But liberals still love the Cuban tyrant. In November 1995, Castro made a triumphant visit to New York. He was the star speaker and main attraction at the United Nation’s fiftieth anniversary bash—the guest of honor. “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” read a
Newsweek
story that week. It hailed Castro as the “Toast of Manhattan!”
Time
magazine agreed. “Fidel Takes Manhattan!” it crowed.
“Fidel Castro got, by far, the loudest and warmest reception in the [United Nations] General Assembly” wrote
Time
magazine. (The United Nations has been sweet on Castro for a long time, and still is. During an April 2000 summit in Havana, Secretary-General Kofi Annan proclaimed, “Castro’s regime has set an example we can all learn from.”)
26
Castro plunged into Manhattan’s social swirl, hobnobbing with dozens of glitterati, pundits, and power brokers. First off, David Rockefeller invited him to a celebrity-studded dinner at his Westchester County estate.
For Fidel’s convenience, the dinner was moved to the Council of Foreign Relations’ Pratt House on East 68th Street in Manhattan. After holding court for a rapt Rockefeller, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas (chairman of the Archer Daniels Midland Company), and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to media mogul Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of talking heads, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, and Barbara Walters all jostled to hear the Comandante’s every comment, clamoring for autographs and photo-ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass killer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro, and smooched him warmly on the cheek.
27
And the mass murderer had barely scratched the surface of his fan club. According to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, on that visit, Castro received 250 dinner invitations from celebrities, power brokers, millionaires, pundits, and socialites. They could forgive the atheist Fidel for wanting to blow up New York Christmas shoppers in 1962 because most of them had probably never regarded him as a terrorist in the first place.
When Fidel planned his terrorist mass murder in New York, terrorism was virtually unknown to Americans. In 1962, the
New York Times
(and every other newspaper) called the Cuban terrorists “would-be saboteurs” or “revolutionists.” In a way, this was progress, because just three years earlier the
New York Times
had hailed Fidel as “a humanist, a man of many ideals, including those of liberty, democracy, and social justice.”
One of the few newspapers to peg Fidel from the beginning was the national newsweekly
Human Events
, which, like the
New York Times
, is still around. On August 17, 1957,
Human Events
published an article that included an interview with Spruille Braden, former U.S. ambassador to Cuba. Braden called the
New York Times
out by name. The famous Gray Lady, he claimed, was smitten with a dangerous Communist whose name was Fidel Castro.
“Fidel Castro was a ringleader in a bloody uprising in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948,” started the
Human Events
article. “That uprising was engineered and staged
by Communists.
The Colombian government subsequently published documentary evidence of Fidel Castro’s role as a leader. The appearance of this Cuban at the head of the uprising in his own country
stamps the insurrection as Communist.
”
While liberals no doubt snickered at such “McCarthyism” (Joe McCarthy had died only two months before), it was
Human Events
that was the prophetic voice, not the reporting of Herbert Matthews in the
New York Times
.
Human Events
knew what was proved with the blood of the thousands of victims that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara sent to the firing-squad.
“The yells of ‘
VIVA CUBA LIBRE!
. . .
VIVA CRISTO REY!
. . .
ABAJO COMMUNISMO!
’ would make the walls of the fortress tremble every night,” wrote Armando Valladares, who listened from his cell in Havana’s La Cabana prison while waiting his turn at the blood-spattered stake. Luckily, a volley from the firing squad (it varied from five to ten men, each man paid $15 a shot, by the way) never reached Valladares. He served twenty-two years in Castro’s dungeons, fled to America, and wrote an international bestseller about his horrific prison ordeal, titled
Against All Hope
. The international Left tried to discredit Valladares and trash his book. But President Ronald Reagan—a longtime
Human Events
subscriber—read the book and promptly appointed him as the U.S. delegate to the UN’s Human Rights Commission. Who better? Reagan reasoned. International leftists ripped their hair out in exasperation, but Valladares, working under America’s UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, gave Castro hell at the United Nations.
In 1961, the year Valladares had been yanked from his home in a dawn raid and imprisoned on utterly bogus charges, Castro had his firing squads working triple shifts. “They usually started at 1 a.m.,” says former political prisoner Gustavo Carmona. “And the volleys would echo through the prison till after dawn.” Hundreds of Cuban patriots (and dozens of American citizens) crumpled every week. By 1965, so efficient were the firing squads that victims were bound to the stake wearing a white T-shirt with a nice eight-inch black circle on the center of the chest. No excuse for missing the vitals now, muchachos.
Not all these martyrs and heroes bound to the execution stake had the energy to bellow in defiance. Before being dragged to the
paredón
(the wall) and bound to the stake, many had been drained of most of the blood in their bodies. The blood was then sold on the world market. This is according to Dr. Juan Clark, a Bay of Pigs veteran, former Castro political prisoner, and nowadays professor of sociology at Miami-Dade Community College. Dr. Clark’s research into Castro’s blood market has included interviews with dozens of political prisoners and defectors who confirmed the practice. Dr. Clark has written extensively on the issue, in both articles and books.
Why would Castro market blood? Because it is one of his few economic successes. He managed to utterly destroy Cuba’s sugar, tobacco, and cattle industries—all major Cuban exports in the pre-Castro years. The man acclaimed by the
New York Times
as a “humanist, idealist, and Robin Hood” had rendered a nation that once had the eleventh highest living standard—not in the hemisphere, not among tropical countries, but in the world—utterly destitute, utterly bereft of foreign exchange. It is also, apparently, Communist practice. To this day the Red Chinese have a similar policy of recycling useful portions of their execution victims, marketing the bodily organs of prisoners who are shot in the back of the neck.
There are other sources for Castro’s blood-marketing as well—namely, U.S. court records, including those filed by an American woman, Katy Fuller, in the Eleventh Circuit court of Miami-Dade County. Her father was killed by Castro’s firing squads in 1960. Here is a portion of
The Estate of Robert Otis Fuller
v.
The Republic of Cuba
, filed May 5, 2002: “Agents of the Castro Government, acting under orders of the Castro Government, led Bobby Fuller to a firing squad where he was shot and killed after being tortured by having his blood drained from his body. Thereafter, his body was thrown into an unmarked mass grave in an unknown location.”
Here’s another lawsuit filed by an American family against Cuba’s “president,” as Peter Jennings invariably labels him.
28
“In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”
Howard Anderson was a U.S. citizen but had been a resident of Cuba since World War II, when the Navy had stationed him there. Among his other friends was my uncle Carl Brumier, a fellow U.S. Navy fighter pilot. In April 1961, Castro’s goons dragged Anderson from his home in a dawn raid. They always came at dawn.
When people wondered why so many Cuban Americans were emotional over the dawn raid to repatriate Elián González to Cuba—this was one big reason why. There were few Cuban American families that didn’t have a family member, friend, or neighbor dragged off in a dawn raid. The tears in Little Havana over the raid ordered by President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, were tied to terrifying flashbacks of friends who were seized in similar raids and never returned.
Howard Anderson was a successful businessman in Cuba, owning a chain of service stations and a Jeep dealership. He was a happy family man with four children, including a cherubic little blonde girl named Bonnie, then five years old. He was the president of the American Legion’s Havana chapter, and he was beloved by his Cuban neighbors. Howard was everything that Castro’s Communists hated: an athletic, popular American naval veteran living in Cuba; a successful businessman; a happy family man; and a friend to freedom-loving (anti-Communist) Cubans.
Enduring horrible tortures, this courageous man refused to rat out the Cuban freedom fighters. “Death to the American!” screamed Howard Anderson’s Communist prosecutor at his farce of a trial on April 17, 1961. “The prosecutor was a madman,” says a Swiss diplomat who witnessed the trial, “leaping on tables, shrieking, pointing. He called them rotten fruit and declared that the only thing they were good for was to fertilize the land with their carcasses.”
29
Anderson simply glared back.
Two days after his “trial,” Howard Anderson’s turn came. They say he refused a blindfold in order to glare at his executioners. He was probably in shock at the time from the blood draining.
“
Fuego!
” The bullets shattered Howard Anderson’s body at dawn, and vultures swarmed in for the feast.
“Those firing squad volleys rang like a dinner bell to the birds,” says Cuban freedom fighter Hiram Gonzalez, who was imprisoned in La Cabana at the time of Anderson’s murder. “Those firing squads had been going off daily since January 7, 1959, the day Che Guevara entered Havana. It didn’t take long for the birds to catch on. Flocks of them had learned to perch in the surrounding trees and atop the wall that surrounded La Cabana fortress. After the volley, they swooped down to peck at the bits of bone, blood, and flesh that littered the ground. Those birds sure grew fat.” Feeding them as well were young men like Rogelio Gonzalez, Virgilio Companeria, and Alberto Tapia, Havana University students and members of Catholic Action, none over twenty-one years old. They refused blindfolds too, and perished yelling, “Long live Christ the King!” They were just three of fourteen thousand young men that Fidel sent to mass graves.
Howard Anderson’s body was dumped in a mass grave, though his wife discovered the grave and snuck in to put a cross over it. Anderson’s daughter Bonnie grew up to become a CNN reporter. In 1978, her journalistic duties took her to Havana, where Castro was due to release some political prisoners. At a reception, Castro approached Bonnie Anderson, smiled broadly, and asked whether she remembered him, and how was her mother.
Bonnie Anderson was disgusted by Castro—and also by her boss, Ted Turner, who cozied up to the dictator. In early 1997, CNN pledged itself to respectful reporting of the Castro regime. Exactly a week after CNN’s pledge, CNN had the first Havana bureau ever granted to a U.S. network. Last year, by the way, the Andersons won their suit against Castro—and no, Bonnie Anderson no longer works for CNN.
Bonnie Anderson had a very personal reason to know about Castro. So do Cuban Americans. But in the next chapter, I’ll provide a little refresher course about what the liberal apologists forget about the terrorist next door.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CUBAN FÜHRER
Journalists have always been suckers
for Castro. “Castro is honest,” reported
Newsweek
magazine on April 13, 1959. “And an honest government is something unique in Cuba. . . . Castro is not himself even remotely a Communist.”
“We can thank our lucky stars Castro was no Communist,” wrote William Attwood in
Look
magazine on March 3, 1959.
“The Cuba of Fidel Castro today is free from terror.” That’s blonde bombshell Dickey Chapelle in (surprisingly)
Reader’s Digest
, April 1959.
Five hundred and sixty-two men had been riddled by firing squads without trial by this time. Habeas corpus had been abolished. And Cuban jails held five times the number of political prisoners as they had under Fulgencio Batista. For the first time in Cuba’s history, many of the prisoners were women. Their crime? Having been wives, daughters, and mothers of the executed men. Most of these were of humble background, many black.
“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,” continued Chapelle’s story.
“Dickey Chapelle would always bring back the facts,” said Bill Garrett, one of Chapelle’s editors. “No matter how long it would take. Dickey would stick with a story.”
I searched in vain for any updates from La Chapelle regarding Cuba. But a movie on the life of this pioneering feminist journalist is in the works, with Jennifer Aniston in the leading role and Brad Pitt as her love interest. I’ll be sure to check it for “facts.”