The Longest Romance (16 page)

Andrew Lindy did not enjoy the advice, expertise or hospitality of KGB-trained apparatchiks.

Upon reading T.J. English's book, many residents of pre-Castro Cuba noticed the discrepancies between the book and what they'd seen. They decided to defy Groucho Marx by believing their eyes instead of an Irish-American author who had visited Cuba 30 years after the events and conjured them in conjunction with Castro-regime officials.

But it turned out that instead of merely citing an apparatchik of Castro's DGI-controlled
Casa de Las Americas,
the bestselling author—whose book enchanted and illuminated Jon Stewart,
dazzled the MSM with its “impressive research,” and was optioned for a film—this author, Mr. T.J. English, actually transcribed the Communist propaganda screeds of this Castro-regime apparatchik word for word. To wit:

“I have no intention of talking to Mr. T.J. English,” harrumphed the book's dedicatee, Enrique Cirules himself, in Castro's (literally) captive media (March 16, 2010). “Instead, I'm offering figures, data and clear evidence of his plagiarism. In his book
Havana Nocturne
(2008) T.J. English did not quote my work; instead, 72 times he mentioned the name of Cirules in an attempt to justify plagiarizing more than 260 pages from the novels
El imperio de La Habana and La vida secreta de Meyer Lansky.
”
¹⁸
Major portions of English's “true” and “thoroughly and impressively researched” book, as hailed by the MSM, were apparently transcribed word-for-word from a
novel conjured
by a Castro-regime apparatchik.

So this chapter started with a novel
(The Godfather
) as the main educational source for liberals on Cuba. And it ends with the torch being passed to another book (
Havana Nocturne
) essentially transcribed from another novel 40 years later.

Fidel Castro overthrew a Cuban government in which the president of the senate, the minister of agriculture, the chief of the army and most crucially the head of state were black. (Fulgencio Batista was a mulatto grandson of slaves born in a palm-roofed shack in the Cuban countryside.) These blacks had all served in a nation 72 per cent white, by the way. Fulgencio Batista had been Cuba's legally-elected president from 1940 to 1944. In 1952, his presidency resulted from a lamentably illegal if nearly bloodless and mostly unopposed coup.
¹⁹

Not that you'll learn any of this from the liberals' exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the
Godfather
II movie.
Today the prison population in Stalinist-apartheid Cuba is 90 per cent black, while only nine per cent of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Many of Cuba's most prominent dissidents are black.

In fact, while a smitten Jesse Jackson yelled “Viva Che! Viva Fidel!” alongside the latter at the University of Havana in 1984—with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, among Jackson's entourage, clapping wildly from the sidelines—the world's longest-suffering black political prisoner, Eusebio Penalver, languished in a torture-chamber within walking distance of the celebration.

“N*gger!” taunted his Castroite jailers between tortures. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” Eusebio Penalver suffered longer in Castro's prisons than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa's.
²⁰

Shortly after a smitten Congressional Black Caucus visited with Raul Castro in December 2009 and returned hailing him as “one of the most amazing human beings we've ever met,”
²¹
the black human-rights activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo was beaten comatose by his Castroite jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull and subdural hematoma. A year later, Zapata was dead after a lengthy hunger strike.
Samizdats
smuggled out of Cuba contain eyewitness reports that Zapata's jailers, while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning him, yelled: “Worthless n*gger! Worthless peasant!”

Shortly before a smitten Charlie Rangel engulfed Fidel Castro in a mighty bear-hug in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, as the smitten audience shook the rafters with bellows of“Viva Fidel!” black human-rights activist and doctor Oscar Elias Biscet was grabbed by Castro's KGB-trained police, thrown into a dungeon, kicked, spat upon and burned with cigarette-stubs. Biscet was given a 25-year sentence in 1999 but released from Castro's torture-chambers in March 2011. Essentially his crimes involved reciting the works of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the UN Declaration of Human Rights in a Cuban public square, while carrying the Cuban flag upside down. This “crime” was greatly compounded by
Dr. Biscet's specifically denouncing the Castro regime's policy of forced abortions.

“Here in this dark box where they make me live, I will be resisting until freedom for my people is gained,” Biscet had declared in the vain hope that any of the “news”-agencies' “press” bureaus permitted by his torturer would report the plight of Cuba's political prisoners.

“My dad explained to me he is in prison for a cause, the cause is human rights, rights for Cubans. Also for the right of that child which hasn't even been born yet,” declared Dr. Biscet's daughter Winnie, who lives in the U.S.

This latter crime goes a long way towards explaining why you've probably never heard of Dr. Oscar Biscet in the MSM. Yet in November 2007 President Bush awarded Dr. Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The award was presented to Dr. Biscet's son and daughter, who reside in freedom in the U.S. The ceremony was virtually blacked out by the media.

Penalver, Zapata, Biscet and thousands upon thousands of other Cubans were convicted in secret, by the regime's hack judges, in a court system copied from Stalin. They suffered their sentences 90 miles from the U.S., with press bureaus including CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, AP and Reuters within walking distance or a short cab-ride of their cells.

Chances are you're familiar with the injustices against Nelson Mandela but have never heard the names of the Cuban political prisoners, much less the details of their suffering.

CHAPTER 11

“W
hen the Castro revolution prevailed, mobsters, who once had the run of Havana, became outcasts,” writes
The Washington Post's
Tom Miller in his paean to the T.J.- English-Castro-regime co-production,
Havana Nocturne.
Both Miller and English forget to add how Castro subsequently rolled out the red carpet for much wealthier and more murderous mobsters to set up shop in Havana. The Castroites' partnership with Colombia's cocaine cowboys made Meyer Lansky's deal with Batista look like a nickel-and-dime gratuity. And the murder tally from the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, who partner with Cuban officials in the Yucatan, equals about one St Valentine's Day Massacre every ten hours for five years.

“We lived like kings in Cuba,” revealed Medellin cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials in the 80's and 90's. “Fidel made sure nobody bothered us.”
¹

Also, there's no mention by T.J. English as to how the Castroite
nomenklatura,
in cahoots with Colombia's cocaine cowboys throughout the 70's and 80's, made multiple times the measly $13 million per year.

In 1996 a federal prosecutor in south Florida told
The Miami Herald.
“The case we have against Fidel and Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in
1988.” Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba's role in drug-smuggling into the U.S. The Clinton administration, hell-bent on cozying up to Castro, refused to press ahead with the case against the Castro brothers' dope-trafficking.
²

The chumminess between Castro and the world's richest, most murderous criminal organizations was showcased in 1981 when the Colombian Communist terrorist group M-19 kidnapped the daughter of one of Colombia's most powerful cocaine
capos,
Fabio Ochoa. Balking at paying any ransom, the enraged Ochoa called together 200 other drug bosses from the Medellin area and explained that a showdown with this commie riff-raff was long overdue.
³
So let's settle this thing once and for all, he reasoned—much as Alejandro Sosa settled things with the uppity “little monkey” Tony Montana in the movie
Scarface.
“You wanna go to war! You wanna go to war! OK, I
take
you to war!”—as Scarface yelled shortly before the movie's gory end.

The fuse was burning down to such a war in Colombia when peacemaker Fidel Castro proffered his good offices. He brought together the two gangs of murderers and the problem was resolved amicably and without bloodshed (for each other) if expensively. The communist terrorists would start getting a cut of the cocaine-smuggling action for various services rendered to the cartel.
⁴

Castro, after all, had started partnering with drug-smugglers almost as soon as he landed in Cuba from Mexico in December 1956. The marijuana planters and dealers in Cuba's remote Sierra Maestra were also enemies of Batista's police and army. An alliance between them and the Castroite guerrillas made perfect sense, especially in view of Castro's protection and promotion by the U.S. media, State Department and CIA. To these ragamuffin dope-smugglers, a partnership with Fidel Castro meant political protection, respectability and cachet similar to what the partnership with Don Corleone lent the sleazier Tattaglia and Barzini.

“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” boasted Robert Reynolds, the CIA's Caribbean Desk Chief from 1957 to 1960.
⁵
“Everyone in
the CIA and everyone at State were pro-Castro, except [Republican] Ambassador Earl T. Smith, boasted Robert Weicha, CIA operative in Santiago de Cuba between 1957 and 1959.
⁶

“Various agencies of the United States directly and indirectly aided the overthrow of the Batista government and brought into power Fidel Castro,” said Ambassador Smith, who served from 1957 to 1959.
⁷

Castro rebels were often provided sanctuary by the U.S. embassy in Havana and at Guantanamo Naval base, where they had also established a spy network for smuggling out arms. “Our cells in Guantanamo were very effective,” writes Cuban General Demetrio Montseny in his memoirs. “We had an intelligence network inside the base. In one memorable action in early 1958, we stole one dozen 61-mm mortars, a 30 caliber machine gun, and 12 Garand m-i's.”

The fruits of the Castro-brokered partnership between the cocaine cartel and M-19 burst into the news on November 6, 1985 when M-19 gunmen stormed the Colombian Supreme Court and murdered twelve, or half, of Colombia's 24 Supreme Court justices. They also burned the U.S. extradition files on cartel boss Pablo Escobar.
⁸

“See?” Fidel Castro must have beamed. “I told you this would work out. A rollicking win-win!”

In 1984 Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his drug-smuggling cohort Manuel Noriega, who facilitated his shipments' layovers in Panana, had a falling-out over storage and transportation fees. It was Fidel Castro again who prevailed upon both parties to kiss and make up. They mediated and resolved the matter in no time. Castro's coziness with both parties again patched up the criminal partnership. Castro's own fiefdom, after all, was beginning to surpass Panama as a transit-point for Colombian cocaine. “The ideological sympathies [anti-Americanism] between my brother and Fidel Castro really came out when Pablo would travel to Cuba and visit with Fidel Castro,” said Pablo Escobar's sister
Alba during a recent radio interview in Miami.
⁹

In 1982 indicted swindler and drug-smuggler Robert Vesco holed up in Havana's Marina Hemingway. Cuban intelligence defector Manuel De Buenza reported seeing him often aboard Fidel Castro's yacht, the Yarama, always accompanied by Castro himself. Vesco died in Cuba on November 2007.

On December 6, 1998, Colombian police seized seven-and-a-half tons of cocaine in the port city of Cartagena and discovered they were bound for Cuba, the pit-stop at the time for much of the cocaine bound for the U.S. The beaming Colombians proudly informed U.S. diplomats of the big bust. That it implicated Fidel Castro, the U.S.'s most implacable enemy, must have struck the Colombian police as particularly gratifying.

But the deluded Colombians did not know that the Clinton administration was deep into courting Cuba at the time. So instead of trumpeting the Colombian coke bust the U.S. State Department pressured the Colombians into hushing up the bust's Cuba connection.

Upon learning the details of this cover-up, Congressman Dan Burton, then serving as Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, fired off a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “Sources close to the American embassy in Bogota have informed me that officials at the U.S. Embassy solicited silence from the Colombian National Police regarding a seven-and-a-half-ton cocaine seizure, destined for Cuba, because it could hurt our budding relationship with the Western Hemisphere's only surviving dictator. It is only logical to conclude the reason there has been no official reaction from the State Department on the seizure is that State did not want the air of coddling a ruthless dictator to be muddied by allegations of drug trafficking.” Congressman Burton never received a reply.

Needless to add, any similar cover-up, especially one involving such a trashing of the “Good Neighbor Policy” and such “Yankee bullying” of a Latin neighbor, would have normally delighted the media and liberals in general. Those Colombian
police officials, the poor saps, were sure that by risking their lives in this case they were being exemplary “good neighbors.”