The Longest Romance (30 page)

“Cuban women political prisoners deserve a monument to be built in their name once Cuba is free,” said Mario Chanes de Armas. “They too, before and now, were beaten and tortured in prison.” The late Mario Chanes de Armas suffered 30 years in Castro's prisons and torture-chambers. Far from a “Batistiano war criminal” as the media mostly describe early victims of Castroism, Chanes had been a Castro ally.
¹²

From the Moncada attack on July 26, 1953, to the landing of the
Granma
in December 1956, to Batista's flight on New Year's Day 1959, Chanes had fought
alongside
Castro and
against
Batista, having being jailed alongside Castro from 1953 to 1955. In 1961 Chanes turned in rebellion against the obvious Stalinization of Cuba by
his former partner and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Until his death in 2007 in a Miami nursing home, Chanes stood as the longest-suffering political prisoner in the world. Alas, The History Channel was not interested in his story, any more than were any of the other media outlets that created “Mandela Mania” upon that South African prisoner's release eight thousand miles away.

Over the decades Fidel Castro's regime has jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown not just in Cuba but in the Western Hemisphere, until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer took power. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro's
gulag
as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin's.

Upon the death of Raul Castro's wife Vilma Espin in 2006,
The Washington Post
gushed that “she was a champion of women's rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, until 1959 Cuba's “glass ceiling” mainly kept women out of prison for political offenses.

This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life for Cuban women” as trumpeted by
The Washington Post
also somehow tripled Cuban women's pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth—this according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime's own figures.

Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee from
The Washington Post's
dutifully-transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from the same.

“Why did Elian's mother leave Cuba? What was she escaping? By all accounts this young woman was living the good life.” Or so said NBC's Jim Avila in April 2000.

CHAPTER 18

“The truth will always be known because there are always brave reporters, like you and Herbert Matthews, who will always risk your lives for seeking the truth!”
(Fidel Castro to CBS's Bob Taber,
1957
)

 

“Castro could have easily been Cuba's Elvis. He's very popular in Cuba. And the adulation for him seems genuine.”
(Dan Rather, 1978)

 

“From these mountains, Castro's guerrilla army took a dream and gave
it
life.”
(Dan Rather in Cuba, 1996)

T
wo months after Herbert Matthews's visit to Cuba, CBS dispatched anchorman Robert Taber and a camera-crew to Castro's camp in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. After his death-defying odyssey to Castro's camp (see the earlier adventure of Herbert Matthews), Taber emerged from Cuba's hills with a long reel and tape of sight and sound that his editor and producer, the late Don Hewitt, fashioned into a 30-minute Castro snow-job. Entitled “Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba's Jungle Fighters,” it aired on May 19, 1957. Fully half of the report consisted of Fidel
Castro facing the camera and announcing his plans for Cuba. No rebuttal was heard on this blockbuster investigative report.

Two years later, while Castro's firing-squads murdered hundreds of Cubans per week, Don Hewitt was again on duty. This time he was producer of Edward Murrow's CBS show“See It Now,” which on February 6, 1959 featured an interview with Castro. By this time Castro had abolished
habeas corpus,
had filled Cuba's jails with five times the number of political prisoners as under Batista, and was killing hundreds without due process. Surely he would be pressed on those human-rights issues by the celebrated scourge of Sen. Joe McCarthy.

“That's a very cute puppy, Fidelito,” Murrow cooed to Castro's son, who skipped merrily on camera at their “home” in the Havana Hilton and plopped the dog on the lap of his loving and pajama-clad papa. “When will you visit us again?” an uncharacteristically smiling Murrow asked a
very
uncharacteristically smiling Fidel. “And will that be with the beard or without the beard?” In this broadcast, CBS did not raise a single issue of substance.
¹

Every night during the week that Murrow interviewed him, Castro and company repaired to their respective stolen mansions and met with Soviet GRU agents to advance the Stalinization of Cuba. That February of 1959, Murrow was fresh from a harangue to the Radio and Television News Directors Association of America, in which he blasted the television industry for “being used to delude” the public.

By April 16, 2000 most people with eyes, ears and functioning brains had noticed that, for going on 40 years, practically everything CBS had broadcast regarding Castro was indeed delusional. (During an interview with Castro in 1978, for instance, Dan Rather had referred to his host as “Cuba's own Elvis!”) But it was on that April date that Don Hewitt's brainchild, “60 Minutes,” truly went the extra mile for Castro, featuring a Dan Rather interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian's father. America saw a bewildered and heartsick father simply pleading to be allowed to have his
motherless son accompany him back to Cuba, his cherished homeland. How could anyone oppose this? How could simple decency and common sense allow for anything else?

“Did you cry?” the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the bereaved father during the “60 Minutes” drama. “A father never runs out of tears,” Juan (actually, the voice of Juan's drama-school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the “60 Minutes” prime-time audience could hardly contain its own sniffles.

Here's what America didn't see.

“Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian's father during that ‘60 Minutes' interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig,” recalls Pedro Porro, who served as Rather's in-studio translator during the taping of the famous interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro's earpiece and Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian's heavily-guarded father. “Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro security-agents the entire time he was in the studio with Rather and Craig.”
²

Officially Craig served as attorney for Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. The humble Cuban worked as a hotel doorman in a nation where the average monthly salary is $16. The high-rolling Gregory Craig, a Clinton crony, worked for an elite Washington law-firm, Williams & Connolly, one of America's priciest.

Upon accepting the case, Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Craig's remuneration, we learned shortly after his return, came from a “voluntary fund” set up by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and administered by the National Council of Churches. The same reporters and pundits, who routinely snicker through any statement by a Republican, reported this item with a straight face.

In an interview with Tim Russert on June 6, 2000, Gregory Craig explained his motivation for accepting the case: “What I want to do is to set Juan Miguel free. I want the father to make a decision uncoerced from Havana, uncoerced from Miami, uncoerced by the press, independently and freely to make a decision where and how
he wants to raise his family. That's all I'm concerned about.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Craig, we have an eyewitness to this non-coercion: Pedro Porro, who saw the taping of Dan Rather's interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez. “Gregory Craig led the Juan Miguel-Cuban-security entourage into the studio, then presided over the interview like a movie director,” says Mr Porro. “It was obvious that Gregory Craig and Rather where on very friendly terms. They were joshing and bantering back and forth, as Juan Miguel sat there petrified. Craig was stage-managing the whole thing. The taping would stop and he'd walk over to Dan, hand him a little slip of paper and say something into his ear. Then Rather would read straight from the paper.

“Juan Miguel was never completely alone,” continues Porro. “He never smiled. His eyes kept shifting back and forth. It was obvious to me that he was under coercion. He was always surrounded by security agents from the Cuban Interests Section, as they called it. When these agents left him alone for a few seconds, Gregory Craig himself would be hovering over Juan Miguel.

“At one point Craig stopped the taping almost yelling ‘Cut!' I was confused for a moment,” recalls Mr. Porro, “until Craig complained that Juan Miguel's answers were not coming across from his translator with ‘sufficient emotion.' So Dan Rather shut everything down for a while and some of the crew drove to a drama school in New York. They hired a dramatic actor to act as a translator, and brought him back.”

Okay, roll ‘em!

“I probably should have walked out,” said Porro. “But I'd been hired by CBS in good faith and I didn't know exactly how the interview would be edited—how it would come across on the screen. I might've known, but you never know how these things play out until you actually see them.”
³

A week later Janet Reno's INS storm-troopers maced, kicked, stomped, gun-butted and tear-gassed their way into Lazaro Gonzalez's Miami house, wrenched a bawling six-year-old child
from his family at gunpoint, and bundled him off to a Stalinist nation, almost certainly against his father's true wishes. They left 102 people injured, some seriously. Many of the injured were ladies who had brandished dangerous weapons. These weapons were rosaries.

No “60 Minutes” investigative report on that, however.

So, in effect, the man who served (however briefly) as Obama's chief White House counsel had earlier agreed to function as a fully deputized agent for a Stalinist regime and had arranged for Castro's kidnapping to be smoke-screened by his chums at CBS.

The New York Times'
incomparable Thomas Friedman could not contain himself: “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon ... warmed my heart.” Imagine getting the staff of a major TV network to act as unpaid aides, consultants, props and publicists for your case—and in prime time to boot. To top it off, Gregory Craig worked for the law firm Williams & Connolly that also, at the time, represented CBS.

When Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba to confer with “The Maximum Leader” (translates almost exactly to Fuhrer in German), Craig told Castro that to manage Elian's extrication he would need Juan Miguel in the U.S. According to most accounts, Castro balked at this. No plantation-owner likes his slaves traveling outside his plantation. Plus, Castro was no doubt privy to Juan Miguel's early communications with his Miami cousins, whom Juan Miguel thanked profusely and told he'd be making his own escape to join Elian.

In December 2011, “60 Minutes” featured another in its long line of joint CBS-Castro productions. This time Anderson Cooper and his production crew partnered with the Stalinist regime's Center for Marine Studies for a propaganda piece on the marvels of Cuban coral-reef conservation. The co-host of the CBS show and conduit for this fruitful communist infomercial was Dr. David Guggenheim, senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation in
Washington, D.C., who chairs its “Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program.” Dr Guggenheim toasts himself as a “Cubaphile” and toasts Castro's fiefdom (which he has visited more than 40 times in recent years) as a “magical place.”

Needless to reiterate, such a gold-plated visa is not handed out haphazardly by the Castro regime. Nor is such a welcome-mat and red carpet rolled out randomly.

During the filming of Anderson Cooper's special, the country Dr. Guggenheim calls a “magical place” was immersed in three days of official mourning for Korea's Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-Il, as decreed by Cuba's Stalinist dictator Raul Castro. When Fidel Castro visited North Korea in 1986 his paeans to his hosts had sounded much like Guggenheim's. “I was astounded by the magnificent achievements of the heroic Korean people,” wrote Castro. “There wasn't a single topic I could not discuss with my illustrious host [Kim Il-Sung].”