Perhaps some of these
roqueros
are crazy, but are they all that different from the tens of thousands who risk death to paddle into the Florida straits on inner tubes, Styrofoam chunks, and rusty barrels? They know the odds: one in three of making landfall. Errant tides, storms, and tiger sharks await. And the kids who squeeze into the landing gear of transatlantic jets—they know where these planes fly, the altitude, the temperatures. But they see a 70 percent chance of death and a 30 percent chance of escape worth it.
Way too cool, indeed, Ms. Raitt. And Ms. King? You’ve got a helluva friend.
CHAPTER SIX
CASTRO’S MURDER, INCORPORATED
Rock stars, Democratic congressmen,
the Hollywood Left, and the liberal media who tour Cuba usually miss some of the most famous revolutionary landmarks of their host Fidel. La Cabana fortress and its execution range aren’t often on the itinerary, for instance. In January 1959, the gallant Che Guevara immediately identified the moat around La Cabana as a handy-dandy execution pit. Alas, it didn’t serve very handily for burial purposes, and the job of dragging out the hundreds of bullet-shattered bodies soon proved troublesome and messy.
Not to worry! Again, Castroite ingenuity came to the fore. I defer to an eyewitness here. A prisoner in Castro’s dungeons for fifteen years, Gustavo Carmona reported that “During the mid-1960s, when some prisoners were dragged out and bound to the wooden execution stake, a heavy nylon sack was brought up to their knees. Their shirts sported a black circle eight inches wide at the chest. After the volleys, the sack was pulled up over the prisoner’s head and tied closed to contain the blood, brain, and bone fragments. Then it was dragged off. All very neat.” Just like the recycling bags so favored by the environmental Left!
By mid-1961, the binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che’s enemies wasn’t enough. Castro’s firing squads demanded that their victims be gagged too, because the shouts of the heroes they murdered badly spooked them. “Their yells, their defiance was a great inspiration. I’ll never forget it,” recalls Hiram Gonzalez, who banged his fists in helpless rage against the bars in his cell.
1
While some prayed and others cursed, the executioners yanked the martyrs from their cells, bent their arms back, and bound their hands. Two more guards came into play. One grabbed the struggling victim’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut.
In 1961 (the “year of the
paredón
,” as the Castroites deemed it), a twenty-year-old boy named Tony Chao Flores took his place at the execution stake, but he hobbled to it on crutches. Tony was a photogenic lad, a cover boy, in fact. In January 1959, his smiling face had been featured on the cover of Cuba’s
Bohemia
magazine (a sort of combination
Time
-
Newsweek
-
People
). In the photo, Tony’s long blond hair dangled over his tanned face, almost to his green
gallego
eyes. His trademark smirk showed below. The señoritas all swooned over Tony.
Tony was actually a rebel at the time. He’d fought Batista too, but with a different rebel group from Castro. Still, he’d taken the rebels at their word. Let’s face it; we’re all idealists and a bit gullible at eighteen.
But within days of marching into Havana, Castro’s deeds began to manifest something different from what the innocent idealists hoped for: mass jailings, mass robbery, firing squads. The Reds grabbed all newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. They banned elections, strikes, private property, and free speech. Each dawn, from one end of the island to the other, Castro and Che’s firing squads piled up the corpses of any who resisted, until fifteen thousand heroes were buried.
Tony Chao wasn’t one to whimper. Soon he became a rebel against Castro, and a formidable one, employing the same M-1 carbine he had used against Batista. Sadly, the Reds had infiltrated Tony’s group and captured some of his compadres in arms.
Employing interrogation techniques lovingly imparted by their East German Stasi and Russian KGB mentors, the security forces finally pinpointed Tony’s hideout. Castro and Che’s goons were closing in, and Tony sensed it. He knew they’d come in overwhelming numbers, heavily armed with Soviet weapons. “Those sons of bitches ain’t never taking me alive!” Tony vowed to his freedom fighter brothers.
At dawn, Tony saw the Reds approaching his hideout and ran upstairs, the high ground, as it were. He grabbed his carbine and a pistol, piled up some ammo, and barricaded himself. The shooting started and turned into a furious firefight. Tony blasted away, casings piling around him, his gun barrel sizzling. He bagged two of Che’s scumbags in the deafening fusillade. But he’d taken seventeen bullets from their Czech machine guns himself, mostly in his legs.
Reds have always been big on show trials, so they wanted Tony alive. They wanted to display him as a trophy, to humiliate him before the nation as an example of what happens to the enemies of Fidel. And alive they dragged him off. Tony was bleeding badly and contorted with pain, but he wouldn’t shut up. Curses shot from his mouth like bullets from those machine guns. “Cowards!” he snarled at his Communist captors. “Fools!” he taunted. “Idiots! Traitors! Slaves! Eunuchs! Faggots! Sellouts!”
The Reds took Tony to a hospital and doctors patched him up—not completely, now, just enough to keep him alive until his trial. Then he was dumped in La Cabana’s dungeons and fed just enough to keep him alive. A month later they went through the farce of a trial and the verdict—naturally—was death by firing squad.
On the way to the stake at the old Spanish fort-turned-prison-and-execution-ground, Tony was forced to hobble down some cobblestone stairs. Again, Tony pelted his captors with dreadful curses and stinging abuse. “Russian lackeys!” Tony yelled again as they dragged him off. “
Maricones!
”
Finally, a furious guard lost it. “
Cabrón!
” (You bastard.) He yanked Tony’s crutch away while another gallant Commie kicked the crippled freedom fighter from behind. Tony tumbled down the long row of steps and finally lay on the cobblestones at the bottom, writhing and grimacing. One of Tony’s bullet-riddled legs had been amputated at the hospital; the other was gangrened and covered in pus. The Castroite guards cackled as they moved in to gag Tony with their tape. Tony watched them approach while balling his good hand into a fist. Then as the first Red reached him—bash, a right across his eyes. The Castroite staggered back.
The other Castroite rushed towards Tony. Tony got a good grip on his crutch and smashed it into the Red scumbag’s face. “
Cabrón!
”
“I’ll never understand how Tony survived that beating,” says eyewitness Hiram Gonzalez, who watched from his window on death row. The crippled Tony was almost killed in the kicking, punching, gun-bashing melee, but finally his captors stood off, panting, and rubbing their scrapes and bruises. They’d managed to tape the battered boy’s mouth, but Tony pushed the guards away before they bound his hands. Their commander nodded, motioning for them to back off.
Now Tony crawled towards the splintered and blood-spattered execution stake about fifty yards away. He pushed and dragged himself with his hands. His stump of a leg left a trail of blood on the grass. As he neared the stake, he stopped and started pounding himself in the chest. His executioners were perplexed. The crippled boy was trying to say something.
Tony’s blazing eyes and grimace said enough. But no one could understand the boy’s mumblings. Tony shut his eyes tightly from the agony of the effort. His executioners shuffled nervously, raising and lowering their rifles. They looked toward their commander, who shrugged. Finally, Tony reached up to his face and ripped off the tape.
The twenty-year-old freedom fighter’s voice boomed out. “Shoot me right here!” roared Tony at his gaping executioners. His voice thundered and his head bobbed with the effort. “Right in the chest!” Tony yelled. “Like a man!” Tony stopped and ripped open his shirt, pounding his chest and grimacing as his gallant executioners gaped and shuffled. “Right here!” he pounded.
On his last day alive, Tony had received a letter from his mother. “My dear son,” she counseled. “How often I’d warned you not to get involved in these things. But I knew my pleas were vain. You always demanded your freedom, Tony, even as a little boy. So I knew you’d never stand for Communism. Well, Castro and Che finally caught you. Son, I love you with all my heart. My life is now shattered and will never be the same, but the only thing left now, Tony . . . is to die like a man.”
2
“
Fuego!
” Castro’s lackey yelled the command and the bullets shattered Tony’s crippled body, just as he’d reached the stake, lifted himself, and stared resolutely at his murderers. The legless Tony presented an awkward target, so some of the volleys went wild and missed the youngster. Time for the coup de grace.
Normally it’s one .45 slug that shatters the skull. Eyewitnesses say Tony required three. Seems the executioners’ hands were shaking pretty badly.
Compare Tony’s death to the arch-swine, arch-weasel, and arch-coward Che Guevara’s. “Don’t shoot!” whimpered the arch-assassin to his captors. “I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”
Then ask yourselves: Whose face belongs on T-shirts worn by youth who fancy themselves rebellious, freedom-loving, and brave? Then fume and gag at the malignant stupidity of popular culture in our demented age.
Castro and Che were in their mid-thirties when they murdered Tony. Many (perhaps most) of those they had murdered were boys in their teens and early twenties. Carlos Machado and his twin brother, Ramón, were fifteen when they spat in the face of their Communist executioners. They died singing Cuba’s old national anthem, cursing Che Guevara’s Internationale. Their dad collapsed from the same volley alongside them.
Hiram Gonzalez was finally released from Castro’s dungeons twenty years after the execution of Tony Chao Flores, and he could finally tell Tony’s story. Enrique Encinosa’s book
Unvanquished: Cuba’s Resistance to Fidel Castro
gives a stirring roll call of the Cuban patriots murdered by the Castroites. When will liberals stopping fawning over the leader of Cuba’s Murder, Incorporated? When will there be a concert—“Rock for Cuba Libre!”—where Tony Chao Flores’s picture, rather than Che’s or Fidel’s, is the icon? When will Tony’s story, or that of his fellow Cuban heroes, be made into a major Hollywood motion picture?
Instead, in January 2004, Robert Redford’s film on Che Guevara,
The Motorcycle Diaries
, received much praise and a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival.
3
They say this was the only film so raptly received. I wonder how many of those applauding the film on Che Guevara oppose capital punishment, unlike Che himself, who used it against men like Tony Chao Flores? Are there any psychiatrists in the house?
CHAPTER SEVEN
FIDEL’S SIDEKICK: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIST CHE GUEVARA
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
1
They say Lewis Carroll
was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted Alice’s Wonderland, a place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward. If only Carroll had lived long enough to visit Cuba in 1959.
“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, Che Guevara. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the
paredón
!”
2
“We don’t need proof to execute a man—we only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. Our mission is not to provide judicial guarantees. Our mission is to make a revolution.”
3
For the first year of Castro’s glorious revolution, the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara was his main executioner, and he executed at a rate that would have done any rival Communist—or National Socialist—proud.
Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than twenty thousand political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached two thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves who were killed during the “Night of the Long Knives.” Another murderous episode, the
Kristallnacht
, which horrified civilized opinion worldwide, caused a grand total of ninety-one deaths. This in a nation of seventy million.
Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed five hundred death warrants, another says more than six hundred. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book
Yo Soy El Che!
that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book
Che Guevara: A Biography
, Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first few years of the Castro regime. For certain, the first three months of the Cuban revolution saw 568 firing squad executions—even the
New York Times
admits it—and the preceding “trials” shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades.