The Longest Romance (8 page)

“The Florida Straits probably record 56 fatal shark attacks every few years,” says Matt Lawrence. “Probably every month during the early 90's,” adds Arturo Cobo.

Right off the southern Florida coast an estimated 70,000 people have perished since 1961 on the high seas, a large but unknown number of these at the hands (jaws, actually) of sharks. To this day, most airborne rescuers report seeing sharks in the vicinity of Cuban rafters. Many have observed attacks. Most survivors mention sharks and shark-attacks often during their terrible voyage.

So here's one of America's most populous states and one bounded by beaches crammed with tourists. You'd really think this setting could provide the Discovery Channel with material much more dramatic and relevant (titillating) for its U.S. audience. So where's the Discovery Channel on this?

In Cuba, partnering with the Castro regime, that's where.

The Cuban press reports very little about rafters. In his tell-all about reporting from Cuba, long-time Havana correspondent for Spain's
Television Espanola
Vicente Botin reports that he never saw a mention of rafters in the state-run media. It's obviously embarrassing.

And for the benefit of those who came of political age after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Communist regimes do not issue media, academic or scientific visas (as in the Discovery Channel's) randomly. “The vetting procedure starts when the regime receives your visa application,” reports Chris Simmons, once the Defense Intelligence Agency's top Cuban spycatcher, now retired. “When your smiling Cuban guide greets you at the airport he knows plenty about you, and from several angles.”

Often they learn much more about you during your stay. “First thing I advised visiting Americans,” an official at the U.S. Interests Section told this writer, “was to check their rooms for bugs—the electronic surveillance type. One of these visitors later told me he'd just fallen asleep when he heard a loud thump from the closet. He opened the door and somebody ran out of the closet almost between his legs and scooted out of the room.”

“My job was to bug visiting Americans 'hotel rooms,” confirms high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez, “with both cameras and listening devices. And famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro's intelligence.”
⁵

In brief, if you're not there to help the regime's image abroad, you're not getting a visa, at least more than once. And if in the Stalinist regime's estimation you helped their image insufficiently, a little “prodding” might be applied, via blackmail. Upon publishing his book, for instance, Spanish reporter Vicente Botin promptly lost his Cuban visa. The Discovery Channel, on the other hand, seems to have a perpetual red carpet into Castro's fiefdom.

“Discovery Channel Returns From Underwater Scientific Expedition Off the Coast of Cuba,” read the
Science Daily
headline in January 1998. “Crew of scientists received a surprise visit from Cuban President Fidel Castro.... Castro has long been interested
in underwater expedition and he spent two hours on the boat talking with the scientists about their findings and about the issues of underwater conservation.” The Castro regime touts scuba diving as among Cuba's top tourist attractions, in case the Discovery Channel hadn't guessed.

The Discovery Channel has also featured sport-fishing videos filmed in full partnership with the Stalinist regime's ministry of tourism. The obvious purpose is to attract a large number of well-heeled sport fishermen from around the world to Cuba's unspoiled and fish-filled coastal waters.

By the simple expedient of banning boat-ownership under penalty of prison or firing squad for everyone except high-ranking government officials, many other nations could boast fishing grounds every bit as unspoiled as those surrounding the Castro brothers' fiefdom. On June 20, 2012, for instance, the Stalinist regime held a huge and public bonfire; not of illegal books like
Animal Farm
—as in the bonfire of 2005 that prompted Ray Bradbury to denounce the Castro regime's book-burning—but of illegal floating devices. These floating devices (mostly one-man contraptions fashioned from styrofoam and wood) belonged to what the regime deplores as “illegal fishermen,” Cubans who paddle out at night in desperate hope of supplementing their slave-era government rations with some of the delicious fish that swarm off Cuba's coast.

These Cubans' paddling and fishing is often hampered by huge wakes thrown by magnificent yachts captained by fat foreign millionaires who roar past them in quest of marlin and wahoo for the walls of their trophy-rooms. But the foreign magnates usually roar by with a friendly wave, perhaps even lifting their mojitos in salutation. Given their docking fees and other expenses at the regime-run Hemingway Marina, the “nationalist” regime which hosts and pampers them would never think to admonish any discourtesy they might show to the gnarled, dusky, hungry natives in their path.

Castro's nationalist regime burned the pathetic little Cuban craft almost within sight of the hundreds of foreign millionaire-owned yachts tethered at Hemingway Marina just east of Havana.

Such a surefire tourism-booster (outlawing fishing by their own countrymen) never seems to have occurred to any of those dreaded right-wing dictators, so vilified in the media. Under Batista, for instance, boat ownership for coastal Cubans was regarded as almost a birthright. During the 50's foreign fishermen clamored for a chance to fish with Cubans aboard their often spacious and luxurious boats. If you're ever in Miami, ask around.

As a five-, six- and seven-year-old I well remember the weekend ritual of fishing with my grandfather. He'd rent a boat much like the one in
The Old Man and the Sea
and not far from where Hemingway's old man set off every morning. He'd row us out a few hundred yards to hand-line for
ronquito
(yellow grunt),
rabi-rubia
(yellowtail snapper) and
cabrilla
(grouper).

I also remember the morning the grimacing fisherman told us the trip was off. He motioned us over to his boat which was overturned in the sand and riddled with bullet-holes. Too many people were going fishing and winding up in Key West, Castro's guards had explained to him as they reloaded their Czech machine-guns with fresh clips.

In brief, Discovery Channel personnel have no trouble obtaining Cuban visas, which in turn drop much tourist currency in regime coffers. Would this continue if their ultra-popular programs “Teeth of Death” or “Blood in the Water” featured the death and blood of men, women and children driven to near-suicidal desperation by the Stalinist regime with which they partner for videos and infomercials of mutual benefit? Would the gracious host and president, who paid the Discovery Channel producers a surprise visit, be cool with those types of shows? The question answers itself.

CHAPTER 5

T
o its partnership with Castro's ministry of tourism, in October 2008 the Discovery Channel added Castro's ministry of history. The program was entitled “Defcon-2” and covered the Cuban Missile Crisis. “DEFCON-2, the official term for the highest level of U.S. military readiness short of nuclear war, goes back to the tension-filled days of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” reads the trailer. “Author Tom Clancy hosts an analysis of key participants on both sides of the confrontation.”

The tension-filled program, complete with a
Jaws-
type soundtrack, features interviews with some of Cuba's highest-ranking apparatchiks, though not Fidel or Raul. Conspicuously absent (for those who know the matter) was the most tension-filled incident of all. Think of what the Discovery Channel's crackerjack writers and producers could have produced using the following incident starring Soviet Premier Khrushchev, as witnessed and later described by Sergei Khrushchev, the premier's son:

“‘Nikita Sergeyevich, a very disturbing message has also come in from Castro.' Oleg Aleksandrovich [Troyanovsky, the premier's assistant] again spoke in quiet and measured tones. ‘The text itself is still at the Foreign Ministry, but I have written down its main points.'

“‘Yes?' asked Father impatiently.

“‘Castro thinks that war will begin in the next few hours and that his source is reliable. In the opinion of the Cuban leadership, the people are ready to repel imperialist aggression and would rather die than surrender. We should be the first to deliver a nuclear strike.

“‘WHAT?!'

“‘That is what I was told,' Troyanovsky responded, without visible disquiet.

“‘What?' said Father somewhat more calmly. ”‘Is he proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?'

“‘Apparently.'

“‘That is insane!' Whatever doubts Father might have had about his decision to remove the missiles had vanished completely. ‘Remove them, and as soon as possible. Before it's too late. Before something terrible happens.'

“The meeting's participants stared at one another incredulously. To start a world war so cavalierly! Obviously events were slipping out of control. Yesterday the Cubans had shot down a plane without permission. Today they were preparing a nuclear attack.

“To general approval, Father ordered that an immediate order be sent to Pliyev through military channels: ‘Allow no one [Castro or his people] near the missiles. Obey no orders [from Castro or his people] to launch and under no circumstances install the warheads.'”
¹

So much for JFK cowing Khrushchev with his bluster and naval blockade. Khrushchev was cowed all right, but by the genocidal lust of his errant Caribbean satrap (and Discovery Channel business partner), not by the commander-in-chief of a nation with a nuclear warhead superiority over his own by a margin of 5,000 to 300.

Khrushchev snickered the truth in his memoirs: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba—for a country 6,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable.” So much for the threat that rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such epics
of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers (i.e., the mainstream media and Hollywood).

Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the so-called Missile Crisis—5,000 nuclear warheads for us, 300 for them—it's hard to imagine President Nixon, much less President Reagan, quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse as Kennedy did. The genuine threat came not from Moscow but from the Discovery Channel's production partner, Fidel Castro.

So naturally there is no mention in the Discovery Channel's “Defcon-2” of how Che Guevara—thinking he was off-the-record a month later—fully confirmed Khrushchev's fears (and prudence). ”If the missiles had remained, we would have used them all and fired them against the heart of the United States, including New York.“
²

“What we contend is that we must walk the path of liberation,” wrote Che in Castro's house organ
Verde Olivo
a week later, “even if it may cost millions of atomic victims .... What we must consider is the ultimate the victory of socialism.”

Khrushchev's response to Castro was low-key and diplomatic: “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. It would have been the start of a thermonuclear war. Dear comrade Fidel Castro I consider this proposal of yours incorrect.”
³

Did Stanley Kubrick realize he had directed a documentary entitled Dr.
Strangelove
rather than a fiction? He simply got a few scenes wrong. The real-life General Ripper and Major T. J. Kong were both in Havana, not at Burleson Air Force Base or Washington, D.C.

The Discovery Channel somehow “omitted” the most dramatic scene from the entire crisis, just as they omit the daily sanguinary drama of the half-century-long “Shark Week” in the Florida Straits. There was no hint in the Discovery Channel special of Fidel Castro's
raging lust to fire the missiles preemptively against the nation in which the Discovery Channel dwells.

Castro's image as the plucky David surviving decades of bullying and brutalization by the Yankee Goliath also emerged intact from the Discovery Channel program. There was no mention whatever of Khrushchev's snickering with satisfaction about the Missile Crisis resolution. “We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along,” he wrote in his memoir. “Security for Fidel Castro's regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro.”

So far from defying a superpower, Fidel Castro has poked along lo these many years by hiding behind the skirts of the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and the British Empire. After the Missile Crisis resolution, Castro's defiance of the U.S. took the form of protection by the U.S. Coast Guard and also by the British Navy, shielding Castro from attacks by his Cuban-exile enemies in the U.S. and the Bahamas.

So sacrosanct was the U.S. pledge to protect Castro that it even stayed Ronald Reagan's hand. When Professor Antonio De La Cova asked Elliott Abrams, assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs under Regan, about the possibility of arming some Cuban
contras
in the manner of Nicaragua's, Abrams replied: “You can't do that because of the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement. We never got there, at least not in the period that I was involved with it. We never got to contemplating any serious action in Cuba which could be considered a violation of the agreement.”
⁴

Castro, on the other hand, was again itching to get his fingers on the button. A Pentagon study declassified in 2009, entitled “Soviet Intentions 1965-1985,” based on extensive interviews with former Soviet officials, shows that Castro's urge to toast Manhattan flared again during the Reagan administration.