CHAPTER 10

Jon Stewart to Don Fidel: Thank You, Godfather

“I mean everybody who saw Godfather II knows what it was like when Castro took over!” (Chris Matthews, “Hardball, The Place for Politics,” MSNBC, October 20, 2011)

 

“All I know about pre-Castro Cuba I learned from Godfather II!” (Jon Stewart, July 23, 2008)

The media love to dwell on how a few U.S. mobsters once bribed a few Cuban politicians to allow a few casinos in Havana. To hear them tell it: in an economy that was overwhelmingly Cuban-owned, export- and manufacturing-oriented, and provided Cubans per capita with an income higher than most Europeans, the 13^th-lowest infant mortality on earth, and attracted a flood of (primarily first-world) immigrants, this tiny sideline—the casino business—made Cuba a hopelessly wretched place screaming for a communist revolution. So don’t bother us with any boring statistics, you Cuban-exile revanchists!

For almost forty years the primary—and perhaps exclusive —educational text on Cuba for liberals was a screenplay by fiction-writer Mario Puzo and winemaker Francis Ford Coppola. Bestselling author T.J. English, in collaboration with Castro-regime apparatchiks, then expanded on this educational franchise. Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba, and Lost it to the Revolution, he entitled the “New York Times Bestseller” that enchanted and enlightened Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, also known as the primary news and educational source for Americans under 40.

“Well-researched ... knowledgeable ... Briskly paced and well-sourced, Havana Nocturne has the air of a thriller with the bonus of being true,” rhapsodized Tom Miller of The Washington, Post about the book.

“Thoroughly and impressively researched,” attested The Miami Herald.

“Bringing together long-buried historical information with English’s own research in Havana ... Havana Nocturne takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil’s playground for mob leaders,” glows the PR notice from publisher William Morrow.

“The roots of this epic antipathy [between the U.S. and Castro] can be traced in part to the influx of mobsters and the plundering of Havana that took place in the late 1940’s and 50’s ... This book is nothing less than The Rosetta Stone, the key to understanding the Cuban Revolution,” the author modestly claims.

During this interview the legendarily edgy and iconoclastic Jon Stewart royally blew his chance to revel in a nonstop snark-fest against the (genuine) establishment. Instead:

“I love this book!” Stewart gushed upon greeting the author on his “Daily Show.” “This is the true story of Cuba—a fascinating book!” continued the Peabody Award-winner, barely containing himself.

As a service to “The Daily Show’s” producers I prepared a script—based on fully-documented information—for Stewart’s interview with T.J. English that seemed ideal for enhancing the Peabody Award-winner’s acclaim for deflating blowhards and smashing pious platitudes with snarky truth. Here it goes.

Welcome to the show, Mr. English, and thanks for coming. First off, it appears that the primary source for your book, cited no fewer than 72 times in quotes and footnotes, is an official of Castro’s totalitarian regime named Enrique Cirules.

In fact, Senor Cirules is an official of Cuba’s La Casa de las Americas, which publishes and promotes the Castro regime’s propaganda in books and articles under the guise of art. In 1983 a high-ranking Cuban Intelligence officer named Jesus Perez Mendez defected to the U.S. and spilled his guts to the FBI. Among his gut-spillings we encounter the following: “The Cuban DGI (Castro’s KGB-trained spy agency) controls Casa de las Americas.” We were hoping to have Mr. Perez-Mendes on tonight to contribute his views on the veracity of your book’s claims, Mr. English, but were thwarted upon discovering that he lives under FBI protection for fear of being assassinated by the folks who hosted you in Cuba and collaborated with you in writing the book. ¹

Mr. English, in your book’s acknowledgements you describe this Castroite apparatchik Enrique Cirules as a “Cuban author.” Wouldn’t this be like describing Julius Streicher as a “German author”?

Instead, minutes into the interview and in response to another Godfather-ite cliché by the smug T.J. English, Stewart—this winner of the Television Critics Association award for “Outstanding Achievement in News and Information”—gushes: “Wow! So the mob actually built Cuba’s economy! So it was actually worse than shown in Godfather II!”

To continue with my script for “The Daily Show:” Mr. English, let’s look at statistics published by scholars who live in a free country without fearing torture-chambers and firing squads for telling the truth. The following items were culled from the Organization of American States, from the UN Statistical yearbook and from the Cuban government before it was totalitarian. We’ll compare these against the claims made by the Castro-regime apparatchik who constitutes the primary source for your non-fiction bestseller.

In 1955, for instance, Cuba contained a grand total of three gambling casinos. The biggest was at the Tropicana Club and featured ten gambling tables and 30 slot machines. The Hotel Nacional featured seven roulette wheels and 21 slot machines.²

By contrast, in 1955 the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas featured 20 tables and 116 slot machines. This means that in 1955 one Las Vegas casino had more gambling action than all of Cuba.

We also ran some numbers, Mr. Author of the Rosetta Stone on the Cuban Revolution. For instance, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority the typical tourist spends five days in their city and spends an average of $580 ($75 in 1957 dollars) on gambling, the main motive for 90 per cent of visitors.

Your own book acknowledges that Cuba’s casinos were patronized almost exclusively by tourists. Well, throughout the 1950’s Cuba averaged 180,000 tourists a year.³ For the sake of this show’s time-constraints, we decided to be very generous and ignore Cuba’s beaches, fishing, dining, palm-studded countryside, old-world architecture, sightseeing etc., etc. We said: let’s assume all those tourists—men, women, adolescents, children—did nothing in Cuba but gamble, and at the Las Vegas rate.

Well, our calculator revealed an extremely generous total of $13.5 million for Cuba’s gambling industry annually. But in 1957 Cuba’s gross domestic product was $2.7 billion, and Cuba’s foreign receipts were $752 million.⁴ Mr. English, could you explain how the beneficiaries of that miniscule fraction of Cuba’s income came to own the entire nation of Cuba and to “infiltrate its levers of power from top to bottom,” as your impressively-researched book claims? “U. S. mobsters,” you write, “concerned themselves with controlling casinos, banks, political leaders and the gross national product of the island.”

More comical still, your book claims that: “Every Monday at noon, a [mobster Meyer] Lansky-appointed bagman was allowed into the presidential palace through a side door. He carried with him a satchel filled with cash, part of a monthly payment of $1.28 million that was to be delivered to the president. Batista never met the courier. He used a relative as an intermediary.”

So, Mr. English, are you claiming that mob chief Meyer Lansky was slipping Batista more than the combined annual gross from every casino in Cuba, including those unaffiliated with Meyer Lansky?

Author Tom Miller, who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic among many other prestigious publications, hailed your book as “well-sourced,” “well-researched” and “knowledgeable.”

We note that Mr. Miller is granted visas by the totalitarian Cuban regime for the asking and currently leads National Geographic “people-to-people” tours of Cuba at a cost of $5,095 per person. These junkets are run in partnership with the Castro regime. Just thought we’d bring this up.

Several books have been written on Meyer Lansky and mob operations in Cuba: Robert Lacey’s Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life, Scott M. Deitche’s The Silent Don: The Criminal World of Santo Trafficante Jr., and Eduardo Saenz Rovner’s The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling from the 1920s to the Revolution. Not one of the major findings in these exhaustively-researched books, by authors who relied on primary sources outside the Castro regime, corresponds with any of yours.

Cuban historian Juan Antonio Blanco—who was acquainted with Enrique Cirules in Cuba but who now teaches at Florida International University—went so far as to follow some of your footnotes to Cirules’s works. He then followed Cirules’s footnotes, many of which sourced documents in the U.S. Blanco found all to be utterly bogus. The FBI files on Meyer Lanksy, for instance, were three feet high. And there was no mention in them of the Meyer Lansky-Batista money launderer named Amadeo Barletta. Something else caught our eye. We were also wondering, Mr. English, given that gambling was perfectly legal in 1950’s Cuba, just what was the point of laundering the proceeds?

Also, Mr. English, according to a U.S. Department of Commerce analysis from 1956, Cuba was “the most heavily capitalized country in Latin America.”⁵ Is it your assertion, Mr. English, that a few slot-machines and bartender tips accounted for that capitalization?

Another interesting statistic, Mr. Impressive Researcher: in 1953, more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. than Americans vacationed in Cuba.⁶ How could the wretched and brutalized residents of that plundered and impoverished nation, as you depict it, have possibly pulled that off?

Mr. English, you wrote in the book’s introduction as follows: “The country’s most precious resources—sugar, oil, forestry, agriculture, refineries, financial institutions, and public utilities—were all up for sale.... Foreign capital washed over the island. ... Such was the extent of American interest in Cuba that this island, roughly the size of the state of Tennessee, ranked in third place among the nations of the world receiving U.S. investments. The financial largesse that flooded Cuba could have been used to address the country’s festering social problems. Hunger, illiteracy, subhuman housing, a high infant-mortality rate, and the dispossession of small farmers had been facts of life in Cuba throughout the island’s turbulent history.”

But in fact, Mr. English, in 1958, out of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills, only 40 were U.S.-owned. And according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in 1958 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 per cent of Cuba’s GNP, and U.S.-owned companies employed only seven per cent of Cuba’s work-force.⁷

By contrast, in 2011 13 per cent of the U.S. manufacturing work-force was employed by foreign-owned plants. So here we have the same liberals who bewail U.S. exploitation and humiliation of pre-Castro Cubans, rejoicing over this greater exploitation and humiliation of Americans today. In fact, here’s the liberal-in-chief himself in June 2011:

“The United States consistently receives more foreign direct investment than any other country in the world,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “By voting with their balance-sheets, businesses from abroad have clearly stated that the United States is one of the best places in the world to invest.”⁸

But in the case of businesses from abroad voting with their balance sheets for pre-Castro Cuba, liberals decry it as a blot on Cuba’s honor and a national humiliation for Cubans. Why the double standard?

Now let’s take pre-Castro Cuba’s festering social problems as you list them ad seriatim:

1.) Hunger—According to the UN’s Statistical Yearbook, in 1958 Cubans consumed 81 pounds of meat annually, making them the third-highest protein consumers in Latin America. That year the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization also ranked Cuba per capita as the biggest exporter of food products in Latin America. In marked contrast, starting in 1962 the Castro regime started rationing food to its subjects to the tune of two ounces of meat, three ounces of rice, 6.5 ounces of starch and one ounce of beans daily. In marked contrast to these rations, back in 1842 the Spanish king had royally decreed daily rations of eight ounces of meat, four ounces of rice, 16 ounces of starch and four ounces of beans for all slaves in the Spanish colony of Cuba.⁹

This means, Mr. English, that Cuban slaves ate better than the subjects of the regime that essentially co-wrote your book.

On to the next of these festering social problems:

2.) High infant mortality—in 1958, Cuba’s infant mortality was the 13^th-lowest—not in Latin America, Mr. English, not even in the hemisphere, but in the world. And Cubans per capita had more doctors and dentists than the U.S.¹⁰

3.) Subhuman housing—Cuba’s per-capita income in 1958 was higher than half of Europe’s. “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” starts a UNESCO study of Cuba from 1957. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker was also among the highest in the world, higher than in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent.”¹¹

4.) Dispossession of small farmers—Cuba’s agricultural wages in 1958 were higher than those in half of Europe. And far from huge latifundia hogging the Cuban countryside, the average Cuban farm in 1958 was smaller than the average in the U.S.¹²

5.) Illiteracy—In a mere 50 years since a war of independence that cost Cuba almost a fifth of her population, Cuba managed almost 80 per cent literacy and budgeted more for public education (23 per cent of national expenses) than any Latin American country. Better still, Cubans were not just literate but also educated; they were allowed to read George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara.¹³

When no New York Times reporter, CNN correspondent or Ivy League scholar is within hearing-range, Communists can be extremely frank with each other.

Early in the Cuban revolution, for instance, Czech economist Radoslav Selucky visited Cuba and was rudely awakened. “We thought Cuba was underdeveloped except for a few sugar refineries,” he wrote when he got home to Prague. “This is false. Almost a quarter of Cuba’s labor force was employed in industry where the salaries were equal to those in the U.S.”¹⁴

Now here’s Che Guevara himself in 1961, after returning with his Cuban underlings from a lengthy tour of Eastern Europe. “We’re not going to say we only saw marvels in those countries,” admitted Che, who undoubtedly had heard much scoffing and snickering from his Cuban subalterns during the trip. “Naturally, for a 20^th-century Cuban with all the luxuries to which imperialism has accustomed him, much of what he saw [in Eastern Europe] struck him as belonging to uncivilized nations.”¹⁵

In 1958 a Mexican (Marxist) professor and United Nations operative visited Cuba and reported: “Cuba has a tremendous advantage in national integration over other Latin American countries because of a largely homogeneous white Spanish immigrant base. Cuba’s smaller Negro population is also culturally integrated. Those feudal modes of labor that exist in the rest of Latin America don’t exist in Cuba. The Cuban campesino does not resemble the one in the rest of Latin America who is tied to the land, and is profoundly tradition-bound and opposed to innovations which would link him to a market economy. The Cuban campesino, in all respects, is a modern man. They have an educational level and a familiarity with modern methods unseen in the rest of Latin America.”¹⁶

The above are hard facts, Mr. English. Your book was written mostly in Cuba with the collaboration of Castro’s KGB-founded-and-tutored regime. “Most people cooperated with me for one simple reason,” you write. “They wanted to see this story finally told free of propaganda and misrepresentation.” But in your acknowledgements you profusely thank Enrique Cirules, an apparatchik of the DGI-run Casa de las Americas, and William Galvez, who is among the highest-ranking comandantes in Castro’s military.

Mr. English, Jon Stewart and his audience are one thing—but do you take all potential readers for complete idiots?

PROSTITUTION THEN AND NOW

Cuban prostitution also figures big in the T.J. English-Castroite collaboration—pre-Castro prostitution, needless to say. In 1961 the Castroites rounded up what they determined were all the prostitutes in Cuba and herded them into re-education camps to learn more seemly professions—like joining Castro’s militia. The total number of women rounded up in this “brothel of the Americas,” as the liberal mantra has called it for over half a century, was about 14,000 (out of a population of 6.7 million Cubans).¹⁷

But a study by the American Journal of Nursing estimates 50,000 prostitutes in New York City alone. With New York City and Cuba having roughly comparable population, that means more than three times the number of prostitutes in New York.

For many folks who grew up in pre-Castro Cuba, an amateur film by Canadian Andrew Lindy entitled “The Cuba Prostitution Documentary” proved more heartbreaking than anything they’d seen on their homeland to that date. Lindy is a winner of the Canadian National Magazine Award; he has no obvious axe to grind. After a visit to Cuba as a tourist in 2011, he observed: “Prostitution is rampant.” Indeed, during his entire stay Lindy was hard-pressed to find a single Cuban woman or girl who wouldn’t offer sex for pay of some sort. And half the males he encountered were at least part-time pimps.

Fortunately for the sake of truth, Lindy visited Cuba as a tourist. Had he gone officially as a documentarian, his work would be as useless for determining the truth about Castroite Cuba as that of Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, Sidney Pollack, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.; or that of Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Berkeley professors. In brief, his work does not fall into the category of 98 per cent of what is published and shown about Cuba outside of Cuba.

Andrew Lindy did not enjoy the advice, expertise or hospitality of KGB-trained apparatchiks.

Upon reading T.J. English’s book, many residents of pre-Castro Cuba noticed the discrepancies between the book and what they’d seen. They decided to defy Groucho Marx by believing their eyes instead of an Irish-American author who had visited Cuba 30 years after the events and conjured them in conjunction with Castro-regime officials.

But it turned out that instead of merely citing an apparatchik of Castro’s DGI-controlled Casa de Las Americas, the bestselling author—whose book enchanted and illuminated Jon Stewart, dazzled the MSM with its “impressive research,” and was optioned for a film—this author, Mr. T.J. English, actually transcribed the Communist propaganda screeds of this Castro-regime apparatchik word for word. To wit:

“I have no intention of talking to Mr. T.J. English,” harrumphed the book’s dedicatee, Enrique Cirules himself, in Castro’s (literally) captive media (March 16, 2010). “Instead, I’m offering figures, data and clear evidence of his plagiarism. In his book Havana Nocturne (2008) T.J. English did not quote my work; instead, 72 times he mentioned the name of Cirules in an attempt to justify plagiarizing more than 260 pages from the novels El imperio de La Habana and La vida secreta de Meyer Lansky.”¹⁸ Major portions of English’s “true” and “thoroughly and impressively researched” book, as hailed by the MSM, were apparently transcribed word-for-word from a novel conjured by a Castro-regime apparatchik.

So this chapter started with a novel (The Godfather) as the main educational source for liberals on Cuba. And it ends with the torch being passed to another book (Havana Nocturne) essentially transcribed from another novel 40 years later.

BLACKS IN CUBA, THEN AND NOW

Fidel Castro overthrew a Cuban government in which the president of the senate, the minister of agriculture, the chief of the army and most crucially the head of state were black. (Fulgencio Batista was a mulatto grandson of slaves born in a palm-roofed shack in the Cuban countryside.) These blacks had all served in a nation 72 per cent white, by the way. Fulgencio Batista had been Cuba’s legally-elected president from 1940 to 1944. In 1952, his presidency resulted from a lamentably illegal if nearly bloodless and mostly unopposed coup.¹⁹

Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie. Today the prison population in Stalinist-apartheid Cuba is 90 per cent black, while only nine per cent of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Many of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents are black.

In fact, while a smitten Jesse Jackson yelled “Viva Che! Viva Fidel!” alongside the latter at the University of Havana in 1984—with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, among Jackson’s entourage, clapping wildly from the sidelines—the world’s longest-suffering black political prisoner, Eusebio Penalver, languished in a torture-chamber within walking distance of the celebration.

“N*gger!” taunted his Castroite jailers between tortures. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” Eusebio Penalver suffered longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa’s.²⁰

Shortly after a smitten Congressional Black Caucus visited with Raul Castro in December 2009 and returned hailing him as “one of the most amazing human beings we’ve ever met,”²¹ the black human-rights activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo was beaten comatose by his Castroite jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull and subdural hematoma. A year later, Zapata was dead after a lengthy hunger strike. Samizdats smuggled out of Cuba contain eyewitness reports that Zapata’s jailers, while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning him, yelled: “Worthless n*gger! Worthless peasant!”

Shortly before a smitten Charlie Rangel engulfed Fidel Castro in a mighty bear-hug in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, as the smitten audience shook the rafters with bellows of“Viva Fidel!” black human-rights activist and doctor Oscar Elias Biscet was grabbed by Castro’s KGB-trained police, thrown into a dungeon, kicked, spat upon and burned with cigarette-stubs. Biscet was given a 25-year sentence in 1999 but released from Castro’s torture-chambers in March 2011. Essentially his crimes involved reciting the works of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the UN Declaration of Human Rights in a Cuban public square, while carrying the Cuban flag upside down. This “crime” was greatly compounded by Dr. Biscet’s specifically denouncing the Castro regime’s policy of forced abortions.

“Here in this dark box where they make me live, I will be resisting until freedom for my people is gained,” Biscet had declared in the vain hope that any of the “news”-agencies’ “press” bureaus permitted by his torturer would report the plight of Cuba’s political prisoners.

“My dad explained to me he is in prison for a cause, the cause is human rights, rights for Cubans. Also for the right of that child which hasn’t even been born yet,” declared Dr. Biscet’s daughter Winnie, who lives in the U.S.

This latter crime goes a long way towards explaining why you’ve probably never heard of Dr. Oscar Biscet in the MSM. Yet in November 2007 President Bush awarded Dr. Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The award was presented to Dr. Biscet’s son and daughter, who reside in freedom in the U.S. The ceremony was virtually blacked out by the media.

Penalver, Zapata, Biscet and thousands upon thousands of other Cubans were convicted in secret, by the regime’s hack judges, in a court system copied from Stalin. They suffered their sentences 90 miles from the U.S., with press bureaus including CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, AP and Reuters within walking distance or a short cab-ride of their cells.

Chances are you’re familiar with the injustices against Nelson Mandela but have never heard the names of the Cuban political prisoners, much less the details of their suffering.