Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant Page 7

  Today, McGovern tells us that economic sanctions are “unjustifiable” and “always fail.” Fine, let’s rewind to your own congressional voting record in the late 1970s, senator. Let’s stop on your views regarding Rhodesia, Chile, and Nicaragua. Very interesting indeed. Turns out, sir, that you thundered to impose sanctions against all three.

  Liberal Democrats, it turns out are a lot like the Hollywood (and music industry) Left when it comes to double standards about Cuba.

  Carole King sang her little heart out for John Kerry during campaign fund-raisers in 2004. Bonnie Raitt did too, after her first choice, Howard Dean, went screaming out of the primaries. Both Carole and Bonnie have also proudly played in Castro’s Cuba. Carole went in February 2002 and serenaded the Maximum Leader with a heartfelt “You’ve Got a Friend.” Bonnie Raitt visited in March 1999 and stopped hyperventilating just long enough to compose a song in Castro’s honor, “Cuba Is Way Too Cool!” Among the lyrics: “It’s just a happy little island!” and “Big bad wolf [that’s us, folks, the United States] you look the fool!”9

  With Woody Harrelson gyrating beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse—she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots—rasped out her ditty at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. The occasion was “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters” back in March 1999.

  “Rock Against Freedom” sounds much better to me. A beaming Jimmy Buffet came on after Bonnie. Then came Joan Osborne, REM’s Peter Buck, and former Police-men Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland. In between crooning and strumming, these cheeky free spirits all dutifully recited their scripts against the “embargo.” (How did Jackson Browne miss this?) Against South Africa a decade earlier, of course, their script called for an embargo. “I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City!” shouted Bonnie Raitt herself, alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall, and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled “Artists United Against Apartheid.”

  Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, and Julio Iglesias all caught hell from their industry peers for a gig at South Africa’s Sun City resort in 1984. These entertainers’ crime was daring to march out of step with the glitterati’s buffooneries and hypocrisies. Because the fact is that their Sun City gig was at a privately owned and unsegregated resort. But that was different: South Africa wasn’t Communist, and the glitterati prefer Communists.

  Most of the five thousand clapping Cubans in the audience were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. And, of course, these pop stars will gladly play in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. They’ll gladly entertain an audience dedicated to the most murderous ideology in human history. According to researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie Raitt’s and Jimmy Buffet’s very audience had a hand in 110,000 political murders of their own. Maybe these musical hipsters didn’t know that, or know that Castro’s Cuba has the highest emigration, incarceration, and suicide rates for young people on the face of the globe.

  When Cuba’s overall suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand in 1986, it was double Latin America’s average and triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate. Cuban women are now the most suicidal in the world, making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged fifteen to forty-eight. The statistics got so embarrassing that the Cuban government ceased publishing them; they are now state secrets. But we also know that Cuba has the highest (or third highest; the sources differ) abortion rate in the world. The suicide and abortion rates smack of hopelessness and despair.10

  And while Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly sing to the Communist regime, I wonder if they know that owning a Beatles or Rolling Stones record in Cuba was a criminal offense or that effeminate behavior, or wearing blue jeans, or being a man with long hair meant the secret police could dump you in a concentration camp with WORK WILL MAKE MEN OUT OF YOU posted in bold letters above the gate and machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG.11 But the conditions were identical. Like Margaritaville, there’s a lot of “wasting away” in Cuba, but it happens behind barbed wire and from slave labor, disease, malnutrition, beatings, and torture.

  After their performance for Castro’s toadies, the rockers and hipsters were invited to a private reception to meet Fidel himself. Knees weakened, mouths gaped, hearts fluttered, skin tingled, mass incontinence threatened. “We completely lost our composure,” squealed English songstress Ruth Merry. “As we lined up, an excited Andy Summers of the Police stood next to me with his copy of Castro’s History Will Absolve Me. Andy was nervously contemplating asking Castro to sign it—but he finally did! . . . Here were all these huge stars, quaking with anticipation! . . . I lost any composure and degenerated into a heap of nervous giggling for the rest of the evening!”12

  I’m losing my composure too, Ruthie dear.

  “Castro was very gracious,” said a Mr. Cripps of a group named Combo Bravo. “He was dressed in a suit and tie!” “Castro and Mr. Cripps spoke for a few minutes through a translator, and another man was present who knew just about everything there was to know about all of us. A detail of Cuban intelligence that Mr. Cripps found eerie,” noted one of the news reports. “Eerie,” Mr. Cripps? Let me assure you, sir, if you lived in Cuba this minor detail would provide more than a vicarious little jolt.

  And you know how rockers and hipsters are always big on wearing red ribbons to show how much they care about AIDS? Well, Castro’s Cuba cares too. His regime banishes AIDS patients to “sanatoriums” in the countryside, where they are basically left alone to die. “Left alone” is the key phrase here. Think about it, in the words of Kris Kristofferson himself, “Freedom’s just another word for” being left alone.

  Or so it seemed to some of Castro’s subjects. Word got around. “You mean no secret police constantly snooping over my shoulder? You mean no waving a stupid little flag for hours in the plaza while the Maximum Gasbag spouts his idiocies? You mean, I can say what I want? Read what I want?” AIDS suddenly became a disease of choice in Cuba.

  In a film titled Cursed Be Your Name, Liberty, Cuban exile Vladimir Ceballos exposes this grim and almost inconceivable episode. Back in the 1980s, young people in Cuba who listened (or tried to listen) to American rock music—to Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, and Jimmy Buffet—were called roqueros and were special targets of the police. They were constantly harassed, beaten, and jailed. Ceballos’s film documents how more than one hundred of these roqueros deliberately injected themselves with the AIDS virus.

  It sounds stupid, crazy, and horrible, I agree. But to these people, banishment to AIDS sanatoriums was a taste of freedom. One scene shows a roquero AIDS victim holding a small, crumpled American flag. With trembling hands, he scrubs it clean, then drapes it slowly across his emaciated chest. This man preferred death by inches, a lingering death of suppurating sores, constant pain, and eventual dementia to living under the rule of the man Carole King warmly serenaded with “You’ve Got a Friend.” He gave himself AIDS because it bought him a few years of life in the equivalent of a U.S. federal prison. On Bonnie Raitt’s “happy little island,” he reckoned this as freedom.

  Perhaps some of these roqueros are crazy, but are they all that different from the tens of thousands who risk death to paddle into the Florida straits on inner tubes, Styrofoam chunks, and rusty barrels? They know the odds: one in three of making landfall. Errant tides, storms, and tiger sharks await. And the kids who squeeze into the landing gear of transatlantic jets—they know where these planes fly, the altitude, the temperatures. But they see a 70 percent chance of death and a 30 percent chance of escape worth it.

  Way too cool, indeed, Ms. Raitt. And Ms. King? You’ve got a helluva friend.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CASTRO’S MURDER, INCORPORATED

  Rock stars, Democratic congressmen, the Hollywood Left, and the liberal media who tour Cuba usually miss some of the most famous revolutionary landmarks of their host Fidel. La Cabana fortress and its execution range aren’t often on the itinerary, for instance. In January 1959, the gallant Ch
e Guevara immediately identified the moat around La Cabana as a handy-dandy execution pit. Alas, it didn’t serve very handily for burial purposes, and the job of dragging out the hundreds of bullet-shattered bodies soon proved troublesome and messy.

  Not to worry! Again, Castroite ingenuity came to the fore. I defer to an eyewitness here. A prisoner in Castro’s dungeons for fifteen years, Gustavo Carmona reported that “During the mid-1960s, when some prisoners were dragged out and bound to the wooden execution stake, a heavy nylon sack was brought up to their knees. Their shirts sported a black circle eight inches wide at the chest. After the volleys, the sack was pulled up over the prisoner’s head and tied closed to contain the blood, brain, and bone fragments. Then it was dragged off. All very neat.” Just like the recycling bags so favored by the environmental Left!

  By mid-1961, the binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che’s enemies wasn’t enough. Castro’s firing squads demanded that their victims be gagged too, because the shouts of the heroes they murdered badly spooked them. “Their yells, their defiance was a great inspiration. I’ll never forget it,” recalls Hiram Gonzalez, who banged his fists in helpless rage against the bars in his cell.1

  While some prayed and others cursed, the executioners yanked the martyrs from their cells, bent their arms back, and bound their hands. Two more guards came into play. One grabbed the struggling victim’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut.

  In 1961 (the “year of the paredón,” as the Castroites deemed it), a twenty-year-old boy named Tony Chao Flores took his place at the execution stake, but he hobbled to it on crutches. Tony was a photogenic lad, a cover boy, in fact. In January 1959, his smiling face had been featured on the cover of Cuba’s Bohemia magazine (a sort of combination Time-Newsweek-People). In the photo, Tony’s long blond hair dangled over his tanned face, almost to his green gallego eyes. His trademark smirk showed below. The señoritas all swooned over Tony.

  Tony was actually a rebel at the time. He’d fought Batista too, but with a different rebel group from Castro. Still, he’d taken the rebels at their word. Let’s face it; we’re all idealists and a bit gullible at eighteen.

  But within days of marching into Havana, Castro’s deeds began to manifest something different from what the innocent idealists hoped for: mass jailings, mass robbery, firing squads. The Reds grabbed all newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. They banned elections, strikes, private property, and free speech. Each dawn, from one end of the island to the other, Castro and Che’s firing squads piled up the corpses of any who resisted, until fifteen thousand heroes were buried.

  Tony Chao wasn’t one to whimper. Soon he became a rebel against Castro, and a formidable one, employing the same M-1 carbine he had used against Batista. Sadly, the Reds had infiltrated Tony’s group and captured some of his compadres in arms.

  Employing interrogation techniques lovingly imparted by their East German Stasi and Russian KGB mentors, the security forces finally pinpointed Tony’s hideout. Castro and Che’s goons were closing in, and Tony sensed it. He knew they’d come in overwhelming numbers, heavily armed with Soviet weapons. “Those sons of bitches ain’t never taking me alive!” Tony vowed to his freedom fighter brothers.

  At dawn, Tony saw the Reds approaching his hideout and ran upstairs, the high ground, as it were. He grabbed his carbine and a pistol, piled up some ammo, and barricaded himself. The shooting started and turned into a furious firefight. Tony blasted away, casings piling around him, his gun barrel sizzling. He bagged two of Che’s scumbags in the deafening fusillade. But he’d taken seventeen bullets from their Czech machine guns himself, mostly in his legs.

  Reds have always been big on show trials, so they wanted Tony alive. They wanted to display him as a trophy, to humiliate him before the nation as an example of what happens to the enemies of Fidel. And alive they dragged him off. Tony was bleeding badly and contorted with pain, but he wouldn’t shut up. Curses shot from his mouth like bullets from those machine guns. “Cowards!” he snarled at his Communist captors. “Fools!” he taunted. “Idiots! Traitors! Slaves! Eunuchs! Faggots! Sellouts!”

  The Reds took Tony to a hospital and doctors patched him up—not completely, now, just enough to keep him alive until his trial. Then he was dumped in La Cabana’s dungeons and fed just enough to keep him alive. A month later they went through the farce of a trial and the verdict—naturally—was death by firing squad.

  On the way to the stake at the old Spanish fort-turned-prison-and-execution-ground, Tony was forced to hobble down some cobblestone stairs. Again, Tony pelted his captors with dreadful curses and stinging abuse. “Russian lackeys!” Tony yelled again as they dragged him off. “Maricones!”

  Finally, a furious guard lost it. “Cabrón!” (You bastard.) He yanked Tony’s crutch away while another gallant Commie kicked the crippled freedom fighter from behind. Tony tumbled down the long row of steps and finally lay on the cobblestones at the bottom, writhing and grimacing. One of Tony’s bullet-riddled legs had been amputated at the hospital; the other was gangrened and covered in pus. The Castroite guards cackled as they moved in to gag Tony with their tape. Tony watched them approach while balling his good hand into a fist. Then as the first Red reached him—bash, a right across his eyes. The Castroite staggered back.

  The other Castroite rushed towards Tony. Tony got a good grip on his crutch and smashed it into the Red scumbag’s face. “Cabrón!”

  “I’ll never understand how Tony survived that beating,” says eyewitness Hiram Gonzalez, who watched from his window on death row. The crippled Tony was almost killed in the kicking, punching, gun-bashing melee, but finally his captors stood off, panting, and rubbing their scrapes and bruises. They’d managed to tape the battered boy’s mouth, but Tony pushed the guards away before they bound his hands. Their commander nodded, motioning for them to back off.

  Now Tony crawled towards the splintered and blood-spattered execution stake about fifty yards away. He pushed and dragged himself with his hands. His stump of a leg left a trail of blood on the grass. As he neared the stake, he stopped and started pounding himself in the chest. His executioners were perplexed. The crippled boy was trying to say something.

  Tony’s blazing eyes and grimace said enough. But no one could understand the boy’s mumblings. Tony shut his eyes tightly from the agony of the effort. His executioners shuffled nervously, raising and lowering their rifles. They looked toward their commander, who shrugged. Finally, Tony reached up to his face and ripped off the tape.

  The twenty-year-old freedom fighter’s voice boomed out. “Shoot me right here!” roared Tony at his gaping executioners. His voice thundered and his head bobbed with the effort. “Right in the chest!” Tony yelled. “Like a man!” Tony stopped and ripped open his shirt, pounding his chest and grimacing as his gallant executioners gaped and shuffled. “Right here!” he pounded.

  On his last day alive, Tony had received a letter from his mother. “My dear son,” she counseled. “How often I’d warned you not to get involved in these things. But I knew my pleas were vain. You always demanded your freedom, Tony, even as a little boy. So I knew you’d never stand for Communism. Well, Castro and Che finally caught you. Son, I love you with all my heart. My life is now shattered and will never be the same, but the only thing left now, Tony . . . is to die like a man.”2

  “Fuego!” Castro’s lackey yelled the command and the bullets shattered Tony’s crippled body, just as he’d reached the stake, lifted himself, and stared resolutely at his murderers. The legless Tony presented an awkward target, so some of the volleys went wild and missed the youngster. Time for the coup de grace.

  Normally it’s one .45 slug that shatters the skull. Eyewitnesses say Tony required three. Seems the executioners’ hands were shaking pretty badly.

  Compare Tony’s death to the arch-swine, arch-weasel, and arch-coward Che Guevara’s. “Don’t shoot!” whimpered the arch-assassin to his captors. “I’m Che! I�
��m worth more to you alive than dead!”

  Then ask yourselves: Whose face belongs on T-shirts worn by youth who fancy themselves rebellious, freedom-loving, and brave? Then fume and gag at the malignant stupidity of popular culture in our demented age.

  Castro and Che were in their mid-thirties when they murdered Tony. Many (perhaps most) of those they had murdered were boys in their teens and early twenties. Carlos Machado and his twin brother, Ramón, were fifteen when they spat in the face of their Communist executioners. They died singing Cuba’s old national anthem, cursing Che Guevara’s Internationale. Their dad collapsed from the same volley alongside them.

  Hiram Gonzalez was finally released from Castro’s dungeons twenty years after the execution of Tony Chao Flores, and he could finally tell Tony’s story. Enrique Encinosa’s book Unvanquished: Cuba’s Resistance to Fidel Castro gives a stirring roll call of the Cuban patriots murdered by the Castroites. When will liberals stopping fawning over the leader of Cuba’s Murder, Incorporated? When will there be a concert—“Rock for Cuba Libre!”—where Tony Chao Flores’s picture, rather than Che’s or Fidel’s, is the icon? When will Tony’s story, or that of his fellow Cuban heroes, be made into a major Hollywood motion picture?

  Instead, in January 2004, Robert Redford’s film on Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, received much praise and a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival.3 They say this was the only film so raptly received. I wonder how many of those applauding the film on Che Guevara oppose capital punishment, unlike Che himself, who used it against men like Tony Chao Flores? Are there any psychiatrists in the house?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FIDEL’S SIDEKICK: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIST CHE GUEVARA

  “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”