The Longest Romance

  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

  THE UNREPORTED COST

  WHO KNEW?

  FRIEND OF OLIGARCHS?

  CHAPTER 3 - The “World’s Luckiest People,” or So Says Newsweek

  CASTRO’S WALL

  CUBA’S MILITARY-TOURISM COMPLEX

  JUVENILE VICTIMS

  “I HATE THE SEA”

  CHAPTER 4 - Here Come the Sharks. Where’s the Discovery Channel?

  CROSSING THE FLORIDA STRAITS FOR FUN AND GLORY

  SO 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

  DRINKING A LIE

  MISSIONARY STYLE

  CHAPTER 7 - To Kill a Labor Leader: Manhunt in Buenos Aires

  CHAPTER 8 - Papa Hemingway Admires Death in the Cuban Afternoon

  ENTER I.F. STONE

  CHAPTER 9 - Castro’s “Revolution of Youth” —Imprisoning the Young

  THE YOUNG AND THE FEARLESS

  USEFUL IDIOTS FROM WOODSTOCK NATION

  CHAPTER 10 - Jon Stewart to Don Fidel: Thank You, Godfather

  PROSTITUTION THEN AND NOW

  BLACKS IN CUBA, THEN AND NOW

  CHAPTER 11 - Not Your Father’s Hit-Men: Gangsters in Cuba Today

  NOT YOUR FATHER’S MOBSTERS

  PIPELINE FOR TERRORISTS?

  COMING TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU

  CHAPTER 12 - How Barack Obama Tried to Lose Honduras to the Dictators

  CNN SPINS HONDURAS

  CHAPTER13 - Keep Your Pants On, Stephen Colbert. Che Wasn’t That Hot

  “THUMBS UP IN CUBA”

  HISTORICAL ACCURACY

  SNUBBING THOSE WHO KNOW

  TAKE ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY WALL, BABY

  REQUIEM FOR A FLACK

  THE HUFFINGTON POST AND DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL

  CHAPTER 14 - Sickos! The Cuban Health-Care Hoax, Directed by Michael Moore

  SICKO SICKENS CUBAN DISSIDENTS

  THE VICTIMS OF “DOCTOR DIPLOMACY”

  RECEIVING IS BELIEVING

  A PLUG FROM CNN

  DOCTORING INFANT-MORTALITY RATES

  CHAPTER 15 - The Cuban “Embargo” —Are You Kidding?

  FAILURE OR SUCCESS?

  SOME “EMBARGO” HISTORY

  OPPOSING THE “EMBARGO” FOR FUN AND PROFIT

  CHAPTER 16 - “Agents of Influence”—Castro’s Ladies and Men in the U.S. Media

  JEREMIAH WRIGHT’S CUBAN FRIENDS

  STEPHEN COLBERT’S FAVORITE CUBA “EXPERT”

  CHAPTER 17 - Barbara Walters, Charmed by the Hemisphere’s Top Torturer of Women

  CASTRO’S CHAMBERS FOR WOMEN

  CHAPTER 18 - Dan Rather on Castro: “This Is Cuba’s Elvis!”

  Endnotes

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  The Connections You Don’t See

  He jailed political prisoners at a rate higher 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. He came closer than anyone in history to starting a worldwide nuclear war. In the above process Fidel Castro converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels the poorest people in the region and boasts the highest suicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.

  Who would guess any of this from reading the mainstream media? Instead we read almost exclusively about how Castro freed Cuba from the greedy clutches of U.S. robber barons and mobsters and rewarded his downtrodden countrymen with free health-care and education. A scornful Uncle Sam then retaliated with a vindictive embargo, still in place. Topping off a half-century of tortured history, Newsweek hailed Cuba as among “the best countries in the world to live.”

  In July 1958 an excited American magazine reporter climbing his way up to Castro’s guerrilla hideout in Cuba’s mountains for a supposedly exclusive interview with the elusive guerrilla chief stopped and gaped at another reporter passing him on the way down. The reporter coming downhill, clutching a secret interview of his own, worked for Boys’Life magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America.1

  Farther along the curiously well-trod trail, the reporter stopped and gaped again. Straight ahead was a huge sign reading “Press Hut—This Way.” Castro had recently installed it to accommodate the throng of journalists seeking interviews at his “secret camp.” By then reporters from The New York Times to CBS, from Look and Life to Reader’s Digest and Boys’Life, had all managed the terrifying trek to the remote hideout while evading Batista’s brutal army and police and obtaining exclusive interviews with the furtive guerrilla commander.

  Two years later, in his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Che Guevara snickered: “Foreign reporters—preferably American—were much more valuable to us than any military victory. Much more valuable than recruits for our guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.”

  Five years earlier, in a letter to revolutionary colleague Melba Hernandez, Fidel Castro had laid down his movement’s mission statement: “We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital—propaganda is the heart of our struggle. For nowwe use a lot of sleight of hand and smiles with everybody. There will be plenty of time later to crush all the cockroaches together.”2

  After so many fake smiles and crushed cockroaches, you’d hope journalists would be on their guard when accepting Castro-regime press releases. But history records few media recruitment drives as phenomenally successful or as enduring as Castro and Che’s.

  “Cuban mothers, let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba’s problems without spilling a drop of blood.” Upon entering Havana on January 8, 1959, Cuba’s new leader Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones. “Cuban mothers,” he continued as the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, “let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry.”3

  The following day, just below San Juan Hill in eastern Cuba, a bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position and pushed dirt into a huge pit with blood pooling at the bottom from the still-twitching bodies of more than a hundred men and boys who’d been machine-gunned without trial on orders of the Castro brothers, as many wives and mothers wept hysterically from a nearby road.

  On that very day the prestigious Observer ran the following: “Mr. Castro’s bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence.”

  These two events epitomize the Castro phenomenon, even half a century later. The Cuban regime oppresses and murders while issuing a smokescreen of lies not merely devious but positively psychopathic. The international media abandon all pretense to be investigators or watchdogs (or even reporters); they become not merely sycophants but publicists.

  On April 21, 1959, Fidel Castro said to Americans: “I am not a communist for three reasons: communism is a dictatorship and for my entire life I have been against dictatorships. Furthermore, communism means hatred and class struggle, and I am completely against such a philosophy. And finally because communism opposes God and the Church. I say this to set your minds and spirits at rest.”4

  For three months prior to that date, Fidel Castro and his Stalinist partners, Raul Castro and Che Guevara, had already been hosting Soviet GRU agents in their respective stolen mansions and buttoning down the Sta
linization of Cuba. Fidel’s brother Raul and sister-in-law Vilma Espin had had assigned KGB handlers since 1953.5

  A half-century of relentless Castroite Communism later, one could have hoped that mainstream journalists would adopt a more prudent approach in reacting to this regime’s statements.

  This book will show how utterly vain is that hope.

  The media’s heraldry of Fidel Castro in 1957 or 1939—though often based on reflexive anti-Americanism, laziness, stupidity and condescension towards Latins (maybe a taste of the lash is what those volatile and frivolous people need)—was in some ways excusable. “A man of many ideals, including those of liberty, democracy, and social justice,” gushed The New York Times about Castro in February 1957. Many prominent Cubans, after all, were equally deluded. But the same theme over half a century later can only be described as the journalistic version of battered-wife syndrome. Among historical figures, Fidel Castro wins hands down as the most persistently effective liar of modern times.

  “Castro’s use of propaganda-assets—interviews with journalists, radio broadcasts—during his guerrilla war against Batista contributed in a major way to his victory and was a preview of the methods he would use so successfully after coming to power,” states a declassified CIA document from 1984 titled “Castro’s Propaganda Apparatus.” “Immediately after assuming power,” it continues, “Fidel Castro set out creating a propaganda empire that today is perhaps the most effective in the Western Hemisphere.”

  Sadly, the CIA itself is a victim of Castro’s effectiveness. In 1987, Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga defected in Prague and revealed that every Cuban agent (four dozen of them) the CIA had recruited to spy on the Castro regime since 1962 was a double agent controlled personally by Fidel Castro.6

  But according to Norman Bailey, formerly of the U.S. office of the Director of National Intelligence: “For Castro, being able to influence U.S. policy and elite opinion-makers is even more important than recruiting spies with access to intelligence information.” 7 Foremost among his successes is Castro’s penetration of U.S. media.

  For close to a decade, most of what Americans have read about Cuba has been doctored by Castro-regime “agents of influence” working in concert with the regime’s intelligence service. Let’s hope the CIA has finally caught on. “Useful idiocy” is one thing, deliberate collaboration quite another. We’ll introduce you to the folks in both camps.

  In 1984, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov wrote: “Cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie—these are the most recruitable people for us; people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.”8

  As if nothing in the intervening half-century had called into question the veracity of Castro regime press releases, on August 8, 2009 a CNN “Special Report” on Cuba’s health-care gushed about the island nation’s “impressive health statistics.” The show featured clips from Michael Moore’s so-called documentary Sicko, while CNN’s Morgan Neill, on location at a for-show Havana hospital, reported live. “Cuba’s infant-mortality rates are the lowest in the hemisphere,” he recited, “in line with those of Canada! Cuba can boast about health-care, a system that leads the way in Latin America.”

  Besides plugging Moore’s Sicko, CNN’s “Special Report” also featured medical expert Gail Reed, introduced on screen as “someone who’s lived and worked in Cuba for decades.” “They [the Cubans] concentrate on prevention,” she explained to CNN viewers. “They concentrate on bringing services closer to people’s homes. When I first came to Cuba in the 70’s, I was very impressed with their efforts in building a new kind of society,” Reed explained.

  Most of her companions at the time were also impressed; like Bill Ayers’s wife Bernardine Dohrn. As it happens, Gail Reed visited Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigades, the starry-eyed college kids who visited ostensibly to cut sugar-cane and help build Cuban socialism, a volunteer Peace Corps of sorts. Or so we were led to believe.

  In fact the Venceremos Brigades were a joint venture between Castro’s KGB-mentored DGI (Central Intelligence) and the U.S. terrorist group known as The Weathermen, which included Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Larry Grathwohl.9

  You’ve probably never heard of Grathwohl. But he looked just the part at the time. He was a ringer for Country Joe McDonald of Woodstock fame (“well it’s one two three, what are we fighting for”). But Grathwohl was actually a proud Vietnam combat veteran recently recruited by the FBI and tasked with penetrating the Weathermen.

  CNN’s Morgan Neill could have fluffed up Venceremos brigadista Gail Reed’s credentials by adding that from 1993 to 1997 she was a regular correspondent for Business Week magazine; that from 1994 to 1996 she served as a Havana-based producer for NBC News; and that today she contributes to The Huffington Post. When Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent, interviewed Gail Reed in Havana in April 2012 for an MSNBC report, Mitchell introduced her as “international director of the nonprofit group Medical Education Cooperation.”

  All true. But for the past 34 years Havana resident Gail Reed has also been married to an officer of Cuba’s DGI named Julian Torres Rizo. Reed is also a regular contributor to Granma, which is the Pravda of Cuba. In 1991 Reed was tasked by the Castro regime with writing its official “Island in the Storm: the Cuban Communist Party’s Fourth Congress,” a not inconsiderable honor.10

  She served in all these capacities while working for Business Week and NBC, by the way. Not that any American reader or viewer imbibing her reports on the marvels of Cuba’s health-care and the wicked U.S. blockade of her adopted country might have guessed her background.

  In early 1983, when Grenada’s Marxist leader Maurice Bishop was planning a propaganda tour of the U.S., Castro appointed Gail Reed as Cuba’s special emissary to his new ally. Her job was to advise Bishop on how to handle (i.e., charm and bamboozle) the U.S. media. And let’s face it; who better than Reed’s boss to proffer such advice?

  The partnership between this future CNN, NBC and Business Week correspondent with Castro’s secret police began in 1969 with those visits to Cuba as a member of the (DGI-created) Venceremos Brigades. This was also the beginning of Reed’s romance with DGI officer Julian Torres Rizo. The terrorist offshoot from the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) known as the Weathermen, and staffed most famously by Barack Obama’s future neighbors Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, served as the DGI’s U.S. recruitment officers, and their job proved easy. In that heady Age of Aquarius, hundreds of starry-eyed college kids were volunteering to “help build Cuban socialism” and “fight U.S. imperialism,” mostly by joyfully cutting Cuban sugar-cane.

  Castro’s DGI had other goals in mind. “The ultimate objective of the DGI’s participation in the setting up of the Venceremos Brigades,” says an FBI report declassified in 1976, “was the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.... A very limited number of VB members have been trained in guerrilla warfare techniques, including use of arms and explosives,” the report said. “This type of training is given only to individuals who specifically request it.”

  “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers wrote 30 years later. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”11 Three months after Dohrn’s return from a Venceremos junket to Cuba, the Weathermen were busy in their Greenwich Village townhouse dutifully constructing a huge bomb destined for the Officers Club in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

  But the bomb went off in their hands, blowing three of them to smithereens. So maybe Castro’s bomb-trainers didn’t do enough either? That, or their Weatherman pupils were tragically inattentive during an important session.

  A week earlier, however, a Weatherman bomb had go
ne off as planned in San Francisco’s Park Police Station, wounding nine and killing police officer Brian V. McDonnell. Larry Grathwohl, the Country Joe look-alike and the FBI’s top mole within the Weathermen at the time, testified under oath that Bill Ayers boasted to him that Bernardine Dohrn had planted the bomb. When police raided the Weathermen’s San Francisco bomb-factory they found Dohrn’s fingerprints everywhere, along with those of Bill Ayers himself“12

  Claims years later (especially during the first Obama presidential campaign) by Ayers and Dohrn, that their bombs were merely overgrown firecrackers meant to make noise and attract attention to their humanitarian cause, don’t pan out, Grathwohl says:

  “Bill Ayers specifically stated that the bombs should be placed when and where the greatest number of police officers would be killed. He specified that they should contain shrapnel, nails and wood staples, and should fire off propane tanks. Their intention was unmistakably to kill people. In fact, one of the devices found in the Pine Street bomb-factory location was a voice-activated detonator, meaning that it was designed to explode only at the nearby sound of a human voice.”13

  In September 1970 Larry Grathwohl foiled two more attempts with similar bombs. These were against the Detroit Police Officers Association, whose building was adjacent to a Red Barn Restaurant usually packed with diners, mostly blacks.

  “When I objected to Billy Ayers that more innocent people would be killed in the restaurant,” recalls Grathwohl, “he replied, ‘Innocent people have to die in a revolution.’”

  After the bombings and an FBI crackdown, the Weathermen went underground. According to Grathwohl, this is when Bill Ayers’s services as a conduit between his fellow terrorists and Castro’s DGI really kicked in. The heat was on, so Ayers instructed all comrades, including Grathwohl, to contact the Cuban embassy in Canada and use the code name “Delgado” to communicate with each other and for safe passage to and from Cuba through Czechoslovakia.