Menchu was a fraud. But in the Escambray Rebellion, thousands of bona fide peasant guerrillas vanished into unmarked graves, thousands of peasant families were driven from their modest homes at gunpoint and into concentration camps, and hundreds of battle-scarred veterans live in Miami today. But not one of them has received any of the attention or awards showered on Rigoberta Menchu—or Fidel Castro.
Why? Because, as liberal British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, “In all essentials Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.” (And Castro won that war big time. The Associated Press dispatches about Castro’s “war” against Batista were written by Castro’s own agent in New York, Mario Llerena. He admits this in his book
The Unsuspected Revolution
.
National Review
’s famous cartoon in 1960 showing a beaming Castro saying, “I got my job through the
New York Times
!” nailed it.
The Escambray rebels fought a real war against a real enemy. They’d hang the corpses of Castro soldiers with a sign: “Two Communist Russian lackeys dead for every Cuban patriot murdered.” When captured, they sneered and spit at the Castroites.
One brave
guajiro
(Cuban for redneck) named Blas Ortega, twenty-one years old at the time, captured a Castroite informer-murderer and strung the quivering little weasel up from a guava tree. Weeks later, after expending his last bullet, Ortega himself was captured by the Communists. He was given a typical Communist show trial. The judge asked him if it was true that he’d hanged a “comrade” with a rope.
Ortega responded with head bowed. “That happens to be true, your honor. But now, having had time to reflect upon it, I’ve decided on a different approach under different circumstances.”
The corpulent Castroite judge leaned forward. “I see.”
“You see, your honor,” Ortega resumed. “If I’d managed to get my hands on you, your honor, I’d have used a cable. No rope would hold your fat ass!”
10
Blas Ortega was still laughing when minutes later he faced a firing squad. With him was another young rebel named Maro Borges. The Reds asked Borges if he had any last words.
“Why yes,” responded Borges. “Thanks so much for the opportunity to allow me to express myself at these last moments of my life, my dear
companeros
. I feel I must let my feelings be known about this sad fratricidal war that so horribly disfigures our noble nation. So here it is,
companeros
: I shit on your cowardly, thieving Communist revolution! And I use Fidel’s face to wipe my ass!”
The flustered firing squad quickly took aim. “
Fuego!
” yelled the enraged Castroite commander. Both young freedom fighters perished laughing.
Carlos Machado was lined up by a firing squad in Las Villas during the rebellion. “Are you going to crack?” they giggled while tying his hands.
“Glass cracks!” barked Carlos. “Men die standing!”
“Very well—
fuego!
”
Carlos was fifteen years old. His twin brother and father were killed with him.
For me, “family night” means a discount at a restaurant. In the Escambray Rebellion it meant half your family murdered by Castro’s death squads. The Milian family lost twelve men in the Cuban freedom fight. When Escambray hero Blas Tardio crumpled in front of a Castro firing squad in March 1965, he was the fifth of six brothers to die.
11
Cuba was on fire that year, from tip to tip, and Castro’s firing squads were working overtime. At one point in 1961, one of every nineteen Cubans was a political prisoner.
12
You probably didn’t know that. But the media has always ignored Castro’s atrocities, even when they had their press hut nearby.
The mass murders were there from the beginning. The place was a field outside the city of Santiago. The date was January 12, 1959. Castro had just entered Havana, and the United States had already blessed his regime with official diplomatic recognition.
Seventy-five men, their hands bound tightly behind them, stumbled through the field in the dark, prodded by bayonets. They could barely see each other—it was 3:30 a.m. with no moon. Most of the men cursed. Some prayed. After walking a hundred yards through the damp grass, they were poked and shoved into a rough line near a large vehicle.
Suddenly a line of army trucks snapped on their lights and the vehicle behind the men shone in the beams. It was a bulldozer. The beams also showed the ditch it had dug—fifty yards long and six feet deep, with a fresh mound of dirt behind it. Five men broke from the group and ran, but were quickly recaptured, bludgeoned with gun butts, and dragged back into line. Most of the men glared resolutely ahead.
A group of women near the trucks were convulsed in sobs, yelling, pleading, wiping tears with their skirts. Many clutched rosaries. Bearded soldiers taunted them and jabbed them with rifle butts, keeping them huddled together.
“Cuban mothers,” Fidel Castro had spoken into a phalanx of microphones the day before, “let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba’s problems without spilling a drop of blood. Cuban mothers, let me assure you, because of me, you will never have to cry.”
13
Five more bearded soldiers stood in front of the trucks, nervously fidgeting with their machine guns. Their drunken commander stood off to the left, swaying, his head turning from the bulldozer and line of captives back to his machine gunners, then back again. Finally he nodded and raised his arm.
“
Viva Cuba Libre!
” The yell came from near the bulldozer, from the bound men glaring into the lights. The women erupted in anguished screams. The startled commander jerked his head, snarled something, and stamped his feet.
“
Viva Cuba Libre!
” Others picked it up. A chorus was starting from the entire line, even from the women. “
Viva Cuba
—”
“
Fuego!
” The enraged Castroite drunkard dropped his arm and the machine guns opened up, drowning the yells from the condemned men. Seventy-five bodies jerked violently and tumbled into the ditch. With the bodies still heaving and twitching and the blood pooling at the bottom of the ditch, the bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and started pushing the earth over them. Two of the women fainted. Others broke through the cordon of soldiers and ran hysterically toward the mangled bodies in the ditch, seeking a last glimpse before the dirt covered their husbands and sons forever. None of them had received a trial.
On that very day, the British newspaper
The Observer
reported: “Mr. Castro’s bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence.”
By the time Castro was cheered at Harvard Law School in April 1959, Mr. Castro’s firing squads had slaughtered 568 men and boys, some as young as fifteen.
By the time Norman Mailer (an opponent of capital punishment) was calling Castro “the greatest hero to appear in the Americas,” Fidel’s firing squads had piled up four thousand corpses.
By 1975, when George McGovern (another opponent of capital punishment) was saying, “[Castro] is very shy and sensitive, I frankly liked him,” the bullet-riddled bodies of fourteen thousand Cubans lay in unmarked graves.
14
Combine this bloodbath with the jailing of more political prisoners per capita than Stalin did (more, in fact, than any nation on earth), add the ghastly deaths of seventy-seven thousand desperate Cubans in the Florida straits, add forty-five years of totalitarian oppression, and what do you get?
You get the December 2003 edition of
The Nation
, where Arthur Miller (a longtime foe of capital punishment) describes Castro as “exciting, a person who could probably have had a career on the screen, and one who’d undoubtedly win an election in his country.”
“Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I’ve ever met! Viva Fidel!” That’s a beaming Jesse Jackson (who wrote an entire book against capital punishment), arm in arm with Castro on a visit to Havana in 1984.
15
Early in the revolution, not everyone immediately got with Castro’s program, even among the Castroite legal team. Take a properly bearded and rebel-uniform-clad judge named Felix Pena. He presided over a famous trial in March 1959 of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary air force pilots. They were accused of “genocide” because of a few forays against Castro’s rebels in the mountains. Pena, the poor sap, had taken Castro’s prattle about his “humanist” and “democratic” revolution seriously.
So he applied the tenets of civilized jurisprudence and found the charge of “genocide” against the men absolutely preposterous. No evidence, no witnesses; none of these pilots had bombed civilians. Precious few had even bombed or strafed the
rebels
. And a third of those on trial were the planes’ mechanics. The aviators were acquitted.
Castro went on TV and screeched for a new trail against the “war criminals” and assembled a new judicial team with a new judge. (Almost six hundred army officers had already been murdered by firing squads on farcical charges, thousands more Cuban soldiers were in prison; now it was time to deal with the air corps.) The new judge dutifully found forty-five of the aviators (and even the mechanics) guilty and sentenced most of them to thirty years at hard labor.
Judge Felix Pena, by the way, was found in his office with a bullet through his head a few days later. And a few months after that, the judge who had condemned the airmen to prison (rather than the firing squad, as recommended by Castro), was
himself
found dead.
Sound like justice? Well, in 1959, the very year this crime took place, Harvard Law School hosted Fidel, and the Harvardites were not disappointed. “Castro Visit Triumphant,” headlined Harvard’s
Law School Forum
for April 30, 1959. “The audience got what it wanted—the chance of seeing the Cuban hero in person.” The adoring crowd gave him a tumultuous reception. Fidel Castro (a white Spanish millionaire’s son and Havana law school graduate who overthrew a black cane-cutter) was hailed as a man of the people.
Alas, this humble man of the people had actually applied to Harvard Law School in 1948. This was brought to light by Harvard’s dean at the time, McGeorge Bundy.
Caught up in the exuberance of the event, Bundy declared that Harvard was ready to make amends for its mistake in 1948. “I’ve decided to admit him!” he proclaimed.
16
Bundy’s quip brought the house down. He triumphantly hoisted the arm of a dictator whose chief prosecutor Che Guevara declared, “To execute a man we don’t need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
One wiseacre at the Harvard lovefest brought up Castro’s record of executions and questionable legal procedures.
“Only the worst of the war criminals have been shot,” Castro replied. “And don’t forget, Cuba’s is the only majority revolution in Latin America in recent years.”
The same smartass asked about the “retrial” of the acquitted aviators.
“If the defendant has a right to appeal,” retorted Castro, “then so do the people!”
17
Castro, whose “courts” declared, “Proof is secondary. We execute from revolutionary conviction!” could barely keep up with the invitations from the world’s most prestigious universities. He’d already been acclaimed at Yale and Princeton, where jubilant upperclassmen hoisted the mass-assassin and abolisher of habeas corpus on their shoulders. “A riotous welcome,” crowed Princeton’s student paper. “A festive, crazy atmosphere, bubbling with enthusiasm.” He had received similar receptions at the National Press Club, at the Overseas Press Club, at the United Nations, and in Central Park.
Cuba’s true freedom fighters never got that reception.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OPERATION CUBAN FREEDOM—NOT!
“Freedom is our goal,”
roared Pepe San Roman to the men he commanded. “Cuba is our cause. God is on our side. On to victory!”
1
Fifteen hundred men crowded before San Roman at their Guatemalan training camps that day. The next day they’d embark for a port in Nicaragua, the following day for a landing site in Cuba called Bahia de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. Their outfit was known as Brigada 2506, and at their commander’s address the men erupted in cheers.
Every man in Brigada 2506 was a volunteer. They included men from every social stratum and race in Cuba—from sugarcane planters to sugarcane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs, and everything in between; some were family men, some were teenagers. Only a hundred of these volunteers had military backgrounds, but their gung-ho attitude impressed their American trainers, who were veterans of Omaha Beach, Bastogne, Corregidor, Inchon, and Iwo Jima.
Only two days later, one of these men, air chief Reid Doster, learned that the Kennedy administration had canceled the scheduled airstrikes. “What? Are they nuts? There goes the whole f—ing war!”
2
First off, the administration’s Best and Brightest nixed the original landing site at Trinidad. This coastal town a hundred miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment. Rebellions had started there three months after Castro’s takeover in January 1959. Also, the nearby Escambray mountains crawled with anti-Communist guerrillas who would join the invaders, and the local militia were known to be disloyal to the Reds. A concentration camp holding six thousand anti-Communist prisoners was located right outside Trinidad. The planned invasion supplies included weapons for them. Just as important, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the Brigada’s air force.