Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

Now at about 75 years old, Fidel Castro is in ailing health. Cuba's economy, as with most of the communist centrally planned economies, is at subsistence level. Average annual per capita income is about $1,500 per person. But still it survives. Two new books go a long ways towards explaining why. Don Bohning's "The Castro Obsession", talks about the secret (and not so secret) operations conducted against Castro from 1959 to 1965. The appearance of a giant country like the United States arrayed against a small insignificant country like Cuba, and then failing created a groundswell of respect and support for Castro among people and countries that root for the underdog. Humberto Fontova's "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant", is really two books in one. The main theme talks about the comments from selected Hollywood types, media and political left wing liberals, praising Castro (shades of Hanoi Jane Fonda). The secondary theme is that Castro has instituted a bloody repressive regime that attempts to control all life in Cuba. While this is not a surprise, the details are shocking in that we have so much more information because of the communication with large numbers of Cubans now living in the US but retaining close links with the island. These two books provide interesting background for the actions that will be playing out over the next few years.

This book destroys the myths about communist Cuba: - Life under Castro is better than it was under Bautista. - 1950s Cuba was poorer and more repressive than Cuba today, and thus, it is necessary to have a dictator like Fidel. - Fidel is a "revolutionary communist leader" who cares about his own poor. - Fidel is an idealist who wants to help the Third World, and should be praised for "standing up to the U.S.". - Che Guevara is an idealist, humanistic hero of guerilla wars, and should be looked up to. - The Cuban Revolution helped the poor in Cuba - Fidel made Cuba less racist. - Left-wing Europeans and Americans are right to support Fidel in his "struggle" against the U.S. - The embargo by the U.S. is wrong The truth: - 1950s Cuba was a fairer, more thriving society than modern Cuba, with more freedoms (sure, Bautista was repressive, but not as much as Fidel). - Fidel and Co. killed 15,000 people who opposed them (mostly by firing .45 caliber handguns into their heads at close range). - Fidel looked up to Adolf Hitler and modelled some of his writing on what Hitler had written ("History will absolve me"). - There have been 500,000 people (mostly poor, mostly black) in Cuba's Gulags - Fidel's thugs regularly use torture on prisoners - Che was an Argentine who personally sent 1,890 men to death - without trial, by firing squad. Che's office had a window where he could look out on the firing squads shooting men in the head with .45 handguns. One after another after another. Che once said, "we don't need evidence", and "we have to become cold-blooded killers". - Fidel hated Che and sent him abroad on "missions" to get rid of him. - Cuba's prisons contain 80 % black prisoners. The communist party is 0.08 % black. Thus, Cuba is a racist country (a U.S. "black panther" who hijacked a plane to Cuba in the 1970s and was ended up in Cuban prison, was brutally maltreated and lost the use of one eye as a result once said, "I would rather be a prisoner in the U.S. than "free" in Cuba). - Fidel was involved in murder across borders (i.e., terrorism). - Fidel pleaded with the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to fire nukes at the U.S. - Despite receiving billions in aid from the USSR over 4 decades, today, the average Cuban gets less rations per day than the slaves in Cuba in 1840 !! - Hollywood and the Left turn a blind eye to Cuba's human rights abuses, praising the dictator, Fidel. (whereas Chile's Pinochet - who the Left love to revile, had 5,000 people killed, Fidel and Co. had 15,000 people murdered, all without a fair trial, many with no trial at all). I wish all the leftwingers in the U.S. and everywhere would read this book before talking about how Fidel is such a great "Third World leader", or putting on that Che Guavara t-shirt.

Cuban born, and cajun-raised, author Humberto Fontova has driven a stake into the black heart of American Leftism with this expose of Hollywood and the U.S. State Department's poster-boy of failed marxism - Fidel Castro. This book has been written for all of us Joe Sixpacks in the United States, who don't understand how it can be that this purely evil, murderous dictator can openly operate a gangster-state ninety miles from NAS Key West with impunity. In this book, Humberto Fontova is telling us exactly why Fidel is still in power... without the continuous unwavering support of two generations of elites in American popular culture, American academia and American government, Mr. Castro would surely be hanging from a lamp post in Havana tomorrow, as he deserves. If you've ever wondered why those stubborn, revanchist, conservative cuban-americans in Miami are so outraged at the U.S. governments bizarre "Cuba-policy" and it's failed "embargo" and are always so out of step with all the other "hispanics" in the U.S.; why they fought so fiercely to try to patriate Elian Gonzalez, why they work so hard, achieve so much as U.S. citizens and have successfully maintained their history, culture and values in the face of a full court press of political-correctness you'll find the answers in Fidel, Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova. HINT: It's because Cuban-americans understand Fidel Castro. Get this astonishingly well-written and eye-opening book and you too will understand who it is that keeps this tyrant Fidel in power - Hollywood Leftists.

Some choice bits from this book: Castro tried to get Nikita Khrushchev to nuke several southern cities in the US in the early 1960's, including New Orleans and probably Baton Rouge. He incarcerates more people as a percentage of population than [...] or Stalin. He murdered 17,000 Cubans and (several dozen U.S. citizens) with firing squads and dumped their bullet-riddled bodies in mass graves. He has impoverished and brutalized Cuba to the point where 20 percent of its population risked their lives to flee. And prior to his glorious reign, Cuba took in more immigrants per capita than any country in the Western Hemisphere. More Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S., and Cuba even had to turn away European immigrants. Castro sent his agents to torture to death American POWs in North Vietnam's Cu Loc POW camp outside Hanoi in 1967. The list goes on and on, as it always does with tyrants. All of whom, I'll add, always call themselves benefactors. And this is a man cheered on by leftists everywhere, especially the nitwits in Hollywood?

The story of Fidel Castro and the policy of the US towards his rule of Cuba is a very strange one. There are a huge number of people on the left who should be opposing such a brutal dictator, except that he is supposedly a socialist / communist and providing for "all the people" rather than a few millionaire exploiters. Of course, that is not true, but the fawning goes on nonetheless. Instead, the people who have fled Castro's brutal tyranny are denounced. They are inconvenient to a liberal agenda that wants to believe that Castro's brand of socialism works. So, these refugees are ignored as much as possible, mischaracterized as rich exploiters who only want to get back properties they had long ago stolen "from the people". What nonsense! For every well to do refugee, there are thousands with nothing who fled for a chance at freedom. It is not an accident that so many Cuban refugees have done well in this country. They wanted to be free and have taken full advantage of what freedom offers to those who work diligently. This useful book by Humberto Fontova, a child of the Cuban exile, is a cry of the heart. It gives passionate voice to those heroes who were tortured and murdered by Fidel and Che. He rails against the "useful idiots" who end up sustaining Castro's brutality. He cites so many of our politicians who find this whole Cuban episode so inconvenient and who want it to simply go away. These politicians and media elites denounce the exile community and try to discredit their voice in order to undermine its powerful political effect. Mr. Fontova makes clear the agony this community has faced in fleeing Cuba, their pride in their success in America, and their frustration with those who either wittingly or unwittingly help prop up Castro's vicious regime. Does their hurt and passion take them too far? Maybe. The author believes in the Castro conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Who knows? I know that nearly every other voice in America is given its say to promote "diversity" no matter how deleterious their prescriptions for our country. We should hear these people as well and then make our judgment. I think this book is a good corrective for the way this community's voice has been ignored and mischaracterized in the mass media. It is better, I think, to hear the voices directly rather than characterized in an unsympathetic press. So, give this book a read and take part in our national debate over our Cuba policy from a more fully informed stance.