The Glazov Gang-The Truth About the Cuban ‘Embargo’

The Glazov Gang

Jesse Ventura Swoons Over Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

FrontPage Magazine

by Humberto Fontova

Jesse Ventura [Hotel Nacional-2002]/
alongthemalecon.blogspot.com

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that somebody like Jesse Ventura is also a major fan of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara? (Or claims to be for the publicity value among the “hip”?)

Recalling his visit to Cuba and meeting with Fidel Castro in 2002 Ventura grew misty-eyed: “Fidel Castro looked into my eyes and told me I was a man of great courage…Maybe he (Castro) saw a little of him in me.”

Recall the Cowardly Lion’s reaction when the Wizard grants him “the NERVE.” Well, Jesse Ventura’s moronic gloating outdoes even the lion’s (“Shucks, folks, I’m speechless..ha-ha…Ain’t it the truth! Ain’t it the truth!”)

And this imbecile and buffoon (or is it master fraud and expert showman?) was elected governor of a populous and prosperous state, and honored by Harvard University with the title of  “Visiting Fellow,” to say nothing of his career as media host  and author.

“And I’ll tell you another thing that shows me a little bit more about Castro” also revealed Ventura in an interview. “The main downtown building in Havana has this huge flat wall and it has got a huge portrait on it. It’s not Castro. It’s Che Guevara. The biggest photograph in downtown Havana was a mural on a wall of Che. Now if Castro was such an egomaniac and all this, wouldn’t he put himself up there instead of Che?”

For a man with Ventura’s (mostly self-) vaunted “street smarts,” Fidel Castro’s blandishments of (the conveniently dead) Che Guevara should be a cinch to plumb. Didn’t Don Barzini send the biggest and fanciest flowers to Don Corleone’s funeral?

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported how on his Cuba visit Ventura spoke at the University of Havana where he “exhorted students to dream big and work hard to achieve success!” Here one blinks, looks again—and gapes. You long to believe otherwise, you grope for an extenuation, you hope you misread—but it’s inescapable: A man elected as governor of a populous and prosperous U.S. State (and a “Harvard Visiting Fellow”) cannot distinguish between the subjects of a Stalinist police state and the attendees of an AmWay convention.

Ask anyone familiar with Communism. To achieve “success” in such as Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom, you join the Communist Party, you pucker up and stoop down behind Fidel and his toadies and smooch away. (Either that or jump on a raft.)

So come to think of it, Jesse Ventura indeed had much to teach those Havana U. students. On his Cuba visit he performed brilliantly.

Years later when, during an interview, The Daily Caller’s Jaime Weinstein suggested to Ventura that Castro runs a very inhumane dictatorship, a “shocked” (or expertly performing?) Ventura gasped:  “They have the highest health care of any Latin American country! … What has he (Fidel Castro) done that’s inhumane?”

For the benefit of the esteemed academics who granted Ventura’s “Visiting Fellowship” at  Harvard University’s  John F. Kennedy School of Government  here’s a few fully- documented  items that might address their esteemed “Visiting Fellow’s” question:

Fidel Castro’s regime jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered Germans during its first six and came closest of anyone in history to starting a worldwide Nuclear war. In the above process Fidel Castro and Che Guevara converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians and boasts the highest suicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.

“What has Cuba ever done to us?!” the again “shocked” (or masterfully miming?) “Harvard Visiting Fellow” gasped recently on his show On the Grid. “We’ve been practicing terrorism against them!”

“War against the United States is my true destiny,” Fidel Castro had confided in a letter to a friend in 1958. “When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger war.”

“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!”

But for the purposes of this discussion let’s overlook the above trivialities, as they’re obviously regarded by Harvard’s esteemed academics. Instead let’s focus on the fact that Jesse Ventura claims some sort of “fellowship” with American servicemen, especially Viet-Nam veterans. (Granted, this fellowship is–to put it mildly—not fully reciprocated.)

So again, for the benefit of the esteemed academics who granted Ventura’s “Visiting Fellowship” at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, we’ll  mention a few items to highlight their “Visiting Fellow’s” ignorance (or expert burlesque?) To wit:

In 1967 Fidel Castro sent several of his regime’s most promising sadists to North Vietnamese prison camps to instruct the Vietnamese reds in finer points of their profession. Testimony during Congressional hearings titled, “The Cuban Torture Program; Torture of American Prisoners by Cuban Agents” held on November 1999 provide some of the harrowing details.

The communists titled their torture program “the Cuba Project,” and it took place during 67-68 primarily at the Cu Loc POW camp (also known as “The Zoo”) on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. In brief, this “Cuba Project” was a Joseph Mengelese experiment run by Castroite Cubans to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human can endure before cracking.

The North Vietnamese—please note!–never, ever asked the Castroites for advice on combat. They knew better. Unlike director Steven Soderbergh, they saw through the whole “Che as Guerrilla” hoopla for what it was and is: a Castroite hoax to camouflage the Inspector Clousseau-like bumblings of an incurable military idiot–and more specifically, Castro’s own hand in the idiot’s offing.

No, the North Vietnamese sought Castroite tutelage only on torture of the defenseless, well aware of the Castroites expertise in this matter.

For their experiment the Castroites chose twenty American POWs. One died: Lieutenant Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force F-105 pilot. His death came slowly, in agonizing stages, under torture. Upon learning his Castroite Cuban affiliation, the American POWs nicknamed Cobeil’s Cuban torturer, “Fidel.”

“The difference between the Vietnamese and “Fidel’ was that once the Vietnamese got what they wanted they let up, at least for a while,” testified fellow POW Captain Ray Vohden USN. “Not so with the Cubans. Earl Cobeil had resisted ‘Fidel’ to the maximum. I heard the thud of the belt falling on Cobeil’s body again and again, as Fidel screamed “you son of a beech! I will show you! Kneel down!–KNEEL DOWN!” The Cubans unmercifully beat a mentally defenseless, sick American naval pilot to death.”

“Earl Cobeil was a complete physical disaster when we saw him,” testified another fellow POW, Col. Jack Bomar. “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 ‘Fidel’ began to beat him with a fan belt.”

According to the book Honor Bound the tortures of U.S. POWs by Castro’s agents were “the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi.”

Should American Taxpayers Fund Cuba’s Media?

TheBlaze.com

Humberto Fontova

Fidel Castro smokes a cigar. (Photo Credit: Guardian.org)

Recently, National Public Radio (lavished with over $4 billion by U.S. taxpayers over the past decade) ran a week-long “special series” on – and from – Cuba. Such was its propaganda value for the Fidel Castro regime that Cuba’s own KGB-founded and mentored media gleefully ran some of the programs – in their pristinely unedited form.

Given totalitarian media practices that’s quite a “compliment” to NPR’s producers. To wit:

“Everything within the Revolution, nothing outside of it.” (Castro speech, June, 1961.)

“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” (Benito Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 1932.)

In his famous speech on June 16, 1961 Castro – whose KGB-designed jails and torture chambers at the time incarcerated one of every 19 Cubans for political “crimes” – was warning the rest of his subjects how they might stay out of them. He set the barbed-wire and machine-gun guarded boundaries of “artistic freedom.” If your prose, poetry, films, or journalism served the purposes of the totalitarian regime (i.e. if you succumbed to lackeyism) you might remain outside of such enclosures. Otherwise?

As usual, as seen above, even with this declaration Castro was stealing – from his hero Mussolini this time. Earlier he also stole from his hero Adolf Hitler.

“Condemn me, it doesn’t matter,” declared Castro during the 1953 trial for his failed Moncada putsch. “History will absolve me.”

“You may pronounce me guilty,” declared Hitler during the 1924 trial for his failed Rathaus putsch. “But the eternal court of history will absolve me.”

Over the decades NPR and Public Broadcasting Service (NPR’s parent taxpayer-subsidized company) have run literally dozens of pieces on Nelson Mandela. So many in fact that an innocent bystander could easily conclude that the plight of “political” prisoners (especially black ones) greatly concerns NPR.

But all of NPR’s “reporting” from Cuba proves otherwise.

While NPR conducted canned interviews with KGB-trained Communist apparatchiks in Cuba last week, many Cubans (male and female, black and white) suffered in KGB-designed jail-cells for such crimes as quoting Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, NPR’s (lily-white) Cuban hosts hold the distinction of jailing and torturing the most black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere – many more than the Vorster and Botha regimes jailed in South Africa.

And unlike Mandela, these Cuban freedom-fighters were jailed either after secret Stalinist trials or after no trial whatsoever. This Castro practice, best we can tell, does not seem to offend NPR. None of the Cuban political prisoners were so much as mentioned during the week-long PBS series. One of these, a black Cuban dissident named Sonia Garro, has spent the last three years in a KGB-designed dungeon without even being charged. This peaceful (but anti-communist) lady was beaten, arrested – and beaten again – for the crime of carrying flowers in a peaceful religious demonstration honoring other peaceful Cuban blacks murdered earlier by Castro’s firing squads.

More than 20 democracy activists arrested in protest in Santa Clara, Cuba. Picture posted by Human Right’s Voices.

Think about it for a second, amigos: Here’s a savagely victimized person who qualifies as black and Hispanic and female – and is being tortured by a lily-white all-male military regime 90 miles from U.S. shores. Here’s racism! Here’s sexism! Here’s a brutal and full-fledged military dictatorship propped up by greedy billionaires committing these horrors daily!

And here’s utter silence by the mainstream media.

Who else in modern history could conceivably get away with anything even approaching this level of sexist, racist oppression and cruelty without a peep of protest from U.S. media and civil rights “leaders?”

Oops! Forgive me. You see I’m implying that the U.S. media and U.S. civil rights “leaders” merely ignore the jailing and torture en masse of Cubans. This is wrong. Actually many of these fine folks go out of their way to glorify the jailer and torturer:

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” – Dan Rather

“Fidel Castro is one hell of a guy! You people would like him!” – Ted Turner

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly – even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” – Andrea Mitchell

“Castro has brought very high literacy and great health care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful, his presence is commanding.” – Barbara Walters

“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” – Jesse Jackson

“It was quite a moment to behold! Fidel Castro was very engaging and very energetic!” – Congressional Black Caucus member Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cali.)

“He’s one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met!” Congressional Black Caucus member Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.)

Students gather behind a business looking for a Internet signal for their smart phones in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, April 1, 2014. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

The June 24 NPR infomercial on Castro’s fiefdom featured a hard hitting interview with Castro official Josefina Vidal, during which NPR’s David Greene unearths such scoops as: The U.S. embargo of Cuba is very wicked. Raul Castro is an earnest reformer and all around swell fellow. And don’t even get us started on his swell big brother Fidel!

Here’s how NPR introduces their gracious Cuban interviewees: “Josephina Vidal is director of U.S. relations for the Cuban government.”

In fact, Vidal is a KGB-trained Cuban agent who was expelled from the U.S. along with 13 other Cuban agents in June 2003 for espionage. Look carefully at the date of Vidal’s expulsion from U.S. shores. Castro’s agents (including Vidal), you see, were stealing U.S. military secrets and selling them to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. How many Americans died as a result of Vidal’s treachery?

We’ll never know – certainly not from (American-taxpayer bankrolled) NPR, who is too busy feting this KGB-trained spy and proven enemy of America to bother informing the Americans who bankroll their programs about such trivial details.

NPR should be quite proud of themselves.

Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and is the author of five books including his latest, The Longest Romance; The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.

An American Hostage in Communist Cuba

USA Survival

Humberto Fontova, the author of two excellent books on Castro's support in Hollywood and the American media, discusses Alan Gross, the American hostage in Cuba; the "Cuban Five;" the JFK Assassination, and more.

Thanksgiving Terror From Friends of a “Cuba Expert” | Babalú Blog

Babalú Blog

By Humberto Fontova

Here’s how her media friends describe the CFR’s Julia Sweig upon their frequent showcasing of her “expertise:”
“Julia Sweig heads the Latin American division for the Council on Foreign Relations.” (Stephen Colbert)
“Julia Sweig is director for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.” (NPR)
“Julia E. Sweig is senior fellow and director of Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.” (New York Times)
Here’s how the Council on Foreign Relations itself describes their star:
“CFR Senior Fellow and Director of Latin America Studies and the Global Brazil Initiative and award-winning author of Inside the Cuban Revolution.
Fine. Let’s turn to the acknowledgments in Julia Sweig’s award-wining book. Here we find:
“In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island…Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.”
Let’s turn now to the front page of The New York Times Nov. 18th edition. Ah! Here we find that Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad had just been arrested by the FBI for a terror plot against Manhattan that would have probably put the death toll from 9/11 in second place. Some background:
On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The explosions were timed for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.Macy’s get’s 50,000 shoppers that one day.Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.

Our friends at Town hall help disseminate some items carefully hush-hushed by the mainstream media and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Who ‘Lost’ Cuba? | Humberto Fontova

FrontPage Magazine

By Humberto Fontova

Much of what’s called “McCarthyism” started with the debate over “Who Lost China.” A similar debate regarding Cuba — and involving  an amazingly similar cast of protagonists and antagonists—erupted when Fidel Castro came out of the closet in late 1960 as a Communist.

Given that Fidel Castro (twice and wantonly) brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and Cuba remains an official “State-Sponsor-of Terror,” you’d think this Cuba debate merits some attention.

That Castro’s predecessor Fulgencio Batista was a “U.S.-backed dictator” and Castro was “bullied” by the U.S. (especially the CIA) into his Soviet-alliance remains a cherished item of liberal (and even mainstream) political folklore. Poor Castro, goes the fairy tale, constantly beaten by the Yankee Big Stick and with nary a carrot in sight. We left him no choice.

Where to begin?

At the beginning, of course. In the late ’50s, two Republican ambassadors to Cuba, Arthur Gardner and Earl T. Smith, lost their jobs for butting heads against their liberal State Department chiefs. These ambassadors’ crimes? Insisting that the official U.S. policy of helping Fidel Castro shoot his way to power in Cuba was stupid.

On August 27, 1960, during Senate subcommittee hearings titled “Communist Threat to the United States Through the Caribbean,” these two former ambassadors to Cuba testified to the nature of the head-butting:

Senator Dodd:  “You have been quoted, Mr. Gardner, as referring to, ‘Castro worship’ in the State Department in 1957 … you are quoted as saying you fought all the time with the State Department over whether Castro merited the support or friendship of the United States … Mr. Gardner, do you have any idea why the United States allowed Castro to get arms from the United States, and would not allow Batista to have arms to preserve his government[?] … [Y]ou have been quoted as saying that Washington, “pulled the rug out” from under Batista?”

Mr. Gardner: “I feel it very strongly, that the State Department was influenced, first, by those stories by [the New York Times'] Herbert Matthews, and soon [support for Castro] became kind of a fetish with them.”

Senator Dodd: “(in preparation for his post) your successor as Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith was actually (sent by his State Dept. superiors) to be briefed by New York Times’ Herbert Matthews?”

Mr. Gardner: “Yes, that is right.”

Moving over now to Gardner’s replacement, Earl T. Smith, who immediately upon his posting noticed the identical pro-Castro “fetish”:

Mr. Sourwine: “Mr. Smith, what agencies of the U.S. Government had a hand in bringing pressure to overthrow the Batista government, and how did they do it?

Mr. Smith: “Well, the agencies, certain influential people, influential sources in the State Department, lower down echelons in the CIA [emphasis added]. I would say representatives of the majority of the U.S. Government agencies which have anything to do with the Embassy. “

Senator Eastland: “Mr Smith, you had been warning the State Department that Castro was a Marxist?”

Mr. Smith: “Yes, sir….I also warned [Cuban] President Batista that there were (Castro) spies in the Cuban Embassy in Washington.”

Senator Eastland: “Would you say that the American Government then, including all of its agencies, was largely responsible for bringing Castro to power?”

Mr. Smith: “The American Government, yes, sir, and the people in the American Government. …I would say that after Castro came to power, that we were very diligent in enforcing our neutrality laws [i.e. arresting anti-Castro Cubans launching raids from Florida]. We even moved people out of Florida; people whom the United States thought might be active in any counterrevolutionary movement.…However, when I was Ambassador to Cuba [during Batista’s term] we seemed to have great trouble in enforcing our neutrality laws.”

Senator Eastland: “And yet in spite of that, of your advices to our Government, you say that our Government was primarily responsible in bringing Castro to power [emphasis added].

Mr. Smith: That is absolutely correct.…In my own Embassy there were certain ones of influence who were pro-26th of July, pro-Castro, and anti-Batista.”

Senator Eastland: “Who were they?”

Mr. Smith:  “I would say the Chief of the Political Section, John Topping, and the Chief of the CIA Section. It was revealed that the No. 2 CIA man in the embassy had given unwarranted and undue encouragement to the [Castro] revolutionaries….. Senator, we [the U.S.] are responsible for bringing Castro in power.  I do not care how you want to word it.”

Indeed, January 7, 1959, marks a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the State Department extended diplomatic recognition (benediction) to a Latin American government as quickly as they bestowed this benediction on Fidel Castro’s that day.

At the time, Castro himself had yet to enter Havana. Nothing so frantically fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” Fulgencio Batista.

Castro’s worldwide fame, his Teflon-like immunity from criticism for his tens of thousands of murders and tortures, for his racism, sexism, lust for nuclear war, for converting a once prosperous nation into a festering, disease-ridden prison and pesthole that repels Haitians and drove over twenty times as many people to die escaping it as died attempting to escape East Germany — all this issues mostly from Fidel Castro’s image as the victimized and plucky David against the bullying Yankee Goliath.

So you can imagine how the above documentation goes over with people genuinely interested in historical truth. To wit: My books on Castro and Che have been translated into four languages, and it’s a ritual by now during my interviews in places like Madrid, Sao Paolo or Warsaw: They always start with what most shocked the interviewer: “Wait- a-minute?! You mean the U.S. helped Castro to power? Then actually served (the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact) as his official bodyguard? Protecting him from exile attacks? You mean all that stuff about hundreds of CIA assassination attempts against Castro is mostly bunk?”

“Well,” I reply, “you read the book. You saw the thorough documentation.”  This “revelation” (regarded as such mostly outside Cuban-exile circles, btw. Most Americans of Cuban heritage have known all of this sordid history frontwards and backwards since roughly 1962) kicks the legs out from under the Castro myth. The truth shatters the very foundation upon which his worldwide fame rests. Thus all the “oohs” and “aaahs,” thus all the frowns and gaping mouths by so many of my interviewers.

And thus also the rage from the Castro regime itself: “Humberto Fontova’s books shamelessly libel our Revolution’s founders,” raves Cuba’s official paper, Cubadebate. “The terms ‘scoundrel’ and ‘traitor’ should precede every mention of Humberto Fontova!”

Cuba “Expert” and Florida voter-ballot “Expert” — been ‘hangin together!

Babalú Blog

By Humberto Fontova

Congressman Joe Garcia and Raul Castro's nephew-in-law Arturo Lopez-Callejas ("Artie Levy to you!"-- also known as "The Castro Family's Fredo") 'hangin in Washington last Feb.

"This past 25th through the 27th of February 2013, CAFE, Cuban Americans for Engagement, held a trip to Washington D.C. to meet with different officials and legislators of the U.S. Federal government...our group was received by three members of Congress, Sam Farr (D-CA), Joe Garcia (D-FL), and by Jim McGovern (D-MA). In the executive branch we were received by the U.S. State Department. Apart from these visits we met with two prominent analysts of U.S.-Cuba relations. Peter Kornbluh, a principal analyst at the National Security Archives at George Washington University, and Wayne Smith...We also visited the Cuban Interest Section and met with Ambassador Jose Ramon Cabañas and other members of the Cuban office in Washington."

Question: if Jose Ramon Cabanas is prevented by Federal law from traveling more than 25 miles from his spying-headquarters (Cuban Interest section office) why are Peter Kornbluh and Wayne Smith (and Lopez-Callejas) allowed to roam freely from sea to shining sea?

Classmates.com! (Multi-Convicted Castroite spy Gerardo Hernandez and Arturo Lopez-Callejas)

babalublog
By Humberto Fontova

He (Gerardito Hernandez on left) rose to the rank of major in Castro's KGB-tutored Intelligence agency! Whereas his classmate at the Castro-regime's top KGB-tutored spy school (Arturito Lopez-Callejas, on left)...well...?

According to the FBI's affidavit, DGI major Gerardo Hernandez and his cohorts were engaged in, among other acts:

• Intelligence gathering against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead Florida.

• Compiling the names, home addresses and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command's top officers along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.

• Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern command.

• Spying on MacDill Air Force base, the U.S. armed forces' worldwide headquarters for fighting "low-intensity" conflicts.

• Locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosive material.

So who pleads for Hernandez' release? Well, among the most voiciferous we find his classmate from
Stalinist Cuba's top spy training center, Arturo (Artie Levy to you!) Lopez-Callejas,

Granted, in the rigorous KGB-mentored curriculum, Arturito fell well behind his classmate Hernandez. "A little slow upstairs," his KGB-tutored instructors always nodded sadly about Arturito, who was never quite up to the intellectual rigors of this demanding profession..But hey, Arturito--whatever else you can say about his "late-development upstairs"--is still a gung-ho team-player--and by golly!-- he surely TRIES hard!

(Arturito SURE seems touchy about his classmate's exposure and fate--and spares no effort to lobby for his classmate's release.

But like his counterpart of the Corleone family this Fredo of the Castro family also gets to dress rakishly and hob-knob with the Babes!

Arturo Lopez-Callejas (“Artie Levy” to you!)–The Castro family’s Fredo

babalublog

By Humberto Fontova, on January 23, 2013, at 2:50 pm

Arturo Lopez-Callejas ("Artie Levy" to you!) calls the Developement Alternatives Inc. memo mentioning Babalu a "declassifed U.S. government document." (in the comments section of The Havana Note) Jose Cardenas sets him straight:

Correction. That is not an official U.S. document -- declassified or otherwise -- that you are breathlessly quoting from. That is an internal DAI memo written after meeting with US officials. Big difference -- which you should have recognized as a former Cuban intelligence analyst.

Any questions why Arturo was booted from MINIT's intelligence analysis dept.? Say what you want about Castro's MINIT, but they don't suffer fools gladly--at last as employees (otherwise they adore them, especially the foreign media, academic and political kind.)
And here was an analyst who (apparently) couldn't distinguish a declassified Gov. document from a private corporate memo!

"Arturito's not the brightest bulb on the tree," you can hear MINIT officials saying years ago. "But he's tall, blue-eyed, glib and knows American slang. A camera-friendly "people-person." The boy belongs in outside sales. Let's send him off to peddle our propaganda in the U.S. district...."

"we have U.S. newspaper people on the payroll, don't we, Tom?..they might like Arturo?"...

..."They might, they just might."

"Great, we'll have them running to Arturito every time Cuba hits the U.S. news cycle. They'll call him an "Expert.""Arturito's much more useful to us in the U.S. Heaven knows we tried and tried to work with him, as his uncle well knows. But Arturito just can't seem to get the hang of this analysis work. His uncle will understand."

"Send Arturo off to do this, send Arturo off to do that...I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says – like dumb. I'm smart and I want respect!"

How the U.S. ‘Bullied’ Poor Little Castro

FrontPage/ by Humberto Fontova

January 7, 1959 marked a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the State Department extended diplomatic recognition to a Latin American government as quickly as it bestowed it on Fidel Castro’s that day.

At the time, Castro himself had yet to enter Havana.

Nothing so frantically fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” Fulgencio Batista (obligatory prefix, used in every MSM and “scholarly” mention of him) seven years earlier. Batista had in fact been punished by a U.S. arms embargo and heavy diplomatic pressure to resign for a year. Batista was subsequently denied exile in the U.S. and not even allowed to set foot in the country that “backed” him.

On a visit to Cuba in 2001 for a “scholarly summit” with Fidel and Raul Castro, Robert Reynolds — who served as the CIA’s Caribbean desk’s specialist on the Cuban revolution in 1960 — clarified the U.S. diplomatic stance of the time: “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” he boasted to his beaming hosts.

Reynolds’ colleague Robert Weicha, who served as CIA chief in Santiago, Cuba, in the late 1950s, concurred: Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State were pro-Castro, except ambassador Earl T. Smith.

In the fall of ’57, Weicha and U.S. Consul Park Wollam smuggled into Cuba the state-of-the-art transmitters that became Castro and Che’s Radio Rebelde. From these mics, the Castroites broadcast their “guerrilla victories” island-wide, along with their plans to uplift Cuba into a Caribbean Shangri-La inspired by the principles of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and St Francis of Assisi. These proclamations were then reaching most of the English-speaking world through the good work of the New York Times and CBS (Herbert Matthews and Don Hewitt, respectively).

“War against the United States is my true destiny!” Fidel Castro had confided in a letter to a friend in June 1958. “When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger war.” Alas, this message was not broadcast over the U.S.-issue “Radio Rebelde,” and apparently slipped past our crackerjack CIA. More >>

Target: Marco Rubio

Humberto Fontova

Last July one of America’s biggest TV networks craved to interview Senator Marco Rubio. Univision is the biggest Spanish-language network in the U.S., reaching thirteen and a half million households, (95 percent of the “Hispanic” total) making it 4th biggest in the U.S., just ahead of NBC. Mexican-Americans make up most of its viewers so the network’s editorial tone essentially echoes that of the Democratic-controlled Hispanic Congressional Caucus.

Univision’s owner is actually an Egyptian-born Israeli-American named Haim Saban, who ranks among the Democratic party’s most lavish benefactors "I don't say this lightly," said Democratic National Committee head Terry McAuliffe back in 2007, "Haim Saban saved the Democratic Party."

This summer Senator Rubio was asked to appear on the network’s top show, Al Punto, for an interview with, Univision’s star anchorman Jorge Ramos, hailed as “the Brian Williams of Hispanic TV” by AdAge. Ramos is a multi-Emmy winner and author of a bestseller titled “Open Borders,” which pretty much sums up his position. Marco Rubio opposes even the Dream Act. So the plan called for “Hispanic” Univision tinkling the tune and “Hispanic” Senator Marco Rubio either stepping and fetching, tapdancing or being outed in front of the vast majority of America’s “Hispanic” households as anything “but a credit to his race,” more like a traitor. Herman Cain knows something about this.

And like Herman Cain, Senator Rubio declined the role of Mr Bo Jangles. So Univision cranked up the inducements. They had the goods on Rubio, they explained in a meeting with his staff. Marco’s brother in law had been busted for drugs in 1987 and they planned a prime-time expose of the scandal. Marco’s cooperation with an interview just might prompt Univision to “soften” or even kill the program altogether.

Marco was 16 years old at the time and this was his brother in law. If this strikes you as hardly scandalous for the freshman Senator, such is the desperation among the “Hispanic” (i.e. Democratic) establishment to damage Marco Rubio that offering to silence this item struck them as an offer he couldn’t refuse. Then the Democratic-Hispanic establishment would tuck Rubio in their pocket as surely as the Corleone’s tucked Nevada Senator Geary in theirs.

When Marco’s sister refused Univision’s offer to “contribute” to their report, the network parked a huge news truck in front of her house, to further harass her and apparently also to demonstrate their investigative prowess. "I always knew Univision to be a professional organization until this happened," said Rubio of the blackmail attempt.

The “expose" on Rubio’s brother-in- law ran for two days last July and instantly fizzled, despite a publicity blizzard by Univision to their MSM soulmates. Apparently the tangent proved too embarrassingly tenuous even for most Rubio-bashers. Univision’s sleaze factor also nixed their planned Republican debate this January. “Even in this time of ever-changing media techniques, Univision’s unethical tactics stand out,” wrote Rick Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan to Univision’s CEO. “Therefore, Gov. Perry will not consider participating in the Jan. 29, 2012, Univision debate until your network addresses this ethical breach and takes action to correct it.” All candidates except Ron Paul are in lockstep with Gov. Perry on this issue.

Last week came time for Target Rubio’s plan B. A front-page story in the Washington Post by Manuel Franzi-Roig (a frequent visitor to Castro’s Cuba which he gushes over as “intriguing and extraordinarily exotic!”) accused Rubio of “embellishing” his family history.

The WaPo’s Rubio-gate boils down to this: Documents they “uncovered” (in fact they’ve been prominently displayed on a Birther blog since May) reveal that Rubio’s parents came to the U.S. in 1956 rather than in 1959 as he has claimed in some interviews and on his Senate website. Castro took over Cuba in January of 1959. So because his parents weren’t fleeing Castro’s rule at the instant of arrival in the U.S. Marco “embellished” his family’s Cinderella story. He’s technically not the son of glamorous “political exiles,” as his Senate bio claims but of tacky “economic immigrants”--legal ones to boot, making them super-tacky in WaPo eyes.

Shame on Marco’s parents. If only they’d SNUCK into the U.S. Then the mildest inquiry into his family history would ignite a media pile–on of “racist kook!”, “bigot!” “Nativist!” against the enquirer.

“If The Washington Post wants to criticize me for getting a few dates wrong, I accept that,” wrote Senator Rubio in his official rebuttal. “But to call into question the central and defining event of my parents’ young lives – the fact that a brutal communist dictator took control of their homeland and they were never able to return – is something I will not tolerate. They stayed because, after January 1959, the Cuba they knew disappeared. They wanted to go back...”

In fact, the back and forth of Cubans between the U.S. and pre-Stalinist Cuba, for both business and pleasure, was common and considered unremarkable at the time. Same for the back and forth of Americans themselves. Think Ernest Hemingway. In 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. than Americans in Cuba.

And why not? "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” documented a report by the UN’s International Labor Organization in 1957. Both this writer’s maternal grandparents were born in Florida of Cuban parents here legally for a few years. But their parents returned with their infant children to Cuba, where all spent the rest of their lives--until Castro’s Stalinism made their 1962 stay in the U.S. permanent.

So imagine: these Hispanic parents voluntarily vacated the U.S. with their invaluable “anchor babies!” And my grandparent’s case was hardly exceptional among pre-Castro Cubans. The cultural, ethnic and business ties between former Spanish colony Florida and former Spanish colony Cuba made such things commonplace. Even as Spain’ “crown” colony, in the 19th century Cuba did more business with the U.S. than with Spain.

The notion of people with Spanish surnames departing the U.S. for their native countries smiling and accompanied by their families instead of glowering and accompanied by The Border Patrol or Sherriff Arapio just doesn’t register in today’s America. But it was routine throughout the 20th Century for Cubans. In the 1950’s when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property, family, etc. and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking only around 25,000 Cubans lived permanently in the U.S. About the same number of Americans lived in Cuba.

But The Godfather II shows none of this, you see. Their exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba omits it--so liberals remain (willfully) oblivious. Sounds flippant? Well, here’s Chris Matthews from this very Sunday, while hosting the author of the WaPo hit-piece “I mean everybody who saw Godfather II knows what it was like when Castro took over!”

Right after hailing Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo as his primary historians on Cuba, Matthews gushed that his guest Manuel Franzi-Roig should win a Pulitzer Prize for his Rubio hit-piece.

You simply cannot make this stuff up.

Cuba among “Best Countries in the World” (says Newsweek)/ Humberto Fontova

En una prueba mas de la "ignorancia" supina de muchos "prestigiosos" medios de comunicacion como demuestra Humberto Fontova Cuba among “Best Countries in the World” (says Newsweek)

Humberto Fontova: un necesario

Se puede o no compartir con Humberto Fontova, pero no se puede desconocer y gracias que esta ahi para hacernos meditar.

Humberto Fontova at The Earned Gift of Discernment

La imagen del Che/ Humberto Fontova

Desde

Humberto Fontova Official Site