After that, Spain got more respect, but the United States learned nothing from Castro the Cowardly León on television.
“Those Americans,” snickered then Brazilian president Janio Quadros at a Latin American summit meeting, “are just like women. They have a masochistic streak; the more you slap them around, the more you get out of them.”
From Spain, Castro got a serious tongue-lashing. From us, he got nothing—or actually, he got plenty. After shrieking, “Let the Yankees invade! I’ll produce 200,000 dead gringos!”
2
(January 15, 1959), after branding the United States “a vulture preying on humanity!” and “the enemy of all Latin nations!” and “the enemy of the progress of all peoples of the world!” (July 1959),
3
and after confiscating American property and businesses, including millions from United States cattle and agricultural companies in Cuba, Castro received about $200 million in U.S. foreign aid from the time he took over on January 1, 1959, until Eisenhower declared, “There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure. That limit has now been reached,” and broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. That date was January 3, 1961.
4
The $200 million figure is provided by CIA inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick, and consisted of U.S. government purchases of Cuban sugar at prices much higher than the world sugar price at the time.
5
Castro’s big boodle came a little later, in the summer and fall of 1960, and amounted to $1.8 billion worth of stolen American property. That’s the biggest heist of U.S. property in history—and more than all the “nationalizations” (thefts) of U.S. property by twentieth-century Communist and “nationalist” regimes combined. But Castro started snatching U.S. assets from the beginning, after barely two months in power. On March 3, 1959, he commenced the mass larceny by “nationalizing” the Cuban telephone company, an ITT subsidiary. Three months later his agrarian reform law snatched millions more from United Fruit and the Pingree and King ranches, among others. Not to mention the hundreds of Cuban-owned farms and ranches that were “intervened,” as they called it.
Many Cuban Americans from the Camagüey region recall the “intervention” at one of the region’s most productive cattle ranches. The Castroites arrived and declared, as usual, that the ranch now belonged to “
la revolución
.” And they, being official
revolucionarios
themselves, were certainly entitled to eat lunch. In preparation, the head
bar-budo
(bearded one) started walking over to a pen that held the ranch’s prize breeding bull, worth $22,000 (in 1959 dollars).
“Not that one!” the rancher yelled as he bustled over. “That’s a
breeding
bull, worth $22,000! Makes no sense to . . . ”
But he was heavily outgunned at the moment (all
barbudos
traveled in heavily armed gangs). The Castroite looked back at his cohorts and snickered while unlimbering his carbine. “You can’t be serious?” the rancher pleaded, looking around wide-eyed, as the imbecile took aim. “Your own blasted
revolución
has much more to gain with that bull alive!”
Blam! The bull collapsed from a shot to the head. The
barbudos
doubled over laughing as the rancher covered his face with his hands. The Reds then butchered the bull for an impromptu barbeque, all the while threatening the rancher with the firing squad for his impertinence. The bull’s worth was irrelevant. And chances are, the Castroites weren’t even hungry. What mattered was a point-blank demonstration of who was now giving the orders in Cuba—and the heavy price of disobedience.
True to their tradition of outstanding—indeed, Pulitzer Prize–winning—reporting on Russian agricultural “reform” (the Ukraine Famine of 1931–33) the
New York Times
heartily applauded Castro’s “revolutionary” larceny, thuggery, and idiocy (Communist economics). “An agrarian reform was long overdue in Cuba,” sniffed a learned
New York Times
editorial in July 1959.
What decent person could disagree? We envision diligent Peace Corps types placing land titles into the gnarled hands of
campesinos,
their clothes ragged, their arms streaked with sweat and dirt but their faces beaming. “Rejoice!” we say. “The cruel system that throttled Cuba’s agricultural production has finally been discarded!” “Rejoice!” we say again. “The selfish, lazy, and villainous are finally getting their just desserts. The virtuous and industrious are finally getting a chance in life!”
“This promise of social justice brought a foretaste of human dignity for millions who had little knowledge of it in Cuba’s former
near-feudal
economy,” were the
New York Times
’s exact words. (Emphasis mine.)
The problem was, in the 1950s the average farm wage in “near-feudal” Cuba was
higher
than in France or Belgium. And the average Cuban farm was actually
smaller
than the average farm in the United States, 140 acres in Cuba and 195 acres in the United States. In 1958, Cuba, a nation of 6.2 million people, had 159,958 farms, 11,000 of them tobacco farms. Plus, only 34 percent of the Cuban population was rural. This is according to a U.S. Department of Commerce document titled “Investment in Cuba” (a public document available to all the Jayson Blairs and Walter Durantys at the
New York Times
at the time, I might add.)
And according to the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, in 1958 the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba was $3. If that sounds “near-feudal,” consider that the average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73. In Belgium it was $2.70, in Denmark $2.74, in West Germany $2.73, and in the United States $4.06. Let’s not even get into the average wage in the rest of Latin America or Asia, much less Africa. Though, nowadays, Cuba’s standard of living can indeed be compared to Haiti’s.
“The general impression of the members of the mission,” continues the U.S. Commerce Department Study, “from travels and observations
all over Cuba
is that the living levels of farmers, agricultural laborers, and industrial workers are higher all along the line than for corresponding groups in other tropical countries.” (Emphasis mine.)
A UNESCO report from 1957 says: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a
large middle class.
Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. . . . The average wage for an eight-hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 percent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 68 percent. 44 percent of Cubans are covered by social legislation.” That’s a higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time.
6
Liberals then and now like to think of pre-Castro Cuba as a veritable U.S. colony, a sordid playground of prostitution and casinos, horribly exploited by American corporations! JFK himself said this in an interview with French journalist Jean Daniel in 1963: “I think that there is not a country in the world, including all the regions of Africa and any other country under colonial domination, where the economic colonization, the humiliation, the exploitation have been worse than those which ravaged Cuba, the result, in part, of the policy of my country.”
“Calumny. . . cheap demagoguery.” That’s what an exasperated Spruille Braden, former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, said after reading JFK’s idiotic claims in that interview. “That abysmal ignorance in Washington concerning this whole Cuban situation endures.”
7
In fact, only 5 percent of
invested
capital in Cuba in 1958 was American, and less than one-third of Cuba’s sugar output was by U.S. companies. Cuba had a grand total of nine gambling casinos in 1958. Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi, have double that number today. And chew on this one: In 1957, when it was touted as the “playground” for Americans, Cuba hosted a grand total of 272,265 U.S. tourists.
8
That year
more Cubans vacationed in the United States than Americans vacationed in Cuba.
We had a “playground” too.
College professors regularly trot out the brutal landowners/oppressed peasant myth. I heard this version myself from one of my college history professors. His name was Stephen Ambrose. You’d think Eisenhower’s official biographer and America’s bestselling historian might have known better. Not when it came to Cuba, where Castro’s siren song lulled his critical faculties to slumber. College professors might not know it, but the rest of us now know that the landless got no land anyway. They became slave laborers for Communist
kolkhozes
(state farms). Soviet advisers from the Ukraine began advising Castro’s National Institute for Land Reform in early spring 1959. Many professors and
New York Time
s journalists used to think Communism worked, but it’s kinda hard to argue that now (to be honest, it was kinda hard to argue it then too). The Bolshevik Maxim Litvinov said “food is a weapon,” and Communists have always used it as a weapon. Castro wielded the weapon early, snatching farms and ranches and then issuing his infamous ration cards to his subjects.
In 1958, the Cuban people had the third highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere. If you think that’s interesting, take a look at this chart, compiled by an intrepid Cuban exile living in Spain:
Food Ration in 1842 for Slaves in Cuba
| Castro Government Ration since 1962
|
|---|
Meat, chicken, fish
| 8 oz.
| 2 oz.
|
Rice
| 4 oz.
| 3 oz.
|
Starches
| 16 oz.
| 6.5 oz.
|
Beans
| 4 oz.
| 1 oz.
9
|
Turns out, when we say Castro “enslaved” Cuba we actually miss half the story—we actually
downplay
the issue. Turns out, the half-starved slaves on the ship
Amistad
ate better than Elián González does now. Remember that when you hear Eleanor Clift say, “To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S.”
10
Remember that when you hear, “Socialism works. I think Cuba might prove that,” which is what Chevy Chase said on Earth Day 2000, after a guided tour of Castroland.
11
Remember that when you hear Danny Glover blame the (easily avoidable, just buy the goods from Mexico) “unjust, unfair, and cruel” U.S. “embargo” rather than the Communist system for the poverty of Cuba.
12
Remember that when you hear Jesse Jackson say, “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” as if the Cuban people have anything to viva Fidel and Che for.
13
Remember that when you hear Steven Spielberg say, “Meeting Fidel Castro were the eight most important hours of my life.”
14
And my favorite Spielberg quote, “I personally feel that the Cuban embargo should be lifted. I do not see any reason for
accepting old grudges being played out in the twenty-first century.”
15
(Emphasis mine.) This from a man who specializes in making movies about American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust.
Cuba’s stellar achievements in the field of health and nutrition saw Havana host the “Second Inter-American Conference on Pharmacy and
Nutrition
” in June 2003. The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences sponsored this farce and its president gave one of Castro’s apparatchiks “the highest decoration that the U.S. College gives to outstanding personalities and institutions in the field of pharmacy and
nutrition
.” (Emphasis mine.)
Two months earlier, Castro’s police had rounded up more than a hundred “dissidents,” put them through sham trials, and shoved them into dungeons. Their combined sentences total 1,454 years. Cuban jails offer patients free electroshock treatment and a weight-loss nutritional regimen. Thirty-four of the prisoners were journalists and independent librarians. Their crimes ran the gamut from possessing George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
to accessing the Internet. The following month UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) awarded Castro’s Cuba its coveted International Literacy Award.
A few months after that, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alice Walker—“I simply love Cuba and its people, including Fidel. He’s like a great redwood.”
16
—visited Havana for the 2004 International Book Fair. She crowed, “There is a direct correlation between the U.S. civil rights movement and Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution. . . . It’s important to stand with people who are struggling, because in the end we will win!”
17
She was referring, of course, to her hosts (the jailers), not the jailed. Walker’s hosts hold the record for the longest and most brutal incarceration of a black political prisoner in the twentieth century. His name is Eusebio Peñalver, and he served longer in Castro’s dungeons than Nelson Mandela served in South Africa’s.
“Nigger!” taunted his all-white jailers between tortures. “Monkey! We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” snickered Castro’s goons as they threw him into solitary confinement. Might the Congressional Black Caucus or NAACP have a cross word for this regime—a white regime where today 80 percent of the political prisoners are black? Jesse Jackson doesn’t, of course. He calls Castro “the most honest and courageous politician I’ve ever met.” On Castro’s last visit to Harlem in 1996, amidst a delirious, deafening, foot-stomping chorus of “Viva Fidel!” and “Cuba si!” his host Charlie Rangel gave him a bear hug.