Cuba’s REAL Rebels – and Dunces
Humberto Fontova Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003 Mayor Ed Koch’s recent article jolted me from my seat. It reminded me that Kurt Waldheim was persona non grata in the U.S. because he’d been a Nazi functionary in the Balkans and either participated in or "had knowledge of" Nazi executions of partisans.
Actually, that’s fine with me. Even before those revelations, Waldheim always struck me as a sleazy liar, an obfuscator and a rat. No wonder he rose so high so fast at the U.N. He was the perfect U.N. secretary-general.
But let me get this straight: "Having knowledge" of atrocities by his co-Nazis against Communist guerrillas 50 years distant put Kurt Waldheim on a Justice Department list of "subversives, terrorists and criminals." He was thus banned from ever treading on American soil.
Interesting, because last November, Victor Dreke (see Dr.Miguel Faria’s article on this murderous swine), a Castro-Communist commander who ordered atrocities against ANTI-Communist guerrillas himself – who executed hundreds of bound and gagged Cuban freedom fighters with his very own Russian pistol, who tortured and murdered U.S. allies as an ally himself of a Soviet Union at that moment installing nuclear missiles (talk about weapons of mass destruction!) 90 miles away and pointing them at the U.S. – this wholesome chap was waved though our portals with a smile!
Indeed he’s welcomed in order to promote a book where he BOASTS about these atrocities, a book that consists of one huge BOAST about a career as a rabid Communist SUBVERTING U.S. policy in Latin America and Africa! This doesn’t put him on the Justice Department list of "subversives"! This doesn’t make him a "criminal"! And this murderous coward does this in the very town where his victims have thousands of surviving family members!
Recall the planned Nazi march in heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., back in 1977? The stunt was rightly condemned by all decent people (this naturally excludes the ACLU) as a wanton, cruel and utterly needless provocation by a goose-stepping gaggle of losers and bums.
Well, Skokie is about as Jewish as Miami is Cuban.
Imagine Kurt Waldheim writing a book about his Balkan tour and invited to address U.S. college students for a reading of his critically acclaimed "Fear and Loathing in the Balkans! Piling Up Those Partisans!"
Well, that’s the equivalent of what happened at Miami’s Florida International University last November. Yet every pink pundit and farm-state politician claims we Cuban-Americans have the Bush administration in a firm testicular grip.
Then kindly inform Bush’s Justice Department. If this is an example of our overbearing "political influence," I’d hate to see when we don’t have any. Whoops! I take that back. We already saw that, didn’t we? On April 22, 2000, when a motherless little boy was traumatized and enslaved, when the U.S. Constitution was trampled and defamed. Recall that even career pinks like Alan Dershowitz gagged that day.
Dreke was a typical Castro commandante, which is to say a complete oaf. Poor guy, he learned military tactics under Che Guevara. He’d have been better off studying under Sgt Bilko.
Earlier I said he subverted U.S. policy. More accurately: He tried to subvert it. Like his jefe, Che, Dreke blundered magnificently in everything he attempted – except murdering defenseless men.
It took this dolt six years and almost half a million troops, scores of Russian advisers, squadrons of Stalin tanks, flame throwers and a massive "relocation" campaign that shamed anything the British did to the Boers, to finally stamp out a motley (but incredibly valiant and resourceful) band of about 5,000 guerrillas.
These were constantly starved for supplies and finally sold down the river by JFK after the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact.
Please be clear on this, friends, because you sure won’t find it in the asinine movie "Thirteen Days" or in the spurious "Missiles of October" – much less in any Oliver Stone movie: The Missile Crisis ended not when JFK "stood up to the Russians," but when he complied with them – when he agreed to never liberate Cuba with U.S. forces, when he agreed to use U.S. forces to safeguard Castro’s regime, when he agreed to prevent Cubans themselves from attempting to liberate their captive island.
JFK cut off the trickle of aid reaching the anti-Communist fighters in Cuba and stopped Cuban exiles from launching raids against the Communists from the U.S. Thousands of valiant men went from being U.S.-trained freedom fighters to "criminal violators of U.S. neutrality laws" overnight. Forty years later the thing still nauseates, still gags anyone familiar with it.
The American Colonials had France and her immense fleet as allies (more French troops served and died at Yorktown than Colonials). The Viet Cong had Russia and China. The Mujahadeen had the U.S. The Nicaraguan Contras had Reagan in the White House, Otto Reich at state and Ollie North at ...? Well, he was helping from somewhere.
The Cuba freedom fighters had ...?
They had about as much as the Hungarian freedom fighters, as much as the Polish Home Army – no one, nothing. So their fate was the same. This makes their fight all the more glorious. It’s hard to believe what these men (and a few women) did with so little.
Xena, Warrior Princess was a sorry chump compared to one such female guerrilla called La Nina Del Escambray. After her husband, sons and a few nephews were murdered by Florida International University’s recent guest of honor, La Nina grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip and took to the hills.
For a year she ran rings around the reds. But the gallant Kennedy-Khrushchev pact finally starved her of supplies and sealed her doom. The reds finally ran her down.
For years La Nina suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons, but she lives in Miami today. Seems to me her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of "Women’s Studies," for a Susan Sarandon role, for a little whooping up by Gloria Steinem, Dianne Feinstein and Hillary herself.
So, ever heard of La Nina?
Of course not. She was an anti-Castroite, you see. Such heresy will never be forgiven in the Beltway or Hollywood. Instead we got Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan feminist-Marxist (I’m being redundant here, I know) who wrote the book "I, Rigoberta Menchu," an autobiography that chronicles the suffering of her family, and indigenous Guatemalans in general, at the hands of that nation’s U.S.-backed military.
As a result, the rotund Menchu (who resembles a well-tanned version of Bella Abzug) was showered with honorary doctorates from countless colleges, nominated as a U.N. "goodwill ambassador" and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her book became required reading in practically every college and high school in the land.
Then, whoops! Turned out the book was a massive pile of baloney. This was exposed by the New York Times, of all things. One investigator, seeking to verify the book’s account of Menchu’s young brother dying of malnutrition, instead found the brother. He looked like Ralph Kramden and was wolfing down a huge platter of tortillas when he was found.
But nothing changed for Ms. Menchu, nary an award or honor was rescinded. The Nobel Peace Prize stuck.
So, let’s step back a second and look at this: Menchu – a fraud consummate and studious – a fraud shameless and relentless – a fraud deliberate and unmitigated – gets the Nobel Peace Prize for an utterly bogus account of U.S.-backed oppression and brutality in Latin America. (Yes, there was oppression and brutality – but by the Communist guerrillas that Menchu heralds!)
Anyway, not only does La Nina get nothing, her GENUINE oppressor, Fidel Castro, after 40 years of GENUINE mass murder and mass incarceration, gets nominated, by some Norwegian parliamentarian, for the Nobel Peace Prize himself!
As I’ve said, folks, compared to this stuff, what Alice found through the looking glass makes sense. I give up! I need a brewskie!
But for lack of supplies, half of Cuba’s population might have joined La Nina and her heroic brothers in arms. Take my word for it, folks. We’ll soon have a peek at that man behind the curtain. The whole Castro thing will be exposed as the con job of the century.
He’s been at it a while, too. Herbert Mathews, Ted Turner, Baba Wawa and Dan Rather ain’t the half of it. Many pre-Revolution Cuban "journalists" were every bit as hypocritical, treacherous and stupid.
Take Miguel Angel Quevedo – Cuba’s Ben Bradlee, let’s call him. He published Cuba’s Bohemia magazine, a combination Time-Newsweek, let’s call it. When Castro was slapped in jail for murder in 1953, the magazine wailed to high heaven for the release of this "young idealistic hero."
"President" Batista (hey, he was every bit the "president" Castro is!) – that vicious tyrant, that bloodthirsty fiend, that fascist brute, as branded by that very Bohemia magazine – complied. He set Castro and hundreds of other gangsters, hoodlums and wastrels loose in a general amnesty.
Four years later, when Castro marched into Havana, Quevedo’s magazine featured the young bearded rebel on the cover with the caption "Honor and Glory to the National Hero!"
Ten months after that issue, Bohemia magazine’s entire operation was honorably and gloriously confiscated by the National Hero’s thugs and Quevedo was scrambling into exile for his very life.
His journalists had ranted at Batista as a "tyrant" almost daily for seven years, much like Bradlee’s ranted at Nixon. Now these wiseacres were scrambling too. Some had suggested – very politely and cautiously – that Batista’s replacement wasn’t exactly living up to his promises. For this, the less agile ones had their skulls honorably and gloriously cracked by club-wielding thugs sent by the "National Hero."
Some Venezuelan journalists are learning similar lessons lately at the hands of Chavez’s "Bolivarian Brigades."
Six years after his magazine was confiscated and turned into an outright Communist propaganda organ, Quevedo found himself living in Caracas. One day while contemplating his past, while summing up what he (and thousands of other fellow myopics) had wrought, he put a revolver to his head and blew his brains all over his living room.
Now, if only some U.S. journalists could be as honest with themselves (the ones who claimed a "better life" would come to the Indochinese when we pulled out, for instance).
The point is, the whole Castro Revolution is a ghastly, bloody and nauseating farce. So many eggs broken. Such a putrid omelet resulting.
The Cuban Fuhrer and his minions excel in one thing – and P.T. Barnum could tell you what it is. Health care? WORSENED atrociously since 1958. Literacy? Cuba’s was already among the highest in the hemisphere in 1958. And let’s not even get into economics and human rights. We’ve covered that before.
Castroites as brave guerrilla fighters? As the valiant Davids against the blundering Goliath of the North? Here’s the biggest joke: It took 50,000 of these Davids with jets, Stalin tanks and battery after battery of heavy Soviet artillery to crush the heroes of Giron, who numbered barely 1,200, had only small arms, and were quickly abandoned by their "allies." The wily Castroites suffered casualties of 20 to 1 in their masterful fight.
What little battlefield success the Castroite numbskulls had came not as guerrillas, but AGAINST guerrillas – came in the most brutal, cowardly and disgusting type of anti-insurgency war. Even with odds of 200 to 1 they couldn’t prevail against the heroes of the Escambray rebellion.
You want to read a book that’ll make your blood boil, eyes water, throat lump, and mouth erupt with cheers almost at the same time? Read Enrique Encinosa’s “Cuba En Guerra” (sadly, available only in Spanish).
Enrique does for Cuba’s anti-Communist fighters what Stephen Ambrose did for the GIs. What fighters! What heroism! These guerrillas went to the mat with the red scum. They had the Castroites quaking in their Russian-issue boots. They fought fire with fire. Best of all, for six years (1960-66) they gave the Communist swine a taste of their own medicine.
They’d hang the corpses of Castro soldiers with a sign: "Two Reds dead for every patriot murdered." When captured, they sneered and spit at the reds.
One brave guajiro (Cuban for redneck) had hung a Communist murderer from a guava tree. Shortly, this guajiro was betrayed by an infiltrator, captured and put in a show trial by the Castroites. The Commie "judge" (who was in the same weight division as Charles Rangel) asked if it was true that he’d used a rope to hang a "comrade."
"Damnl right!" the guajiro shot back. "But If I’d gotten my hands on your fat *ss I’d have used a cable!" Minutes later the guajiro faced a firing squad. They asked him if he had any last words. He did:
"I S**T on your Communist Revolution!" he yelled as they took aim. "And I use Fidel’s face to wipe my ....!
Then the bullets ripped into his chest. As I said, some of these freedom fighters live in Miami today. But you’d never know it. And what a shame. The books! The movies! The magazine articles! The CNN and NPR interviews! The History Channel documentaries that could be – if only the Beltway media and Hollywood could pry their lips from Castro’s saliva-slickened heiny for a split second.
(Come on, Andy Garcia ...you out there? Talk to some of your Hollywood chums. Lots of unsung heroes among your compatriots, Andy. Many real-life Rambos and Pvt. Ryans among those Brigadistas and ex-alzados. And many remain as close as any "Band of Brothers," too, Andy.)
The anti-Communist guerrillas gave the Castroites fits. Battered and baffled, the Cuban reds finally went whimpering to their Russian sugar daddies. First thing the Russians did, with a roll of the eyes, was "reassign" Che to another command. This astounding imbecile had bumbled long enough.
After all, the Russians had ample "hands on" experience in extermination campaigns. Recall the Kulaks. Recall the mass slaughter of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian and Polish guerrillas after WWII ...
You don’t recall those? Of course not. ANTI-Communist insurgencies, though a thousand times as protracted and heroic as any by Communists, never get any press.
Jonas Savimbi learned this bitter lesson too. Part of it is practical. Unlike the strutting and loquacious French Resistance (which numbered about 50 million AFTER June 6, 1944, and 5,000 before), most anti-Communist freedom fighters lie in mass graves with a Russian bullet in the neck, while "journalists" and academics toast the cowards, sadists and swine who murdered them.
Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in history from Tulane University. He's the author of "Helldiver's Rodeo," described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher's Weekly, "A must-read!" by Booklist, and "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.
You may reach Mr. Fontova by e-mail at hfontova@earthlink.net.
Editor's note: "Let Freedom Ring" - Sean Hannity reveals how to triumph over the left