The Longest Romance Read online

  “They weren’t out to change the system,” testified Grathwohl. “They were out to destroy it, to completely destroy it. That’s what they said the first time I met them, and that’s what they said the last time I was with them.”

  “You come from a society that must be destroyed,” stressed Julian Torres Rizo to the Venceremos brigadistas he was training in Cuba to make bombs, as he’d been trained by the KGB. This boyfriend and future husband of CNN, Business Week, NBC and Huffington Post correspondent Gail Reed then admonished: “It’s your job to destroy your society.”14

  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.

  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?

  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

  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:

  Mario Chanes (30 years), Ignacio Cuesta Valle (29 years), Antonio Lopez Munoz (28 years), Indasio Hernandez Pena (28 years), Alberto Fibla (28 years), Pastor Macuran (28 years), Roberto Martin Perez (28 years), Roberto Perdomo (28 years), Teodoro Gonzalez (28 years), Jose L. Pujals (27 years), Miguel Alvarez Cardentey (27 years), Eusebio Penalver (28 years).

  No? None of these names rings a bell? And yet their suffering took place in a country only 90 miles from U.S. shores, in cells and torture-chambers off-limits to inspection by the Red Cross and Amnesty International, unlike apartheid South Africa’s. An association of these Cuban heroes, representing 3,551 years in Castro’s prisons and torture-chambers, resides in the U.S. today.

  Shortly before his death in 2006, one of those ex-prisoners, Eusebio Penalver, granted this writer an interview. “For months I was naked in a six-by-four-foot cell,” recalled Eusebio. “That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But they never succeeded in branding me as common criminal, so I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.”2

  In light of this totalitarian secrecy by their torturers, these revelations would seem of immense interest and value. In fact most of the ex-prisoners reside in New York City and Miami, a short cab ride from most mainstream media studios. They’d be easy to contact for dramatic interviews, inspirational human-interest segments, etc.

  Also note that all of the above suffered prison as long as or longer than Nelson Mandela. Ninety or more miles from U.S. shores, they suffered at the hands of a Stalinist regime that craved to nuke the U.S. But none has ever been featured in a U.S. mainstream media report. Apparently the media perceive no human-interest quotient for U.S. viewers in any of this.

  Yet when Nelson Mandela, who suffered his prison term at the hands of a segregationist regime eight thousand miles away, first visited the U.S. in 1990, the media-watchdog group Accuracy in Media termed his tumultuous media coverage “Mandela Mania.” “The hero of oppressed people everywhere!” hailed ABC. “A larger-than-life figure!” gushed CNN. “A virtual symbol of freedom!” crowed CBS. “His name has a mystical quality!” gushed Dan Rather. “A worldwide hero!” continued “Gunga Dan” Rather, who went on to compare Mandela to Mother Teresa.

  Other reports compared Mandela to the Pope, Jesus Christ and Moses. The New York Times devoted 23 pages to laudatory articles on Saint Mandela in one single week. Ted Koppel hosted an ABC “Town Meeting” with Mandela where every question was sugar and spice and everything nice.3

  All the networks that were responsible for the tumultuous coverage of a South African political prisoner have been granted news bureaus in Havana by the regime that created the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history. But none of the latter has ever been featured in those networks’ reporting.

  Interestingly, at the very time of his adulatory U. S. media coverage, the U.S. State Department listed Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) as a terrorist organization. Today the U.S. State Department still lists Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

  Moral: if you want U.S. mainstream-media encomiums, be a foreign terrorist rather than a Cuban-American victim of the terrorists who craved to nuke the U.S.

  OK, let’s try the names of some women political prisoners who were jailed and tortured for years and even decades by Fidel Castro’s regime. This totalitarian horror, by the way, was utterly unknown in the Western Hemisphere until introduced by the man swooned over by Barbara Walters and A
ndrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer. Here’s a handful of the thousands of ladies who suffered in Castro’s prisons and torture chambers: Ana Rodriguez, Miriam Ortega, Isabel Tejera, Nelly Rojas, Olga Morgan, Maritza Lugo, Georgina Cid, Caridad Roque, Sara Del Toro, Mercedes Pena, Aida Diaz Morejon, Agata Villarquide, Alicia Del Busto, Albertina O’Farrill.

  Again the names are all unfamiliar, right? Yet these ladies all live in the U.S. today, mostly minutes from mainstream media studios. But no producer for Oprah or Joy Behar or Katie Couric, none from the Lifetime or Oxygen TV, much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either. And for obvious reasons; “The Real Grandmaws of Miami” just doesn’t interest Bravo TV.

  Women’s prison conditions were described by former prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure three feet wide by six feet long. The toilet consisted of an eight-inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter; especially in cool temperatures the rats come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies, and we were often bitten. For week’s we’d be locked up in total darkness with a little cup of filthy water daily to drink. Nothing to wash or to flush the excrement and vermin-crammed hole that passed for a toilet. Nothing to wash away the menstrual fluid that caked to our legs. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

  Indeed a study found that, by 1986, Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand—making it double Latin America’s average, making it triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, and with Cuban women the most suicidal in the world.4