Hollywood's Favorite Tyrants

[BaronVonBigmeat]

One of the myths of the hard left that won't die is the myths about Castro's revolution. I haven't seen any of it on this particular forum, but on others it's quite common to hear someone lifting up Castro's Cuba as an example of how socialism can work. Besides ignoring the fact that most 3rd world countries they compare Cuba with do not have much economic freedom to begin with, they brush off questions of human rights abuses, as though it were just a few bad apples involved. So, I'd like to present a few choice quotes by Humberto Fontova, author of Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant. All of the following can be found here:

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Leftwingmonsters.asp

I'd like to think that half of the lefties expressing admiration for Castro's Cuba do it out of ignorance, and/or the mistaken notion of "the enemy (Castro) of my enemy (US federal government) is my friend". No, that's a terrible error in logic, and it makes you look like a hypocrite when you condemn US abuses (which do exist) and brush off abuses in foreign countries. (Then there's the other lefties, the "communism can work" types, who just don't give a shit about government abuses, so long as it is working towards supposed equality. I hold them in about the same regard as skinhead holocaust deniers.)

Anyway, on with the highlights! I was going to copy/past the human rights abuses, but decided not to. I'd have to quote the whole damn article. Besides, most people have heard of that, but what people don't know is how Castro actually made Cuba economically worse off. Read the article if you want all the gristly details.

Fidel Castro entered Havana on January 8, 1959, to wild acclaim from all quarters. Most Cubans were jubilant; Castro was promising an end to the corrupt governments that had plagued Cuba since independence. Far from any Communism, Castro was promising a revolution "as green as Cuba's palm trees!" with national elections in three months. Private property would be secure, a free press guaranteed, friendly relations with the U.S. were essential.

Yet within three months of his entry into Havana, Castro's firing squads had murdered an estimated 600-1,100 men and boys, and Cuba's jails held ten times the number of political prisoners as under Fulgencio Batista, who Castro overthrew with claims to "liberating" Cuba.

As with so much else regarding pre-Castro Cuba, major misconceptions abound in this editorial. To wit: in the 1950's the average farm-wage in "near-feudal" Cuba was higher than in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba in 1958 was $3. The average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73; in Belgium $2.70; in Denmark $2.74; in West Germany $2.73; and in the U.S. $4.06. Also, far from huge latifundia dominating the agricultural landscape, the average Cuban farm in 1958 was actually smaller than the average farm in the U.S.: 140 acres in Cuba vs. 195 acres in the U.S. In 1958 Cuba, a nation of 6.2 million people, had 159,958 farms -- 11,000 of which were tobacco farms. Only 34 percent of the Cuban population was rural.

Two years into his revolution Castro managed to turn Cuba's traditional immigration pattern on it's head. Prior to 1959 Cuba experienced net immigration. In fact--as a percentage of population-- Cuba took in more immigrants in the 20th century than the U.S. took in--and this includes the Ellis Island years. In 1958 the Cuban embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. From 1903-1950 Cuba took in over one million Spanish immigrants. (notice: pre-Castro Cuba's wetbacks came from the first -world.) Also, before Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S.[7] Back then people were as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to escape. Come Castro and half-starved Haitians ( a short 60 miles away) turn up their nose at Cuba.

In 1958 Cuba had a higher standard of living than any Latin American country and half of Europe. I'll quote a UNESCO report from 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population)than U.S. workers... the average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 68 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans were covered by Social legislation, that's a higher percentage then in the U.S. at the time."

In 1958 Cubans had the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere. But in 1962 Castro's government introduced ration cards that persist to this day. While comparing a Cubans' daily rations as mandated by Castro's government to the daily rations of Cubans slaves as mandated by the Spanish King in 1842, an intrepid Cuban exile uncovered this fascinating info:[9]

Food Ration in 1842 for slaves in Cuba: Castro Gov. Ration since 1962:

meat, chicken, fish--8 oz 2 oz.

Rice-- 4 oz. 3 oz

Starches-- 16 oz. 6.5 oz

Beans 4 oz. 1 oz.


The half-starved slaves on the ship Amistad ate better than Elian Gonzalez does now. Yet Eleanor Cliff told us on in her column and again on the McLaughlin Group that: "To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S."

The Soviets ended up pumping some $130 billion into Cuba.[10] That's ten Marshall plans, and pumped-- not into a war-ravaged continent of 300 million-- but into an island of 7-9 million. Yet the ration cards persist to this day.

In a film titled "Cursed Be Your Name, Liberty," Cuban exile Vladimir Ceballos documents how in the mid 80's over one hundred Cuban youths deliberately injected themselves with the aids virus. At the time Castro's Cuba had developed a very efficient method of dealing with the malady. The patients were banished to "sanatoriums" in the middle of the countryside and basically left alone till they died. "Left alone" is the key phrase here.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

Next up: Che Guevara. You may know him as "that scowling guy on the trendy T-shirts". Let's examine this fierce, noble guerilla warrior.

As for the rest of Time's assertions, other than his competence at murdering bound, gagged and blindfolded men, Che Guevara failed spectacularly at everything he attempted in his life. First he failed as an Argentine medical student. Though he's widely described as a medical doctor by his hagiographers (Castaneda, Anderson, Taibo, Kalfon) no record exists of Guevara's medical degree. When Cuban-American researcher Enrique Ros inquired of the Rector of the University of Buenos Aires and the head of its Office of Academic Affairs for copies or proof of said document, Ros was variously told that the records had been misplaced or perhaps stolen. [4]

In 1960 Castro appointed Che as Cuba's "Minister of Economics." Within months the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba's gold reserves, was practically worthless. The following year Castro appointed Che as Cuba's "Minister of Industries." Within a year a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria and Japan, a huge influx of immigrants and the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society, all who were grateful to leave with only the clothes on their back.

Most observers attribute this to "Communist mismanagement." Che himself confessed to his multiple economic errors and failings. Actually, given the goal of Cuba's ruler since January of 1959 -- i.e., absolute power -- the Cuban economy has been expertly managed. Castro inherited a vibrant free market economy in 1959 (something unique among communist rulers). All the others -- from Lenin to Mao to Ho to Ulbricht to Tito to Kim Il Sung --took over primitive and/or chaotic, war-ravaged economies.

Che's role in "Imperialism's First Defeat!" as Castro refers to the Bay of Pigs invasion merits mention. The American invasion plan included a ruse in which a CIA squad dispatched three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba in Pinar Del Rio (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors and a tape recording of battle.

The wily Guerrilla Che immediately deciphered the imperialist scheme. That little feint 300 miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse, he determined. The real invasion was coming in Pinar Del Rio. Che stormed over to the site with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded and waited for the "Yankee/mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs and mirrors did their stuff offshore.

Three days later the (literal) smoke and mirror show expended itself and Che's men marched back to Havana. Somehow Che had managed to wound himself in the heated battle against the tape recorder. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post April '61 pictures of Che (the picture we see on posters and T shirts was taken a year earlier.)

Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Fidelista at the time, speculates the wound may have come from a botched suicide attempt. Che hagiographers John Lee Anderson, Carlos Castaneda and Paco Taibo insist it was an accident, Che's own pistol going off just under his face.

Here's a summary of the Battle of the Bay of Pigs, and the militia's performance: 51,000 Castro troops and militia with limitless Soviet arms, including tanks and planes and batteries of heavy artillery met 1400 mostly civilian exile freedom-fighters most with less than a month's training. These men carried only light arms and one day's ammunition. The Che-trained militia hit them, then immediately halted and fled hysterically.

They were ordered back, probed hesitantly again, got mauled again and retreated in headlong flight again. They marched back again, many at gun-point, and rolled in battery after battery of Soviet 122 mm Howitzers. They rained 2000 rounds of heavy artillery into lightly-armed men they outnumbered 50 -1. ("Rommel's crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment," explains Bay of Pigs historian Haynes Johnson.) Then Castro's unopposed air force strafed the invaders repeatedly and at will.

The invaders stood their ground to the last man and the militia was forced to probe yet again -- and retreat again in headlong flight. They eventually stopped and brought in reinforcements. (50-1 was not enough.) They rained another Soviet artillery storm on the utterly abandoned and hopelessly outnumbered freedom fighters and finally moved in to overwhelm them -- after three days of effort in which the invaders hadn't eaten, drank or slept, and had run out of ammunition. Castro's forces took 5200 casualties in the process. The freedom fighters suffered 114. [14]

Che did show up at the battle site, but the day the shooting ended.

"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"

Che Guevara wrote these lines while in his early twenties, before he had gotten his hands on any such enemy. The passage appears in Che's Motorcycle Diaries, recently made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford -- the only film to get a whooping standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival. It seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form his touching tribute.

Two weeks after Che entered Havana and took his post at La Cabana fortress, Castro saw his instincts as a personnel manager fully vindicated. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men.

As commander of the La Cabana prison, Che often insisted on shattering the skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself with watching the executions. Che's office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his firing squads at work.

After a hard day at the office, Che repaired to his new domicile in Tarara, 15 miles outside Havana on the pristine beachfront (today reserved exclusively for tourists and Communist party members, by the way). The "austere idealist," Che, hadn't done too badly for himself in this real estate transaction, known in non-revolutionary societies as theft.

"The house was among the most luxurious in Cuba," writes Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes. ''Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba's most successful building contractor. The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets. One TV had been specially designed in the U.S. and had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control (remember, this was 1959.) This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion's garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.

Among the many categories of criminals against revolutionary morals were "delinquents." Please take note Che T-shirt wearers: this "delinquency" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music. Among the more hilarious manifestations of Che idolatry was the rock musician Carlos Santana's grand entrance to the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony where he stopped, swung open his jacket, and proudly displayed his Che T-shirt as the cameras clicked.

By the late 60's among the tens of thousands of inmates at Guanahacabibes and the rest of the UMAP concentration camp system in Cuba were "roqueros," hapless Cuban youths who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music. Carlos Santana, was grinning widely -- and oh so hiply -- while proudly sporting the symbol of a regime that made it a criminal offense to listen to Carlos Santana.

By late 1964 Minister of Industries' Che had so badly crippled Cuba's economy and infrastructure and so horribly impoverished and traumatized its work force that the Russians themselves were at wits end. They were subsidizing the mess, and it was getting expensive -- much too expensive for the paltry geopolitical return. "This is an underdeveloped country?!" Anastas Mikoyan had laughed while looking around on his first visit to Cuba in 1960. The Soviets were frankly tickled to have a developed and civilized country to loot again, the countries of Eastern Europe after WWII.

Che's fetish to "industrialize" Cuba immediately and by decree, as he thought his role model Stalin had "industrialized" the Soviet Union, ended Cuba's status as a relatively developed and civilized country. In one of his spasms of decrees, Che ordered a refrigerator factory built in Cienfuegos, a pick and shovel factory built in Santa Clara, a pencil factory built in Havana. Supply? Demand? Costs? Such bourgeois details didn't interest Che. None of the factories ended up producing a single product.

Che railed against the chemists in the newly socialized Coca-Cola plant because the Coke they were producing tasted awful. Some of the flustered chemists responded that it was Che who had nationalized the plant and booted out the former owners and managers, who took the secret Coca-Cola formula with them to the United States. This impertinence was answered with the threat of Guanahacabibes.

During this time Che's ministry also bought a fleet of snow plows from Czechoslovakia. Che had personally inspected them and was convinced they could easily be converted into sugar cane harvesting machines, thus mechanizing the harvest and increasing Cuba's sugar production. The snowplows in fact squashed the sugar cane plants, cut them off at the wrong length and killed them. Four years into the revolution Cuba's 1963 sugar production was less than half of its pre-Revolutionary volume.

It would be difficult to imagine a more cockamamie plan for Bolivia than Che's. Under President Paz Estenssoro in 1952-53 Bolivia had undergone a revolution of sorts, with an extensive land reform that -- unlike Che's and Fidel's -- actually gave ownership of the land to the peasants, the tillers of the soil themselves, much like Douglas McArthur's land reform in post-war Japan. Even crazier, Che himself, during his famous motorcycle jaunt had visited Bolivia and witnessed the positive results of the reform. Still, his amazing powers of self-deception prevailed.

Che convinced himself that in a section of Bolivia where the population consisted -- not of landless peasants -- but of actual homesteaders, he'd have the locals crowding into his recruitment tent to sign up with a bunch of foreign communists to overthrow the government that had given them their land, a series of rural schools and left them completely unmolested to pursue their lives. These were Indians highly suspicious of foreigners and especially of white foreigners, to boot. Che was undaunted by any of these facts. Hasta la victoria siempre! as he liked to say. At this stage in his life Che was probably more deluded than Hitler in his Bunker.

There is no evidence that Castro took the Bolivian mission seriously. His Soviet patrons were certainly not behind it. They knew better. They'd seen every guerrilla movement in Latin America wiped out.

The Bolivian Communist party itself stood aloof from Che's final mission. Its head, Mario Monje, was a faithful follower of the Soviet party-line. The only Bolivians Che managed to recruit were renegade Communists and Maoists. Che's guerrilla force averaged 40-45 members and was pompously named the "National Liberation Army." Yet at no point during its 11 month venture did Bolivians make up more than half of its members. And most of these came from the cities and areas far distant from the guerrilla base. The rural population shunned their "National Liberation Army" like a plague.

"We cannot develop any peasant support," Che admits in his diaries. "But it looks like by employing planned terror (emphasis mine) we may at least neutralize most of them. Their support will come later."

It never did. It was the campesinos themselves who kept reporting the guerrilla's whereabouts to the army, with whom they were generally on excellent terms. And for an excellent reason: it was composed mainly of Bolivian campesinos, not bearded foreigners who stole their livestock.

Among the unreported idiocies regarding Che's Bolivian debacle, was how he split his forces into a vanguard and a rearguard in April of 1967, whereupon they got hopelessly lost and bumbled around , half-starved, half-clothed and half-shod, without any contact for 6 months -- though they were usually within a mile of each other. [43] They didn't even have WWII vintage walkie-talkies to communicate. Che's masterful Guerrilla War, gives no explanation for such a tactic.

Dariel Alarcon, a Cuban who was one of the three guerrillas who managed to survive and escape Bolivia, reports in his book, Benigno; Memorias de un Soldado Cubano how in the very midst of this blundering around, Che was obsessed with posing for photos. One was Che atop a (presumably stolen) horse on a ridgeline where he was strategically silhouetted against the bare sky. Che handed Alarcon his Pentax and had him back off just the right distance to capture the entire scene. Che nodded then plucked out a machete and waved it high over his head, even adding a sound score to the scene, shouting: "I am the new Bolivar!" as Alarcon dutifully clicked away.

Barely two months later the "National Liberation Army" was wiped out. Che's capture merits some clarification. His hagiographers have romanticized his last day alive. Che was defiant, they claim. Che was surprised, caught off guard and was unable to properly defend himself or to shoot himself with his last bullet as was his plan.

Nothing in the actual record supports this fantasy. In fact everything points to Che surrendering quite enthusiastically, right after he ordered his men to fight to the last man and the last bullet.

Most did, but Che was captured with a full clip in his pistol. Even more suspiciously, though he was in the bottom of a ravine during the final firefight and could have escaped in the opposite direction like a few of his men, Che actually moved upwards and towards the Bolivian soldiers who had been firing. Yet he was doing no firing of his own in the process. Then as soon as he saw some soldiers he yelled, "Don't shoot! I'm Che!" [45]

Immediately after his capture his demeanor was even more interesting "What's your name, young man?" Che asked a soldier. "Why what a great name for a Bolivian soldier!" he blurted after hearing it.

One of these, Felix Rodriguez (currently President of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association, and a friend of mine I'm very, very proud to say,) convinced the Bolivian military to stop summarily executing all the guerrilla prisoners. Questioned properly and treated decently, they could provide valuable information and help close the net on Che and his group.

And so it happened with a prisoner named Jose Castillo Chavez. Rodriguez played good cop with him and deciphered Che's whereabouts. He persuaded the Bolivian military to send their Ranger battalion to the area post-haste.

"But their training isn't complete," replied the Bolivian commander.

"No matter!" answered Rodriguez. "I think we've got Che pin-pointed! Send them in!" Barely a week later Che was yelling his pitiful plea to those Bolivian Rangers. "Don't Shoot! -- I'm Che, I'm worth more to you alive than dead!" [47]

The Bolivian high command didn't see it that way. Though he was captured alive, Che was executed the next day. Compared to the courageous and defiant yells of his own firing squad victims --"I kneel for no man! Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo! Aim right HERE!"-- Che Guevara proved on his last day alive that he was unworthy to carry his victims' slop buckets.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

More articles by Humberto Fontova.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/fontova/fontova-arch.html

It goes on and on. I'll try to find an interview of him I read, which goes into more detail about the economic conditions before/after Castro. Also I'll try to find some articles about their health care system, which is perhaps the most frequently touted advantage of Cuba. It's actually quite good, but there is a catch you never hear: Cuba actually has two heath care systems. The good one is for high-ranking party members and foreigners who pay with cash. It has few regulations, no insurance requirements, no lawsuits presumably, and you simply pay in cash.

The system for the common masses is of course wretchedly awful, and plagued by filthly conditions and chronic shortages of even the most mundane supplies.

edit: Ahh, here we go. Google for "cuba health care myths" and so forth.

http://www.babalublog.com/archives/001470.html
http://www.therealcuba.com/Page10.htm (warning: many photos that will make you sick)
http://www.netforcuba.org/InfoCuba-EN/HealthCare/HealthCareSystem.htm
http://www.canf.org/Issues/medicalapartheid.htm (dual health care systems)
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2538

 

[KarlMarx]

It is just amazing, or should I say shocking, to see the list of people that think Castro is such a great guy. Hollywood seems to beat a path to Castro's door for the chance to speak with that ignoble tyrant.

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg --- Spielberg announced that his dinner with Castro "was the eight most important hours of my life."

Actor Jack Nicholson told Daily Variety, following his three-hour 1998 meeting in Cuba that, "He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything."

Model Naomi Campbell declared that Castro was "a source of inspiration to the world."

Comedian Chevy Chase, said he believes "socialism works" and explained that "Cuba might prove that."

American media moguls, including the president of CBS TV, the head of MTV and the editor of Vanity Fair, visited Cuba in 2001 and had nothing but praise for the Caribbean Island.

Other Hollywood celebrities who have visited Cuba and Castro include Robert Redford, Spike Lee, Sidney Pollack, Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Shirley MacLaine, Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kevin Costner.

Can you imagine, if Hollywood of the 1930s acted this way? We would have seen Judy Garland, Clarke Gable, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart and a cast of others beating their way to Berlin to have an audience with "Der Fuhrer". And the heads of major newspapers and radio companies announce that "Hitler is good for Germany", and defend his "liberation" of Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia and others. Perhaps they would have ignored or denounced any news of genocide against the Jews.

and it gets better.... how about those "Che" T shirts? Few people know who Che Guevara was, let alone know anything about him. It's obvious that the man was a blood thirsty monster, who begged for his life before he was killed by his captors. Wearing a Che T-shirt is like wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Hitler or Al Capone.

Communists have killed, tortured, enslaved, and oppressed far greater numbers of people than the Nazis ever did. Everyone has heard about the Holocaust, but few have heard about the terrors of the Communist gulags, labor camps and prisons. Is it because the Communists hadn't carried out a campaign of genocidal extermination against their opponents? Is it because the Communists didn't plunge the entire world into a war? Or is the real reason that our educational system, with its left wing domination, has ignored the crimes of Communism and instead focused its attention on the crimes committed by the extreme right?

 

[Abbey Normal]

Comedian Chevy Chase, said he believes "socialism works" and explained that "Cuba might prove that."

I'm curious- did Chevy make this comment from his gated mansion?

 

[Gunny]

Not sure why this is so hard to believe. Yassir Arafat went from the despised, "Grandaddy" of modern Arab terrorism to a Nobel Peace Prize winning "statesman" in 20-something years.

Why not Castro?

The media made both what they were, and remade Arafat and are working on Castro with the aid of the lunatic fringe in Hollyweird who would know the real world if they got kicked out of their mansions into it.