Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  CHAPTER ONE - THE TERRORIST NEXT DOOR

  CHAPTER TWO - THE CUBAN FÜHRER

  CHAPTER THREE - THE COWARDLY LEÓN

  CHAPTER FOUR - THE DOPE TRAFFICKER NEXT DOOR

  CHAPTER FIVE - ROCK AGAINST FREEDOM!

  CHAPTER SIX - CASTRO’S MURDER, INCORPORATED

  CHAPTER SEVEN - FIDEL’S SIDEKICK: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIST CHE GUEVARA

  CHAPTER EIGHT - CUBA BEFORE CASTRO

  CHAPTER NINE - STUPID LIBERALS IN THE CIA

  CHAPTER TEN - “WE FOUGHT WITH THE FURY OF CORNERED BEASTS”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - OPERATION CUBAN FREEDOM—NOT!

  CHAPTER TWELVE - FIDEL AS BUSINESS PARTNER

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - FIDEL’S USEFUL IDIOTS

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - CASTRO’S TUGBOAT MASSACRE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - WHO NEEDS FREEDOM?

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  To Cuba’s greatest generation: the freedom fighters, living and dead, of

  Brigada 2506, the Escambray Rebellion, and all the rest who fought Com-

  munism; and to the parents who sacrificed all to bring us to America, most

  especially to my own parents, Humberto and Esther Maria.

  PREFACE

  Cuba is only ninety miles away, but very few Americans know that a Communist tyranny that rivals North Korea’s—and that had nuclear weapons decades before North Korea did—is just off the coast of Florida. The history of Castro’s revolution is known to everyone personally in little Havana in Miami. But it is virtually unknown beyond there—or at least the truth about it is unknown. So liberals, and the liberal media and liberal Hollywood, get away with the most outrageous lies about Cuba and Cuban Americans. This book is meant to bust their myths with truth.

  It’s also a book to express gratitude to the thousands who put their lives on the line to fight Communism in Cuba—and to the United States that has given us, as exiles, the warmest welcome anyone has ever received. The process of becoming Americans wasn’t easy for our parents, who came with no money, no prospects, and no English. They had to succumb to such barbarisms as forsaking siestas, dining before 10 p.m., and—Dios mio!—watching their children date without chaperones. But their children were spared the horrors, humiliations, and degradations—the firings squads and prison camps—of life under the Communists. In America today, these Cuban parents number in the hundreds of thousands. You might call me and my Cuban American contemporaries “America’s luckiest generation;” our freedom, prosperity, and happiness resulted from the sacrifices of two different (though always considered brother) nations’ greatest generations: our parents and the Americans, the World War II generation, who welcomed us. This book is a small way of saying thanks.

  Humberto Fontova

  New Orleans, Louisiana, December 27, 2004

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE TERRORIST NEXT DOOR

  On Saturday morning, November 17, 1962, FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., took on “all the trappings of a military command post,” according to historian William Breuer.1 As well it might. The night before, an intelligence puzzle had finally come together and revealed a criminal plot that staggered the G-men. These were agents who had foiled Nazi plots to blow up American oil refineries in World War II. They had fought Soviet agents for two decades. They weren’t easily impressed, but they were worried now.

  They hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. They were haggard, red-eyed, seriously wired, and super tense. Time was nearing to swoop down on Fidel Castro’s plotters. Raymond Wannall and Alan Belmont sat in an office just down the hall from that of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Belmont was Hoover’s second in command. Wannall was head of the bureau’s intelligence division. They had special agent John Malone, who ran the New York field office, on one phone line. On other lines they talked with FBI agents in Manhattan who were trying to keep surveillance on the ringleaders of a massive terrorist plot.

  The intelligence was hair-raising. Agents of Fidel Castro had targeted Manhattan’s busiest subway stations—including Grand Central Station—for rush hour explosions. This was no chump operation. Nor was it a military operation. It was something the United States didn’t know much about in 1962: terrorism. The plotters planned the fiery death and maiming of thousands of New Yorkers. More evidence came in showing that the subway wasn’t the only target: Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s . . . twelve detonators . . . several major incendiaries . . . five hundred kilos of TNT. “Blasts are timed for the Friday after Thanksgiving,” came the latest intel. Five hundred kilos of TNT primed to hit on the busiest shopping day of the year. A day when parents take their kids to meet Santa Claus.

  “Keeping the Cuban suspects under physical surveillance all that night of the seventeenth without their knowing they were being watched put an enormous burden on those New York field agents,” Raymond Wannall later reported to the New York Times. “But they managed it with great skill.”2 These were J. Edgar Hoover men—there were no acceptable excuses for any intelligence or security “breakdown” in those days. The old man simply wouldn’t stand for it.

  Notice the date again, November 1962. It was just weeks after the Cuban missile crisis, and the country was still badly rattled.

  With the terrorist plot unfolding, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI realized we were looking down the barrel of a genuine threat from the same place—Cuba. As proof, there was none of the saber-rattling of the Cuban missile crisis. That’s for bluff. And as Ernest Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon about bulls that snort and paw the ground, an animal bluffs in order to avoid combat.

  Khrushchev wanted peace; Castro didn’t. True, in 1957 the redoubtable New York Times had passed along his heartfelt message, “You can be sure that we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people.”3

  But here’s the same Fidel Castro confiding in a letter to a friend a month later: “War against the United States is my true destiny. When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger and wider war.”4 (Please note: This was before any alleged “bullying” by the United States. In fact, Castro said this while the U.S. State Department and CIA were backing Castro’s movement, and even helping to finance it.) After defecting in 1964, Castro’s own sister brought an unmistakable message to Congress: “Fidel’s feeling of hatred for this country cannot even be imagined by Americans.” She testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities: “His intention—his OBSESSION—is to destroy the U.S.!”5

  “My dream is to drop three atomic bombs on New York,” snarled Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, in 1960.6 And don’t forget, Raul Castro is almost assuredly Fidel Castro’s successor. Atomic bombs might have been a tad ambitious, but Fidel’s 1962 bomb plot was serious enough. The March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all ten of them, killed and maimed almost two thousand people. The al Qaeda–linked terrorists used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT, roughly ten kilos per blast. Rafael del Pino, who once headed Castro’s air force and defected in 1987, has confirmed that Castro’s 1962 bomb plot involved five hundred kilos of TNT, among other explosives and incendiaries.

  The head Castroite terrorist of the 1962 plot was Roberto Santiesteban. He worked—surprise!—at the United Nations, where fellow conspirators José and Elsa Gómez were also to be found. Santiesteban had arrived in the U.S. on October 3, 1962, on a diplomatic passport and served as aide to Castro’s UN ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Two other conspirators were Marino Suero and José García, both Cuban i
mmigrants, naturalized Americans, who lived in New York and ran a costume jewelry shop in Manhattan. Their shop was the plotters’ headquarters and storage facility. Suero and García also belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The FBI had already outed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as a Castro-funded “front group.” Its membership rolls would later include Lee Harvey Oswald, a name everyone would know in a year’s time, as well as CBS correspondent Robert Taber (he became the Committee’s executive secretary), leftist filmmaker Saul Landau (now a professor in California and an “adviser” on several CBS and PBS “specials” on Castro), and The Nation magazine co-owner Alan Sagner (whom President Clinton appointed as head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1996).

  The FBI knew that the Cuban plotters were to meet that night of November 17 in García’s shop on West 27th Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s garment district. “Hey, wait a minute!” you say. “How’d the FBI know this? How’d they have them pegged?” The answer is: moles. The FBI penetrated the Castroite group. Bureaucratic types call it “HUMINT” (human intelligence). Remember, this was J. Edgar Hoover’s outfit. This was the FBI well before the Frank Church Committee and Jimmy Carter gelded it.

  “Got Suero and García in sight,” reported John Malone on the phone to Alan Belmont in Washington, D.C. “Can arrest them easily.”

  “Anything on Santiesteban?” asked Belmont.

  “We have the area [around the UN] staked out but haven’t spotted him yet,” answered Malone.

  “Then hold off,” ordered Belmont.

  The FBI wanted a clean sweep, the three ringleaders nabbed together. And Santiesteban seemed the likely leader. Nabbing his cohorts prematurely could send him underground in a flash. The plot obviously involved dozens more conspirators and might be reactivated. Another ten Cuban “diplomats” serving at the UN were suspected by the FBI of running a sabotage school training in the use of explosives and incendiary devices.

  Two hours later, Malone relayed field agent reports that Suero and García were getting skittish.

  “Hold off,” ordered Belmont again. “Let’s wait for Santiesteban.”

  “We discussed these decisions amongst each other,” recalled Raymond Wannall. “And we all supported Al [Belmont] completely on his decision to hold off until Santiesteban was spotted. But we were sure happy we weren’t the ones making this tough call. If it didn’t turn out right—whoa, boy—Mr. Hoover would not have been very happy. We knew Al could feel Mr. Hoover’s unseen pressure right over his shoulder that entire night and morning.”7

  Another hour went by, with the caffeine-addled field agents maintaining their increasingly precarious surveillance. They were watching Suero, who was in a parked car on Third Avenue and East 24th, whiling away his time necking passionately with an unknown woman. These weren’t “suicide” bombers—not by a long shot. They looked forward to their rewards in Havana: stolen mansions, stolen limos, lobster and champagne, chauffeurs, free travel, nubile señoritas at their beck and call, the usual Communist perks.

  García, meanwhile, was preparing for the meeting at his costume shop. At 10 a.m., Belmont got another call from Malone in New York. “We got Mr. Three in sight,” said a tense Malone. “Roberto Santiesteban is walking along Riverside Drive, heading for a car with a diplomatic license plate.”

  “Grab them all,” ordered Belmont. “Round them up.”

  The agents closed in, but Santiesteban looked behind him, sensed their intentions and—beep-beep!—took off like the Roadrunner. He was sprinting down the sidewalk and hurdling hedges like a true Olympian. As he ran, he was jamming paper in his mouth and chewing furiously.

  But six FBI agents were after him. Their hats (mandatory, no Starsky and Hutch attire back then) immediately flew off when they sprang to the chase. Their leather shoes slapped the concrete and their ties flapped furiously over their shoulders as they sprinted and leaped in hot pursuit. Finally they surrounded the suspect. They stood there panting and glaring at him. Finally an agent pounced. Santiesteban dodged him. Another FBI man grabbed hold, but the slippery Castroite spun and broke his tackle. Santiesteban dodged and weaved frantically, but the FBI guys managed to gang-swarm him. Santiesteban fell, raging and cursing, flailing his arms and jabbing his elbows like a maniac. They grabbed his arm and bent it behind his back just as he was reaching for his pistol.

  Suero was plucked from his car without incident. His lady friend was questioned and released. García was in his costume shop stacking grenades and detonators in a vault when he heard the door open. “So early, Roberto!”8 he said without turning. His shop had been locked. Only Roberto Santiesteban had a key. The G-men nabbed García.

  Another group of agents had the much easier task of arresting the Cuban missions switchboard operator, Elsa Gómez, and her husband, José, as they left their apartment on West 71st Street. They gave in without a struggle.

  The FBI estimated that from twenty-five to fifty others might have been involved in the plot. They soon discovered from interrogation and captured documents that the target list was even bigger than they had guessed. It included Manhattan’s main bus terminal, oil refineries on the New Jersey shore, and the Statue of Liberty.

  Castro and his UN diplomats wailed about “police brutality” and “diplomatic immunity.” But on November 21, Santiesteban, Suero, and García were indicted for sabotage, conspiracy, and acting as unauthorized agents of a foreign government. Five months later, all were safely back in Cuba. We exchanged them for CIA agents that Castro had held since the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  Had the Castroite terrorists succeeded in their plot, September 11, 2001, would be remembered as the second-deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. How did the FBI foil Castro’s men? With very gauche tactics: no computers, satellites, or graduate degrees in “systems analysis.” Instead, they used wiretaps, payoffs, and shady characters. They often resorted to shameless guile, rampant double-crossing, and malicious backstabbing. It was a lot like serving in Congress. And, of course, it was Congress that gleefully dismantled the old Hoover FBI and rendered it incapable of preventing September 11, 2001, the way it prevented November 23, 1962.

  Castroite espionage continues against the United States. In June 2003, President Bush expelled fourteen Cuban “diplomats” for engaging in “unacceptable activities.” Seven worked—surprise!—at the United Nations. On September 14, 1998, the FBI arrested fourteen Castro spies in Miami who were known as the “Wasp network.” According to the FBI’s affidavit, these Castro agents were engaged in, among other things:• Intelligence gathering against the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West, the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Florida

  • Sending letter bombs to Cuban Americans

  • One Castro agent, Antonio Guerrero, had compiled the names and home addresses of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.

  • Two other spies, Joseph Santos and Amarylis Silverio, were charged with infiltrating the spanking new headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.

  • A third man, Luis Medina, was spying on MacDill Air Force Base, the U.S. Armed Forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.

  At the bail hearings, assistant U.S. district attorney Caroline Heck Miller said the urgency to act on the case was because “the defendant has made allusions to the prospect of sabotage being visited on buildings and airplanes in the Southern District of Florida.”

  Interestingly, Jane’s Defense Weekly, the preeminent journalistic authority on military matters, reported on March 6, 1996, that since the early 1990s Cuban commandos had been training in Vietnam for attacks on installations remarkably similar to the Boca Chica and MacDill bases, with the “political objective” of bringing “the reality of warfare to the American public.” Apparently the FBI didn’t see any linkage. The Jane’s article came out two years before the FBI arrested the Wasp spies.
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  These spies had also infiltrated the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue. From them, Castro got the exact flight plan that resulted in the shooting down in February 1996 of two of the group’s unarmed planes, which were flying a humanitarian mission. The pilots routinely flew over the Florida straits to rescue Cubans fleeing the Communist regime. Given that an estimated 50,000 to 87,000 Cubans have died in the “cemetery without crosses,” these pilots were risking their lives to save desperate balseros from joining that terrible tally. Castro, Ted Turner’s fishing buddy (Ted calls him “one helluva guy”), couldn’t stand for that. So his MiG jets shot the planes down, over international waters, without warning and without trying to turn them aside. It was simply murder. Even the United Nation’s Security Council condemned the attack.

  Of the fourteen Castro spies charged in the Wasp network case, four managed to escape to Cuba, five pleaded guilty, and five pleaded innocent. At their Miami trial, the five pleading innocent had some vociferous defense witnesses, as you might imagine. What you might not imagine is that these staunch defense witnesses were two retired U.S. Army generals. Apparently planning attacks on U.S. military bases and being accomplices in the murder of four U.S. citizens mattered little to Generals Charles Wilhelm and Edward Atkeson. They spoke eloquently, and apparently authoritatively, in defense of Castro’s spies. Wilhelm himself was the former head of the U.S. Southern Command and Atkeson had been the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Both men had served under President Clinton and had apparently absorbed the Clinton administration’s policy of downplaying the Cuban threat. I’d love to know how the FBI reacted to their courtroom adversaries—American generals trying to discredit the FBI for uncovering the biggest espionage cell since the Cold War.