Exposing the Real Che Guevara

Within months of Che’s appointment, the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba’s gold reserves, was practically worthless. In 1958, Cuba had 518 million pesos in circulation. A year later, 1,051 billion pesos were in circulation. A few months later 1,187 billion were in circulation and suddenly declared worthless, whereupon a new 477 million were printed up and distributed as replacements.²

Talent like this begs for promotion. Castro promptly appointed Che as Cuba’s “minister of industries.” Che quickly wrecked Cuba’s formerly robust sugar, cattle, tobacco, and nickel export industries. Within a year, a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria, Japan, and Spain, a huge influx of immigrants, and the third-highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society.

The customary observation that this was “communist mismanagement” is wrong. In the service of the goal of absolute power, the Cuban economy was expertly managed in the tradition of Lenin, Mao, Uncle Ho, Ulbricht, Tito, and Kim Il Sung.

A less megalomaniacal ruler might have considered the Cuban economy a golden goose. Castro, through Che, wrung its neck. He methodically wrecked Latin America’s premier economy in order to disallow any other centers of power from developing. Despite a deluge of tourism and foreign investment from Canada, Latin America, and Europe for over a decade, Cuba is as essentially communist in the early twenty-first century as it was in 1965. The Castro brothers are very vigilant in these matters.

Castro’s rationale was simply to run Cuba as his personal hacienda, and the Cuban people as his cattle. His minister of industries, however, seemed to actually believe in the socialist fantasy. When Che pronounced in May 1961 that under his tutelage the Cuban economy would boast an annual growth rate of 10 percent, Che seemed to believe it.

This is where libertarian-free-market ideologues got it wrong. They insisted that with the lifting of the embargo, capitalism would sneak in and eventually blindside Castro. All the proof was to the contrary. Capitalism didn’t sweep Castro away or even co-opt him. He swept it away. He wasn’t a Deng or a Gorbachev. In 1959, Castro could have easily left most of Cuba’s economy in place, made it obedient to his whims, and been a Peron, a Franco, or a Mussolini. He could have grabbed half and been a Tito. He could have demanded a piece of the action from all involved and been a Marcos, a Trujillo, a Mobutu, or a Suharto. But this wasn’t enough for him.

Castro lusted for power on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao. And he hired a sadistic and pretentious true believer named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch to help him get it; first as chief executioner of his enemies (real, imagined, and potential), then as economic wrecking ball. The task accomplished, Ernesto Guevara was himself liquidated as routinely and cleverly as Castro had liquidated many other accomplices, rivals, and even a few true enemies.

One day, Che decided that Cubans should learn to play and like soccer (futbol) like the citizens of his native Argentina. A sugar plantation named Central Macareno near Cienfuegos had recently been stolen from its American owners (contrary to leftist mythology, barely a quarter of sugar plantations were U.S.-owned). The plantation also included a huge orchard of mango, avocado, and mamey trees that were just starting to give fruit. Che ordered them all cut down and the ground leveled in order to construct a soccer field.

A year later the field was weed-grown, potholed, and unusable. The decaying trunks of the fruit-yielding trees were still piled up around the edges of the field even as most Cubans scrambled for fresh fruit on the new black market. It seemed that—the threat of Guanahacabibes notwithstanding—Che’s Cuban subjects simply didn’t take to Che’s futbol.

Che also believed he could “industrialize” Cuba by fiat, just as he believed his role model Stalin had “industrialized” the Soviet Union. In fact, Che’s decrees ended Cuba’s status as a developed, civilized country. In one of his spasms of decrees, he ordered a refrigerator factory built in Cienfuegos, a pick and shovel factory built in Santa Clara, a pencil factory and a shoe factory built in Havana.

Che railed against the new Coca-Cola plant’s chemists because the Coke they were producing tasted awful. Some of these flustered chemists responded that he’d been the one who nationalized the plant and booted out the former owners and managers, who took the secret Coca-Cola formula with them to the United States. This impertinence was answered with the threat of Guanahacabibes. During Che’s ministry, he also bought a fleet of snowplows from Czechoslovakia—surely a parable of communism, if ever there was one. Che had personally inspected them and was convinced they could easily be converted into sugarcane harvesting machines, thus mechanizing the harvest and increasing Cuba’s sugar production. The snowplows in fact squashed the sugarcane plants, cut them off at the wrong length, and killed them. This was just one reason Cuba’s sugar production in 1963 was less than half of its Batista-era volume.³

Che’s famous Havana shoe factory turned out a product that was good for about two blocks of brisk walking before disintegrating. Che Guevara, naturally, couldn’t figure out why the shoes his pet factory manufactured just sat on shelves. In 1961, most Cubans still wore their prerevolutionary shoes, constantly repairing them, constantly polishing them—anything but wearing the product from Che’s showcase factory. This enraged him, and he finally stormed down to the factory.

Knowing his “humanistic” reputation, all the factory workers were on their best behavior. “What’s the problem here!” Che barked at the factory foreman. “Why are you turning out shoes that are pure shit!”

The factory foreman looked Minister of Industries Guevara straight in the face. “It’s the glue, it won’t hold the soles to the shoe. It’s that shitty glue you’re buying from the Russians. We used to get it from the U.S.” This really stung Che. So he went off on one of his habitual tirades as the factory workers quaked, fearing the worst. Many had lost relatives in La Cabana, or had relatives behind the barbed wire of Che’s pet concentration camp in Guanahacabibes.

“We did,” shot back the foreman, “repeatedly, but nothing happened!” Che ordered his ever-present henchmen to grab the insolent foreman. “Now you people figure out how to make these shoes better.” Che glared. “Or the rest of you will get it!” He spun away and stomped off with his captive, who was not seen again.⁴ Yet Jon Lee Anderson assures us that “it was social change, not power itself, that impelled Che.”

In 1964, the Soviets themselves finally told Castro that Che had to go. Castro knew who buttered his bread. He had never much liked Che. And with power thoroughly consolidated, Castro no longer needed his Robespierre.

Here we come to another hoary myth spun by Che’s hagiographers, that of his “ideological” falling out with the Soviets. Che’s pureness of revolutionary heart, we’re told, led him to clash with the corrupt Soviet nomenklatura. In fact, this was a purely practical conflict. The Soviets simply refused to bankroll Che’s harebrained fantasies any longer. When Che finally realized this, he knew he was on the way out. He decided to retaliate. So in December 1964, right after his visit to the United Nations, Che visited his friend Ben Bela in Algeria and delivered his famous anti-Soviet speech, branding them “accomplices of imperialist exploitation.”

To many it looked like Che was setting the stage for a role as the Trotsky of his generation. For Che, it was just a new role to play. When he touched down in Havana after the speech, the regime’s press was absolutely mute regarding both his speech and his recent return. Soon, he was invited to visit the Maximum Leader and Raul. Raul had just returned from Russia, where Che’s Algeria speech had caused quite a stir. As soon as he got within earshot, both Castros ripped into Guevara as undisciplined, ungrateful, and plainly stupid.

“Fidel!” Che stuttered back. “Please, show me some respect! I’m not Camilo!” Che’s wife, Aleida, was forced to jump in between the men, exclaiming, “I can’t believe such a thing is happening between longtime compañeros.” ⁶

The quaking Che finally went home, where he found his telephone lines cut. Much evidence points to Che’s undergoing house arrest at this point. And it was under that house arrest that a seriously chastened and apparently frightened Che composed his famous “farewell letter to Fidel,” in which he groveled shamelessly.

“I deeply appreciate your lessons and your example . . . my only fault was not to have had more faith in you since the first moments in the Sierra, not having recognized more quickly your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary. I will take to my new fields of battle the faith that you have inculcated . . .” and on and on in unrelenting obsequiousness. ⁷

In fact, Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933—five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. Forty-eight hours of pay were due for that forty-hour week, with one month’s paid vacation. The lauded social democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this until thirty years later. Many Cubans enjoyed nine days of sick leave with pay, compulsory unemployment insurance paid by management, and—get this, Maxine Waters, Medea Benjamin, and all you feminist Castro groupies—three months’ paid maternity leave. This was in the 1930s.⁹

Pre-Castro Cuba’s labor laws led to a frequent lament in Havana’s Yacht Club: “It’s easier to get rid of a wife than an employee!” (This yacht club, incidentally, denied membership to the mulatto Batista himself—Cuba’s president!)

In the 1950s the average farm wage in “near-feudal” Cuba, as the New York Times described the nation in 1959, was higher than those of France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba in 1958 was $3.00. The average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73; in Belgium, $2.70; in Denmark, $2.74; in West Germany, $2.73; and in the United States, $4.06.¹⁰

With the term “near-feudal,” the New York Times also implied a Cuban countryside monopolized by a tiny number of millionaire absentee landlords, their vast estates worked by stooping legions of landless serfs. Jon Lee Anderson also describes Cuba’s “wealthy class of land barons . . . consigning the workers to lives of endemic poverty.”¹¹

Actually, the average Cuban farm in 1958 was smaller than the average farm in the United States, 140 acres in Cuba versus 195 acres in the United States. In 1958, Cuba, a nation of 6.4 million people, had 159,958 farms—11,000 of which were tobacco farms. Only 34 percent of the Cuban population was rural.

In the 1950s, Cuban longshoremen earned the highest wages in Latin America and among the highest wages in the world for their trade, higher than those in New Orleans at the time. In 1958, Cubans owned more televisions per capita than any other Latin Americans, and more than any other continental Europeans. And Cubans owned more cars per capita than the Japanese and half of the countries of Europe.¹²

In short, Cuban workers had purchasing power. In 1958, Cuba had the hemisphere’s lowest inflation rate—1.4 percent. The U.S. rate that year was 2.73 percent. The Cuban peso was historically equal to the U.S. dollar, completely interchangeable one to one.¹³

Cuba had its two top years economically in 1957-58, when, according to the New York Times and leftists in general, Cuba was not only “near-feudal,” but in the midst of a ferocious “guerrilla war” at the hands of the masterful guerrilla chieftain, Che Guevara.

The country that in 1958 had the third-highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere would soon be on government rations.¹⁴ And what were these rations? It is instructive to compare the daily rations imposed on Cubans by the brilliant Argentine’s ministry to the daily rations of Cuban slaves as mandated by the Spanish king in 1842.¹⁵

Cuban slaves actually ate better than Cuban “citizens” under Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s economic overlordship. These levels of rations persist to this day. Lincoln once said, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” Undoubtedly, many Cuban Americans watching The McLaughlin Group had an impulse to see Eleanor Clift have to choke down her daily ration of beans and starch, with a little stringy meat.

People never vote as candidly as when they vote with their feet. In the twentieth century, before Castro and Che marched into Havana, Cuba took in more immigrants per capita than any other country in the Western Hemisphere—more than the United States, including the Ellis Island years. In 1958, the Cuban embassy in Rome had a backlog of twelve thousand applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to emigrate to Cuba. From 1903 to 1957 Cuba took in over 1 million immigrants from Spain and sixtyfive thousand from the United States.¹⁶

Jamaicans and Haitians jumped on rafts trying to enter Cuba. Now, not only do people risk their lives to flee, 2 million as of 1992, but half-starved Haitians a mere sixty miles away turn up their noses at the place. People used to be almost as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to escape.

Here’s another example of actions speaking louder than statistics: When Castro’s rebel movement called for a “National Strike” against the Batista dictatorship on August 5, 1957—and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work—the “National Strike” was completely ignored. Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their “liberators,” reporting to work en masse.

The anti-Batista rebellion was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent, beginning with Fidel Castro himself. “Workers and peasants” were conspicuous by their scarcity. The Castro-Che regime’s initial showpiece cabinet consisted of seven lawyers, two university professors, three students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor, and one captain who defected from the Batista army.¹⁷ They were a notoriously “bourgeois” bunch, as Che himself might have put it. By 1961, it was the workers and campesinos, or country folk, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains.

No discussion of Cuba is complete without mentioning Cuba’s vaunted “health care.” Colin Powell himself, at the same time he was making his case against Saddam Hussein at the United Nations, was quoted as saying that “Castro had done some good things for Cuba.”¹⁸ Chances are he was anticipating some comment on Cuba’s “health care” from the reporter and answered on reflex.

So again, some facts. In 1958, Cuba had the lowest infant mortality in Latin America and the thirteenth lowest in the world. Cuba ranked ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, and Spain.¹⁹ Today (and this if you believe the figures issued by Castro’s propaganda ministry), Cuba ranks twenty-fifth from the top. So relative to the rest of the world, Cuba’s health care has worsened after forty-seven years of Stalinism. Another thing: Castro’s Cuba’s staggering abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth makes it—by far—the highest in the hemisphere and among the highest in the world. This reduces infant mortality by “terminating” high-risk pregnancies. Yet even with this harrowing statistic, Castro’s Cuba of today ranks relatively worse in infant mortality than Batista’s Cuba of half a century ago. Also, in 1957, Cuba had more doctors and dentists as a percentage of population than the United States and the United Kingdom.²⁰

Another left-wing truism is that Cuba was nothing but a corrupt and prostituted “playground” for American tourists. In 1957, Cuba hosted a grand total of 272,265 U.S. tourists. In 1950, there were more Cubans vacationing in the United States than Americans vacationing in Cuba. (In 2002, by the way, smack in the middle of the nefarious U.S. “embargo”—nay, the diabolical “imperialist blockade!”—approximately 203,000 Americans visited Cuba, by hook or by crook.²²) Biloxi, Mississippi, today has three times as many gambling casinos as all of Cuba had in 1958.

Of course, we can’t discuss Cuba without an account of her exploitation and humiliation by the rude and rapacious Yankee businessmen and gangsters who dominated her economy. Cuba’s Mayari province was a “virtual vassal state of United Fruit,” claims Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson. Cuba itself was “a virtual semicolony of the United States,” claims Jorge Castañeda. Che Guevara himself berated the United Fruit Company as “the Green Octopus.”²³

In fact, in 1958—after only fifty-five years of independence following an utterly devastating war against Spain—only 9 percent of Cuba’s invested capital was American, and less than one-third of Cuba’s sugar production was by U.S. companies. Of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills, only 40 were U.S.-owned. And only a fraction of these were owned by United Fruit.²⁴ Some “octopus.”

“I think there is not a country in the world, including all the regions of Africa and any other country under colonial domination, where the economic colonization, the humiliation, the exploitation have been worse than those which ravaged Cuba.” Those words were not spoken by Che Guevara on the stump at the United Nations. That was John F. Kennedy in an interview with French journalist Jean Daniel in 1963. “The result, in part, of the policy of my country,” added JFK for good measure.²⁵

History tells a different story, one in which U.S. policymakers had little choice. Che Guevara, as president of Cuba’s National Bank, repeatedly raged against Cuba’s business ties to the United States. Even though the United States bought Cuban sugar above the world price, Che denounced America for “economic slavery”!

Okay, fine, said Ike. So Americans stopped buying Cuban sugar. Well, according to Che, this response was now Yankee “economic aggression”! When Jean Paul Sartre called Fidel, Raul, and Che “the children in power,” he meant it as a compliment. It was, in fact, a painful truth, for Cuban economic policy was a tantrum. Che Guevara asked for the embargo. In a hysterical speech televised on March 23, 1960, Che Guevara declared, “In order to conquer something we have to take it away from somebody. That something we must conquer is the country’s sovereignty. It has to be taken away from that something called monopoly. It means that our road to liberation will be opened up with a victory over the U.S. monopolies!”²⁷

Che was ordering mass larceny directed at U.S. businesses. As economic minister, Che ordered the theft of almost $2 billion from U.S. businessmen and stockholders. Some 5,911 businesses were stolen—lock, stock, and barrel—from their hard-working, capital-risking, rightful owners at gunpoint. This remains the biggest heist in history. In two weeks, and using a few bands of machine-gun-toting goons, Castro and Che swiped more from American businessmen than all the other “nationalizations” (lootings) by all other nationalist (looter) regimes on earth, combined.

Castro crowed about it gleefully into a phalanx of microphones and shrieked that he’d never repay a penny. And he hasn’t. A few who resisted the plunder were executed. One was American citizen Howard Anderson, who had his Jeep dealership stolen. (Anderson, the reader will recall, was one of the victims of Che’s vampirism.) Another was Robert Fuller, whose family farm was stolen. Like Anderson, Fuller was bound, gagged, and shoved in front of a firing squad.

Europeans, especially the French, gloated while watching Che and Castro loot Uncle Sam. Then they scooted in themselves, rubbing their hands. The Europeans, however, were surprised to miss their windfall. Cuba was more than willing to borrow, but found repayment of foreign commercial and bilateral debt with all nonsocialist countries decidedly inconvenient. It stopped payment in 1986. The Paris Club of creditor nations found Cuba simply uninterested in talking to them.

It sounds so easy. Why, just hop on a raft. Soon you’re drinking café con leche with your cousins in Miami. Nothing to it! Except that up until very recently only one in three rafters lived through the ordeal.

Varadero, where Isane stayed, is a gorgeous beach east of Havana where millions of Cubans cavorted every weekend, at least during Cuba’s stint as a racist-fascist U.S. satrapy terrorized by crooks and gangsters.

In 1959, Fidel and his vanguard of the downtrodden rose in righteous fury. Inflamed by a patriotic fervor, they ended foreign humiliation of Cubans. Of this we’re assured by everyone from Charles Rangel, to Noam Chomsky, to Robert Redford, to Jesse Jackson, to Norman Mailer, to virtually any Ivy League history professor.

Now, after almost fifty years of this fervently nationalist revolution, the best of Varadero beach is barricaded against Cubans by armed police and reserved for rich foreigners, their local footservants, and prostitutes.

Jimmy Carter, Barbara Boxer, and high-rolling trade delegations from Nebraska, Louisiana, California, or Maine are welcome, as well as many Isanes. But let a nongovernmental Cuban citizen try to enter and he’s bludgeoned with Czech machine-gun butts.

And I suspect Isane didn’t know the half of it. She probably didn’t know that before the glorious revolution, Cuba had a standard of living higher than the Venezuela and Mexico she’d visited, and higher than half of Europe, and boasted almost double her native Spain’s per capita income.

Revolutionary Cuba’s early minister of industries and bank president Che Guevara had quite a base to work with. It usually requires an earthquake, volcano, tsunami, or atom bomb to match Che’s industrial and economic achievements in Cuba. Indeed Tokyo, Pompeii, and Hiroshima have all recovered. Havana, richer in the 1950s than Rome or Dallas, now resembles Calcutta, Nairobi, or Phnom Penh. One place where Cuban exiles agree wholeheartedly with Castro is regarding his exalted post as a Third World leader. He and Che certainly made Cuba into a Third World country.

In January 2006, supermodel Helena Houdova, who had also been crowned “Miss Czech” in 1999, visited Cuba. She followed in the footsteps of Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, who had visited in 1998—but not in their exact footsteps. Campbell confined herself to the sparkling tourist enclaves and to the regime-approved sites, dutifully following the regime’s helpful “guides” to La Plaza de la Revolución dominated by its huge portrait of Che Guevara. She came away smitten with everything around her.

“I’m very nervous!” Campbell twittered after arriving late at a press conference held at Havana’s Hotel Nacional. “I just spent an hour and a half talking with your president, Fidel Castro! But he told me there was nothing to be afraid of. Fidel knew who we were from reading about us in the press, but he said that it wasn’t the same as meeting us in person. We had also read so many things about Fidel. It is a great pleasure to be in Cuba,” she gushed. “I’ve enjoyed myself, and I plan to come back. . . . Fidel Castro is a source of great inspiration for me, an intelligent and impressive man who fought for a just cause.”²⁹

Czech supermodel Helena Houdova tried to shake her government “guides” and venture into the interior of Havana. She heads a charity called the Sunflower Foundation that assists poor, handicapped, sick, and orphaned children worldwide. The Castro regime could have told her not to waste her time looking for such things in Cuba. Everyone from Naomi Campbell to Eleanor “to be a poor child in Cuba is better than being a poor child in America” Clift could have told Helena Houdova that nothing remotely of the sort afflicts Cuban children.

But Ms. Houdova was born and lived in Czechoslovakia, a nation overrun by Soviet tanks in 1945 and again in 1968. Unlike Ivy League and Berkeley professors, and all those hard-nosed investigative reporters from Dan Rather to CNN’s Lucia Newman, she knew better than to believe the proclamations from the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist regime—especially those of its multitude of agents and useful idiots. “It is almost impossible to provide any assistance through official means because the Communist authorities refuse to admit anything in their country does not work,” Houdova told the Prague Daily Monitor before visiting Cuba.³⁰

The intrepid model visited several Havana hospitals (not the ones for tourists and foreigners, the ones for Cubans) and came away disgusted. She then started snapping pictures of the dreadful slums around her in downtown Havana. And that’s when the cops walked up and ripped the camera from her hands. “They screamed at us,” said Houdova. “We were afraid, but we grew up under communism and know what it is like.”

Castro’s goons tore open the camera and stole the roll of film, but somehow Houdova managed to conceal the memory card of her digital camera inside her bra. Houdova and her friend, psychologist and fellow model Mariana Kroftova, were dragged off and detained for eleven hours without being allowed to contact the Czech embassy, and without being able to communicate with their captors in English. They were finally released after signing a document pledging they would refrain from joining any “counter-revolutionary activities.”

Now let’s see how Castro learns such charming conversation points about such visitors as Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss—and Jack Nicholson. “Fidel Castro is a genius!” gushed Jack Nicholson after a visit to Cuba in 1998. “We spoke about everything,” the actor rhapsodized. “Castro is a humanist like President Clinton. Cuba is simply a paradise!”³²

Jack Nicholson has been saying such things for years now. Many of his Hollywood cohorts follow suit. Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Woody Harrelson, Leo DiCaprio, Chevy Chase, Robert Redford, and many others have waxed euphoric on Castro and his island prison. Bill O’Reilly called these celebs “Hollywood pin-heads.” But there might be more to these celebrity plugs.

“My job was to bug their hotel rooms,” says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez. “With both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself.” And according to some sources, Havana, given the desperation of its brutalized and impoverished residents, has recently topped Bangkok as the world mecca for child sex. It’s a blackmailer’s bonanza.

“He [Delfin Fernandez] has not only met some of the most famous men in the world,” says the London Daily Mirror about the Cuban defector, “he’s also spied on them and been witness to some of their most innermost secrets.”

“When the celebrity visitors arrived at the hotels Nacional [where Campbell and Moss stayed], Melia Habana, and Melia Cohiba,” says Fernandez, “we already had their rooms completely bugged with sophisticated taping equipment. . . . But not just the rooms, we’d also follow the visitors around, sometimes we covered them twenty-four hours a day. They had no idea we were tailing them.”³³

Famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar was a special target for this bugging, but nothing of value came of it for Castro. “Everybody already knows I’m a maricón!” Almodóvar laughed at Castro’s blackmailers. “So go right ahead! Knock yourselves out!”

“Fidel Castro is a special connoisseur of these tapings and videos,” Fernandez says. “Especially of the really famous.” Not even Castro’s closest “friends” are safe from this bugging. The best example is Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. In what appeared as a touching act of generosity and friendship, Castro gave his friend “Gabo” his very own, stolen mansion in Havana. “We had remodeled it right before,” remembers Fernandez, “and we installed more cables for bugging devices than for the normal electrical appliances. We taped everything. Fidel doesn’t trust anyone.”

Castro’s top intelligence people would gather for the screenings of these tapes almost like Hollywood types for the screening of an upcoming movie. “Hummmm, these scenes are more scandalous than anything in any of her movies!” Fernandez recalls a top intelligence officer chortling while watching the nighttime cavortings of a famous Spanish actress. “Now, it really seems to me, compañeros,” the Castro intimate chortled as he looked around the room, “that this señora should be making more respectful comments about our regime, right?”

“But famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro’s intelligence,” says Fernandez. “When word came down that models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss were coming to Cuba, the order was a routine one: twenty-four-hour-a-day vigilance. Then we got a priority alert, because there was a rumor that they would be sharing a room with Leonardo DiCaprio. The rumor set off a flurry of activity and we set up the most sophisticated devices we had.

Turns out, however, that at least one visiting dignitary foiled Castro’s intelligence. On his visit to Cuba in 1998, Pope John Paul’s assistants discovered and removed several bugging devices from His Holiness’s hotel room. Perhaps Castro had a grudge against the papacy. Most don’t recall, but in January 1962, Pope John XXIII excommunicated Fidel Castro from the Catholic Church. It seemed fitting, considering the hundreds of Cuban men and boys crumpling to Castro’s firing squads while yelling, “Long Live Christ the King!” during their last seconds on earth.

“Since she is usually desperate,” writes one Dr. Julia O’Connell Davidson, “he can secure sexual access to her very cheaply.”³⁶ O’Connell Davidson, professor of sociology at Britain’s University of Nottingham and author of The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution, conducted a thorough study of contemporary Cuban prostitution.

“A Cuban prostitute can often be beaten down to as little as U.S. $2 to $4,” O’Connell Davidson writes. “Inexperienced women and girls can be persuaded and/or tricked into spending a whole night with a client for the cost of a meal, a few drinks or small gift. Sex tourists state that it costs them less to spend two weeks indulging themselves in Cuba than it does in other centers of sex tourism, such as the Philippines and Thailand. This is partly because competition between so many Cuban women lowers the price.

“Girls aged 14 and 15 are even more desperate for dollars and therefore more vulnerable. We met 14- and 15-year-old prostitutes working in Varadero who reported that a number of their Italian, Canadian and German clients make between three and five trips to Cuba per year. More disturbing still, such tourists are paying older Cuban women and men, often prostitutes themselves, to procure 14- and 15-year-old girls for them.”³⁷

Professor O’Connell Davidson found that what she termed the “hostile sexuality” of many of Cuba’s visiting tourists “can be encapsulated in the motto ‘Find them, feed them, f^**k them, forget them’ . . . A U.S.-based company that publishes a book and electronic newsletter entitled Travel & the Single Male identifies Cuba as a new ‘hot destination for the adventurous single male.’ One British tourist explained that his Cuban ‘girlfriend’ (he had traded in another woman for her the previous day) had suggested that he move out of the hotel where he was paying $20 per night, and stay in her flat where she would do all his washing and cook his meals for him. For all this, plus acting as guide and interpreter and granting him sexual access, she asked only $5 a day plus the cost of the food. At home, this man could not even buy a pack of cigarettes for this sum, far less obtain the services of a maid/prostitute.”³⁸

Professor O’Connell Davidson also discovered something of interest for Charlie Rangel, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Naomi Campbell, Kweisi Mfume, Che tattoo wearer Mike Tyson, and Che T-shirt wearer and rapper Jay-Z. “Cubans face many of the same ‘racialised’ barriers that oppress Black people elsewhere in the world. Groups that face this kind of structural disadvantage are often over-represented in prostitution. Our initial impression was that there were more Black than ‘mixed’ or white jiniteras (prostitutes). As one Canadian said to me, ‘You can call a nigger a nigger here [in Cuba], and no-one takes it the wrong way.’ ”

Professor O’Connell Davidson concluded that in Cuba racists “find opportunities for satisfying a sexual appetite for others they both despise and desire. For them, Cuba is ‘paradise.’ Cuba presently has a great deal to offer the sex tourist. Such men can contemptuously command Cuban women and girls with the same ease that they order cocktails.”³⁹

But, lest we get the wrong idea and lump her with that tacky Miami bunch, Professor O’Connell Davidson closes with the following: “Their power [to command Cuban women] rests not only upon the obscene disparity in wealth between the developed and underdeveloped world, but also upon American foreign policy. Under Batista, the U.S. indirectly organized Cuba as its brothel and gambling house. Today, its punishment of Cuba is helping to recreate the conditions under which Cuban women and girls must become the playthings of the economically advantaged.”

Once again, it’s the Americans’ fault. Well that’s more like it, especially in view of Professor O’Connell Davidson’s academic standing. At least she documents well what she saw in front of her eyes and heard with her ears in Cuba.

In 1958, Cuba enjoyed a higher standard of living than (I’m looking at the professor’s last name) Ireland. As we have seen, Cuba under Batista was not part of the “underdeveloped” world, much less “a brothel and gambling house for the U.S.” In 1958, Cuba had approximately 10,000 prostitutes. Today 150,000 women ply their desperate trade on the island.⁴⁰

Professor O’Connell Davidson’s University of Nottingham is ranked among Britain’s ten best universities by the London Sunday Times. So we can’t expect them to teach accurate Cuban history, any more than Berkeley or Yale or Princeton teaches it. The “obscene disparity in wealth” between Cuba (today) and the developed world that Professor O’Connell Davidson documents has nothing to do with U.S. policy and everything to do with Castro’s policy—especially his appointment of Ernesto “Che” Guevara as president of Cuba’s National Bank and Cuba’s minister of industries in quick succession.

His communist jailers were always asking Eusebio Peñalver for a “confession,” for a signature on some document admitting his “ideological transgressions.” This would greatly alleviate his confinement and suffering, they assured him.

They got their answer as swiftly and as clearly from Peñalver as the German commander who surrounded Bastogne got his from the 101st Airborne. Eusebio scorned any “re-education” by his Castroite jailers. He knew it was they who desperately needed it. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was they who should don it. Through thirty years of hell in Castro’s dungeons, Eusebio Peñalver stood tall, proud, and defiant.

Ever hear of him? He lives in Miami. Ever see a CNN interview with him? Ever see him on 60 Minutes? Ever read about him in the New York Times? The Boston Globe? Ever hear about him on NPR, or during Black History Month? Ever hear the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus mention him?

He was a Cuban political prisoner. And as we all know, with the mainstream media and academia, that form of oppression doesn’t count. Today, Castro’s police bar black Cubans from tourist areas. Cuba’s most prominent political prisoner, Elias Biscet, is black (I won’t bother asking if you’ve heard of him). And exactly .08 percent of Cuba’s communist rulers are black. In other places they called this “apartheid.”

The Russians Say “Nyet!”

What Che Had to Work With

The U.S. Embargo—Che Begged for It

“Che Lives”—the Squalid Legacy

Desperate Prostitutes

Blacks in Cuba