Exposing the Real Che Guevara (26 page)

Castro’s goons tore open the camera and stole the roll of film, but somehow Houdova managed to conceal the memory card of her digital camera inside her bra. Houdova and her friend, psychologist and fellow model Mariana Kroftova, were dragged off and detained for eleven hours without being allowed to contact the Czech embassy, and without being able to communicate with their captors in English. They were finally released after signing a document pledging they would refrain from joining any “counter-revolutionary activities.”

“The revolution’s watchmen rose up because I was taking pictures of something they do not like,” she summed it up after arriving back in Prague.
³¹

Now let’s see how Castro learns such charming conversation points about such visitors as Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss—and Jack Nicholson. “Fidel Castro is a genius!” gushed Jack Nicholson after a visit to Cuba in 1998. “We spoke about everything,” the actor rhapsodized. “Castro is a humanist like President Clinton. Cuba is simply a paradise!”
³²

Jack Nicholson has been saying such things for years now. Many of his Hollywood cohorts follow suit. Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Woody Harrelson, Leo DiCaprio, Chevy Chase, Robert Redford, and many others have waxed euphoric on Castro and his island prison. Bill O’Reilly called these celebs “Hollywood pin-heads.” But there might be more to these celebrity plugs.

“My job was to bug their hotel rooms,” says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez. “With both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself.” And according to some sources, Havana, given the desperation of its brutalized and impoverished residents, has recently topped Bangkok as the world mecca for child sex. It’s a blackmailer’s bonanza.

“He [Delfin Fernandez] has not only met some of the most famous men in the world,” says the
London Daily Mirror
about the Cuban defector, “he’s also spied on them and been witness to some of their most innermost secrets.”

“When the celebrity visitors arrived at the hotels Nacional [where Campbell and Moss stayed], Melia Habana, and Melia Cohiba,” says Fernandez, “we already had their rooms completely bugged with sophisticated taping equipment. . . . But not just the rooms, we’d also follow the visitors around, sometimes we covered them twenty-four hours a day. They had no idea we were tailing them.”
³³

Famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar was a special target for this bugging, but nothing of value came of it for Castro. “Everybody already knows I’m a
maricón
!” Almodóvar laughed at Castro’s blackmailers. “So go right ahead! Knock yourselves out!”

“Fidel Castro is a special connoisseur of these tapings and videos,” Fernandez says. “Especially of the really famous.” Not even Castro’s closest “friends” are safe from this bugging. The best example is Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. In what appeared as a touching act of generosity and friendship, Castro gave his friend “Gabo” his very own, stolen mansion in Havana. “We had remodeled it right before,” remembers Fernandez, “and we installed more cables for bugging devices than for the normal electrical appliances. We taped everything. Fidel doesn’t trust anyone.”

Castro’s top intelligence people would gather for the screenings of these tapes almost like Hollywood types for the screening of an upcoming movie. “Hummmm, these scenes are more scandalous than anything in any of her movies!” Fernandez recalls a top intelligence officer chortling while watching the nighttime cavortings of a famous Spanish actress. “Now, it really seems to me,
compañeros
,” the Castro intimate chortled as he looked around the room, “that this
señora
should be making more respectful comments about our regime, right?”

“But famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro’s intelligence,” says Fernandez. “When word came down that models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss were coming to Cuba, the order was a routine one: twenty-four-hour-a-day vigilance. Then we got a priority alert, because there was a rumor that they would be sharing a room with Leonardo DiCaprio. The rumor set off a flurry of activity and we set up the most sophisticated devices we had.

“The American actor Jack Nicholson was another celebrity who was bugged and taped thoroughly during his stay in the hotel Melia Cohiba,” states Fernandez.
³⁴

Turns out, however, that at least one visiting dignitary foiled Castro’s intelligence. On his visit to Cuba in 1998, Pope John Paul’s assistants discovered and removed several bugging devices from His Holiness’s hotel room. Perhaps Castro had a grudge against the papacy. Most don’t recall, but in January 1962, Pope John XXIII excommunicated Fidel Castro from the Catholic Church. It seemed fitting, considering the hundreds of Cuban men and boys crumpling to Castro’s firing squads while yelling, “Long Live Christ the King!” during their last seconds on earth.

A good example of Che’s ability to deny plain facts was on display during a state visit to Czechoslovakia in 1960, when his Cuban companions pointed out the numerous prostitutes on the streets, and in the very hotel where they stayed. Che nodded wearily. Back in Cuba when one of these winked and brought up the prostitutes, Che flared indignantly, “I didn’t see any prostitutes there!”
³⁵
The Cubans looked at each other, shrugging, but knew better than to press the issue. Che didn’t
want
to remember the sight of prostitutes in a glorious socialist nation.

The Cuba that Castro and Che built has since become a global brothel, one in which women are exploited with shocking ease for “sex tourists.”

“Since she is usually desperate,” writes one Dr. Julia O’Connell Davidson, “he can secure sexual access to her very cheaply.”
³⁶
O’Connell Davidson, professor of sociology at Britain’s University of Nottingham and author of
The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution,
conducted a thorough study of contemporary Cuban prostitution.

“A Cuban prostitute can often be beaten down to as little as U.S. $2 to $4,” O’Connell Davidson writes. “Inexperienced women and girls can be persuaded and/or tricked into spending a whole night with a client for the cost of a meal, a few drinks or small gift. Sex tourists state that it costs them less to spend two weeks indulging themselves in Cuba than it does in other centers of sex tourism, such as the Philippines and Thailand. This is partly because competition between so many Cuban women lowers the price.

“Girls aged 14 and 15 are even more desperate for dollars and therefore more vulnerable. We met 14- and 15-year-old prostitutes working in Varadero who reported that a number of their Italian, Canadian and German clients make between three and five trips to Cuba per year. More disturbing still, such tourists are paying older Cuban women and men, often prostitutes themselves, to procure 14- and 15-year-old girls for them.”
³⁷

Professor O’Connell Davidson found that what she termed the “hostile sexuality” of many of Cuba’s visiting tourists “can be encapsulated in the motto ‘Find them, feed them, f
^**
k them, forget them’ . . . A U.S.-based company that publishes a book and electronic newsletter entitled Travel & the Single Male identifies Cuba as a new ‘hot destination for the adventurous single male.’ One British tourist explained that his Cuban ‘girlfriend’ (he had traded in another woman for her the previous day) had suggested that he move out of the hotel where he was paying $20 per night, and stay in her flat where she would do all his washing and cook his meals for him. For all this, plus acting as guide and interpreter and granting him sexual access, she asked only $5 a day plus the cost of the food. At home, this man could not even buy a pack of cigarettes for this sum, far less obtain the services of a maid/prostitute.”
³⁸

Professor O’Connell Davidson also discovered something of interest for Charlie Rangel, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Naomi Campbell, Kweisi Mfume, Che tattoo wearer Mike Tyson, and Che T-shirt wearer and rapper Jay-Z. “Cubans face many of the same ‘racialised’ barriers that oppress Black people elsewhere in the world. Groups that face this kind of structural disadvantage are often over-represented in prostitution. Our initial impression was that there were more Black than ‘mixed’ or white
jiniteras
(prostitutes). As one Canadian said to me, ‘You can call a nigger a nigger here [in Cuba], and no-one takes it the wrong way.’ ”

Professor O’Connell Davidson concluded that in Cuba racists “find opportunities for satisfying a sexual appetite for others they both despise and desire. For them, Cuba is ‘paradise.’ Cuba presently has a great deal to offer the sex tourist. Such men can contemptuously command Cuban women and girls with the same ease that they order cocktails.”
³⁹

These are not the words of embittered Cuban exiles, but a reading from a feminist European college professor.

But, lest we get the wrong idea and lump her with that tacky Miami bunch, Professor O’Connell Davidson closes with the following: “Their power [to command Cuban women] rests not only upon the obscene disparity in wealth between the developed and underdeveloped world, but also upon
American foreign policy
. Under Batista, the U.S. indirectly organized Cuba as its brothel and gambling house. Today, its
punishment
of Cuba is helping to recreate the conditions under which Cuban women and girls must become the playthings of the economically advantaged.”

Once again, it’s the Americans’ fault. Well that’s more like it, especially in view of Professor O’Connell Davidson’s academic standing. At least she documents well what she saw in front of her eyes and heard with her ears in Cuba.

In 1958, Cuba enjoyed a higher standard of living than (I’m looking at the professor’s last name) Ireland. As we have seen, Cuba under Batista was
not
part of the “underdeveloped” world, much less “a brothel and gambling house for the U.S.” In 1958, Cuba had approximately 10,000 prostitutes. Today 150,000 women ply their desperate trade on the island.
⁴⁰

Professor O’Connell Davidson’s University of Nottingham is ranked among Britain’s ten best universities by the
London Sunday Times
. So we can’t expect them to teach accurate Cuban history, any more than Berkeley or Yale or Princeton teaches it. The “obscene disparity in wealth” between Cuba (today) and the developed world that Professor O’Connell Davidson documents has
nothing
to do with U.S. policy and everything to do with Castro’s policy—especially his appointment of Ernesto “Che” Guevara as president of Cuba’s National Bank and Cuba’s minister of industries in quick succession.

Institutionalized racism was abolished in Cuba thirty years before Rosa Parks was thrown off that Montgomery bus. The government Che Guevara helped overthrow had included blacks as president of the Senate, minister of agriculture, chief of the army, and
head of state
, Fulgencio Batista himself.

Batista grabbed power in a (bloodless) coup in 1952, but in 1940 he had been elected president in elections considered scrupulously honest by U.S. observers. So whatever racial barriers existed in Cuba at the time did not prevent a country that was 71 percent white from voting in a black president
—
and electing him almost twenty years before Eisenhower sent federal troops into Little Rock to enforce integration.

Today, Cuba’s jail population is 85 percent black. The regime Che Guevara cofounded holds the distinction of having incarcerated the longest-serving black political prisoner of the twentieth century, Eusebio Peñalver, who was holed up and tortured in Castro’s jails
longer than Nelson Mandela languished in South Africa’s
.

Peñalver was bloodied in his fight with communism but unbowed for thirty years in its dungeons. “Nigger!” taunted his jailers. “Monkey! We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” snickered Castro’s goons as they threw him in solitary confinement.
⁴¹

His communist jailers were always asking Eusebio Peñalver for a “confession,” for a signature on some document admitting his “ideological transgressions.” This would greatly alleviate his confinement and suffering, they assured him.

They got their answer as swiftly and as clearly from Peñalver as the German commander who surrounded Bastogne got his from the 101st Airborne. Eusebio scorned any “re-education” by his Castroite jailers. He knew it was
they
who desperately needed it. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was
they
who should don it. Through thirty years of hell in Castro’s dungeons, Eusebio Peñalver stood tall, proud, and defiant.

Ever hear of him? He lives in Miami. Ever see a CNN interview with him? Ever see him on
60 Minutes
? Ever read about him in the
New York Times
? The
Boston Globe
? Ever hear about him on NPR, or during Black History Month? Ever hear the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus mention him?

He was a
Cuban
political prisoner. And as we all know, with the mainstream media and academia, that form of oppression doesn’t count. Today, Castro’s police bar black Cubans from tourist areas. Cuba’s most prominent political prisoner, Elias Biscet, is black (I won’t bother asking if you’ve heard of him). And exactly .08 percent of Cuba’s communist rulers are black. In other places they called this “apartheid.”

12

Che in Africa

 
Che Guevara’s campaign in Africa came to a comic end because Che could not begin to match his opponents’ skill in organizing and inspiring African troops.