Happy Birthday Fidel ! (S.F.Sentinal)

[White_Male_Canada]

No joke,americans celebrate communism:

Happy Birthday Fidel

San Franciscans honor the life of the world`s longest reigning

revolutionary leader...

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/news_in_brief/happy_birthday_fidel_060814.shtml

[chefmike]

It is surprising that the people turned on Batista, isn't it? He sounds like he was a swell guy...

Some excerpts from:

Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr. The Real CIA. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.
Chapter 7

Batista's Cuba

Fidel Castro had taken over the government of Cuba on January 1, 1959. By the time Batista fled Havana, he had lost the support of most of the Cuban people as the result of the progressive tyranny and terror he imposed in a frustrated and futile effort to suppress the July 26 movement. I was very familiar with this as I had made trips to Cuba in 1956, 1957, and 1958 in an effort to help the government establish an effective organization to fight Communism and had watched the progressive deterioration of Batista's strength.

I decided to personally direct an inspection of activities in Latin America and mapped out a six-week trip that started in Havana and ended in Mexico City and included every country on the continent. When I went over the itinerary with the then Director Allen Dulles, he noted the stop in Havana and said he thought this would be a good opportunity to cash in on a promise that President Fulgencio Batista of Cuba had made to his brother, the Secretary of State. Batista had told Foster Dulles that he would organize an effective agency to cope with Communist activities in Cuba. In June of 1956 little had been done except to funnel some money into an organization that existed only on paper. It appeared that most of the money never reached the proper destination.

"Our man in Havana" greeted me at the airport with some disquieting news. It seemed that Ambassador Arthur Gardner, a wealthy Michigan manufacturer by background, had issued orders that no one in the embassy was to have any contact with those elements in the Cuban political spectrum who opposed Batista. This made good sense from the ambassador's point of view. He was accredited to the Cuban government. United States policy at the time was to give full support to the Batista government, and this included military assistance. Fidel Castro had landed with a few men in the Sierra Maestra and was attracting considerable interest and some support throughout Cuba. The government was concerned by anybody who talked to Castro sympathizers and felt that any dealings with the American embassy by Castro sympathizers would provide support and encouragement to Batista's opposition. Ambassador Gardner wanted to keep relations with the government as smooth as possible, and the easiest way was to prohibit any such contacts.


The visit to the Presidential Palace was one that would not be easy to forget. Just three months before some students had attempted a raid on the palace in an effort to assassinate President Batista. They had succeeded in reaching the second floor on their way to the private quarters on the third floor before they had been stopped by the guards, and consequently extensive new security precautions had been instituted. The ambassador's limousine, flying the American flag from its front fender, was more than a block from the palace when we were stopped at a barbed-wire barricade by a soldier with a tommy gun slung casually across his arm. We were stopped twice more before we finally reached the palace.

Minister Santiago Rey then escorted us into the President's office. I was interested in seeing Batista, as I had read about him for years and had been refreshing my memory with some research. I was particularly interested in observing how this ex-army sergeant who had twice seized power would conduct himself. He had now been President for four years, having staged a coup in 1952 when it appeared that he would fare no better than third in the legitimate election.

Batista came to the door to greet us and to shake hands. His English was very good, undoubtedly considerably helped by his exile in Florida. He too was in spotless white and looked cool, calm, and collected. He sent for coffee and offered us Cuban cigars. He and Ambassador Gardner then started to talk about the portrait of Jose Marti, which hung on the wall, and how it could be better lighted. I remembered that Marti had been one of the leaders of the movement in Cuba for independence from Spain and that like Fidel Castro he had also landed in Oriente Province at the eastern end of the island and tried to build up a guerrilla force. I wondered whether Batista was thinking of this similarity as they were talking. Or maybe he was remembering that Marti had been killed before Cuba was free.

After the coffee and cigars President Batista startled us by suggesting a group picture as a souvenir of the occasion. Over the years I had grown allergic to cameras in the hands of others, but did not know whether one should insult a chief of state by refusing to have a picture taken with him. I looked hopefully at Ambassador Gardner, hoping he would have a ready and diplomatic out at his fingertips, but he was already agreeing. I turned desperately to "our man in Havana," but he was quietly disappearing into the drapery. So I was had. After the cameraman had snapped his quota I laughingly noted that this was something unusual for me and that I hoped these were only for our personal files to commemorate a memorable and hopefully profitable occasion. Oh, yes, I was assured, that was all. As soon as we were alone afterward I clamped a firm grip on my colleague's arm and told him to get those pictures. He shook his head sadly and started his telephone calls. The next day the picture was in eleven Havana dailies describing the call as official and identifying me by name, title, and organization. Thus I found myself being used to bolster a shaky and increasingly unpopular regime.

My third and last trip was in September 1958. There was still a strong desire to strengthen the BRAC and make its work against the Communists more effective. We also wanted to see whether we could not do something about the increasing number of Soviet freighters and sugar ships that were visiting Cuban ports. To this end I took along an expert who not only was bilingual in Russian, but also had spent considerable time during World War II in the Navy helping to train the crews of the Soviet merchant marine. We thought there was the possibility that he could encounter some of his former trainees in Cuba and be able to establish some profitable contacts.

But we started to learn about the change in the situation on the drive in from the airport, and then listened for several hours through drinks and dinner after we arrived at the apartment. It was a story of the progressive deterioration of the strength of the Batista government and an increase in strength of the opposition crystallizing around the July 26 movement of Fidel Castro. It was now a vicious and deadly cycle. As the terrorism of the opposition increased, the brutality of the police and military intelligence people became more horrible. I was told that the Bohemia, then one of the most popular picture-news weeklies in Cuba and widely circulated in Latin America, had been trying secretly to keep a tally of those tortured to death or executed by the police, and now estimated that as many as ten a week were killed in Havana alone.

I was skeptical, as my friends had known I would be. They had brought pictures to prove it. These photographs had been taken by a doctor of a woman who had come to him for treatment. She was a schoolteacher and had been arrested with one of her male students on suspicion of plotting against the government. They were taken by the police to a prison where they had been tortured. She had been severely beaten and he had been pounded into unconsciousness. They had been released because the teacher's sister fortunately had friends in high enough positions in the government to open the prison doors. The doctor who treated the woman said he had never seen a human body more mistreated. He had taken the pictures, with her permission, because there were still some who did not believe or realize what was going on. The horrible wounds on the woman's body were convincing, as were the reports of case after case of the sons of prominent Cuban families who had joined either the students' organization or the July 26 movement and had been arrested and killed.

It was this type of atrocity that was costing Batista the last of his support among the people of Cuba. Originally the Castro movement had attracted only the rabble fringe, the extreme left, and those elements of students who were always revolutionary. It was known that there were some Communists with him in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Vilma Espin, who had been known as a Communist when she attended graduate school in the United States, was there; she was later to marry Raoul Castro. Che Guevara, a known Argentine revolutionary, was there. And it was known that Fidel himself had participated in the Bogotazo, the riots in the capital of Colombia in 1948 that had disrupted the inter-American conference. It was hard to determine how many of Castro's hard-core guerrillas were Communists, or how powerful were the Communists in the July 26 movement. Castro had been known as a revolutionary since his student days at the University of Havana and had achieved notoriety for his unsuccessful attack on the Army barracks at Moncada on July 26, 1953, the date for which his movement was named. But we were not sure whether he was an avowed Communist.

By the fall of 1958 it was estimated that 80 percent of the people had turned against the Batista regime, and while probably nowhere near that percentage supported the July 26 movement, it was rapidly gaining greater support throughout Cuba. Only the army stood between Batista and disaster.

I asked how the army was doing in its operations against the guerrillas and was told that it was not fighting. Only rarely did it venture from its barracks and obviously was very reluctant to move into the hills to seek out the rebels. It was the usual pattern of a rising rebel force: ambushes of army columns, hit and run attacks, assassinations, and sabotage.

Castro's strength in the Sierra Maestra was steadily increasing. Raul Castro was now commanding another force in the Escambray Mountains in Central Cuba, and Che Guevara reportedly had a third column in the west in Las Villas Province. They were able to live off the land as they treated the campesinos well and got their support--intelligence as well as food--and then were able to ambush government trucks, cut communications and supply routes, and move around themselves with relative impunity.

I inquired as to the progress of BRAC and was given the discouraging report that it had gone the way of the other Cuban intelligence agencies. It was now concentrating almost exclusively on the Castro organization and using violence in its interrogations, despite our constant protests. The only encouraging note was that its fourth chief was a respected former police officer who had served in the United States and who would do the right thing if so ordered.

On leaving Ambassador Smith's office I made my way to all sections of the embassy to get their views: the Political Section, Military Attaches, Public Affairs Officer (USIA), Legal Attache (FBI), and many others. With little variation it was the same story that I had heard the night before--a government out of touch with the people and the situation, hanging on desperately and hoping for a miracle. The minute the army wavered it would collapse.

There were two particularly memorable meetings that bear mentioning. I did not want to attract attention by going to the BRAC building. My picture taken with Batista the previous year had been attention enough, and a wheel chair is hard to disguise. So we asked Colonel Mariano Faget, the chief of BRAC, to come to the embassy. He was cooperative, informative, and obviously apprehensive over the situation. I admired the way in which he told me the facts without being in any way disloyal to the regime. When I told him of my concern over reports of brutality in his organization, he held out his hands in the classical gesture of despair. When I asked if it would help if we protested to Minister Santiago Rey in the hopes that it would get to Batista, he urged that I do so. We did exactly that and the memo that I handed Santiago Rey was very blunt.

The second meeting scared me to death. I was told that there was an important man who insisted on seeing me at the hotel and that it was vital that I do so, listen to him, and ask him all the questions that came to mind. I asked John Topping, the very able political counselor of the embassy and a Foreign Service officer with considerable experience, whether he thought I should see the man, and he urged me to do so.

My guest arrived at the apartment in the late afternoon. He was a prominent Havana professional man, who had never been engaged in politics and who had an impeccable reputation for honesty and integrity. He had had enough, had joined the July 26 forces, and was now one of their leaders in Havana. His life wouldn't have been worth anything if these facts were known and he had been apprehended by the Batista police.

We offered him a drink. He didn't drink. He did smoke, almost without stopping. And he talked about the political situation in Cuba for almost two hours and then answered my questions for another hour. I breathed a sigh of relief when he left and was glad he wasn't picked up while meeting with us. He never was!

When he left I drafted a cable to Washington. It created quite a stir in the Agency when it arrived, but perhaps not enough. It was probably the most precisely prophetic cable I ever wrote. For obvious reasons I cannot, and would not, quote its exact text, but essentially after reporting at some length on the situation in Cuba as mentioned above, it said that it appeared that the army was disintegrating and that it was unlikely that Batista could last to the end of the year. ( He fled Cuba December 31 )

The situation in Cuba deteriorated rapidly in the fall of 1958. Everybody feared the unrest and bloodshed that might follow the overthrow of Batista, and there was considerable discussion of what to do about it. It was finally decided to ask William Pawley, a former ambassador who had had many business interests in Cuba and was a personal friend of Batista, to undertake a special mission to Havana. His objective was to convince Batista to step aside for a military junta in order to avoid a blood bath. It was felt that a junta offered the best possibility of bringing peace to the troubled island. There was debate on which generals would be able to wisely restore order. The problem was made the more difficult because they had to be acceptable to Batista or he would never yield to them, yet they could not be too closely identified with the President or they would be unable to deal with the rebels. The Secretary of State also decided that Ambassador Smith in Havana, for his own effectiveness, should not be told about the effort.

Despite William Pawley's persuasive best, Fulgencio Batista was not yet ready to turn over the government. He didn't believe that the situation was as bad as Pawley described it and felt that the army would still be able to turn back the Castro forces.

What it all seems to add up to is that Fidel Castro is a revolutionary, who originally had no precise political philosophy and who turned Communist when the Communists seemed to offer him the most support. He started in the hills of Cuba with relatively few followers and little support. He treated the peasants well; promised them what they wanted. He appealed to the students and gradually won their support as they became more and more disenchanted with the corruption of the Batista government and the increase in repressive measures. The Cuban army didn't want to fight anyway, and by treating prisoners fairly and concentrating attacks on the officers he eventually succeeded in breaking its resistance.

When Castro took over the government of Cuba the Communists, already strong in his movement, went to work in earnest, taking over the key spots. The moderates who dominated his early government were gradually forced out or, repelled by his measures, left. By 1960 Cuba was in all respects a Communist country.

The question then before the American government was what to do about it. There was wishful thinking--as there has been about every Communist takeover--that Castro could not last. But every day that passed belied this, as he got stronger and established himself more firmly in power. The United States had outlived the day of "dollar diplomacy" and had renounced intervention in the internal affairs of other nations by the use of force. But there was almost a frantic desire in Washington to get rid of Castro, and perhaps it was only natural that the effort should be made by irregular means--after all, that was how Castro himself had gotten in. If the United States could assist the Cuban exiles in developing paramilitary forces, perhaps these could land in Cuba and overthrow him just as he had overthrown Batista.

Thus was born the Bay of Pigs.

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cuban-rebels/kirkpatrick.htm

No joke,americans celebrate communism:

Happy Birthday Fidel

San Franciscans honor the life of the world`s longest reigning

revolutionary leader...

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/news_in_brief/happy_birthday_fidel_060814.shtml


No joke agreed. Yet another reason the left is losing it's power base.

Truth be evident, the liberal left is de facto communist. From wealth transfer schemes like prop 87 to language control laws like "hate crime" legislation.

They can't compete in the market place because they're weak. Instead, they'll legislate themselves a wage, legislate themselves a favorable marketplace and subjugate their constituents with welfare, free drug needles and affirmative action....

As a brown man, I am insulted that liberals think I need a head start in the marketplace in order to compete.

They're condescending and arrogant (and as we all know, arrogance is empty confidence and lost votes)

[specialk]

[quote="TFan



As a brown man, I am insulted that liberals think I need a head start in the marketplace in order to compete.

They're condescending and arrogant (and as we all know, arrogance is empty confidence and lost votes)[/quote]

The only thing "brown" about you "Tfan" a.k.a "your racist", is your eyes, because that's how full of shit you are!!! :P :P

[Jamie Michelle]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods47.html

The Real Fidel

A Discussion With Humberto Fontova

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

[July 20, 2005]

Humberto Fontova is the author, most recently, of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant. [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895260433/lewrockwell/ ] Thomas Woods, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, recently spoke to him about it.

Woods: I think what surprised me most about your book was your discussion of the social and economic status of Cuba before Castro took power. You are critical of Batista, so you cannot be accused of being an apologist for him--though I'm sure you have been anyway--but the statistics you marshal seem rather at odds with what we hear from, say, Ed Asner and Chevy Chase.

Fontova: These stats always blow people away. Prior to Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. In the 20th century before Castro, Cuba took in more immigrants (per capita) than any country in the Western hemisphere--more than the U.S including the Ellis Island years. In 1958 the Cuban embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. From 1903–1957 Cuba took in over one million Spanish immigrants, and 65,000 from the U.S. Notice: pre-Castro Cuba's wetbacks came from the first world.

People used to jump on rafts--primarily from Jamaica and Haiti--in order to get into Cuba. Now, not only do people risk their lives to flee (2 million as of 1992), but half-starved Haitians a mere 60 miles away turn up their noses at the place.

We always hear and read about those Asian economic "tigers" right? Well, in 1958 Cuba had double Taiwan's per capita income. Cuba had one much higher than Japan's too, higher than Austria's, than Italy's--hell, higher than half of Europe's, not to mention the rest of Latin America. Boy did we--with a little help from our friends in the U.S. State Dept. and CIA--screw up!

I refer to Batista's replacement when I say "screwed up." Batista was--as I call him in the book--a political hoodlum. Most middle-class Cubans found him distasteful, but regarding everyday life and commerce, he was an irrelevancy. Indeed Cuba had its two top years economically in 1957–58, when according to the New York Times and pinks in general, not only was Cuba "horribly impoverished," but "wracked by a ferocious civil war"!

Tell it to the immigrants clamoring to get into Cuba and to the tourists, New York Times. Cuba had its top year tourist-wise in 1958. Which is not to say Cuba was the "playground" pinks always claim it was for U.S. tourist debauchery. In fact, in 1957 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. than Americans in Cuba! Biloxi, Mississippi today has three times as many gambling casinos as all of Cuba in 1958.

Now to poor, and especially, to black Cubans, Batista was a hero and benefactor, because he was black himself and had always been a champion of social legislation. In the 1950s Cuba's workers were more unionized as a percentage of population than U.S. workers. Cuban labor got a higher percentage of the national GDP than Switzerland's and France's at the time. Cuban labor was very powerful and was totally beholden to Batista. Naturally Cuba would have been even wealthier without these impediments to business. I point them out only to show that Batista was no "right-wing lackey of Yankee business interests," as the mythology holds--speaking of which, in 1958 only 7 per cent of Cuba's invested capital was American and less than one-third of Cuba's sugar production was by U.S. companies. Yet pinks tell us United Fruit owned and ran Cuba!

"It's easier to get rid of a wife than an employee!" was a lament often heard in Havana's Yacht Club in those years (where Batista--Cuba's president!--was denied entry). That's why many of Cuba's plutocrats, Julio Lobo (sugar magnate and Cuba's richest man) and Jose "Pepin" Bosch (who owned Bacardi), for instance, always loathed Fulgencio Batista (the mulatto cane cutter and grandson of slaves), and funded Castro's (the lawyer and Spanish millionaire's lily-white son) Julio 26 Movement out the wazoo. Talk about blowback!

Cubans roared with mirth over the movie Havana, staring Castro fan Robert Redford, and produced by Castro fan Sydney Pollock. Reviewers hailed it as "historically accurate." One scene shows Batista in a meeting with American gangsters. Batista has blonde hair and blue eyes just like Redford…. Hey, he was a Yankee capitalist lackey, right? So he must have looked like a Yankee capitalist.

"Batista was black?!" gasped a badly freaked Pollock at a Hollywood party shortly after the movie came out. He'd run into Andy Garcia who informed him, between guffaws.

In fact, a high proportion of Batista's army was black and mulatto, especially the officer corps. Castro and Che murdered 600 of them without trial in the first three months of 1959. Even the New York Times admits it. Had these massacres taken place anyplace else, they'd be called lynchings and the United Nations, NAACP, etc., would raise holy hell. Imagine, in any other setting, a lily white regime (like Castro's) lynching several hundred blacks, dumping them in mass graves, then getting a standing ovation by the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and Hollywood! Tom, compared to what Cuban-Americans see in the news every day, what Alice found on the other side of the looking glass seems perfectly logical.

I love the reaction when I throw this stuff (fully documented in my book) at some pinko professor who learned all about Cuba from the New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and from visits to Cuba, which is to say, from Castro's propaganda ministry. Gotta hand it to him, though. I used to be in Sales and Marketing for Fortune 500 companies. Sure wish I coulda gotten away with snowing as many people as Castro has. Frankly, I'm envious.

[Woods:] Aren't we always being told about the miracles in health care and education that have taken place under Castro? Any truth to that?

[Fontova:] Here we go again! Castro shovels out the BS. Pinks open wide, gulp it down, rub their tummies and ask for seconds. In fact, Cuba's heath care has worsened relative to the rest of the world since 1958. To wit: Cuba's infant mortality rate in 1957 was the lowest in Latin America and the 13th lowest in the world. This according to U.N statistics. Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in this department. Now (and if you believe Castro's own inflated figures) Cuba is 24th in the world. And this with 60.4 per cent of Cuba's pregnancies ending in abortion (which skews infant mortality rates downward). In 1957 Cuba had twice as many physicians and teachers in relation to population as the U.S. It ranked first in Latin America in national income invested in education and its literacy rate was 84 per cent. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates (to scale) than the U.S.

[Woods:] Very little surprises me any longer, but I'm frankly aghast at this Che Guevara T-shirt phenomenon among young Americans. What on earth accounts for this? What do these poor kids think they're saying by wearing such a shirt? You might think supposedly idealistic young people would be put off by someone who carries out summary executions and considers evidence and proof to be dispensable bourgeois conventions.

[Fontova:] In the Cuban Revolution, Che combined the roles Beria played earlier for Stalin and Himmler for Hitler. But he's a rock star. I've asked dozens of his t-shirt wearers, and that's what they tell me. Others think he was some kind of social worker, a Peace Corps type, at worst, a somewhat misguided idealist. It's unreal. Of course, in their day, pinks and imbeciles said the same about Stalin and Mao. How can you get mad at people like that? You finally give up. Che's lessons and history are fascinating and valuable, but only in light of Sigmund Freud or P.T. Barnum. One born every minute, Mr. Barnum? If only you'd lived to see the Che phenomenon. Actually, 10 are born every second.

Here's a "guerrilla hero" who in real life never fought in a guerrilla war. When he finally brushed up against one, he was routed.

Here's a cold-blooded murderer who executed thousands without trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an "unnecessary bourgeois detail," who stressed that "revolutionaries must become cold-killing machines motivated by pure hate," who stayed up till dawn for months at a time signing death warrants for innocent and honorable men, whose office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions--and today his T-shirts proudly adorn people who oppose capital punishment!

Here's communist Cuba's first "Minister of Industries," whose main slogan in 1960 was "Accelerated Industrialization!" Whose dream was converting Cuba (the hemisphere, actually) into a huge state-run bureaucratic-industrial ant farm--and he's the poster boy for greens and anarchists who scream and rant against industrialization!

Here's a plodding paper-pusher, a notorious killjoy, an all-around fuddy-duddy--"I have no friends and no woman," declared this dolt and sourpuss, "my friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically." Here's a humorless teetotaler who imposed a no-booze, no-gambling regime under penalty of his very severe enforcement in towns like Santa Clara which his "column" overran from Batista's forces--and you see his T-shirt on MTV's Spring Break revelers!

Che excelled in one thing: mass murder of defenseless men. He was a Stalinist to the core, a plodding bureaucrat and a calm, cold-blooded--but again, never in actual battle--killer. The estimates of those he murdered without trial run from 600 to 2500. And Che often applied the coup de grace with his own pistol.

"Don't shoot," Che whimpered when the wheels of justice finally turned and they cornered him in Bolivia. "I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!" His own victims' bravery was completely lost on Che.

Call Castro every epithet in the book, as I have. But don't call him stupid. As I said, Tom, business schools could quintuple their students' productivity if they studied, then taught, the Cuban Revolution and its defenders, which is to say: how so much BS was sold to so many by so few. I'm a historian (of sorts) and in studying modern history, I've never known of a snow-job like the one Castro pulled--first on Cubans, then on most of the world. Hence my book, an attempt at least to try to set the record straight.

[Woods:] How has the Catholic Church functioned under Castro? What kinds of restrictions on its freedom of action, if any, has the Castro regime put into effect?

[Fontova:] Ironically, Castro owes his life to a Catholic archbishop, Santiago's archbishop, Monsignor Pérez Serantes. After Castro's rebels (wastrels, winos, petty crooks) attacked the Moncada army barracks on July 26, 1953 (hence their name) Castro went into hiding from Batista's police--actually he went into hiding during the attack and let his men face the hot lead. At any rate, Monsignor Serantes interceded with Batista's people for clemency and so Castro agreed to come out of hiding and surrender to the authorities who otherwise would probably have "shot him while trying to escape."

In 1961 Monsignor Serantes fled into exile just ahead of a firing squad. That was the year Castro booted out most of Cuba's Catholic clergy and took over the schools, including the one I attended that was run by the Marists. Those who practiced the faith in Cuba weren't massacred as in Red Spain, but they were harassed and often imprisoned. Emilio Izquierdo is president of a former political prisoners association in Miami today. He was a major source for my book. When they rounded him up and put him in a forced labor camp in 1967 his charge read, "Active in Catholic associations." These camps also held the clergy who hadn't fled Cuba in time.

[Woods:] During the twentieth century the Christian faith was a rallying point for so many peoples living under totalitarian regimes. Is the same true for Cuba?

[Fontova:] "The yells of 'Viva Cristo Rey!' would make the walls of that prison fortress tremble," recalls former political prisoner Armando Valladares, who heard them nightly--then the blast from the firing squad. That was the cry from hundreds of Cuban Catholic youths who were crumpling in front of Che's firing squads in the early years of the Revolution. A college youth group named Catholic Action was among the first and most active in opposing the communization of Cuba. The Spanish Civil War was only 22 years distant at the time. Most Cubans had relatives in Spain and many were Spanish immigrants themselves at the time. Memories of that bloodbath and the massacres of priests and nuns were vivid. So Catholic groups sprang to action, and died by the hundreds. Finally Che demanded that the martyrs' mouths be taped shut. Their defiant yells were badly spooking the firing squads.

Cuba was officially declared an "atheist state" in 1962, the same year Castro banned the celebration of Christmas and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The "atheist state" designation ended in 1992. The Soviet sugar-daddy had crumbled shortly before. Cuba's economy was in even more desperate straits than usual. People were more desperate than usual. So he made some cosmetic changes.

The Pope's visit to Cuba in 1998 was a wonderful thing for Cuban Catholics. The Pope was certainly doing his job and tending to this very desperate and deprived section of his flock with the visit. But naturally the press and liberals read more into it. They started warbling and gushing about how this might be the "beginning of the end for Castro," as the Church had played such a vital role in Communism's demise in Eastern Europe.

"Bullfeathers," snorted Cuban-Americans. "Castro is no Jaruzelski or Gorbachev. He'll use the Pope's visit for a propaganda ploy and nothing will change."

Well, as usual, us Cuban-American "crackpots" and "hard-liners" were proven precisely right. Castro will never allow the Church or the Pope to become a rallying point for any opposition to his rule. Havana's archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who was among those nominated to replace Pope Paul II, is widely regarded as something close to a Castro collaborator. Ortega was in fact a fellow prisoner of Emilio Izquierdo in the forced labor camps I mentioned earlier. He's no Cardinal Mindszenty, believe me. Sensibly perhaps, he knows better than to rock the boat.

Catholics can practice their religion in Cuba today with only minor harassment and baptisms are on the rise. This is a good sign. But an active Catholic knows he's under careful scrutiny by the government's Comites De Defensa De La Revolucion. These Comites are neighborhood spy and snitch groups, active on every city block in the country. They were introduced to Cuba by the East German STASI in 1961. They had worked quite well in East Germany. These Comites are responsible for handing out (or denying) the infamous government food ration cards, so they can be quite intimidating. "Food is a weapon," said Stalin as the emaciated corpses piled up in the Ukraine.

[Woods:] Has the see-no-evil crowd attacked you or your book? If so, on what grounds?

[Fontova:] I'd love to play the martyr role here, but not really, Tom. I can't complain. Everything in my book is meticulously documented. As one reviewer wrote, "Fontova doesn't recycle nasty rumors about Castro; he documents deeds. He doesn't smear; he illustrates."

In fact, some astounding things have happened. The New Orleans Times Picayune has a notoriously liberal editorialist who's also a friend of mine. He'd just written an editorial hailing Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco for visiting Cuba in March and dining with Castro, Cuban-Americans were "irrational hot-heads" for protesting--the whole bit. Then he got hold of my book

"If we'd only known!" was the gist of his new editorial. The words "shocking" and "jaw-dropping," I'm very gratified and humbled to say, have appeared in many reviews, even by liberals.

[Woods:] Thanks, Humberto.

July 20, 2005

Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [send him mail: woodst@sunysuffolk.edu ] holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Columbia. His books include the New York Times (and LRC) bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895260476/lewrockwell/ ], The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0739110365/lewrockwell/ ], and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895260387/lewrockwell/ ]

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

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See also:

"Monster," Humberto Fontova, FrontPageMagazine.com, July 15, 2005 http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18739

[chefmike]

The only thing "brown" about you "Tfan" a.k.a "your racist", is your eyes, because that's how full of shit you are!!! :P :P[/b]

LMFAO...no doubt about that... but on the other hand, maybe it's right-wing nutjob Alan Keyes, who has now outed himself as yet another bible-banging hypocritical right-winger who lusts after tranny flesh... :lol: :lol:

[chefmike]

It is surprising that the people turned on Batista, isn't it? He sounds like he was a swell guy...

Some excerpts from:

Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr. The Real CIA. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.
Chapter 7

Batista's Cuba

An informed opinion:

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cuban-rebels/kirkpatrick.htm

The authors bio:

Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr. served with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its inception in 1947 until 1965. The papers document Kirkpatrick's career at the CIA, including his role as inspector general during the Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as his service in the U.S. Army and Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and his time as a professor of political science at Brown University.

Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr. was born in Rochester, New York, on July 15, 1916. He attended Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs in 1938. After leaving Princeton, Kirkpatrick worked on the editorial staff of U.S. News and World Report until enlisting in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which later evolved into the Office of Strategic Services, in 1942. Based in London, Kirkpatrick served as a liaison with British, French, Norwegian, Czech, and Polish intelligence services. In 1943, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, where he served as the intelligence briefing officer for General Omar Bradley, a post he retained until the end of the war.


After a brief return to U.S. News and World Report, Kirkpatrick joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when the agency was created in 1947. He served as a division chief, deputy assistant director of operations, and executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith, and appeared to be well positioned for a leadership role in the organization when he contracted polio during a 1952 trip to Asia on agency business. He was left paralyzed from the waist down in 1953 and spent the rest of his career in a wheelchair.


After Kirkpatrick returned from hospitalization, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles named him inspector general of the CIA, a post he held until 1961. Richard Helms, another intelligence officer, had been appointed director of covert operations, a job that Kirkpatrick had been expected to assume. As inspector general he traveled overseas on inspection tours, despite his wheelchair, and performed liaison work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He also served as chairman of a joint study group examining all of the United States' foreign intelligence efforts, a group whose report resulted in the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961.


At the request of Dulles, Kirkpatrick also compiled an internal report on the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The controversial report, which remained classified until 1998, was critical of the planning and execution of the operation and was rumored to have caused resentment among staff at the CIA, particularly Dulles. Kirkpatrick would later write that he believed the report cost him "a fighting chance at the directorship."


In December 1961, John McCone, the new director of the CIA, asked Kirkpatrick to chair a working group to study the organizational structure of the agency, which resulted in a major reorganization. In April 1962, Kirkpatrick was named executive director of the CIA, a new position created in order to help ease the administrative demands on McCone and future directors.


In 1965, Kirkpatrick left the CIA to become a professor of political science at Brown University. In addition to lecturing and teaching, he served as president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, and was a member of the board of directors of the Naval War College and the Defense Intelligence College. Kirkpatrick also contributed to Encyclopedia Britannica (as well as other encyclopedias) and wrote three books for the general public, as well as textbooks used in the intelligence community and articles for journals dealing with military and intelligence matters. He retired from Brown in 1982 and moved to Middleburg, Virginia, one year later.

The only thing "brown" about you "Tfan" a.k.a "your racist", is your eyes, because that's how full of shit you are!!! :P :P

At last you address me directly instead of the pussy-foot snipes you've been taking.

I'll give you this one for free, just for finally growing a pair... no matter how temporary.