The Longest Romance

The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro

Humberto Fontova

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781594036675
• eBook ISBN: 9781594036682
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fidel Castro jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six. Alone among world leaders, Castro came to within inches of igniting a global nuclear holocaust.But you would never guess any of that from reading the mainstream American media. Instead we hear fawning accounts of Castro liberating Cuba from the clutches of U.S. robber-barons and bestowing world-class healthcare and education on his downtrodden citizens. "Propaganda is vital—the heart of our struggle,” Castro wrote in 1955. Today, the concept is as valid to the Cuban regime as ever.History records few propaganda campaigns as phenomenally successful or enduring as Castro and Che’s. The Longest Romance exposes the full scope of this deception; it documents the complicity of major U.S. media players in spreading Castro’s propaganda and in coloring the world’s view of his totalitarian regime. Castro’s cachet as a celebrity icon of anti-Americanism has always overshadowed his record as a warmonger, racist, sexist, Stalinist, and godfather of modern terrorism. The Longest Romance uncovers this shameful history and names its major accomplices.

CHAPTER 1

The Golden Anniversary: A Half-Century of Loyal Service

The proverbial Man from Mars visits New York in February 1957, picks up the world’s most prestigious newspaper and on the front page reads: “Fidel Castro is humanist, a man of many ideals including those of liberty, democracy and social justice ... the need to restore Cuba’s constitution and to hold elections.”

Herbert Matthews, Latin America expert for The New York Times, had briefly “embedded” himself in Cuba’s hills during a guerrilla war, interviewed the Cuban guerrilla leader himself and come away with the scoop. “Cuban Rebel Is visited in Hideout,” reads the headline.

“You can be sure we hold no animosity towards the United States,” he quotes Fidel Castro. “Above all we are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to dictatorship.”

“What we do know today, in spite of the censorship, is that Cuba is undergoing a reign of terror,” reports Herbert Matthews in the same piece. “This is an overworked phrase, but it is a literal truth so far as the regime of General Batista is concerned.... ” “It amounts to a new deal for Cuba,” Matthews said of Castro’s program, “radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist.”

Visiting two years later the Martian discovers from another New York Times Latin America expert that Fidel Castro assumed power and events are playing out exactly as predicted by his colleague: “Castro’s promise of social justice brings a foretaste of human dignity for millions of Cubans who had little knowledge of it in Cuba’s former near-feudal economy,” wrote New York Times’ reporter Tad Szulc from Havana in February 1959. (emphasis mine)

“Cuba is now a happy island,” chimed in Herbert Matthews. Happily that “reign of terror” was finally over and done. Dickey Chapelle over at Reader’s Digest concurred. “The Cuba of Fidel Castro today is free from terror,” she wrote in April 1959. “Civil liberties have been restored in Cuba and corruption seems to be drying up. These are large steps forward, and they were made against fearful odds.”

Putting down Reader’s Digest the Martian picks up The Washington Post to read from renowned pundit and Pulitzer Prizewinner Walter Lippmann: “It would be a great mistake even to intimate that Castro’s Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite.”

Moving over to Newsweek, our Martian reads that “Castro is honest, and an honest government is something unique in Cuba. Castro is not himself even remotely a Communist.”

The Martian visits again a generation later, in 1996, to find that this same Fidel Castro is visiting New York for the UN’s 50th-anniversary celebration. “The Toast of Manhattan!” reads the Time magazine headline covering the visit. “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” reads the one by Newsweek. He reads on to learn that parties, luncheons and assorted celebrations rage in Fidel Castro’s honor Manhattan-wide, with millionaire pundits, businessmen and politicians spanning the American political spectrum clamoring for his autograph, everywhere from the head offices of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to the Council on Foreign Relations.

dp n="20" folio="3" ?

First, there was a luncheon at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Dan Rather, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters, all jostled for photo-ops and Castro’s autograph. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in his presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.¹

Fast-forward to 2009, and the Martian again visits the U.S., which recently elected the candidate of its majority political party as president. “How can we help President Obama?” he reads that Fidel Castro is asking from Cuba. “Fidel Castro really wants President Obama to succeed,” continues the article, quoting officials from one of the U.S. legislature’s most powerful assemblies, the Congressional Black Caucus, who were visiting Cuba.²

“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?

dp n="22" folio="5" ?

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

dp n="23" folio="6" ?dp n="24" folio="7" ?

CHAPTER 2

Communist Omelet: The Unreported Cost in Life and Treasure

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)

Forget 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:

dp n="27" folio="10" ?

Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle (29 years), Antonio Lopez Munoz (28 years), Indasio Hernandez Pena (28 years), Alberto Fibla (28 years)...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 - The Golden Anniversary: A Half-Century of Loyal Service
• CHAPTER 2 - Communist Omelet: The Unreported Cost in Life and Treasure
• CHAPTER 3 - The “World’s Luckiest People,” or So Says Newsweek
• CHAPTER 4 - Here Come the Sharks. Where’s the Discovery Channel?
• CHAPTER 5 - The Discovery Channel Spins the Missile Crisis
• CHAPTER 6 - Castro’s Running-Dogs: Herbert Matthews and The New York Times
• CHAPTER 7 - To Kill a Labor Leader: Manhunt in Buenos Aires
• CHAPTER 8 - Papa Hemingway Admires Death in the Cuban Afternoon
• CHAPTER 9 - Castro’s “Revolution of Youth” —Imprisoning the Young
• CHAPTER 10 - Jon Stewart to Don Fidel: Thank You, Godfather
• CHAPTER 11 - Not Your Father’s Hit-Men: Gangsters in Cuba Today
• CHAPTER 12 - How Barack Obama Tried to Lose Honduras to the Dictators
• CHAPTER13 - Keep Your Pants On, Stephen Colbert. Che Wasn’t That Hot
• CHAPTER 14 - Sickos! The Cuban Health-Care Hoax, Directed by Michael Moore
• CHAPTER 15 - The Cuban “Embargo” —Are You Kidding?
• CHAPTER 16 - “Agents of Influence”—Castro’s Ladies and Men in the U.S. Media
• CHAPTER 17 - Barbara Walters, Charmed by the Hemisphere’s Top Torturer of Women
• CHAPTER 18 - Dan Rather on Castro: “This Is Cuba’s Elvis!”
• Endnotes
• INDEX
• Copyright Page