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Happy Birthday, Fidel
Humberto Fontova
Friday, Aug. 15, 2003
(Originally in NewsMax.com)
Aug. 13 was Fidel Castro's 77th birthday.
My cousin Pedro's birthday also comes this month. But the last one he celebrated
was his 18th. That was in 1961, the year he fell
into the custody of Fidel "Helluva Guy" Castro's secret police, for
"questioning." Pedro was a frail, mild-mannered boy and
member of the youth group Catholic Action.
I was only 7 years old but still recall the phone call. Four decades later the
anguished screams from my mother, grandmother and
sisters still echo in my head. My aunt was silent, however. She'd fainted while
holding the phone. The voice had instructed her to
come claim her boy's corpse.
My father went instead (Aunt Maria was a widow). Remember the stricken Vito
Corleone as he lifted the blanket over Sonny?
"Look what they did to my boy," he stammered. "Please do
everything you can, " he implored his mortician friend. "I don't want
his mother to see him this way."
My father said much the same for his favorite nephew. I'll leave it at that. You
get the picture. Even at the wake my aunt could
barely recognize her only child. Till her death in 1993 in New York, she never
fully recovered psychologically. Once at a
demonstration in New York this saintly woman, a Catholic social worker in Cuba,
was denounced as a "Worm!" and "Fascist!"
by jeering Charlie Rangel and Jose Serrano supporters.
Scholar Armando Lago has confirmed that my cousin Pedro has a minimum of 110,000
co-victims. I wish I could do them all
justice here. One day we will. Aunt Maria had (and has) hundreds of thousands of
grieving sisters at the hands of Ted Turner's
fishing buddy and Diane Sawyer's cuddle bunny .
Yet I never see them interviewed on network TV, though I'm always seeing people
sniffling and clearing their throats during
interviews. Seems TV people like that sort of thing. Instead, I keep seeing the
murderer himself asked things like "What is your
favorite color, Mr. President?" I also saw the mass murderer's office
featured on CNN's "Cool-Digs!" segment.
Alejandro Del Valle would have been 64 this year, but he died at 22 the same
year as my cousin. Three weeks before his death,
Alejandro parachuted into what seemed like the very jaws of death at the Bay of
Pigs. With his last handful of bullets he led his
horribly outnumbered men into a charge against Stalin tanks that scrambled away
in panic.
Somehow Alejandro survived the battle. With his ammo expired and 50,000 Red
troops combing the long-doomed beachhead,
Alejandro jumped on a rickety sailboat with 22 others from his band of brothers
and shoved off. The first day at sea their fury
made them forget their wounds, their thirst and the scorching sun. They spent it
raging and cursing the betrayal by their "allies."
By the eighth day, five of the men had died from their wounds, from thirst and
from exposure. All received a burial at sea from
their dazed comrades. By the 10th day in the unrelenting sun without food or
water, three more had perished.
By the time a freighter picked them up, 18 days after setting off from the
doomed beachhead, 10 had died slowly and agonizingly,
including Alejandro. Dehydrated, starved, horribly sunburnt and probably
delirious, Alejandro had leaped overboard with a knife
to battle a huge shark that had followed them for a day. He thought the raw
flesh might feed his slowly starving men.
The shark escaped and Alejandro was hauled aboard, where he lay down in a
hollow-eyed daze and said nothing as night closed
in.
Next morning, Alejandro's comrades found him dead. He'd expended his last
reserves of strength against the shark.
The Apaches dispatched their most hated enemies by staking them in the sun. Mel
Gibson will soon show that death by crucifixion
worked as cruelly.
Roughly 50,000 Cubans have died like those young heroes. That's an estimate.
Many probably died more quickly. Hammerheads
and bull sharks make quick work of their prey. Tiger sharks don't dally at a
meal. You've seen it on the Discovery Channel.
"Nature's perfect killing machine," the narrator deadpans during a
close-up of those teeth.
He'd be loath to admit it, a proper '60s person with his Che T-shirts and all,
but Eric Burdon of the Animals wrote a song that
resounds with many Cubans: "We gotta get outta this place ... if it's the
LAST thing we EVER do!"
The last thing, indeed, for 1 in 3.
"Dentuso" (toothy one)! Hemingway's Old Man snarled while whacking
those sharks with his oar. "Cabrones!" he said as they
ripped and mangled his marlin. Dentuso's teeth have the same effect on
thirst-crazed humans dangling helplessly in the water as on
the Old Man's marlin.
A consistently hot item on Cuba's black market is used motor oil: poor man's
shark-repellant, they say. Perhaps for a few minutes.
I suppose when desperate we all cling to false hopes. And people get no more
desperate than for a chance to flee from the
handiwork of Norman Mailer's and Oliver Stone's hero.
Say that, by a small miracle, their recklessness pays off and they sight land.
Can any of us, sitting in our dens with a brewskie and
the remote, imagine the elation? No, it's not a touchdown by our team. No, the
bachelorette didn't pick the one we thought cutest.
No, the Terminator didn't just vanquish the bad guys. It's: "I'm delirious
with thirst and hunger and fatigue, I'm covered with
second-degree burns and totally destitute. But, Gracias a Dios, that's AMERICA
on the horizon!"
Well, here's comes the U.S. Coast Guard. Now it's back to Castroland - and worse
persecution. The same day Del Valle set off
in the sailboat from the Bay of Pigs, 100 of his captured comrades from the
invasion were jammed into a tractor-trailer for
transport to prison in Havana. "No Mas!" yelled the desperate men from
inside the truck. "No more FIT!! POR FAVOR!!"
They were struck with gun butts, jabbed with bayonets, spit on and jammed in
tighter. "Men are DYING in here!" more yells.
"They're being CRUSHED!"
"GOOD!" Snarled the Castro commander. "That'll save us the
bullets to SHOOT YOU!"
BLA-A-A-A-A-A-M! and he emptied a Czech machine gun through the truck, just over
their heads (the only shots this gallant
comandante fired the entire battle).
More bayonets jabbed and 50 more captives were shoved in. It took 20 Castro
soldiers huffing and puffing to finally jam the
doors shut and muffle the screams.
It was an eight-hour drive to Havana in the scorching tropical sun. We hear
horror stories of prisoners hauled off in cattle cars.
Well, these men dreamed of a cattle car. Those allow air. This was a rolling
oven. Soon the yelling stopped and the gasping
started. No vents in this trailer; only the bullet holes let little wisps of air
into the sweltering death chamber.
The Brigadistas beat vainly on the walls. With their last reserves of strength
they rocked back and forth, trying to tip the truck over
on the bumpy roads. Sweat and excrement sloshed at their boots. The stronger
captives lifted their weaker or wounded comrades
toward those bullet holes for a precious gasp.
Finally the only effort in the chamber was gasping. "Could Dante's inferno
be worse?" asked a survivor years later. Eight agonizing
hours later they finally opened the trailer's doors in front of the prison camp.
When all had stumbled out, 10 remained on the filthy
floor. They were dead.
As always, whatever stumps the Castroites in open battle they always manage
against the helpless and unarmed. The commander
who ordered this, Osmany Cienfuegos, was recently Cuba's minister of tourism.
Hope you enjoy your Cuban vacations, amigos.
Firing squads - "FUEGO!!"- are much quicker than any of the above. So
perhaps the 18,000 Cuban (and a few score
American) boys staked and blindfolded before them were actually among the
luckiest of Jesse Ventura's charming host's victims?
Perhaps Steven Spielberg's and George McGovern's pal actually did them a favor?
It wouldn't surprise me to see Stevie and Georgie claim this. Nothing surprises
me from that bunch anymore.
After all, according to George "peace candidate" McGovern, his pal
Castro - the man who panted and salivated at getting his
hands on nuclear missiles, the man who but for the prudence of the Butcher of
Budapest would have launched 43
intermediate-range nuclear missiles at the U.S. - this same man, is actually
"very shy, sensitive and likable."
And according to Oliver Stone, he's "a man who cares deeply for his nation
and his people." ("His" INDEED, Ollie!)
"If the missiles had remained," Che Guevara told the London Daily
Worker in November 1962, "We would have used them
against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. We must never establish
peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death
between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of
liberation even if it costs millions of atomic
victims."
Che iconography on T-shirts and posters remains very popular today, especially
among peace activists and anti-nuclear
demonstrators.
"Fidel's feeling of hatred for this country cannot even be imagined by
Americans." That's Juanita Castro, Fidel's own sister,
testifying to the House Committee on Un-American Activities after defecting in
June of 1965. "His intention - his OBSESSION -
is to destroy the U.S!"
"Say hello to my little friends!" Fidel had dreamed of yelling at the
hated Yankees right before the mushroom clouds. "Damn that
fuddy-duddy Khrushchev!" He raged for years afterward.
As I write, Cuba jams our satellite broadcasts into Iran using technology
acquired from China, which acquired it from the Clinton
administration. Two days after 9/11 the Defense Department's top Latin American
expert (Ana Belen Montes) was arrested by
the FBI as a Castro spy. The "Wasp network" of 10 Castro spies
arrested in Miami in '99 had, among other goodies, the names
and home addresses of the U.S Southern Command's top officers.
Castro's cold war is not over - and he still dreams of turning it hot.
Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, "Gulag," that, all told, 18
million people passed through Stalin's prison camps. At any
one time, 2 million were incarcerated. That was out of a Soviet population of
220 million.
Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.5 million. According to Freedom House, 500,000
Cubans (young and old, male and female)
have passed through Castro's prison camps. Punch your calculator ... see that?
Turns out that calling Castro a "Stalinist" actually
downplays his repression.
But no problem. Few liberals call him a Stalinst. Instead they call him
"charming," "likable" and "one hell of a guy!"
In March 1996 when Castro addressed the U.N. ( to a raucous, foot-stomping
ovation, naturally) on its 50th birthday, David
Rockefeller asked the honor of his presence for a celebrity-studded dinner at
his Westchester county estate.
"My pleasure," responded Castro. And after holding court for a rapt
Rockefeller along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas
and Random House's Harold Evans, he flashed over to Mort Zuckerman's Fifth
Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati
including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Bernard Shaw, Diane Sawyer and Barbara
Walters all jostled for a tryst, cooing and
gurgling to his every syllable.
And the Lider Maximo had barely scratched the surface of his fan club. According
to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic
Council, on that visit Castro received 250 dinner invitations from American
celebrities and power brokers. Many a millionaire,
pundit and socialite who narrowly escaped incineration at his hands 36 years
earlier now pouted at his RSVP.
Last year at that Missile Crisis reunion and "workshop" in Havana, a
beaming Robert McNamara hailed his charming host a "great
statesman" for his conduct during the crisis.
Kafka and Fellini, force-fed hallucinogenics and locked in a room to brainstorm,
couldn't dream this stuff up. Friends ... I give up.
Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in history from Tulane University. He's the
author of "Helldiver's Rodeo," described as
"Highly entertaining!" by Publisher's Weekly, "A must-read!"
by Booklist, and "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted
Nugent. You may reach Mr. Fontova by e-mail at hfontova@earthlink.net.
Arriba (up)
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Carta abierta a Agustín Roa Bastos
Peña Cubana
Apoyo a premio para Payá
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Happy Birthday, Fidel
Norteamericano caido por Cuba
Saludos de Catalunya
Carta abierta a una eurodiputada
"End the Embargo" Coffee
El Panda ecologista
Libertad para Miguel Galbán
Revolución débil
Llamada a Fidel
Estereotipos
Carta a bibliotecarios canadienses
Cuba y el "día del ambiente"
Hospedaje en Cuba
La Iglesia esconde su lámpara
Un volki en Cuba
En Vietnam tambien hay represión
Monika y la revolución
¿Persigue Cuba armas biológicas?
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