The Longest Romance (13 page)

I guess “left-wing death squads” just doesn't have the same ring to it as the other Latin American type, so often and reflexively condemned by literati. That the Cuba Archive Project has already documented (by name) almost triple the number of murdered and “disappeared” by Castro and Che Guevara's death-squads as the estimate of those disappeared by Pinochet's just doesn't register among the enlightened. George Plimpton's deputy editor provided the perfect example. It's worth quoting him again: “I didn't quite believe him. Quite simply, I'd never heard a word about such executions.”

According to the internationally acclaimed
Black Book of Communism,
16,000 executions took place 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Cuba swarmed with foreign reporters and Hollywood producers.

But in Linville's defense, and assuming he relied on the mainstream media for news and history, where would he have heard of them?

By 1964, with the egg on his face crusting into a thick layer, even
The New York Times
began rejecting Herbert Matthews's Cuba articles, whereupon I.F. Stone stepped up to the plate, citing Matthews's “outstanding history of reporting” on Cuba. “Report on Cuba The New York Times Was Afraid to Print,” he titled a Matthews article of February 1964 in his
I.F. Stone's Weekly.
“Fidel Castro is one of the most extraordinary men of our age,” the article starts. “The U.S. has paid heavily for a shocking underestimation of his intelligence and abilities.”

Declassified Soviet documents expose I.F Stone as a full-fledged KGB agent from 1936 to 1939 and a desultory “agent of influence” for the rest of his life. This was again shown by declassified KGB documents in a book published by Yale University Press, not exactly a propaganda arm for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Does anyone else notice some commonalities among Herbert Matthews's friends and champions?

CHAPTER 9

“C
astro's is a revolution of youth.” (Herbert Matthews)
¹

The notion of Castro's Cuba as a stiflingly Stalinist nation never quite caught on among the enlightened. Instead the island often inspires hazy visions of a vast commune, rock-fest or Occupy encampment, studded with free health clinics and with Wavy Gravy handing out love-beads at the entrance. The regime was founded by beatniks, after all. In 1960 Jean-Paul Sartre hailed Cuba's Stalinist rulers as
“les enfants au pouvoir”
(the children in power). A few months earlier Fidel Castro spoke at Harvard on the same bill as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. And ever since then, long-haired Che Guevara has reigned worldwide as top icon of youthful rebellion.

“They saw in him,” writes Camelot court scribe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system.....”
²

In fact the brain-shackled robot Fidel Castro and Che Guevara tried to create with their firing squads, forced-labor camps and Stalinist indoctrination makes the Eisenhower era's Organization Man look like a combination of Jimi Hendrix and Jack Kerouac.

“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!” declared Che Guevara in a famous speech in 1961. “The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible,” commanded this
icon of flower-children. “Instead the young must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”
³

Youth, wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass.” Those who chose their own path (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-imperialist rock‘n' roll) were denounced as worthless delinquents and herded into forced-labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point. In a famous speech, Che even vowed “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals,” he raved.
⁴

And if the Eisenhower era's Organization Man often brought some of his work home, the Castroites sought to outdo him a thousand-fold. “Our revolutionaries,” Che Guevara wrote in his “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” “have children who with their first faltering words do not learn to call their father; wives who must be part of the general sacrifice necessary to carry the revolution to its destination. Their circle of friends is strictly limited to the circle of revolutionary companions. There is no life outside the revolution. A father who devotes himself to the revolution cannot be distracted by the thought of what his child needs, of his worn shoes, of the basic necessities which his family may lack.”

Castro, said Camelot scribe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had “summoned a dozen friends and overturned a government of wicked old men.”

“I'm going back to Cuba to kill Che Guevara!” snarled Jose Castano (then 17) to fellow paratrooper Manel Menendez (then 23). These youths were then in Guatemala, training as members of Brigade 2506 for what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.
⁵

Che Guevara had personally tortured and murdered Jose's father two years earlier. Needless to add, Jose Castano, Sr. had been
completely defenseless at the time. To Jose's 16-year-old son, Che Guevara—twice his age at the time—was a very wicked old man.

Herbert Matthews had declared that “Castro's is a revolution of youth” at around the time Jose, Manel and hundreds of other Cuban youths were training to overthrow Castro. “If a label must be given he is a pre-scientific Utopian socialist, not a Marxist.”

The average age of the thousands of men murdered by firing squad during this overturning of wicked old men was probably about 25. During a two-week period in August 1964, 477 men were murdered by Castro's firing squads. Not a single victim had been affiliated with the wicked Batista regime. Most, in fact, had fought it. Many, perhaps most, of the murdered men were younger than Castro and Che by a decade and had been early members of Castro's own rebel army and government.
⁶

Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when a volley from Castro's firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father crumpled beside Carlos from the same volley and tumbled into the same mass grave. Felicito Acosta, Lorenzo Espino, Justo Garcia Jr., Efrain Brizuelas and Jesus Carrillo were all 16 when they died by Soviet-armed firing squad in the same area. Lorentino Pelaez Jr., Tito Sardinas and Juan Blanco were 17. Emeterio Rodriguez and Ruben Acosta were 15. Antonio Ruiz Acosta and Luis Gonzalezwere each 14 when the Castroite volley tumbled them into a mass grave.
⁷

These Cuban teenagers (along with thousands of others) had joined their fathers, uncles and cousins to resist the plans of Soviet advisors three and four times their age to steal their families' small farms and build a Stalinist
kolkhoz.

Jose Ramon Cruz was four years old when Castro and Che marched into Havana in 1959. As a teenager he took to writing mildly ribald graffiti on some of the walks of his home town of Camaguey. Unfortunately his brand of humor was completely lost on Castro's Stasi-tutored police, who repeatedly jailed and beat him. In 1971 Jose organized a public protest against his revolutionary
treatment. Castro's police quickly showed up, and this time they shot him to death. The beloved teenagers' funeral was a crowded, noisy event that required Castro's Soviet T-34 and Stalin tanks to rumble into the area, quell the hooliganism and restore order. A mini-Budapest in the tropics.

Among Jose Castano and Manel Menendez's band of brothers in Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs invasion was 16-year-old Felipe Rodon, who on April 17
^th
, 1961 grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face point-blank one of Castro's Soviet tanks on the bloody Bay of Pigs beachhead. At 10 yards Felipe fired at the clanking monster and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and the Soviet tank, sent to Cuba by the fat and wicked old men in the Kremlin, rolled over little Felipe.

Gilberto Hernandez was 17 when a round from a Czech burp-gun put out his eye on that same beachead. Castro troops were swarming in but he held his ground, firing furiously with his recoilless rifle for another hour until the Soviet-trained Castroites finally surrounded him and killed him with a shower of grenades.

When he hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Jose Antonio San Roman, the commander of Brigade 2506, was 27 years old. His second-in-command, Erneido Oliva, was 27. The political delegate of the exiles' provisional government, Manuel Artime, was 28.

Among the leaders of the anti-Castro Cuban underground of the time were Rogelio Gonzalez, Alberto Tapia, and Virgilio Campaneria. None was older than 26 in 1961 when murdered by Soviet-armed firing squads. Seventeen other college kids were murdered by Castro and Che's firing squads that week in early 1961. Far from belonging to Batista's “wicked old men,” all these youngsters had fought against the Batista regime. In utter vain will you search for any mention of this by
The New York Times
or the media in general.

As for foreign commentators on the Cuban revolution, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., et al., weren't merely wrong; they were smugly propounding the very opposite of the truth.
Cuban “children” were in positions of power all right, but as armed opponents of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. These youngsters were also paying for their bravery with their lives—and by the thousands. The ones captured stood tall, proud, defiant and silent through ghastly torture by Castro's secret police, then being tutored by wicked old men from the Kremlin (KGB). But the Cuban kids went to their deaths before Castro's firing squads while defiantly yelling “Down with Communism!”

“The defiant yells of ‘Down with Communism!' made the walls of La Cabana prison tremble,” recalls an eyewitness to these firing-squad massacres, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro's prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission. Valladares himself was 21 when jailed for the counterrevolutionary crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. During Cuba's “reign of terror”—Batista's dictatorial rule, according to Herbert Matthews—such a crime would have elicited mere chuckles from those wicked old men.

For the above crime, and in a secret trial, Castro's judicial apparatchiks gave Valladares a 30-year prison sentence. Before, during and after this trial the Castro regime jailed tens of thousands of political prisoners for crimes similar to that of Valladares. For planting bombs in public places—and during an open trial crammed with international observers—an independent judiciary gave the same sentence, 30 years, to Nelson Mandela. The segregationist regime of South Africa was often suspended from the UN for its human-rights violations. Castro's regime, on the other hand, went on to chair the UN Human Rights commission.

Felix Rodriguez was 17 when he first volunteered to fight the wicked old men (almost twice his age) who had taken over Cuba in 1959 with the help of the wicked older men in the Kremlin. As a 19-year-old member of Brigade 2506, Felix infiltrated Communist Cuba weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, organizing underground freedom-fighters, planning for the sabotage of key roads
and bridges, staying a step ahead of the Castro's secret police and their KGB handlers and coaches, as 58-year-old Herbert Matthews shilled for them in the U.S. media. Almost half of his comrades in the infiltration teams (all in their early 20's) died in front of firing squads, after torture. Nineteen-year-old Felix Rodriguez knew the odds. He volunteered anyway.

After the Best and Brightest had stabbed the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters in the back, Rodriguez again foiled the Communist dragnet by slipping into the Venezuelan embassy and escaping a year later to Florida. After the Best and Brightest stabbed them again and twisted the blade with the Kennedy-Khrushchev swindle that supposedly solved the Missile Crisis, Rodriguez, along with hundreds of his Brigade 2506 brothers, enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Later, as a CIA operative, Rodriguez played the key role in tracking down and capturing Che Guevara in Bolivia and was the last to question him. “Finally,” at age 26, “I was face to face with the assassin of thousands of my countrymen, of hundreds of my patriot friends,” recalls Rodriguez. His captive Che Guevara was almost 40 at the time; in Felix's eyes he was among the wickedest of the old men who had converted his homeland into a joyless, stifling police state and satrapy of the even older men in the Kremlin.

But remove the wispy beard and beret from Che Guevara and you've got Jim Morrison of The Doors. In 1959, Raul Castro with his blond ponytail was a ringer for Joe Walsh circa “Hotel California.” Yank the cowboy hat from Camilo Cienfuegos's head and you've got the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia. Put a green army cap on Cream's drummer Ginger Baker, darken his thin beard a bit, and there's Fidel Castro himself.

So these Cuban Stalinists were on the cutting edge of fashion. They pre-empted the Haight-Ashbury look by a decade. In any picture with them, Nikita Khrushchev looks as far out of place as the frumpy Ed Sullivan introducing the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane on his stage. But in fact the fat, bald, boorish Butcher of
Budapest was the main patron, bankroller and soul-mate of these young, hirsute, hard-core Cuban Bolsheviks.

And woe to Castro's subjects who attempted the “Heepee” look and lifestyle when it really kicked in a few years later!

“These youths walk around with their transistor radios listening to imperialist music!” raved Fidel Castro as he denounced rock ‘n' roll in a 1968 speech. “They corrupt the morals of young girls and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? No! There's nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!”
⁸