Read Online Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova - Free Book Online Page B

a national holiday—in honor of Franco, not in enmity. Something that many leftists don’t acknowledge is that Castro has stayed true to his fascist roots. Indeed, leftists like José “Pepe” Figueres of Costa Rica and Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela were Castro’s first and bitterest enemies in Latin America. They were socialists, all right—but they were pro-American socialists, hence instant foes. Franco, a genuine fascist with the blood of tens of thousands of Communists on his hands, was an instant friend, because of Spanish anti-Americanism.
    All of this is no apology for Batista. Cuba’s prosperity (higher per capita income than Austria or Ireland, double Japan’s), its civil institutions (including a completely independent judiciary), and its free, vibrant, and sassy press were in spite of having a political hoodlum at the helm. But Batistiano political rule was benevolent compared to Fidelista everything rule.
    Cuban Americans hear Batista compared to Castro in practically every political conversation: “Hey, both were dictators, right? And Cuba was horribly poor and exploited back then, right? So what’s the big deal? At least now the people have pride, free health care, free education . . .”
    “At first I’d want to tear my hair out!” That’s Manuel Márquez-Sterling. His father, Carlos, helped write Cuba’s constitution in 1940 and was considered by many Cubans and by U.S. ambassador Earl Smith as the winner of Cuba’s last presidential election, in November 1958. Then Batista’s people got hold of the ballots and declared Batista the winner. The U.S. embassy conducted its own investigation and considered Carlos Márquez-Sterling the legitimate winner. So did Fidel Castro, who’d threatened to assassinate Carlos several times unless he withdrew his name from contention (he didn’t).
    Castro knew damn well Márquez-Sterling would win. And he knew damn well this would blow Castro’s scheme of filling Cuba’s political power vacuum as the only “viable alternative to Batista.” (This Castroite fable is still nearly ubiquitous among Cuban “scholars.”) Having failed to intimidate Márquez-Sterling and botching a couple of assassination attempts against him, Castro’s armed goons simply rounded up all the ballots at gunpoint and burned them. So there, Márquez-Sterling, said the Castroites. See? We won anyway.
    Márquez-Sterling was Batista’s best known and most vociferous political enemy in Cuba. His son Manuel was himself roughed up by Batista’s police. He bristles at the equation of Batista with Castro. “The comparison is ludicrous, preposterous, completely idiotic. It’s not even a case of apples and oranges. It’s grapes to watermelons. I’m a retired college professor. I dealt with some of America’s best-educated people. And I’d hear this outrageous idiocy repeatedly.
    “Look, I finally said to all my students, faculty, cohorts, and friends. You find me a country—and not just in Latin America, but anywhere—that in its first fifty years of independence climbed to the world’s top 10 percent in almost every socioeconomic indicator, as Cuba did. Go ahead, show me one.
    “In the late 1950s, Cuba had a political problem, not a socioeconomic one. Overall, Cuba was rich, her people healthy and well-educated. The Cuban peso was always on par with the U.S. dollar. Cuba’s gold reserves covered its monetary reserves to the last penny. But that’s only half the story, because Cuban labor laws were among the most advanced in the world. Cuban labor got a higher percentage of the national GNP than in Switzerland at the time.
    “And regarding that vaunted Castroite health care we hear and read about constantly, in 1957, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was the lowest in Latin America and the thirteenth lowest in the world, for heaven’s sake! Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in that department. Now (and using