Life in Castroland is damn hard for socialist ideologues. It’s a cinch, however, for terrorists and gangsters. Those are Castro’s true friends and cronies.
The amazing thing is that after having been forced to flee from Castro, Cuban Americans in Miami are now condemned by liberals. Liberals typically pronounce the words “Miami Cubans” as if smelling curdled milk, and they inevitably denounce them as Batistianos. “Cuba policy has not been decided in Washington,” harrumphs Bill Press. “It’s been decided in Miami, by former Batista supporters, who lost the revolution to Castro in 1959 and still think they can reverse history.”
11
Or as my late history professor Stephen Ambrose said, “Those rich Cubans fled to Miami and started agitating to go to war in order to reclaim all their ill-gotten property.” Even in some liberal (artistic, intellectual) Cuban exile circles, especially in New York or Spain, digs against Miami’s Cubans are de rigueur on grounds of class. To them, “Miami Cuban” represents what red-state America is to American liberals.
Before Castro, Cuba had a huge middle class—36 percent of Cuba’s population in 1957, according to the United Nations. Most who fled Cuba from 1959 to 1966 were middle class white-collar professionals. The book
Miami: City of the Future
cites a University of Miami study that a majority of south Florida’s Cuban Americans qualified as blue-collar back in the old country. Almost all these Cubans fled with only the clothes on their backs.
In his book
The Spirit of Enterprise
, George Gilder titled a chapter “The Cuban Miracle.” He wrote: “No other immigrant group so inundated a city and transformed it so quickly and
successfully
, while achieving such multifarious business breakthroughs as the nearly 800,000 fugitives from Castro’s regime who made Miami their home after 1960.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1997 Cuban Americans owned 125,300 companies, with annual revenues of $26.5 billion. The 1998 census showed that second-generation Cuban Americans have higher educational and income levels than Americans in general. And of course they vote Republican. No wonder liberals hate them.
CHAPTER NINE
STUPID LIBERALS IN THE CIA
“Castro is not only not a Communist,
he’s a strong anti-Communist fighter.”
1
That’s what the CIA’s reigning expert on Latin American Communism, a genius named Gerry Drecher (who worked under the alias of Frank Bender) said after meeting with Fidel Castro in 1959. Frank Bender also approached Rufo López-Fresquet, Castro’s first economics minister who accompanied Castro on that trip to the U.S., and offered to share his intelligence with Castro in the joint anti-Communist fight.
2
“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas.” That’s Robert Reynolds, who was the CIA’s “Caribbean desk” specialist on the Cuban revolution from 1957 to 1960.
3
“They were all pro-Castro.” That’s another CIA operative in Cuba at the time, Robert Wiecha. “All—and so was everyone in State, except [Republican] Earl Smith.”
4
The CIA is a government bureaucracy like any other, with the same liberal bias, as Cuban Americans know all too well. Many able and patriotic Cubans walked away from the CIA from 1960 to 1962, amazed, aghast, and disgusted that the CIA wanted to work only with Cuban socialists. Former Fidelistas were their favorites. This wasn’t new for the CIA. From the beginning of the Cold War, it made a pet of the Democratic Left.
“We want for Cuba what you want for the U.S.,” exclaimed Rubio Padilla to Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence. “We want free enterprise, the rule of law—not socialism.”
5
Padilla was a medical doctor, a prominent lay Catholic leader, and one of pre-Castro Cuba’s most respected figures. He was untainted by any Batista connection. In fact, he loathed Batista and had worked against him his entire life. Padilla wanted to work with the CIA in the anti-Castro fight. But after seeing the leftist bigotry of the agency, he predicted its efforts would end in disaster and refused to be a part of it. He worked tirelessly for decades, helping destitute exiles and seeking his homeland’s liberation. But he wanted nothing more to do with the CIA.
Unhappily, this antipathy was often mutual. “I’ve dealt with a fairly rich assortment of exiles in the past,” wrote CIA honcho Desmond Fitzgerald. “But none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro—a sculptor in silly putty.”
6
Desmond “Des” Fitzgerald was a Camelot CIA man, Harvard educated and a Kennedy family intimate. “Bobby Kennedy and Desmond Fitzgerald conducted most of their business together at Washington cocktail parties and receptions, rather than in their respective offices,” wrote John Davis in his book
The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster
.
“Des Fitzgerald always called the attorney general ‘Bobby,’ not ‘Mr. Attorney General,’ and he was photographed so often at Georgetown cocktail parties that his CIA cover was probably blown,” said a CIA colleague.
7
When Desmond Fitzgerald talks about “genuine stupidity,” you ought to know that he was the mastermind of many ingenious plots to assassinate Castro. One was to employ an exploding sea conch. Another involved infecting Fidel’s scuba regulator with tuberculous bacilli. Yet another plan was to douse his wetsuit with deadly chemical agents. As we know, none of these panned out. Fitzgerald finally settled on an ink pen with a poison hypodermic tip so thin that Castro wouldn’t feel it when the assassin “accidentally” brushed it against him.
Many of the allegedly stupid Cuban exiles—and many of the CIA’s own lower-level operatives (who were generally on excellent terms with the Cuban exiles)—tried to dissuade Fitzgerald from his ingenious plans. What troubled them more even than the Austin Powers–level brilliance of the schemes was the man Fitzgerald was entrusting with Castro’s assassination. He was immensely proud that he’d set up an “inside job,” recruiting a Cuban official for the deadly deed. The Cuban exiles tried to tell Fitzgerald that man he’d recruited to assassinate Castro was a double agent.
8
The double agent was a Castro intimate named Rolando Cubela. He’d meet Fitzgerald or his subordinates in Brazil or France and then fly back to Havana and report them to his boss, Fidel Castro.
“You think Castro’s just gonna sit on his ass and not retaliate?” snorted Frank Sturgis.
9
Sturgis knew Castro personally from flying arms to Castro during the anti-Batista days. The CIA employed Sturgis as part of its anti-Castro effort. Castro answered Sturgis’s question on September 7, 1963, shrieking: “We are prepared to answer in kind! U.S. leaders who plan on eliminating Cuban leaders should not think that they are
themselves
safe!”
10
(Emphasis mine.)
Lyndon Johnson came to agree with Sturgis. “I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” he said in an off-the-record chat with Howard K. Smith after viewing classified documents. “Kennedy tried to get Castro—but Castro got Kennedy first. It will all come out one day.”
11
General Alexander Haig came to agree with Sturgis too. Haig served as a military aide in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. “As I read the secret report, I felt a sense of physical shock, a rising of the hair on the back of my neck,” Haig wrote. He was reading a classified report one month after the Kennedy assassination. “I walked the report over to my superiors and watched their faces go ashen.” He was told: “From this moment, Al, you will forget you ever read this piece of paper, or that it ever existed.”
12
The classified intelligence report that so rattled Haig detailed precisely how a few days before the Dallas assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, accompanied by Castro intelligence agents, had been spotted in Havana. He’d traveled there from Mexico City.
Haig saw this well before the Warren Commission report was published. Among the few people who knew that Oswald had traveled to Mexico City and visited the Cuban embassy were Cuban exiles: Salvador Diaz-Verson knew it, Carlos Prio knew it, and Emilio Nunez Portuondo knew it. This last got the hair-raising datum from a friend who worked at the embassy. The day after the assassination, Portuondo’s friend, a closet Castro hater, recognized Lee Harvey Oswald’s picture.
“
Asesinos
!” screamed Elena Garro, a Mexican national with friends at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The day after the assassination she stood pointing at the embassy building. “
Asesinos
!” she yelled, convulsing in sobs. She recognized Lee Harvey Oswald too. She’d seen him hobnobbing with Cuban embassy people several days earlier. A friend of Garro’s, a Mexican intelligence agent named Manuel Calvillo, told her to watch it, and even to get out of town for a while. She was in danger from the Communists. Calvillo himself took Elena Garro and her daughter into hiding.
13
“Castro always had his best intelligence people in Mexico City,” says a man who often went up against them, longtime Cuban freedom fighter Raphael “Chi-Chi” Quintero, who today lives in Miami.
The aforementioned Portuondo was well known in diplomatic circles, by the way. He’d been Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-1950s. Portuondo had already made a notorious name for himself when he ripped into the Soviets for their butchery of Budapest in 1956, causing much gasping and coughing from the assembled delegates to the General Assembly.
Immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Portuondo told U.S. intelligence that Oswald had been at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, but he refused to divulge his source. Ironically, on the very day of the Kennedy assassination, Des Fitzgerald was meeting in Paris with double agent Rolando Cubela, giving him the poison ink pen to take back to Havana.
The Central Intelligence Agency was scrupulous about excluding from its anti-Castro fight anyone with experience fighting Castro. Rolando Masferrer’s private army in Cuba,
los Tigres,
specialized in giving the Castroite “rebels” a taste of their own medicine during the rebellion. “Hey, somebody had to fight the Castroites,” snorted Masferrer in an interview years later. “Batista’s army sure wasn’t.”
The CIA wanted nothing to do with the exiled Masferrer. Indeed, Masferrer was jailed in Florida right before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Repeatedly rebuffed by the CIA, the enterprising Masferrer was forming another private army and was poised for an invasion himself.
Or take a Cuban gentleman named Raphael Diaz-Balart. His two sons, Lincoln and Mario, are among the most effective conservative Republicans in Congress today. In May 1955, Batista personally ordered the release of Fidel Castro as part of a general amnesty after Castro had served a measly seventeen months of his fifteen-year sentence. Senator Raphael Diaz-Balart thought Batista’s general amnesty stupid. In a speech in the senate chamber, he said, “Fidel Castro and his group have repeatedly declared from their comfortable prison that they will leave prison only to continue plotting acts of violence and whatever it takes to achieve the total power they seek.” The senator continued, “They have refused to take part in any type of peaceful settlement, threatening both the members of the government and members of the opposition who support electoral solutions to the country’s problems.
“They do not want peace,” Senator Diaz-Balart stressed. “They do not want a national solution. They do not want democracy, or elections, or fraternity. Fidel Castro and his group seek only one thing: power—and total power at that. And they want to achieve that power through violence so that their total power will enable them to destroy every vestige of law in Cuba, to institute the most cruel, most barbaric tyranny... a totalitarian regime, a corrupt and murderous regime that would be difficult to overthrow for at least twenty years.” Diaz-Balart was an optimist. It’s now been more than forty years that Castro has brutalized Cuba. But the senator was right about everything else.
He continued, “This is because Fidel Castro is personally nothing more than a psychopathic fascist.... I believe this amnesty—so imprudently adopted—will bring days, many days, of mourning, pain, bloodshed, and misery to the Cuban people. For Cuba’s sake, I ask God that I be the one mistaken.”
14
Why was Castro in prison to begin with? He’d been jailed for planning and leading the murderous attack on Cuba’s Moncada army barracks—an attack that killed more than a hundred people on July 26, 1953. Not that Castro
personally
had a hand in any of the shooting; he always studiously avoided combat where the enemy might shoot back. “Run!” one former colleague remembers Castro shrieking when Batista’s soldiers unexpectedly defended themselves. “Every man for himself!”
15
“Wait a minute!” said the colleague. “What about the girls? We can’t just . . . ?” (Castro’s July 26 Movement was a progressive bunch, shoving women into combat.) “No time to rescue the girls—no time for that!”
16
Castro gasped as he streaked from the battle zone like a gazelle on steroids.
Sadly, many of the saps Fidel and Raul left behind faced death and torture by Batista’s soldiers. These enraged and undisciplined troops handed Castro his fondest wish: the July 26 Movement now had martyr and victim status, thanks to Cuba’s then-free press. Unfortunately for Cuba, Batista had banned capital punishment. And Cuba had a completely independent judiciary. So Fidel received a pretty light sentence for plotting, leading, and inciting armed violence that left more than a hundred people dead. Actually, the judges who sentenced Castro to fifteen years almost apologized for it. According to Georgie Anne Geyer, Nieto Pineiro-Osorio, the judge who did the sentencing, “was vastly sympathetic to the Castro insurgents.” Some judges, like Manuel Urrutia, voted for acquittal.
17