba's tourism industry, which in turn is the regime's top money-maker.

The Cuban military's Gaviota tourism group is a corporate umbrella encompassing: Aerogaviota SA (airlines), Almest SA Hoteles Gaviota (hotels), Gaviota Tour (bus touring company), Marinas Gaviota (marinas), Tiendas Gaviota (tourist souvenir stores, restaurants) and Parques Naturales Gaviota (national parks, museums).

The presentation also revealed something that goes a long way towards explaining Raul Castro's confident entrenchment and recent brazen murder of dissidents. Last year Cuba enjoyed record tourism revenues: 2.7 million tourists leaving almost $3 billion in military-regime coffers, and precious little to other sectors of society, owing to the regime's tourist apartheid, where Cubans (especially darker-skinned ones) are strictly segregated by billy club and at gun-point from tourist areas, except as waiters, maids, bellhops, shoe-shine boys, masseuses, etc.

With this tourist-revenue windfall going on for almost two decades, Cuba's ruling military robber-barons are making a killing. Why would they voluntarily upset their own apple-carts by democratizing the system and opening it to competitors?

As GAESA's chief executive officer we find Raul Castro's son-in-law, Maj. Luis Alberto Rodriguez
Lopez-Callejas
. Lately—and seemingly out of the blue—one of the U.S. media's most-beloved and oft-quoted experts on U.S.-Cuban relations is a lecturer on Latin American politics at the University of Denver named Arturo
Lopez-Levy (Callejas),
who happens to be Maj. Luis Alberto's cousin.

In 2005, Arturo Lopez-Levy
(Callejas)
received the Leonard Marks Essay Award of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He has also been a fellow of the Inter-American Dialogue and the (Jimmy) Carter Center. Let the issue of U.S.-Cuba relations blip on the media radar nowadays and, given his supposed expertise on Cuban matters,
The New York Times
almost immediately reaches
out to Arturo Lopez-Levy, Raul Castro's nephew-in-law—not that anyone would guess it anywhere in his media bio.

“Mr. Lopez-Levy is a former secretary of the B'Nai B'rith Lodge in Cuba.” That's how
The New York Times
introduced him in a story of March 2012. “A Cuban-born academic who left the island ten years ago and lectures at the University of Denver,” is how
The New York Times
described its valued source in another article three weeks later.

“Arturo Lopez Levy is Ph.D. candidate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies of the University of Denver, Colorado,” is how CNN summarizes its frequent contributor.

Professor Arturo Lopez-Callejas's media-soundbites, lectures, articles, papers and speeches all stress a common theme: namely, that the U.S. should allow unfettered travel to Cuba. “Canadian respect for the human right to travel, as it is defined in the Universal Declaration, is a model to be emulated by the United States.”

Despite the general fetish to consult and quote him, no mainstream media outlet has ever mentioned Arturo Lopez-Callejas's kinship with Cuba's dictator, much less his closer kinship with the Cuban dictator's son-in-law, much less this son-in-law's position as chief of the Castro regime's business monopoly over Cuba's tourist industry.

In brief: the head of Castro's tourist industry, through the good offices of the mainstream U.S. media, has his cousin constantly lobbying for more U.S. travel to Cuba. And the U.S. public for the most part remains utterly oblivious to his background and possible motives, much less to what tourism in Cuba might mean to the Cuban people's prospects for freedom.

“We don't need no stinkin' registration with the U.S. Justice Department as agents of a foreign government!” could well be the chuckle of Castro's U.S. agents; and for going on half a century now.

A 17-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine-gunned to death for the same crime the same year. Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro's police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had sought asylum, and clubbed him to death with rifle-butts.
⁸

Yes, behind those statistics lie people, often children. Carlos Anaya was three on July 13, 1994 when Castro's Coast Guard rammed and sank the escaping tugboat that held his mother and 70 other desperate Cubans. His boatmate Yisel Alvarez was four. Helen Martinez was six months old. Forty-three Cubans drowned, II of them children. Fidel Castro personally decorated the boat captain responsible for the ramming, sinking and drownings. The premeditated Castroite atrocity and deafening media silence outraged even Ted Koppel.

“Three and a half years ago, in the summer of 1994, something terrible happened out there, seven or eight miles out at sea, off the northern coast of Cuba,” he broadcast from Miami on ABC's “Nightline,” January 20, 1998. “It was an incident that went all but unnoticed in the U.S. media. The Cuban-American community protested but they protest a lot and, as I say, we in the mainstream media all but ignored it.”

And they're still ignoring it. Cubans had the misfortune of being born on a picturesque island. “The most gorgeous land human eyes have ever seen,” Columbus is fabled to have said when he first saw it. Location, location, location, as real-estate folks say. Flying or boating into Cuba, then sipping
mojitos
along its beaches while gazing north just doesn't provoke the same emotions as sipping
Schnapps
in a cafe near the Brandenburg Gate and gazing east.

The
mojito
goes down smoothly, the Cohiba smoke curls languidly through the air, the salsa music pulses in the background, the mulatto prostitutes beckon. Unlike the vista in Berlin, the panorama in Cuba gives no hint of anything like the barbed wire and machine-gunners of the murderous Wall, portions of which remain for the very purpose of reminding tourists of the recent horror.

Very few visitors to Cuba conjure how those gorgeous emerald, blue and cobalt waters reap the name of “cemetery without crosses.” It's a Cuban thing, apparently.

“I Hate the Sea” is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It's about the young men Rafael met on the beach west of Havana. Some were building a raft while another stood off by himself at the edge of the waves and stared out to sea. “It incarcerates us worse than prison bars,” fumes the loner as he curses and spits into a receding wave along the shoreline.

Mankind has always been drawn to the sea. For most of us the sea soothes, attracts, infatuates. The most expensive real estate always faces the sea. “Water is everywhere a protection, like a moat,” writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger.” As a species we love it.”

Yet Cubans now hate it. Che was right. The Cuban revolution indeed created a “New Man”—but one more psychologically crippled than even Che imagined. In Cuba, Castro and Che's totalitarian dream gave rise to a psychic cripple beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: the first people in the history of the species to hate the sea.

“I hate the sea because it took away the only thing I had after living so long in Cuba—the hope of leaving it,” the young man, Roberto, tells dissident journalist Contreras. “Drowning doesn't scare me much. By merely living here in Cuba you're drowning in a
sense. We live in a jail-cell but with bars of salt water and sharks.”

“The sea had already swallowed his girlfriend and only brother,” explains Contreras; the journalist has spoken with many foiled rafters who tell of the enormous waves, of the constantly-circling sharks, of terror almost unimaginable, before their “rescue” by the U.S. Coast Guard which then returned them to Cuba as mandated by a treaty President Clinton signed with Castro in 1994.

“You're playing Russian roulette when you paddle off from here in a raft,” the boy tells Rafael Contreras. “But at least there's a chance. Staying here in Cuba means slowly choking to death anyway, at least for people like me.”

Roberto could come across as a contestant on “Survivor,” or as a thrill-seeking fan of “X-treme” sports as featured on MTV—that is, except for the Cuban setting. “Here in Cuba I'm drowning on the surface, right here on dry land,” continues Roberto, stomping his feet on the sand. “The way I feel right now, I'd rather live out there on the bottom with my girlfriend and brother than continue drowning by inches in this piece-of-shit country. Good-bye,” he says, running towards his friends.

Contreras then realized that Roberto was part of the group assembling the ramshackle raft. They pushed it out over the small waves, clambered on board and started paddling north.

A few weeks later Rafael Contreras finished his piece. “Nobody around here has heard anything about Roberto and his friends,” he wrote. “Perhaps he's happy out there on the bottom of the sea with the silence of the fishes while the rest of us continue drowning by inches here in Cuba.”

The quip “sleeping with the fishes” never quite caught on in Cuba. It hits too close to home for too many families. But Castro rolls out the red carpet for Francis Ford Coppola on every one of his frequent visits to Cuba. “Fidel, I love you,” gushed a young Francis Ford Coppola. “We both have beards. We both have power and want to use it for good purposes.”
⁹

CHAPTER 4

E
dward O. Wilson calls the shark “the most frightening animal on earth ... a killing machine, the last free predator of man.” Yet fully aware of the high odds of being eaten alive by sharks, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have taken to the sea in flimsy rafts to escape what
Newsweek
magazine hails as among the “Best countries in the world to live,” what Jack Nicholson calls “a paradise,” and what Bonnie Raitt commemorates in song as a “happy little island.”

“I'd just joined Freedom Flight International when my colleagues came in from a flight with a video, ”recalls Matt Lawrence, who flew rescue flights over the Florida straits in the 90's in conjunction with Brothers to the Rescue. “On this video one could see a tiny raft. Then the plane came in for a lower pass and I expected to see the typically heartbreaking empty raft, as happened so often.

“But something was moving on this raft. Now I expected to see a desperate rafter waving a shirt or anything else that might have been available to him in order to get the plane's attention. This was also routine, and not as heartbreaking. But then I noticed the water all around the raft turning red ... the cloud spreading ...