Read Online Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova - Free Book Online
Authors: Humberto Fontova
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics
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disdained by Che were baths).
These hapless “deserters” were hunted down like animals, trussed up, and brought back to a dispassionate Che, who put a pistol to their heads and blew their skulls apart without a second thought. After days spent listening to Che and smelling him, perhaps this meant relief.
Who can blame Fidel for ducking into the nearest closet when this yo-yo came calling? Call Fidel everything in the book (as I have) but don’t call him stupid. Guevara’s inane twaddle must have driven him nuts. The one place where I can’t fault Fidel, the one place I actually empathize with him, is in his craving to rid himself of this insufferable Argentine jackass.
That Che’s Bolivian mission was clearly suicidal was obvious to anyone with half a brain. Fidel and Raul weren’t about to join him down there, but were happy to see him go. Two months later he was dead. Bingo! Fidel scored another bull’s-eye. He rid himself of the Argentine nuisance and his glorious revolution had a handsome young martyr for the adulation of imbeciles worldwide. Nice work.
Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel, and cowardly. He was full of himself, a consummate fraud and an intellectual vacuum. He was intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke in clichés, and was a glutton for publicity. But ah! He did come out nice in a couple of publicity photos, high cheekbones and all. And we wonder why he’s a hit in Hollywood.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CUBA BEFORE CASTRO
In 1955, a murderer and terrorist was in a Cuban jail. I’ll let the prisoner himself, Fidel Castro, describe a Batista-era jail: “I feel like I’m on vacation!” No one ever got the same impression from one of Castro’s jails. It gets even better: “Tonight it’s angel hair pasta with calamari in red sauce and some Italian chocolates for dinner followed by an excellent cigar. Tomorrow morning I’ll be in the courtyard again lying in a lounge chair in my shorts feeling the sea breeze in my face. Sometimes I think I’m on vacation.” 1
Funny how the liberal media, which regularly ignores Castro’s gulag of torture and executions, invented a Batista that Castro wouldn’t recognize. “Batista murdered thousands,” wrote the incomparable Herbert Matthews in the New York Times in 1957, “usually after torture.”
The Chicago Tribune ’s Jules Dubois was more prosaic: “The Cuban dictator [Batista] is an egomaniac, a man of greed, a sadist. He crushes everyone who is an obstacle in his path. He orders the persecution, torture, assassination, and exile of his obstructionists. He directs the thought control of the entire population and insists upon the deification of his person and his relatives. He instills fear and total subjugation among his subordinates. He purges the judiciary to destroy the independence of the courts. He operates a police state with censorship of all media and limitless spies.” 2
Then the sagacious Dubois caps it: “It was not until Fidel Castro came along that the people of Cuba found the leader to fight for their lost liberty.” Actually, it was not until Fidel Castro that inner tubes (for rafts) and ping-pong paddles (for oars) became the hottest items on Cuba’s black market—or that Cuba even needed a black market. It was not until Fidel Castro that Cuba experienced the highest rate of emigration, per capita, of any nation in the Western Hemisphere in the twentieth century. It was not until Fidel Castro that the police state painted by Dubois became a reality.
But from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times , from CBS to CNN, from Harvard to Berkeley, liberal pundits and professors all assert that pre-Castro Cuba was a pesthole of grinding poverty, oppression, and hopelessness.
Colin Barraclough of Toronto’s Globe and Mail epitomizes these scribbling donkeys. “Fulgencio Batista presided over one of the most blood-soaked and corrupt, yet frighteningly successful,
These hapless “deserters” were hunted down like animals, trussed up, and brought back to a dispassionate Che, who put a pistol to their heads and blew their skulls apart without a second thought. After days spent listening to Che and smelling him, perhaps this meant relief.
Who can blame Fidel for ducking into the nearest closet when this yo-yo came calling? Call Fidel everything in the book (as I have) but don’t call him stupid. Guevara’s inane twaddle must have driven him nuts. The one place where I can’t fault Fidel, the one place I actually empathize with him, is in his craving to rid himself of this insufferable Argentine jackass.
That Che’s Bolivian mission was clearly suicidal was obvious to anyone with half a brain. Fidel and Raul weren’t about to join him down there, but were happy to see him go. Two months later he was dead. Bingo! Fidel scored another bull’s-eye. He rid himself of the Argentine nuisance and his glorious revolution had a handsome young martyr for the adulation of imbeciles worldwide. Nice work.
Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel, and cowardly. He was full of himself, a consummate fraud and an intellectual vacuum. He was intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke in clichés, and was a glutton for publicity. But ah! He did come out nice in a couple of publicity photos, high cheekbones and all. And we wonder why he’s a hit in Hollywood.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CUBA BEFORE CASTRO
In 1955, a murderer and terrorist was in a Cuban jail. I’ll let the prisoner himself, Fidel Castro, describe a Batista-era jail: “I feel like I’m on vacation!” No one ever got the same impression from one of Castro’s jails. It gets even better: “Tonight it’s angel hair pasta with calamari in red sauce and some Italian chocolates for dinner followed by an excellent cigar. Tomorrow morning I’ll be in the courtyard again lying in a lounge chair in my shorts feeling the sea breeze in my face. Sometimes I think I’m on vacation.” 1
Funny how the liberal media, which regularly ignores Castro’s gulag of torture and executions, invented a Batista that Castro wouldn’t recognize. “Batista murdered thousands,” wrote the incomparable Herbert Matthews in the New York Times in 1957, “usually after torture.”
The Chicago Tribune ’s Jules Dubois was more prosaic: “The Cuban dictator [Batista] is an egomaniac, a man of greed, a sadist. He crushes everyone who is an obstacle in his path. He orders the persecution, torture, assassination, and exile of his obstructionists. He directs the thought control of the entire population and insists upon the deification of his person and his relatives. He instills fear and total subjugation among his subordinates. He purges the judiciary to destroy the independence of the courts. He operates a police state with censorship of all media and limitless spies.” 2
Then the sagacious Dubois caps it: “It was not until Fidel Castro came along that the people of Cuba found the leader to fight for their lost liberty.” Actually, it was not until Fidel Castro that inner tubes (for rafts) and ping-pong paddles (for oars) became the hottest items on Cuba’s black market—or that Cuba even needed a black market. It was not until Fidel Castro that Cuba experienced the highest rate of emigration, per capita, of any nation in the Western Hemisphere in the twentieth century. It was not until Fidel Castro that the police state painted by Dubois became a reality.
But from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times , from CBS to CNN, from Harvard to Berkeley, liberal pundits and professors all assert that pre-Castro Cuba was a pesthole of grinding poverty, oppression, and hopelessness.
Colin Barraclough of Toronto’s Globe and Mail epitomizes these scribbling donkeys. “Fulgencio Batista presided over one of the most blood-soaked and corrupt, yet frighteningly successful,
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