This Week in History: How JFK Surrendered to a Snickering Khrushchev and Castro

Humberto Fontova Oct 28, 2023 @ Townhall.com

"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal President Kennedy cut with Khrushchev regarding the missiles in Cuba. 

'Aaw come on, Humberto!' Some amigos retort. 'Gen. LeMay was a serious war-monger and NUTCASE!—the model for Gen. Ripper in Dr Strangelove!  Are you saying we shoulda started a worldwide nuclear war with tens of millions incinerated to liberate a two-bit Caribbean island of barely 7 million people?! Get a grip, DUDE! Geeez!' 

Nothing of the sort. In fact, the choice at the time was never between nuclear war and surrendering Cuba along with U.S. national security. This was amply recognized by some of LeMay’s fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff, by a diverse array of Republican Party leaders of the time, and even by a few cold-warrior Democrats—though you’d never guess it from the 60 year Democrat-Media-Hollywood juggernaut of pro-Kennedy propaganda.

Let’s do this. Let’s bypass LeMay, and look at what many of his “less Gen. Ripper-like” colleagues and contemporaries were saying at the time about Kennedy’s “resolution” to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Joint Chiefs of Staff Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor (a Kennedy favorite) represented opposite poles of the military establishment of the time. Well: 

"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of Kennedy’s deal.

"We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.

Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, represented different poles of the Republican Party. Yet both agreed: 

"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” wrote Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviet squatters rights in our backyard." 

"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Defense establishment stalwart Gen. Alexander Haig, who served as Asst. National Security Advisor to Kissinger during Nixon’s term and as Sec. of Defense under Reagan. 

"The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas."

Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: 

"This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."

But not for the Soviets. 

"We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba." 

In fact, according to Khrushchev’s own son Sergei, his father prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!?” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28th 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?” 

“Apparently.” 

“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission. Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack…..But that is insane!..Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier. 

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat during the Cuban missile crisis. Apparently, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach. 

In his diaries, Khrushchev snickers further: "It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba–for a country 8,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable." So much for the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers.

Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (5,000 nuclear warheads for us, 300 for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy. 

What the situation called for was some mature and low-key “Brinksmanship,” of the type President Eisenhower used to end the Korean War and keep us out of any more during his terms. And (as President in 1962) his top understudy (former Vice President Nixon) would have been just the man to employ it against Khrushchev.

Of course, had Nixon been president since 1960, there would have been no Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962—in fact, there’d been no Castro regime since April of 1961.) 

In any case, the genuine threat in Oct. 1962 came — not from Moscow — but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, November 1962.)

“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear-armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.” 

"Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said," snickered Fidel Castro as late as 1968. "Perhaps one day they'll be made public."

"We can't say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us." That's Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis.

Castro's regime was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Here’s the exact wording from Khrushchev when gleefully agreeing to Kennedy’s terms:

“You (JFK) in your turn gave (to Khrushchev) the assurances that the so-called “quarantine” would be promptly removed and that no invasion of Cuba would be made, not only by the U.S. but by other countries of the Western hemisphere either.”

Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.

JFK's Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country!

It's a tribute to the power of Castroite mythology that, even with all this information a matter of public record for over half a century the academic/media mantra (gloat, actually) still had Castro, "defying ten U.S. Presidents!"

Nothing of the sort. Instead he’d been protected by them.

 

The Bay of Pigs 62th Anniversary — What Really Happened

Humberto Fontova  |  Apr 15, 2023 

 

 

“It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety (italics mine,” wrote Beltway media stalwart and former Democrat White House official Lawrence Hass two years ago in The Hill. 

“1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs…It was an unmitigated disaster…Kennedy had learned the hard way not to blindly trust the advice of his decorated military and intelligence chiefs.”

Unsurprisingly, rather than go through the trouble of concocting their own propaganda, communist Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored media simply transcribed the U.S. beltway media….Think I exaggerate?

“It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president (John F. Kennedy, JFK) launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety,” headlined Stalinist Cuba’s propaganda organ Prensa Latina, April, 12, 2021.) 

“1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs… Lawrence J. Hass, a U.S. expert on international relations, acknowledged on Monday that Washington's invasion of Cuba in Bay of Pigs was 'an ill-conceived military venture and an unmitigated disaster.”

Between snickers 62 years earlier, Che Guevara explained the fascinating process seen so starkly above: “Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” Ernesto “Che” Guevara, 1959.

In fact, in complete refutation of the Media-Democrat-Castroite spin, the lack of naivety started with invasion’s very begetter and main booster: Vice President Richard Nixon. 

Here was the man who bucked the astonishing naivety (and treachery) of the Beltway establishment to see through and call out Alger Hiss. Nixon was also among the first U.S. officials to buck the astonishing naivety (and treachery) of the Beltway establishment by calling out and urging the overthrow of the closet Stalinist and Soviet asset Fidel Castro—and at the very moment Castro was being lionized by the U.S. media, State Dept., and even many in the CIA.

In fact, the military venture was expertly-planned and was anything but naive. The astonishing blunders and naivety were entirely Camelot’s. 

After it dropped in their lap with Nixon’s electoral defeat, the New Frontiersmen insisted on sticking their manicured fingers and fumbling with almost everything planned on the orders of the Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord. 

“Help the Cubans to the utmost,” Eisenhower stressed to his successor while handing over the reins. “We cannot let Castro's government go on.”

For starters, the original invasion plan by the CIA and its military partners (all WWII and Korea vets) picked the Cuban town of Trinidad as the landing site. This coastal town 100 miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and the military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment and offered good off-loading facilities. 

Also, the nearby Escambray Mountains crawled with anti-communist guerrillas, who were giving the Castroites fits. These would join the invading force that also carried arms for them. Just as importantly, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the freedom-fighter’s small air force. 

Alas, landing in a populated area like Trinidad was deemed "too noisy" by the guilt-stricken New Frontiersmen. They had a fetish about hiding the U.S. role (this massive secret!) Any hint of such a role might discomfit the Latin American "street," you see. The New Frontiersmen suffered a guilty conscience about such "Yankee bullying." 

And, mercy me, what would the U.N. say? The Best and the Brightest suffered a veritable fit of the vapors just thinking about it. So back to the drawing board for the planners. 

They returned with a landing site at the Bay of Pigs, a desolate swamp. This was worse from a military standpoint but had a good chance of success – given total air superiority, given the complete obliteration of Castro’s air force. This was stressed by the military and CIA planners, just as it’s stressed here by me. Don’t let Camelot’s Press Agency (the Beltway media and academia) feed you any malarkey about this all-important factor, please, amigos. 

Idiotically (and tragically) 80 percent of the pre-invasion sorties by the freedom-fighter planes from Nicaragua -- the essential component of the plan to knock out Castro's air force on the ground as originally devised under the Eisenhower administration -- was canceled at the last moment by JFK on the advice of his Best and Brightest. The U.S. hand after the first air strike (that “HUGE SECRET!”) was showing, you see. 

So the flustered and guilt-stricken Knights of Camelot, while frantically fanning their blushing faces, nixed the next airstrikes literally in their tracks. Some of the freedom-fighter planes were already taxiing down the crude runways.    

'WHAT?! Are they NUTS?!” bellowed Brigade Air Force chief Reid Doster when he learned that Kennedy had canceled most of the vital airstrikes to destroy Castro’s small air force before the invasion. “There goes the whole f***ing war!" 

The canceled airstrikes made the Brigade's lumbering B-26s easy prey for Castro's jets and fast Sea-Furies -- and the troops, ships and supplies below them were even easier prey. It was a turkey shoot for the Castroites. 

But the unequal battle raged furiously on the tiny beachhead. “Where are the planes?” kept crackling over U.S. Navy radios two days later. “Where is our ammo? Send planes or we can’t last!” Brigade Commander Jose San Roman kept pleading to the very U.S. fleet that escorted his men to the beachhead. Crazed by hunger and thirst, his men had been shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. By then many suspected they’d been abandoned by the Knights of Camelot. 

That’s when Castro’s Soviet Howitzers opened up, huge 122 mm ones, four batteries’ worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the freedom-fighters over a four-hour period. “It sounded like the end of the world,” one said later. “Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” wrote Haynes Johnson in his book, the Bay of Pigs. By that time the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. But these men (representing every race and social class in Cuba) were in no mood to emulate Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps by retreating. Instead they were fortified by a resolve no conquering troops could ever call upon–the burning duty to free their nation. 

The term "liberation" was no abstraction to these men. No navel gazing about the merits of "regime change" for them. Sullen or hostile foreigners in sandals, beards, kiffeyehs, and strange robes wouldn’t be the ones meeting them. They’d be bashing open prison doors and bulldozing down barbed wire, all right – but their own fathers, uncles, cousins and even sisters, aunts, daughters would be the ones staggering out to suffocate them with teary hugs and sobs. 

One of 19 Cubans was a political prisoner that horrible year. Firing squads were murdering hundreds every week. Dozens of American citizens languished in Cuba’s prison cells too. 

"If things get rough," the heartsick CIA man Grayston Lynch radioed back, "we can come in and evacuate you." 

"We will NOT be evacuated!" San Roman roared back to his friend Lynch. "We came here to fight! We don't want evacuation! We want more ammo! We want planes! This ends here!”

It seemed like Camelot’s criminal idiocy had finally relented when Pres. Kennedy allowed some Skyhawk jets to take-off from the Essex, which was just offshore of the beachhead.  One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro tanks and infantry making for the freedom-fighters.  The Soviet tanks and trucks were sitting ducks. "Aha!" he thought. "Now we’ll turn this thing around!" The pilot began his dive.

"Permission to engage denied," came the command.

"This is CRAZY!" he bellowed back. "Those guys are getting the hell shot out of them down there! I can see it!" Turned out, JFK had allowed them to fly and look—but not to shoot!

Some of these battle-hardened Navy pilots (well before U.S. military personnel were required to be “woke”) admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed on the Essex. Now they slammed their helmets on the deck and broke down completely.

"I wanted to resign from the Navy," said Capt. Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the fleet off the beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.

A close-up glimpse of the heroism on that beachhead might have pushed those Essex pilots over the edge.

The freedom-fighters’ spent ammo inevitably forced a retreat. Castro's jets and Sea Furies were roaming overhead at will and tens of thousands of his Soviet-led and armed troops and armor were closing in. The Castro planes now concentrated on strafing the helpless, ammo-less freedom-fighters. 

"Can't continue,” Lynch's radio crackled - it was San Roman again. "Have nothing left to fight with ...out of ammo...Russian tanks in view....destroying my equipment.” 

"Tears flooded my eyes," wrote Grayston Lynch. "For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country." 

When the smoke cleared and their ammo had been expended to the very last bullet, when a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after three days of relentless battle, barely 1,400 of them -- without air support (from the U.S. Carriers just offshore) and without a single supporting shot by naval artillery (from U.S. cruisers and destroyers poised just offshore) -- had squared off against 21,000 Soviet-led Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Soviet tanks. The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted over 3,000 casualties on their Soviet-armed and led enemies. This feat of arms still amazes professional military men. 

“They fought magnificently and were not defeated,” stressed Marine Col. Jack Hawkins a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who helped train them. “They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies and support promised by their sponsor, the Government of the United States.” 

 

The Kennedy Family’s Love Affair With Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

Humberto Fontova Apr 08, 2023

“Cheryl Hines is a successful actress, director, producer, and podcast host, but the Hollywood starlet may be gearing up to add First Lady to her long list of impressive roles,” reports the Daily Mail this week. “The 57-year-old's husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he's officially challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for the upcoming 2024 presidential election.”

Which is interesting enough, without the following: “She (Hines) even once had lemonade with Fidel Castro at his house in Cuba. 'We went to Cuba, this was probably 10 years ago, while we were there, my husband wanted to see if we could visit with Mr. Castro'….

"'When we got to the hotel, there was a guy in a white linen suit who said, "El Presidente will see you." 'They came and picked us up in a van, it was a nice van, I was like, "Woah, what's happening?"

"'We got to his house and he was wearing a track suit. We sat down with him, [my husband] and him spoke in Spanish for a while. They talked about assassination attempts, as one does when you're drinking lemonade. He was sweet. It was the best lemonade I've ever had, I don't know what was in it but it was fantastic.'"

As luck would have it, we discussed those (mostly bogus) assassination attempts here just last week.  But naturally, RFK Jr. swallowed Castro’s hoary propaganda hook, line and sinker. To wit:

“Despite its poverty, Cuba has managed some impressive accomplishments. Cuba’s government boasts the highest literacy rates for its population of any nation in the hemisphere" ….blah…blah…blah.

I’ll spare you the rest of RFK Jr’s regurgitations of Castroite propaganda in his article for the Inter Press Service from Jan. 2015, which also predictably denounces one of the crown jewels of post-war U.S. foreign policy: the phenomenally successful “Cuba embargo.”

We’ve discussed this so-called embargo at length here at Townhall, primarily how it’s not a bona-fide embargo by any stretch of the word’s definition, since for over two decades the U.S. has been among Cuba’s top food suppliers. The main provision of this “embargo” is that the relentlessly deadbeat Castro-Crime-Syndicate (mislabeled “Cuba” by the Democrat/Media Complex) pay cash up front for U.S. imports. This has made the U.S. taxpayer among the very few on earth spared fleecing for millions by the Castro-Crime-Syndicate…..speaking of which! 

From just this week:  “A British judge ruled that Cuba’s National Bank can be sued by lenders who are owed 72 million euros.” 

And speaking of the Kennedy family’s historic affection for the mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring Stalinists who have run Cuba; remember when RFK Jr’s mother Ethel Kennedy was discovered to have decorated both her Florida home and the Kennedy family’s estate named Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia, with pictures of Che Guevara?

And remember how even before the shrieks of “Fake News!” from sophisticated liberals against “deplorables” could commence for spreading something so patently absurd  as a famous American political matriarch decorating her homes with pictures of  an epic America-hater whose lifelong craving was to incinerate the U.S.—even before any of this, Robert Kennedy Jr himself boasted for the public prints that  “My mom loves Che Guevara! Her dog is named Che!”     

According to Pinterest, the Che Guevara picture at Hickory Hill was (is) located in the late Robert F. Kennedy’s very home office!  

This makes the Che Guevara family presence all the more “fascinating,” considering that these Kennedys were America’s twin “commanders-in-chief” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and during the infamous Bay of Pigs treachery which took place 22 years ago this very week.

More “fascinating” still, the Hickory Hill office picture is the original uncropped version. The famous Che Guevara pic seen on t-shirts and posters was a cropped version of one taken by Alberto Korda in March 1960. Korda’s real name was Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez and he was a KGB agent, as revealed by Soviet-Bloc intelligence defector Ion Pacepa. The cropped picture was spread throughout the world by I. Lavretsky and Giangicomo Fetrinelli, respectively full-time and part-time KGB agents, as also revealed by Pacepa. 

Hence, every person you see sporting that t-shirt or poster is a genuine “Russian colluder!”— though probably unwittingly in about 80 percent of the cases, when they qualify merely as morons. 

Several fascinating questions now arise: Was that Che pic present in RFK’s office in the early 1960s, when he was head of the famous Operation Mongoose, purportedly a Kennedy/CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow his regime? If so, there’s no indication the Che pic was used as a dartboard, as it sits alongside what are (presumably) revered Kennedy family members. 

Now, if the man (Robert F. Kennedy) tasked with overthrowing the Castro regime kept a cherished picture of Che Guevara in his home office, are there any more questions why Fidel Castro died peacefully in bed at 90?

 

Did the Diabolical CIA Really Try Repeatedly to Assassinate Poor Innocent Little Fidel Castro?

Humberto Fontova Apr 01, 2023 @ Townhall.com

CIA officials get paid pretty handsomely. And their job-description is pretty clear: to assess foreign threats against our national security and defend us against them.

So you’d really hope the American taxpayer was getting an honest return on their “investment” and CIA officials were really  "putting on their thinking caps" and really  "burning the midnight oil" attempting to bump-off a mass-murdering Soviet satrap and terrorist who set up shop 90 miles from our shores during the height of the Cold War.

HAH! Hope again. “So far as I have been able to determine,” revealed E. Howard Hunt who, during the early 1960s, served as head of the political division of the CIA’s “Cuba Project,” “no COHERENT plan was ever developed within the CIA to assassinate Castro, though it was the heart’s desire of many exile groups.”

Interestingly, Hunt stressed that killing Castro was his own recommendation. But he couldn’t get any serious takers within the agency.

Now let’s head over to the famous Church-Committee hearings in the mid 70’s when all these (so-called) assassination attempts were first “revealed.” Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), by the way, was a notorious pinko just panting to smear anti-communists. Yet here’s among the items his (highly-embarrassed) Committee (grudgingly) discovered and reported:

“In August 1975, Fidel Castro gave Senator George McGovern a list of twenty-four alleged attempts to assassinate him in which Castro claimed the CIA had been involved… The Committee has found NO EVIDENCE that the CIA was involved in the attempts on Castro’s life enumerated in the allegations that Castro gave to Senator McGovern.”

“Coherent” is probably the key word by Hunt. All those “assassination plans” the Fake News Media transcribes and parrots from Castro’s disinformation officers (both in Cuba and in the U.S.) were probably mostly brainstorming speculations by half-drunken officials. A few might have gotten half-heartedly halfway off the ground.   

Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA man who played a key role in capturing Che Guevara, also noticed the “incoherence” of these assassination plans. “While we were training for the Bay of Pigs me and a friend volunteered to kill Castro,” Rodriguez recalled to your humble servant. “We were given a rifle with a telescopic sight and we attempted to infiltrate Cuba… after the third attempt, we returned and they (CIA handlers) told us that the plan had been changed, had been canceled, so they took the rifle away.” 

Oh, I know, I know, the Fake News Media has been flogging these “finely-tuned dastardly assassination attempts” against poor innocent little Castro for decades, and more recently jump-started the fake-history campaign with the “revelations” from the declassified JFK assassination documents.

In fact, the overwhelmingly liberal and most Ivy League “educated” CIA suits of the time may have found offing Fidel Castro too heart-wrenching of an operational flip-flop. To wit: 

• “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas” (Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s Caribbean Desk chief from 1957 to 1960).
• “Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except [Republican] ambassador Earl Smith” (Robert Weicha, CIA operative in Santiago Cuba).
• “Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever” (crackerjack Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel, 1958).
• “Without U.S. help Fidel Castro would never have gotten into power. The State Department played a large part in bringing Castro to power. The press, the Chief of the CIA Section are also responsible… we are responsible for bringing Castro in power. I do not care how you want to word it" (Earl T. Smith U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, 1957-59).
• “A friendly and persuasive CIA representative who had an opportunity of talking to Fidel Castro for an hour (when the Soviet satrap visited Washington D.C. in April 1959) emerged in a state of ecstasy about Castro’s receptivity, responsiveness and understanding” (Steven Bonsal U.S. ambassador to Cuba 1959-61).

In fact, Raul Castro had a KGB handler since 1954, and when arrested in Mexico in 1956, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was found to have, in his very wallet, the calling card of the KGB's top Latin American agent, Nikolai Leonov. During his Mexico exile, Fidel Castro was also plotting the future Stalinization of Cuba in meetings with both Leonov and with his Cuban KGB colleague Osvaldo Sanchez.

But never mind all those tacky Cuban “deplorables” frantically warning U.S. agencies of the above. They often wore ill-fitting suits and reeked strongly of “McCarthyism,” a most offensive odor to the (mostly) Beltway blueblood CIA suits. Much better, sniffed the CIA suits, to rely on our socio-economic counterparts in Cuba like the Bacardis, who concur with us that the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and their colleagues are all as pure as the driven snow. 

Consequently, thanks in part to recommendations from our crackerjack CIA sleuths based in Cuba, January 7, 1959, marks a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the U.S. granted diplomatic recognition (benediction) to a Latin American government as quickly as we bestowed this benediction on Fidel Castro’s that day. In fact, nothing remotely as fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” (as the Fake News Media habitually refers to him) Fulgencio Batista.

Oh, I know, I know, the Fake News Media, Fake History Channel and Fake Academics all swear up and down that Castro was a smitten Jeffersonian Democrat strumming his guitar and crooning love songs under our balcony -- until a mean ‘ole Uncle Sam bullied him (kicking and screaming) into the arms of Mother Russia.

In fact, that yarn ranks right up there with “Cuba’s Free and Fabulous Healthcare!” and indeed with the “Dastardly CIA’s Assassination Plots!” in the pantheon of Castroite/Fake News Media fables. 

The CIA /Castro assassination meme (like so many others) was hatched by the KGB and Cuban DI (Directorio de Intelligencia) –more specifically by multi-decorated for meritorious service DI colonel Fabian Escalante, seen here with his commander-in-chief. The fairy-tale/meme really took off with Escalante’s “book” (i.e., KGB-mentored disinformation pamphlet) "638 Ways to Kill Castro."

There was a day when honest historians and reporters laughed-off the obvious propaganda tracts of a totalitarian regime’s counterintelligence executives, especially from one who, far from having defected, still functioned as a full-fledged and high-rolling Stalinist official.

Alas when it comes to documenting Cuban totalitarianism, the normal rules of historiography and reporting, and even of decency, logic and common sense, have long been turned on their heads.

 

A Genuine Heroine for Women’s History Month

Humberto Fontova Mar 18, 2023 @ Townhall.com

Ever heard of Zoila Aguila, also known as “La Niña Del Escambray?”  No?...And yet her story seems to check every box for a Woke feminist super-drama.

You mean to tell me that from the Mainstream Media (so abundant with “feminists”) you didn’t hear about this “Latina” girl who, when younger than Miley Cyrus, courageously took up arms as a guerrilla fighter against a murderous, terror-sponsoring (genuinely) Russia-colluding regime, was captured, horribly tortured in utterly dark, underground dungeons crawling with rats and roaches where she lost her baby and eventually her mind? She suffered 15 years as a political prisoner enduring horrible tortures, alongside the longest-suffering female political prisoners in modern history, in a locale absolutely infested with mainstream “news” bureaus and their intrepid “reporters” and correspondents. Finally she was released in a prisoner exchange and found refuge in the U.S.

You mean the U.S. Mainstream Media didn’t inform you of how her brother and husband, fellow guerrilla fighters against Soviet commanded oppressors, were also captured by Soviet–armed and commanded storm-troopers on orders of the regime whose historic rationale was the destruction of the U.S.—and were murdered by firings squads, well within earshot of the “latina” freedom-fighter, as the murderers taunted her with laughs and jeers? 

Well, gosh?  Doesn’t this story—involving events just 90 miles from U.S. shores and subsequent  legal U.S. resident—seem to have all the villains, heroes, drama and plot the Mainstream Media/Democrat/Hollywood/Publishing-Complex could ever DREAM of—for a smashing, human-interest story, documentary, movie, etc?

AH! But here’s the kicker, amigos: the latina freedom-fighter in question, Zoila Aguila, who passed away in Feb. of  2021 in Miami, fought against and was tortured horribly till insane by the regime co-founded by the Left’s premier poster boys—Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Need I say more about the media blackout?

When the hacks who host and narrate programs on The History Channel, NPR, etc. call Che Guevara a "guerrilla fighter" they're quite correct, but unwittingly. After all, the term "Indian fighter" was used for cowboys who fought against Indians right?  Well, did your history professor or The History Channel inform you that one of the bloodiest and longest guerrilla wars on this continent was fought - not by - but against Fidel Castro and Che, Guevara and mostly by campesinos (country folk)?  

Didn't think so. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba's Kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway. Had these rebels gotten a fraction of the aid the Afghan Mujahideen got, the Viet Cong got — indeed that George Washington's rebels got from the French — had these Cuban rebels gotten any help, some bandits named Fidel Castro and Che Guevara would probably merit less Wikipedia space today than Pancho Villa.

But JFK's Missile Crisis "solution" pledged to Castro and his Soviet sponsors that the U.S. pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline. 

Kennedy's shameful surrender to Khrushchev which “solved” the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis cut this lifeline. The Cuban freedom-fighters working from South Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro and his Soviet patrons remained utterly unmolested as they consolidated Stalinism 90 miles from U.S. shores. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country.

Zoila Aguila was prominent among these lonely and virtually-unknown Cuban freedom-fighters. On the other hand the utterly bogus battles of the utterly bogus guerrillas (the Castro brothers and Che Guevara) had been trumpeted to high heavens by the U.S. media. And this relentless propagandizing was highly appreciated:

“Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda,” snickered Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.

This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the MSM and all you'll learn about it from those illustrious Ivy League academics. To get an idea of the odds faced by those betrayed rural rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface."

Che had a very bloody (and typically cowardly) hand in this slaughter, one of the major anti-insurgency wars on this continent. Many of these anti-communist guerrillas were executed on the spot upon capture, a Che specialty. "We fought with the fury of cornered beasts," is how one of the lucky few who escaped described this desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through their proxies Fidel and Che. 

In 1956 when Che linked up with Fidel, Raul, and their Cuban chums in Mexico City, one of them (now in exile) recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as "Fascists!" and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.

In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. He had a hand in the following: "Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits." At one point in 1962, one of every 17 Cubans was a political prisoner. Fidel himself admits that they faced 179 bands of "counter-revolutionaries" and "bandits." 

Mass murder was the order in Cuba's countryside. It was the only way to decimate so many rebels. These country folk went after the Reds with a ferocity that saw Fidel and Che running to their Soviet sugar daddies and tugging their pants in panic. That commie bit about how "a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people, etc." fit Cuba's anti-Fidel and Che rebellion to a T. So in a relocation and concentration campaign that shamed anything the Brits did to the Boers, the gallant Communists ripped thousands of Cubans from their ancestral homes and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba. 

One of these Cuban redneck wives (Zoila Aguila) refused to be relocated. After her husband, sons, and a few nephews were murdered by the Gallant Che and his Soviet-armed and led minions, she grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip and took to the hills. She became a rebel herself. Cubans knew her as La Niña Del Escambray. 

For a year she ran rings around the Communist armies sweeping the hills in her pursuit. Finally in 1964 she ran out of ammo and supplies and the communist storm-trooper rounded her up. All this was totally ignored by the foreign media. 

On the other hand, Zoila Aguila’s torturers got no end of adulatory coverage from media “feminists.”

Grammy Winner Bonnie Raitt—Hypocrite Extraordinaire

Humberto Fontova Feb 11, 2023@ Townhall.com

“When Bonnie Raitt won the award for Song of the Year at the 2023 Grammys on Sunday night for her track Just Like That,” The Daily Mail reports this week, “some were shocked that the accolade went to the 73-year-old folk singer - over huge artists like Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Harry Styles, Beyonce and Adele, who were also nominated for the category.”

Much less shocking, given Raitt’s social and political milieu, is this rock and roller’s propaganda ministrations for the only regime in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere to criminalize rock & roll and herd its practitioners and fans into forced-labor camps.

You see, amigos: Back in March of 1999, Bonnie Raitt was among the top acts of a celebrity-studded propaganda extravaganza for Stalinist Cuba titled “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters." During her visit to the Castro-Family-Fiefdom, Raitt stopped hyperventilating just long enough to compose a song in Fidel Castro's honor titled, "Cuba Is Way Too Cool!" Among the lyrics: "It's just a happy little island!" and "Big bad wolf (the U.S.) you look the FOOL!" 

With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots, rasped out her ditty at Havana's Karl Marx theater. "Rock Against Freedom" sounds much better to me. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffet came on after Bonnie. 

Then came Joane Osborne. R.E.M's Peter Buck, former Police’s Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn. In between crooning and strumming, these cheeky free-spirits all dutifully recited their propaganda scripts against the U.S. "embargo."  

Against South Africa a decade earlier, of course, their script called FOR an embargo. 

A crowd of 5000 Cubans huddled before them, swaying and clapping. All were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let's step back and contemplate the scene: here's these troubadours for human rights, here's the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa ("I Ain't Gonna Play Sun City!" thundered Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, "Artists United Against Apartheid.") 

But she'll GLADLY play in Havana's Karl Marx theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she'll happily compose a song in their honor—and all on the house! 

Here's Bonnie and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning lovesongs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology whose minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to the late researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie and Jimmy's very audience had a hand in 110,000 of these murders. Here's these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists! 

These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe. 

When Cuba's suicide rate reached 24 per thousand in 1986—making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48—at that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites. 

But apparently not Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters. When in his charming presence, neither of these feminists could keep from bursting into those toothy smiles and throwing their arms around the man who drove more women to end their lives than anyone in the world. 

Cuba also has the world's highest (or third highest, depending on the source) abortion rate. I say there's a relationship with the suicide rate. They both smack of hopelessness and despair. 

In Castroland, Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles' and Rolling Stones' records—where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and dumped in concentration camps with "Work Will Make Men Out of You," in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG. But the conditions were identical. 

Much "wasting away" within their barbed wire, Mr Buffet. But not from Margaritas. Slave labor, disease, malnutrition, beatings, torture and hunger strikes caused the "wasting way." Stepping on pop-tops is no fun, I agree, Mr Buffet. But neither is being bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of bayonets, a pastime much indulged by your charming Castroite hosts. Armando Valladares provides harrowing details of scores of such deaths in his “Against All Hope.” 

The blight is also known as Castroism, and is also known as inspiration for happy little jingles by Bonnie Raitt.

 

Fidel Castro Celebrant Raphael Warnock Neck to Neck With Herschel Walker in Georgia Runoff

Humberto Fontova Dec 03, 2022 @ Townhall.com

“A new poll this week shows Georgia’s Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker tied with his Democratic opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock in the runoff election next week,” Townhall recently reported.

“Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock worked at a church (Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church) that hosted and celebrated late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in 1995, past news stories and Warnock's biography indicate…Warnock's campaign, though, says he was a junior member of the staff at the time Castro spoke at the church and was not a decision-maker," reported Fox News during his initial senatorial race.

Perhaps a recap of that Fidel-lovefest is in order: 

“God Bless you, Fidel!” boomed (head) Pastor Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church while introducing Fidel Castro during that famous New York visit. The People’s Weekly World provides more fascinating details:

“The audience which included New York Democratic representatives Charles Rangel enthusiastically greeted the Communist leader with a ten minute standing ovation. Chants of ‘FIDEL!-FIDEL! VIVA-FIDEL!’ resounded from the rafters.”

Shortly the delirious ovation rose to the level of an earthquake, to a veritable hurricane. The very walls and rafters shook with shrieks of "FIDEL! VIVA FIDEL!!" You see, Elmore Breathe, head of the "Patrice Lumumba Coalition" and chair for the meeting, asked the audience, "Who would you rather come to Harlem? Fidel or Giuliani?" 

"FIDEL!" They erupted. "FIDEL! VIVA FIDEL!" 

Incidentally: “The U.S. is a vulture preying on humanity! War against the U.S. is my true destiny!” declared Fidel Castro in April 1958, at a time our crackerjack CIA and State Department were helping him both materially and morally.

“VIVA FIDEL!..VIVA FIDEL!” roared and stomped the Abyssinian Baptist Church crowd. 

Incidentally: “You Americans just don’t understand it. The depths of my brother Fidel’s hatred for your country cannot be imagined by you Americans.  His intention—his OBSESSION!—is to destroy the U.S.!”  said Juanita Castro during Congressional testimony in June of 1965.

 “FI-DEL!...FI-DEL!…VIVA FI-DEL!” chanted Pastor Warnock’s flock while standing and whooping and clapping deliriously. 

Incidentally: “What!?” gasped Nikita Khrushchev on Oct. 28th 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Fidel Castro is proposing that we start a nuclear war?! That we launch missiles from Cuba?! But that is INSANE!..Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” 

“FIDEL!..VIVA FIDEL!..VIVA FIDEL” boomed Pastor Warnock’s congregation for a deafening ten-minute ovation. 

“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear-armed. That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to fire them at the U.S.!” Fidel Castro told Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992.

“VIVA FIDEL-VIVA FIDEL!” yelled pastor Warnock’s fellow celebrants in delirious joy. 

Incidentally: “Kneel!--KNEEL DOWN!” the Cuban torturer screamed at the bound and bloodied but unbowed U.S. POW in front of him, Lieutenant Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force F-105 pilot shot down over North Vietnam. “You son of a beech! I will show you!” continued screeching the Castroite torturer. Earl Cobeil was a complete physical disaster when we saw him. He had been tortured for days and days and days. His hands were almost severed from the manacles. He had bamboo in his shins. All kinds of welts up and down all over; his face was bloody. Then the Cuban torturer again began to beat him with a fan belt.The Cubans unmercifully beat a mentally defenseless, sick American naval pilot to death. “The tortures of U.S. POWs by Fidel Castro’s agents were the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi," according to the book “Honor Bound.”

“VIVA FIDEL! VIVA FIDEL!... VIVA FIDEL!”  bellowed pastor Warnock’s enraptured congregation till hoarse (with presumable accompaniment from their pastors).

Not that New York’s delirious reception for the mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring dictator who almost nuked New York ended at New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Far from it! 

“The Toast of Manhattan!” crowed a Time magazine story of the day. 

“The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” also read a Newsweek story that week. Both articles referred to the social swirl and acclaim that engulfed Fidel Castro upon his visit to New York by the very Manhattan media and business luminaries who barely escaped incineration at his hand. The occasion was the UN’s 50th anniversary celebration. In fact, New York’s Castromania almost recaptured the hysteria for Simon and Garfunkel’s 1981 reunion in Central Park. 

Along with his visit to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Stalinist dictator’s itinerary also involved a luncheon at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas, and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, and Barbara Walters, all jostled for photo-ops and stood in line for the warmongering mass-murderer's autograph. 

Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-murderer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into a toothy smile, wrapped her arms around Fidel Castro, and smooched him warmly on the cheek. 

"You people are the cream of the crop!" beamed the mass-murderer to the rapt and smiling throng he’d come within a hair of incinerating and now surrounded him. 

"Hear, hear!" chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee. But many more were left panting, because according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, Fidel Castro had gotten over 250 dinner invitations from Manhattan celebrities and power-brokers. 

Everything above—however outrageous it may seem—is meticulously documented here. 

The jailer and torturer of the longest suffering black political prisoners in modern history was bear-hugged by Charles Rangel and cheered (presumably) by Raphael Warnock.

 The jailer and torturer of the most female political prisoners in the modern history of the western hemisphere was hugged and smooched by feminist Diane Sawyer. 

The jailer and torturer of the most journalists in the modern history of the Western hemisphere found everyone from Dan Rather to Mike Wallace to Tina Brown lining up for his autograph. 

The jailer and torturer who abolished private property within his Stalinist fiefdom found David Rockefeller and Mort Zuckerman crowding around him for a handshake. 

The Communist dictator who abolished capitalism under penalty of firing squad and torture chamber was honored in the board room of the Wall Street Journal with a VIP luncheon.

Pigs Are Flying—A Famous Rock Star Denounces Che Guevara!

Humberto Fontova Nov 12, 2022 @ Townhall.com 

“I still don’t like Che Guevara T-shirts. [Expletive] Che Guevara!.. To be in the company of people going, 'No way, man,' I cannot hear it…There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism.” (U2’s singer Bono in a recent interview with an instantly disgruntled New York Times Magazine reporter.)

Just maybe, Bono has read beyond Rolling Stone and The New York Times, where he would have never learned that:  

In a famous speech in 1961 Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion" as "reprehensible." "Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates," commanded Guevara. "Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service." 

Perhaps Bona can have a word with fellow rocker Graham Nash, famous for the lyrics in his hit Chicago: 

“If you believe in justice, if you believe in freedom, Let a man live his own life "Rules and regulations who needs them!”

This same Graham Nash has long been a vocal champion of the regime Che Guevara co-founded,  which regulates more of its subjects activities than has almost any regime in the modern history of the human race, from what they eat to what they read, from where they travel to where they work, etc. etc. 

Rules and Regulations, INDEED, Mr. Nash! 

The regime celebrated by Graham Nash has bound and gagged more political prisoners than any regime in the modern history of the Western hemisphere.

In 1979, Graham Nash proudly played with his musical cohorts (Stills and Crosby) at Havana Jam, a concert strictly for the Stalinist fiefdom’s nomenklatura and their offspring. Since then, Nash has often visited Stalinist Cuba.

Youth, wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass." Those who “chose their own path" (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-Imperialist Rock & Roll) were denounced as "delinquents." In his famous speech Che Guevara even vowed "to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!" 

On top of jailing political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdering more people in its first three years than Hitler’s in its first six, here’s an (abbreviated) list of the things prohibited under penalty of jail and/or forced labor by the regime co-founded by the man cheeky free-spirit rockers often celebrate: 

1. To say "Down with Fidel!" or “Che Sucks!” Cuba’s constitution mandates 18 months in prison for anyone overheard cracking a joke against Castro or Che. If the neighborhood CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, imported to Cuba by the East German STASI, who grandfathered it from Hitler’s Gestapo) overhears any such deviation from “ideological purity” the regime “will want a word with you.” 

2. Travel abroad without permission from the government. (which is granted mostly to regime toadies and hacks. 

3. Switch jobs without regime permission. 

4. Switch homes without regime permission.

5. Publish anything without regime permission. 

6. Own a personal computer, a fax machine or a satellite antenna. 

7. Access the Internet. Cuba’s Internet is under constant regime “surveillance.” By the secret police. only a tiny percentage of the Castro regime’s subjects have access to the web, a lower percentage than in Papua New Guinea. This is a nation that pre-Castro/Che had more telephones and TV’s per-capita than most European countries.

8. Send your children to a private or religious school. All schools belong to the Communist party. 

9. Tune in to any free radio or television station. In Cuba, all media is property of the Stalinist regime. 

12. Read books, magazines, or newspapers not approved by the regime. All books, magazines, and newspapers in Cuba are published by the Stalinist regime. 

13. Receive publications from abroad or from visitors. This is punishable by jail pursuant to Law 88. 

14. Openly communicate with foreign journalists. 

15. Visit or stay in hotels, restaurants, beaches or resorts for tourists (regime permission is granted to a tiny number of regime hacks and toadies).

16. Accept gifts or donations from foreign visitors. 

17. Seek employment with foreign companies allowed to do business in Cuba (regime permission is required for employment with these accomplices with Stalinism).

18. Own your own home or business. 

19. Earn more than the wages established by the regime for all employees: $7-12 monthly for most jobs, $15-20 monthly for professionals, such as doctors and government officials. 

20. Sell any personal belongings, services, homemade foods or crafts without regime permission.

21. Fish along the coastline or board a boat without regime permission. 

22. Belong to any independent trade union. The regime controls all unions and no individual or collective bargaining is permitted; neither are strikes or protests. 

23. Organize any artistic performance without regime permission. (Don’t look for this announced at the Sundance Film Festival but before Robert Redford released the Motorcycle Diaries he was mandated to travel to Cuba and give a special screening for approval to one of the film’s co/producers: Fidel Castro. So in effect, this Castroite provision can actually extend beyond Cuba’s borders.) 

24. Select a doctor or hospital. The regime assigns them all. 

25. Seek medical help outside of Cuba. 

26. Hire an attorney. All are assigned by the regime. 

28. Refuse to participate in an event or mass demonstration organized by the Communist Party. (Turn down such an “offer” and watch your food rations shrink and employment status crumble.) 

29. Refuse to participate in "voluntary" work for adults and children. (see above) 

30. Refuse to vote in a single party election featuring only Stalinist candidates nominated by the Stalinist regime. 

31. Transport any food products for either personal or family consumption between provinces. 

32. Slaughter a cow. This "felony" is sanctioned by five years imprisonment. 

33. Purchase or sell real estate or land. 

34. Select a career. In the selection process for universities (all of which belong to the Stalinist regime), regime apparatchiks select it for you, closely reviewing your record of “ideological purity,” as reported to them by regime snitches. 

35. Invite a foreigner to spend the night at your home. 

36. Buy milk in a regime outlet for any child older than seven years. Only Cuban children up to seven years of age have the right to pay a quota for milk. After that, parents can only obtain milk in the black market—if caught and their “ideological purity” (as reported by regime snitches) is in question, jail time is usually in the offing for the hapless Castro subject. 

Today the world’s largest Che Guevara image adorns Cuba’s headquarters and torture chambers for its KGB and STASI-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting. 

But Graham Nash has many, many hot competitors in the Cuba stupidity contest. Owing to bandwidth constraints, we’ll only mention the one most closely breathing down Nash’s neck, Carlos Santana. 

So let’s recall the 2005 Academy Awards where the famed guitarist (on hand to perform the sound score for the Robert Redford-produced Motorcycle Diaries) couldn't contain himself. He stopped for the photographers on the carpet grand entrance, smiled deliriously and swung his jacket open. 

TA-DA! There it was:  Carlos' elegantly embroidered Che Guevara t-shirt. Carlos' face as the flashbulbs popped said it all. "I'm so COOL!" he beamed. "I'm so HIP! I'm so CHEEKY! So SHARP! So TUNED IN!" 

Tune in to this, Carlos: In the mid 1960s, Fidel and your charming t-shirt icon set up forced-labor camps in Cuba for, among many others, "anti-social elements" and "delinquents." Besides Bohemian (Haight-Ashbury, Greenwich Village  types) and homosexuals, these camps were crammed with "roqueros," who qualified in Che and Fidel's eyes as useless "delinquents." 

A "roquero" was a  hapless youth who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music in Cuba. 

Comprende, Carlos? Do you see where I'm going with this, Carlos? 

Yes, Mr. Santana, here you were grinning widely -- and OH-SO-hiply!-- while proudly displaying the symbol of a regime that made it a criminal offense to listen to music by Carlos Santana!

This Week in History—JFK’s Immorality and Deceit Continue

Humberto Fontova  |  Oct 29, 2022 

“'My Cuban Missile Crisis tryst with JFK': When the United States stood on the brink of nuclear Armageddon during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F Kennedy sent his wife and children away to stay at the family's summer farm in Virginia. But he pulled his 19-year-old mistress (Mimi Alford) close, summoning her from her college while he stared down the Soviet Union.” 

But don’t take this appalling datum from me. After all I’m an “embittered right-wing-Cuban exile with an axe to grind.” Fine. Take it from JFK’s mistress-of-the-minute herself. Details here.

Presidential mistress (while a teenager) Mimi Alford claims the President who remains the most popular in modern U.S. history offered her amyl nitrate poppers during a nude swimming party at the Palm Springs estate of Bing Crosby, the most popular entertainer of America’s Norman Rockwell era. The party took place around “White” Christmas of 1962.

“The shouts and shrieks of the partygoers,” writes Seymour Hersh in his earlier (but corroborating book) The Dark Side of Camelot, “had the California State policeman guarding the estate that night assuming the sounds were actually the nighttime calls of coyotes.”

But as the whoops and shrieks got louder the alarmed state troopers finally called Kennedy’s Secret Service agents Joe Paolella and Larry Newman to ask if some coyotes were bothering the president. The agents, long accustomed to averting their gaze during these frequent episodes, finally went around the back fence and investigated. “(Kennedy’s top aide) Dave Powers was banging a girl on the edge of the pool,” recalled Newman, “while the President was sitting across the pool having a drink and talking to some broads. Everybody was buck**s naked.”

But no word from the Secret Service agents if Bingo’s “Silent Night, Holy Night” played in the background during this solemn Yuletide celebration.

Mere months earlier dozens of Cuban exiles (many of them college kids about Mimi Alford’s age) were infiltrating Cuba and bringing out eye-witness reports of what remains the biggest military threat to the U.S. since 1812. In the process dozens were also dying by firing squad and torture at the hands of Castro and Che Guevara’s KGB-tutored secret police.

For all the good the Cubans did:

“Nothing but refugee rumors,” sneered JFK’s National Security advisor, McGeorge Bundy on ABC’s Issues and Answers on October 14, 1962. “Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued the Ivy League luminary, barely masking his scorn for these hot-headed and deceitful Cubans and their sensational reports of missiles. “There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba,” he scoffed.

And for all the thanks the Cubans got:

“There's fifty-odd-thousand Cuban refugees in this country," sneered President Kennedy himself the following day, "all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They're the ones putting out this kind of stuff."

Exactly 48 hours later U-2 photos sat on the president’s desk revealing those “refugee rumors,” complete with nuclear warheads, and pointed directly at Bundy, JFK and their entire staff of sagacious Ivy League wizards.

After the Missile Crisis "resolution," the U.S. Coast Guard and even the British navy (when some intrepid exile freedom fighters moved their operation to the Bahamas and Kennedy notified his chum, British PM Harold Mc Millan of their intrepidness) shielded Castro from exile attacks. In the Florida Keys and Bahamas they were arresting and disarming the very exiles the CIA had been training and arming the month before. 

Eighteen months after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, two months after his deal with Khrushchev (and shortly after Bing Crosby’s party) a guilt-stricken JFK ransomed the surviving Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters back from Castro's dungeons. Living under a daily firing-squad sentence for almost two years, these Cuban freedom-fighters (all volunteers and overwhelmingly civilian) – aware it would probably save their lives – had refused to sign the confession damning the “U.S. Imperialists” (the very nation, which for all they knew at the time, that had betrayed them on that beachhead.) “We will die with dignity!” responded their second-in-command Erneido Oliva to his furious KGB-trained interrogators, again and again and again.

To Castroites, such an attitude not only enrages, but baffles.

On Dec. 29, 1962, these Cuban freedom fighters, many on crutches, others in wheelchairs, gathered with their destitute and traumatized families in Miami’s Orange Bowl to hear President Kennedy address them. “I am here today not to be honored—but to pay honor,” intoned the U.S. president. “I know of no men in modern history who showed more courage under more difficult conditions than those before me today.”

The president continued in this vein and upon completing his tribute the Cuban freedom-fighters handed him their sacred battle flag, a gesture which surprised and seemed to deeply move the U.S. president.

“I will never abandon Cuba to Communism!” declared JFK while addressing the recently ransomed Bay of Pigs freedom fighters and their families in Miami’s Orange Bowl Dec. 29, 1962. “I promise to deliver this Brigade banner to you in a free Havana!”

“That was the first time it snowed in the Orange Bowl,” later wrote CIA man named Grayston Lynch who was in attendance. Lynch helped train many of the Bay of Pigs freedom fighters and he landed on the beach with them, firing the first shots of the invasion. Then — from 1961-64 — he led several dozen commando raids into Cuba, as part of Operation Mongoose. Probably nobody had the “hands-on” experience with the actual nuts and bolts of Mongoose as Grayston Lynch. The “snow” comment appears in Lynch’s book Decision to Disaster published in 1998, after years of analyzing the entire Mongoose matter, and obviously refers to the “snow job” JFK was pulling by claiming he’d help overthrow Cuban communism.

But at Kennedy’s promise on that Dec. 29^th 1962, the stadium had erupted: “CUBA LIBRE!” yelled the delirious crowd while hugging and cheering and sobbing. “CUBA-LIBRE!” yelled men (and boys) who’d snickered in the face of KGB torturers weeks earlier, but now wept openly. The hour of liberation seemed nigh, and with the full backing of “The Leader of the Free World.”

Ah, but unbeknownst to most of them, two months earlier this same Leader of the Free World had made a different pledge to Khrushchev, ensuring anything but a Cuba Libre; promising, in fact, that Havana would remain Communist, as enforced by U.S. arms.

And the following 60 years showed which pledge the U.S. honored. The pledge to the Butcher of Budapest to preserve Castroite Stalinism has proven sacrosanct–while the pledge of liberty to the men who risked their lives to warn the U.S. of the greatest threat in her history was trashed.

This Week in History—JFK Surrenders to Khrushchev During Cuban Missile Crisis

Humberto Fontova  |  Oct 22, 2022

"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal President Kennedy cut with Nikita Khrushchev regarding the missiles. 

'Aaw come on, Humberto!' Some amigos retort. 'Gen. LeMay was a serious war-monger and NUTCASE!—the model for Gen. Ripper in Dr Strangelove!  Are you saying we shoulda started a worldwide nuclear war with tens of millions incinerated to liberate a two-bit Caribbean island of barely 7 million people?!' 

Nothing of the sort. In fact, the choice at the time was never between nuclear war and surrendering Cuba along with U.S. national security. This was amply recognized by some of LeMay’s fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff, by a diverse array of Republican Party leaders of the time, and even by a few cold-warrior Democrats—though you’d never guess it from the 60 year Democrat-Media-Hollywood juggernaut of pro-Kennedy propaganda.

Let’s do this. Let’s bypass LeMay, “circle-back,” and look at what many of his “less Gen. Ripper-like” colleagues and contemporaries were saying at the time about Kennedy’s “resolution” to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Joint Chiefs of Staff Generals Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor (a Kennedy favorite) represented opposite poles of the military establishment of the time. Well:

"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of Kennedy’s deal.

"We've been had!" yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.

Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, represented different poles of the Republican Party. Yet both agreed: 

"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” wrote Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviet squatters rights in our backyard." 

"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Defense establishment stalwart Gen. Alexander Haig, who served as Asst. National Security Advisor to Kissinger during Nixon’s term and as Secretary of Defense under Reagan. "The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas."

Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: "This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."

But not for the Soviets. "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba." 

In fact, according to Khrushchev’s own son Sergei, his father prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!?” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28^th 1962, as recalled by Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?” 

“Apparently.” 

“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission. Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack…..But that is insane!..Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier. 

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat during the Cuban missile crisis. Apparently, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach. 

In his diaries, Khrushchev snickers further: "It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba–for a country 8,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable." So much for the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers.

Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (5,000 nuclear warheads for us, 300 for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy. 

What the situation called for was some mature and low-key “Brinksmanship,” of the type President Eisenhower used to end the Korean War and keep us out of any more during his terms. And (as President in 1962) his top understudy (former Vice President Nixon) would have been just the man to employ it against Khrushchev.

Of course, had Nixon been president since 1960, there would have been no Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962—in fact, there’d been no Castro regime since April of 1961.) 

In any case, the genuine threat in Oct. 1962 came — not from Moscow — but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of The London Daily Worker, November 1962.)

“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear-armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.” 

"Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said," snickered Fidel Castro as late as 1968. "Perhaps one day they'll be made public."

"We can't say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us." That's Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis.

Castro's regime was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Here’s the exact wording from Khrushchev when gleefully agreeing to Kennedy’s terms:

“You (JFK) in your turn gave (to Khrushchev) the assurances that the so-called 'quarantine' would be promptly removed and that no invasion of Cuba would be made, not only by the U.S. but by other countries of the Western hemisphere either.”

Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.

JFK's Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country!

It's a tribute to the power of Castroite mythology that, even with all this information a matter of public record for over half a century the academic/media mantra (gloat, actually) still had Castro, "defying ten U.S. Presidents!"

Nothing of the sort. Instead he’d been protected by them.

When Mrs. Tom Brady Modeled Che Guevara

Humberto Fontova  Oct 08, 2022 @ Townhall.com

Source: Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File

“Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen's marital woes continue to make headlines as multiple reports claim the NFL star is 'hurt' as the supermodel is the one spearheading their likely divorce,” Reports Yahoo Entertainment this week.

And speaking of people “hurt” by the supermodel’s behavior: ask the thousands of Americans of Cuban heritage whose fathers, grandfathers, brothers, etc. were murdered in cold blood by the terrorist/coward who supermodel Bündchen once cheekily modeled on her bosom and butt.

At the São Paulo fashion show on July 15, 2002, Bündchen catwalked wearing a glamorous bikini consisting entirely of faces of Che Guevara, who rarely bathed and constantly reeked of “boiled liver” and “rotting fish,” according to his early comrades and surviving victims. 

Granted, the future Mrs. Tom Brady probably thought the cool, long-haired image clinging to her bosom and buttocks that day depicted Pink Floyd’s lead guitarist, or perhaps The Door’s lead singer, freshly-bathed and redolent of Guerlain - but still.

Bündchen, once the world’s highest paid model and a champion of “female empowerment,” comes across as a genuinely decent person, devoted mom, and sincere philanthropist. Given her childhood in Brazil, her subsequent social circles and the educational qualities of the mainstream media, expecting her to have a clue about her Bikini icon that day seems unfair if not preposterous. Chris Matthews, after all, admitted that he learned much about the Cuban Revolution from The Godfather II. Time magazine, after all, hailed Che Guevara-- co-founder of a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered more of them than pre-war Hitler’s, and craved to ignite a nuclear war - as “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.

Indeed, on this issue, being a high school dropout probably helped Mrs. Brady. Given the tenor of “higher” education nowadays, an Ivy League degree in any of the social “sciences” would have probably made her into an even more fervent cheerleader for Che-wear. So I offer the following more as missionary than as heckler:

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed and tortured 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s. Whatever the term “female empowerment” actually means, surely the definition includes the type of fortitude these ladies (mostly girls younger than yourself today upon their arrest) called forth to survive in Cuba’s prisons, forced labor camps and torture chambers. If not, then the term is even more air-headed than it sounds.

Finally free, they now find their torturer and the murderer of some of their loved ones glorified on everything from T-shirts to thong underwear. This in an age where “sensitivity” supposedly rules in every venue of public discourse.

These women’s prison conditions were described by former Cuban political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consisted of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

 “On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls Manuela Calvo from exile today. "But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely, their bones broken, their mouths bleeding,” recalls Polita Grau. 

Many of these heroic ladies live in the U.S. today. But no producer for The View, Lifetime TV, etc.—much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either.

But you’ve certainly seen their torturer hailed by “feminist” reporters.

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, in 1958, Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S. 

This Castroite “improvement of status” 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.

On Christmas Eve of 1961, a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Che’s Soviet-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet–style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from the Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant. 

In 1962, a Cuban Catholic nun named Aida Rosa Perez was overheard saying things about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara similar to those Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg routinely broadcast about George Bush. Sister Rosa Perez was quickly rounded up at Soviet gun-point and sentenced to 12 years at hard labor. Two years into her sentence, while toiling in the sun inside Castro's Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister Rosa collapsed from a heart attack.

The Cuban Archive project has fully documented many firing squad executions of Cuban women by the regime co-founded by Che Guevara. Over 200 women died from various beatings, brutalities and tortures while in prison. 

Thousands of Cuban women have also drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to “empower” themselves by fleeing the handiwork of your cheekiest fashion statement, Mrs. Tom Brady. This from a nation that prior to Castroism towered over your native Brazil in every socio-economic indicator. 

You’d like to think that in subsequent years Bündchen had learned a bit about her one-time Bikini decoration. Instead in 2016, when Obama’s “opening” made Cuba (still run by the regime that jailed and tortured the most black, female and gay political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere) the world’s “coolest” “be-seen” locale for celebs—even at this late stage of the game, Gisele Bündchen saw fit to join her hipster colleagues and model a Che beret in Havana.