How a Bay of Pigs Survivor Became a Brutal American Mobster

The mess of a CIA operation had horrific consequences for the organized crime scene back in the United States.

By Seth Ferranti

https://www.vice.com/

March 19, 2018

In April 1961, about 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and backed by the CIA set out to invade and overthrow the Fidel Castro regime. The Bay of Pigs operation, as it has since become notoriously known, was, of course, an unmitigated disaster—those exiles who weren't killed by well-prepared pro-Castro forces were rounded up and imprisoned until the Kennedy Administration was able to negotiate their release. The fiasco not only helped lay the groundwork for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 but generally made the United States look like shit.

The mess of a CIA operation had long-term consequences for the organized crime scene back in the United States, too. Among those members of Brigade 2506—the would-be-liberators of Cuba—released back to American custody in 1962 was José Miguel Battle, Sr., a former Havana cop. He went on to reinvent himself in the US as El Padrino, a "Godfather" of the Cuban-American Mafia. Thanks in part to his connections to both legendary Italian mafiosi and the Havana underworld, he became a sort of king of the numbers racket in the New York/New Jersey metro area. With criminal interests all along the Eastern seaboard, Battle’s run continued into the George W. Bush era, when he and his son were finally arrested in 2004. Numbers, murder, and drugs—El Padrino seemed to outlast politics itself in a ruthless bid for power and riches.

In his new book, The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, out March 20, the master of true crime TJ English explores the life of the Cuban mob boss who, the author concluded, consciously modeled himself on Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone as he got older. VICE caught up with English about his new book and where El Padrino ranks in the chronicles of gangster lore. Here’s what he had to say.

VICE: What do you think José Miguel Battle learned as a vice cop in Havana that would help him head a criminal empire in the United States? 

He learned how corruption works and how the world operates. How organized crime is a conduit between the upper world (the business and political class) and the underworld (the criminals and gangsters). Battle delivered the skim from the casinos to the presidential palace. He was the go-between, the bagman between Meyer Lanksy and President Fulgencio Batista and his government. Battle really understood how you needed to take care of people within the system. Payment would be made to whoever needed.

When he got to the United States and wanted to set up this gambling empire revolving around a numbers racket, or what Latinos called “bolita,” he knew if it was properly organized, it could be a goldmine. Part of organizing it was making sure he cleared it with the necessary Mafia figures in the United States. He set up meetings, through Santo Trafficante, with all the key Mafia figures in the New York/New Jersey area and started this bolita enterprise, which was quite vast and profitable on many levels.

It's remarkable that the failed Bay of Pigs invasion seemed to ultimately bring together the men who would become the Cuban Mafia in America. But given the way things were run in Batista's Cuba, it's not exactly shocking, right?

A lot of the Mafia figures and Cubans who were displaced by the revolution were angry. They had lost money, property, and belongings, had been unceremoniously kicked out of the country, and wanted to take Cuba back. They had a mutual interest with the CIA and the US government, who saw the Communist government of Fidel Castro as a threat, and wanted to overthrow it. All these elements—the Mafia, the CIA, and the Cuban exiles—formed a coalition and became determined to kill Castro and take back Cuba. The biggest initiative in that effort was the Bay of Pigs invasion. The men from this botched invasion, including Battle, became the foundation of The Corporation.

A lot of Americans' frame of reference for Cuban gangsters is probably still Brian De Palma’s Scarface, which emphasizes the Mariel boatlift of Cubans into Florida. How did Al Pacino's Tony Montana compare to the real man they called El Padrino?

José Miguel Battle was more of an establishment figure, the guy with lots of connections in the upper world. Tony Montana was a refugee, a guy with nothing, from the lowest level of the gutter who rose up. El Padrino was much more of an old-school don, because of his understanding of how the system worked. But the Mariel boatlift did have an impact on The Corporation. When they arrived in New Jersey and Miami, they were immediately integrated into the criminal underworld, and they were the kinda guys who would do the type of criminal assignments that other people might not be willing to do. Murders, all kinds of hard-line criminal activities. Some of the most violent criminal activity was done by the Marielitos, as they were called.

Like plenty of real-life and fictional mob figures, El Padrino didn’t exactly take kindly to betrayals. But the incident with his one-time protege Ernesto Torres—whom he is said to have ordered killed—was the closest he came to hard time in prison before he actually got nabbed in 2004, right?

Ernesto Torres was known to the organization as El Hijo Prodigo, the prodigal son. He was this young kid, 19-years-old, who showed talent as a gangster and as a killer. He started out pretty much as a hitman: One of his first missions was to try to avenge the murder of Battle's brother. Battle saw him as someone he could mentor and shape, maybe even to take over the organization. Others in the organization couldn't quite understand it, because this guy Torres wasn't very bright and didn't seem like the kind of guy who would make a good leader. Ernesto was always broke. He started kidnapping other bankers in the organization, and holding them for ransom money.

Eventually, Torres did the unthinkable and shot one of the kidnapped bankers. The guy survived, but Torres almost killed him. The other bankers told Battle that he had to do something about it because this guy was a loose cannon.

[After Torres's death], Battle was put on trial for conspiracy and found guilty on one of the counts. It looked like he was going to be put away for a long time—his reign was over. Torres's girlfriend had testified against him, but Battle beat that charge on a technicality. He got a lighter sentence. When there was some belief that he would be tried again using the girlfriend as a witness, the organization took care of that situation by murdering her before that trial could ever take place.

El Padrino was eventually brought down due to the dogged pursuit of one law enforcement official—David Shanks—whom you had access to. Why do you think he made bringing down this mafioso his career? 

David Shanks was just a Miami cop who came into the story of The Corporation kind of late. By the time he was involved, Battle had moved from New Jersey down to Miami, and the Corporation had been up and running for a least 15 years or 20 years in the New York area, and was now moving its operations. David Shanks was the guy who had worked organized crime, particularly street gambling and money laundering. He's one of the guys who first comprehended, I think, the full scope of what the Corporation was all about. He did a lot of it through tracking the money and how the money was being laundered by a kind of a check-cashing scheme, and he had connected that money-laundering scheme to the organization itself. He investigated them for about 20 years.

How do stories that teeter in the grey areas of politics and crime, like the ones you are so inclined to write, reflect on what’s going on today in that arena in our country? 

If you don't understand the history and the workings or organized crime in America, you can't understand America. That's how intertwined they are, and always have been, and still are. We talk often about how the mafia diminished and all that, and, of course, it has. But I don't think the corrupt mandate that created organized crime has diminished at all. It just keep taking on new forms and new shapes depending on what the dominant racket is in any given era at any given time. At one time it was illegal booze. Then it was sort of labor racketeering, and then it was narcotics. Any number of things. Political corruption and law enforcement corruption is always part and parcel to what makes the world go around. I don't think that's changed much.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Learn more about English's new book, which drops Tuesday, here.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.

By blaming everything else but socialism and tweaking its definition, the Left has managed to keep it haute couture.

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

December 20, 2017

Opponents of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro demonstrate in front of riot police in Caracas on January 24, 2015 (AFP Photo/Federico Parra)

It's a puzzle. Over the last decade, Venezuela has supplanted Cuba as the Shangri-La of the American left. Not long ago, self-declared socialist senator Bernie Sanders insisted that the American dream was more achievable in the Bolivarian Republic than in America. A string of Hollywood luminaries made the pilgrimage to visit the socialist Mecca to say ponderous and stupid things.

Today, the praise is more muted, because events have illuminated that stupidity. The government recently advised its citizens to eat their pet rabbits. Inflation in Venezuela is reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Roughly 85 percent of Venezuelan companies have stopped production to one extent or another, in the most oil-rich country in the world.

And yet, socialism is arguably more popular — in theory — than at any time in American history, particularly among young people. A Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll last November found that 42 percent of young people support capitalism, but 44 percent prefer socialism for a socioeconomic system.

Why the disconnect? For conservatives of my ilk, the most obvious answer is that, for the left, socialism itself is never to blame. One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Twitter feed, which insists daily that the socialist ideal has never been tarnished by real-world socialists. A tweet permanently affixed to the top of their page reads: “Are you about to tell us ‘Socialism was tried in Russia’ or ‘Look at Venezuela’ etc? It has NEVER EXISTED! It comes AFTER global capitalism!”

Even mainstream liberals don’t like to concede any points in socialism’s disfavor. The late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was a murderer and a tyrant. So was the late Cuban communist Fidel Castro. Pinochet helped his country transition to democracy. Castro, who killed more people, left his country as a police state. But while Pinochet is a demonic figure in the liberal imagination, Castro’s status is far more complicated. He is still a hero to many.

For the last decade, the New York Times has covered the socialism of both Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, with the same sophisticated nuance it long applied to Cuba. Over the weekend, it ran a heart-wrenching story on how Venezuela’s poor children are dying from starvation. But the culpability of Chavism, Venezuela’s brand of socialism, is something the reader has to bring to the page. Such passive detachment between cause (in this case, socialist policies) and effect (mass misery and starvation) is rarely found when the Times reports on, say, Republican economic policy.

The disconnect between socialism’s record and its invincible appeal also stems from leftists’ denial of what it really entails. Thus, Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Great Britain, dragged the Labor party away from its official socialist dogma about the need for the “common ownership of the means of production.”

“Socialism for me,” Blair said, “Was never about nationalization or the power of the state, not just about economics or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life, a set of values, a belief in society, in cooperation, in achieving together what we cannot achieve alone.”

That’s why he rejected socialism in favor of what he called “social-ism.”

Similarly, Bernie bros focus on social solidarity rather than political economy.

But even this watered-down spirit of “we’re all in it together” — whether you call it socialism or nationalism — can do enormous damage. It is very hard to reconcile with democracy and the rule of law, unless there’s a dire national crisis, and even then it may cause grave damage.

I don’t want America to be Denmark. But at least Denmark recognizes that social democracy requires democracy, free speech, and the rule of law to keep it from turning into Venezuela on the Baltic. I wouldn’t be so concerned about the rising support for socialism among young people in the United States, save for the fact that it’s been accompanied by a modest decline in support for democracy, too.

READ MORE:
The Road to Serfdom Runs Through Venezuela
Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela Is a Warning for Bernie Sanders Supporters
NYT’s Venezuela Story Forgets to Mention Socialism

– Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. © 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Terrorist Bill Ayres Eulogizes Terrorist Che Guevara on the 50th Anniversary of Che’s Death

Humberto Fontova
https://townhall.com/
October 11, 2017


Che Guevara Monument and Mausoleum

"To us, Che was a symbol of boldness, intelligence, internationalism, self-sacrifice, solidarity and, as he said, “at the risk of appearing ridiculous,” love. Che rejected personal gain and privilege for the leaders in a struggle for a fair and just society; he lived as he asked others to live.”(Former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayres, writing in The Nation. Oct 8th.)

In fact, “Che Guevara’s house was among the most luxurious in Cuba,”wrote Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes about the mansion Che Guevara “nationalized” (stole at Soviet gunpoint from rightful owner and moved into) in January 1959.

After a hard day at the office signing firing-squad warrants and blasting teenagers’ skulls apart with the coup-de-grace from his .45, Che Guevara retired to his new domicile just outside Havana on the pristine beachfront. Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba’s most successful building contractor. Today, the area is reserved exclusively for tourists and Communist party members. Here’s the rest of the description of Che’s Havana mansion: 

''The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets. One TV had been specially designed in the U.S. and had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control (remember, this was 1959.) This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion's garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights."

It was in this mansion early in 1959 that Soviet GRU agent Angel Ciutat tutored his eager pupil Che on the finer points of Stalinizing Cuba. Among the many excellent reasons for the reluctance of Castroites to loosen (even slightly) their Stalinist grip on power lies El Compromiso Sangriento. (The Blood Covenant.)

You see, amigos: most who have climbed to positions of authority in Castro's regime did so as accomplices in mass-murder. In brief, all Castroite military and police officer candidates took their places as firing squad murderers, as explained by Soviet GRU officer Ciutat to the (probably) panting, salivating Che.

A brief aside: historically and almost universally, some members of a firing squad shot blanks, to assuage their conscience. But such assuaging would contradict the Castroite firing squads' most vital purpose.

The point of the Blood Covenant was to bond the murderers, especially those in line for future regime leadership, with the murderous regime. The more shooters the more murderers. The more murderers thus manufactured the more people highly-motivated to resist any overthrow (or even modification) of their system. Karma, as they say--especially in the form Nuremberg justice-- can be a real b*tch. Castroites wanted no part of it.

And after 16,000 firing-squad murders (according to the Black Book of Communism, not exactly a Cuban-exile tabloid) Cuba's officer corps was plenty "bonded" to the regime.

Think about that for a second: a murderous policy handed down by a Soviet butcher and eagerly implemented by an Argentine psychopath of murdering Cuban patriots, instantly became government policy in newly "nationalist" Cuba. Got it?


Supporters visit the statue of Ernesto Che Guevara in La Higuera where he was executed, Santa Cruz, Bolivia, October 8, 2017. (Reuters)

From his prison-cell window, a former Cuban freedom-fighter and political prisoner named Tito Rodriguez-Oltmans, watched this blood covenant in action. "Every evening the military cadets and regime officials would be bused in and armed with Belgian .308 caliber FALs as they lined up for the firing squad," recalls Mr. Oltmans, a prisoner in La Cabana prison in the early 1960s. “As darkness fell the condemned patriot -- shirtless and gagged -- would be dragged to the execution wall and bound. The cadets and officials would line up only four meters in front of the patriot and all had loaded weapons." ...FUEGO!

Mr Rodriguez Oltmans somehow avoided death by a Castroite firing-squad but witnessed, at extremely close quarters, such a murder of one of his cellmates, a legless 21 year old boy named Tony Chao. A few months earlier Tony had been shot several times in the legs during a firefight with Castro’s Soviet-led troops. Only his injuries allowed the Castroites to capture Tony alive, only to amputate his shattered legs before murdering him.

Shortly before his murder Tony received a letter from his mother. “My dear son,” she counseled, as recalled by Mr Oltmans, “how often I’d warned you not to get involved in these things. But I knew my pleas were vain. You always demanded your freedom, Tony, even as a little boy. So I knew you’d never stand for communism. Well, Castro and Che finally caught you. Son, I love you with all my heart. My life is now shattered and will never be the same, but the only thing left now, Tony . . . is to die like a man.”

“FUEGO!” Mr Rodriguez-Oltmans then watched from his cell window as Che Guevara’s lackey yelled the command and the firing squad’s bullets shattered Tony’s crippled body, just as he’d reached the stake on crutches , lifted himself and stared resolutely at his murderers. But Che’s firing squads usually murdered a hero who was standing. The legless Tony presented an awkward target. So some of the volley went wild and missed the youngster. Time for the coup de grâce.

Normally it’s one .45 slug that shatters the skull. Mr Rodriguez-Oltmans recalled that Tony required . . . POW!-POW! . . . POW! — three. Seems the executioner’s hands were shaking pretty badly. But they finally managed. Castro and Che Guevara had another notch in their guns. Another enemy dispatched — bound and gagged as usual.

Compare Tony’s death to the arch-swine, arch-weasel and arch-coward Che Guevara’s capture. “Don’t shoot!” whimpered the arch-murderer to his Bolivian captors. “I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

Then ask yourselves: whose face belongs on T-shirts worn by youth who fancy themselves, rebellious, freedom-loving and brave?

Chomsky's Venezuela Lesson

By John Stossel
https://townhall.com/
May 31, 2017


Director Oliver Stone and president Hugo Chavez attend the 'South Of The Border' Premiere at the Sala Grande during the 66th Venice Film Festival on September 7, 2009 in Venice, Italy.

Venezuela descends into chaos. Its people, once the wealthiest in Latin America, starve. Even The New York Times runs headlines like "Dying Infants and No Medicine."

My Venezuelan-born friend Kenny says his relatives are speaking differently. Cousins who once answered "Fine" or "Good" when asked, "How are you?" now say, "We're eating."

Eating is a big deal in the country that's given birth to jokes about a "Venezuelan diet." A survey by three universities found 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average 19 pounds this year.

So are American celebrities who championed Venezuela's "people's revolution" embarrassed? Will they admit they were wrong?

"No," says linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky. "I was right."

Sigh.

Actor Sean Penn met with Hugo Chavez several times and claimed Chavez did "incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor."

Oliver Stone made a film that fawned over Chavez and Latin American socialism. Chavez joined Stone in Venice for the film's premiere.

Michael Moore praised Chavez for eliminating "75 percent of extreme poverty."

Hello?! In Venezuela, Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, created extreme poverty.

Chomsky, whose anti-capitalist teachings have inspired millions of American college students, praised Chavez's "sharp poverty reduction, probably the greatest in the Americas." Chavez returned the compliment by holding up Chomsky's book during a speech at the U.N., making it a best-seller.

Is Chomsky embarrassed by that today? "No," he wrote me. He praised Chavez "in 2006. Here's the situation as of two years later." He linked to a 2008 article by a writer of Oliver Stone's movie who said, "Venezuela has seen a remarkable reduction in poverty."

I asked him, "Should you now say to the students who've learned from you, 'Socialism, in practice, often wrecks people's lives'?" Chomsky replied, "I never described Chavez's state capitalist government as 'socialist' or even hinted at such an absurdity. It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained ... Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital."

What? Capitalists "undermine the economy" by fleeing?

I showed Chomsky's email to Marian Tupy, editor of HumanProgress.org. I like his response: "If lack of private capitalism -- I assume he means total abolition of private enterprise and most private property -- is his definition of socialism, then only North Korea and Kampuchea qualify."

Tupy also asks how Chomsky thinks "capitalists sabotaged the economy by taking money out if capitalists are superfluous to a functioning economy."

Good questions. Chomsky's arguments are absurd.

As Tupy wrote elsewhere about another socialist fool, "As much as I would like to enjoy rubbing (his) nose in his own mind-bending stupidity, I cannot rejoice, for I know that Venezuela's descent into chaos -- hyperinflation, empty shops, out-of-control violence and the collapse of basic public services -- will not be the last time we hear of a collapsing socialist economy. More countries will refuse to learn from history and give socialism 'a go.' 'Useful idiots,' to use Lenin's words ... will sing socialism's praises until the last light goes out."

I fear he's right. This love for state planning is especially outrageous today because anyone who pays attention knows what does work: market capitalism.

Socialism failed in Angola, Benin, Cambodia, China, Congo, Cuba, Ethiopia, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, North Korea, Poland, Somalia, the Soviet Union, Vietnam and now Venezuela. We are yet to experience the blessed event of seeing one socialist country succeed.

Yet during the same years, capitalism brought prosperity to Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, most of Western Europe, and years ago, to a mostly poor and undeveloped country we now call America.

In 1973, when Chile abandoned its short-lived experiment with socialism and embraced capitalism, Chilean income was 36 percent that of Venezuela. Today, Chileans are 51 percent richer than Venezuelans. Chilean incomes rose by 228 percent. Venezuelans became 21 percent poorer.

Venezuela has greater oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. But because some people believe socialism is the answer to inequality, Venezuelans starve.

What should Venezuela do once the tyrant falls?

It should do what Dubai and Hong Kong did, and what America should do next with Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico: create "prosperity zones." I'll explain in my next column.

FIDEL CASTRO’S HISTORIC PROPAGANDA AFFILIATES SUDDENLY UPSET OVER 'FAKE NEWS'

When the mainstream media was more than happy to disseminate the lies of a monster.

Humberto Fontova

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

December 19, 2016

Barbara Walters and Fidel Castro (ABC News)

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

“Propaganda is vital—propaganda is the heart of our struggle.” Fidel Castro

“The vetting procedure starts the minute the (Cuban) regime receives your visa application. When your smiling Cuban ‘guides’ greet you at the airport they know plenty about you, and from several angles.” Chris Simmons, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuban spycatcher, now retired

“The Castro regime assigns 20 security agents to follow and monitor every foreign journalist. You play the regime’s game and practice self–censorship or you’re gone.” Vicente Botin, reporter for Madrid’s El Pais who was booted from Cuba for taking his job title seriously.

Entire books have been dedicated to thoroughly documenting the mainstream media’s long, lucrative and gleeful partnership with the Castro regime’s KGB-trained propaganda apparatchiks in spreading (genuine) fake news. Given current bandwith constraints, let’s limit ourselves to a couple of the most outrageous examples:

After strolling down the red carpet Cuba’s Stalinist regime so often throws down to welcome NBC ‘s Andrea  Mitchell, this “intrepid reporter” frequently interviews a Cuba-based  “health expert” named Gail Reed. Ms Mitchell always introduces Reed as “the international director of the nonprofit group Medical Education Cooperation.”

Perfectly true. But let’s see if some trifling items regarding this favorite NBC (and CNN ) guest’s backgrounds  just might tinge their commentary, just might make a judicious person suspect her of disseminating “fake news,” shall we:

Oh!...and CNN, another media fan of Gail Reed’s “impartial expertise”, calls her “a Medical Expert.” Fine. But it’s also interesting that:

For the past 38 years Havana resident Gail Reed has been married to an officer of Cuba’s Directorio General de Intelligencia (spy service) named Julian Torres Rizo. This KGB-trained apparatchik recruited Reed back in 1969 when she visited Cuba as a member of the (DGI-created) Venceremos Brigades of “starry-eyed” U.S. college kids. Obama’s future “neighbors” Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, by the way, served as recruiters for these VenceremosBrigades. This was an important function as leaders of the terrorist group Weather Underground. 

“Your society must be destroyed!” the KGB-trained Rizo coached his eager hippie recruits in Cuba. “It is now your duty to help destroy your society!” Reed was so enchanted with Stalinist, terror-sponsoring Cuba that she moved there and became a top writer for Cuba’s Communist party press (the same one, by the way, that frequently bashes your humble servant as a “SCOUNDREL!” and a “TRAITOR!” 

Not that any American viewers imbibing her reports on the marvels of Cuba’s healthcare and the wickedness of the U.S. “Blockade” of her adopted country in those “mainstream” media organs might have guessed any of Gail Reed’s background. For such illuminating disclosures it greatly helps to consult a “SCOUNDREL!” and “TRAITOR!”

Everything above thoroughly documented here. 

“Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.” (ABC’s Barbara Walters)

“Only minutes after my arrival at the Hotel Riviera in Havana, I was told to be in his (Fidel Castro’s) office within 15 minutes,” wrote Barbara Walters about her first interview with Fidel Castro in May 1977. “There I found a very courtly, somewhat portly Fidel Castro. He apologized for making me wait for two years and said that now he wanted to cooperate. Castro suggested that he personally escort us on a visit to other parts of the country, and he gave me the choice of places. I selected the Bay of Pigs and the Sierra Maestra mountains….

“On Wednesday, Castro himself came to our hotel to pick us up…Then, driving a Russian-made jeep, he took us to the Bay of Pigs, where we boarded an armed patrol boat. We thus became, according to Castro, the first Americans to cross the Bay of Pigs since the U.S.-supported invasion there in 1961.” 

Barbara Walters’ crossing of the Bay of Pigs was probably more than a historical sight-seeing junket. On the other side and near the mouth of the bay sits Castro’s personal island-resort Cayo Piedra, that houses his luxurious get-away chateau. According to defectors, when younger, Fidel Castro often repaired to this remote but luxurious villa for spearfishing among other recreational pursuits.    

Juan Reynaldo Sanchez, a Lieut. Colonel in Cuba’s Armed Forces who spent 17 years as Fidel Castro’s bodyguard/valet had just been promoted to the position when Barbara Walters visited Cuba for her first interview with the Stalinist dictator in May 1977. Sanchez defected to the U.S. in 2008 and explained to this writer how he was part of the Castroite entourage that accompanied Ms Walters and Fidel to the latter’s island chateau. Ms Walters does mention that: 

“We stopped at a little island for a picnic lunch of grilled fish and pineapple. During which Castro swapped fish stories with the ABC crew. It was here that we taped our first but brief and candid interview with him.” 

And speaking of candidness, when in her book “Audition” Barbara Walters confessed to an adulterous affair with Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, Oprah Winfrey asked if she had been in love at the time.

"I was certainly…. I don't know…I was certainly infatuated," answered Walters.

"Infatuated?" asked Oprah.

"I was certainly involved," Walters says. "He was brilliant. He was exciting!”

“His personal magnetism is powerful. His presence is still commanding!" panted Barbara Walters about Fidel Castro during her 2002 interview with the hemisphere’s top torturer of women.

Argentinian journalist Juan Gasparini in his Spanish language book Mujeres de Dictadores (Women of Dictators) writes that, “It is widely supposed that Fidel Castro had several amorous adventures with the North American reporter Barbara Walters who twice visited Cuba to interview him.  It is said that she later visited Cuba more discretely for private visits.” 

 Tags: Communist Cuba, Fidel Castro, Mainstream Media

Castro’s greatest victory

By Caroline B. Glick

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/

November 28, 2016

Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, right, and P.L.O leader Yasser Arafat join hands following the P.L.O. closing speech at the final session of the 7th Non-Aligned Summit conference, March 13, 1983 in New Delhi. (AP)

The Palestinians are loudly mourning the passing of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. PLO chief and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas ordered flags in the PA to be flown at halfmast on Sunday to honor Castro.

They are right to celebrate him.

The Cuban Communist dictator, who murdered tens of thousands of his own people, imprisoned tens of thousands more, caused a million Cubans to flee their homeland and transformed an island paradise into a water enclosed prison was a key ally of Palestinian terrorists in their war to destroy Israel.

Castro’s support for the PLO and its longtime terrorist master Yasser Arafat spanned five decades. Castro’s secret police, the DGI, trained Palestinian terrorists both in Cuba and in the Middle East.

According to the CIA, several hundred Palestinian terrorists were trained in Cuba in the 1970s. Cuban trainers also worked with the PLO in Algiers and Damascus and later in training terrorists from around the world at PLO training camps in Lebanon in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Military training in terrorist tactics wasn’t the only way that Castro helped Arafat. He also provided the PLO with diplomatic cover and political guidance. Palestinian terrorists, including Arafat, began routinely visiting Cuba in the early 1960s. Castro welcomed the formation of the PLO in 1964. His military and intelligence officers met with Arafat and other senior Palestinian terrorists in Algiers and Damascus as early as 1965.

In 1974 the PLO adopted the Phased Plan for the annihilation of Israel. The Phased Plan committed the PLO to a piecemeal strategy of destroying Israel rather than calling for the terrorist group to work with Arab states to destroy Israel in an all-out war.

According to the Phased Plan, the PLO committed to take control over every inch of territory under Israeli control that it could and use those areas as launchpads for expanding the war whose ultimate goal was Israel’s eradication.

Shortly after signing the initial Oslo peace deal at the White House in September 1993, Arafat told an audience at a mosque in South Africa that the Oslo process was the first step toward the implementation of the Phased Plan.

The Phased Plan was trumpeted by the Soviet bloc and their supporters in the Western Left as a sign of PLO moderation. Following its adoption, with Soviet support and Cuban sponsorship, the PLO began winning major diplomatic battles over Israel.

Arafat was invited to address the UN General Assembly later in 1974 where he spoke with a gun strapped to his hip. The PLO was then granted “observer status” at the UN.

Arafat paid a triumphant visit to Havana following his UN appearance where he was warmly greeted by Castro. The next year, the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 defining Zionism as a form of racism. Cuba was the only non-Arab state to sponsor the resolution.

Resolution 3379 set the stage for the diplomatic war against the Jewish national liberation movement and the Jewish state that has raged ever since.

Cuban partnership with the PLO was part of a larger political war waged through Third World leaders by the KGB against the US and the Western world. Both the KGB archive spirited out of the Soviet Union by Vasili Mitrockhin and the revelations of former Romanian Communist spy chief Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978, have demonstrated the nature of that war.

The KGB used the language of human rights and national liberation as a means to deny the US-led West the moral legitimacy to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellites. Castro and Arafat were leading fighters in this propaganda war.

The basic concepts behind this war were developed shortly after the end of World War II. Under the KGB, the US and its allies were deliberately smeared as colonialist and imperialist powers. Every liberation group and every state that was supported by the US was castigated as reactionary. On the other hand, every terrorist group and regime that were supported by the USSR were celebrated as authentic, democratic revolutionary movements seeking to free their peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism.

The political war placed the US and its allies into an intellectual trap. Inside the closed intellectual jail of liberation theory, every action the West took was necessarily reactionary and imperialistic. As a result the US and its allies could do nothing to defend themselves since every argument they made was simply dismissed as imperialist propaganda.

The political successes won by the Soviet propaganda war were extraordinary. For instance, in 1969, the Non-Aligned Movement comprised of newly independent post-colonial states sided with the Vietnamese Communists against the US at its fourth conference. The NAM was silent about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year.

Vilifying Israel was a major component of the Soviets’ political warfare strategy. Israel was viewed as a key enemy of the USSR.

It wasn’t always this way.

Until 1949 the Soviet Union viewed the Zionist movement and the nascent Jewish state as a potential client. The Truman administration recognized Israel just moments before the Soviet Union did. And unlike the US, the Soviets supplied arms to Israel during the 1948-49 War of Independence. Without Soviet help, it is doubtful that Israel would have survived the joint invasion of five Arab armies the day it declared independence.

The Soviets soured on Israel for three reasons. First, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, decided to side with the US against the USSR in the Cold War despite the State Department’s hostility toward Israel.

Second, Ben-Gurion moved to purge Communists from the IDF and other power centers immediately after the War of Independence.

Finally, the Soviets soured on Israel because the birth of Israel awoke the yearnings of the Jews of the Soviet Union. In 1949, Israel’s first ambassador to Moscow, Golda Meyerson – later Meir – was mobbed by Soviet Jews when she visited the main synagogue in the city.

A wave of antisemitic repression followed the event. It was in 1949 that the Soviets began castigating Zionism as a form of imperialism and racism. Zionism became a code word for Jewish and prominent Jews in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc were arrested, tried in show trials and murdered for alleged “Zionist” sympathies.

The Soviets also viewed their ideological assault on Zionism as a means of demonizing the US. The Jews’ native rights to the land of Israel were as old and wellknown as the Bible. If Westerners could be convinced that the Jews were colonial usurpers in Israel, they could be convinced that Western civilization was evil.

According to Pacepa, by 1968 the KGB completed its control over the PLO. It used Castro and his DGI agency as a means to promote the Palestinian political war against Israel. According to Cuban American researchers, Castro was a conduit for promoting anti-Zionism and support for Palestinian terrorists among Western radicals. For instance, the DGI introduced PLO terrorists to African American radicals like the Black Panthers, who were trained by Castro’s forces.

Castro’s lionization by the Palestinians and the international Left alike shows that 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the Soviets’ political war against the US-led West was not only successful during the Cold War, but is still very much a part of our world.

Castro never taught the Palestinians how to live in peace. He never taught them how to raise crops. He taught them how to murder and libel. He taught them how to indoctrinate others to believe lies about themselves and about their perceived enemies.

The fact that these lies are still believed by so many in the Left shows that Castro died a victor. The fact that the terrorist methods he developed with Arafat under the guiding hand of Moscow are still viewed by Western intellectuals as legitimate “tools of resistance” shows that he won.

And the fact that Palestinian murderers who learned the trade at his knee are still viewed as legitimate forces in world politics shows that together with his KGB bosses, Castro was able to get away with his crimes.

The West managed to defeat the Soviet state, but not the Soviet cause. And the flags at half-mast for Castro in Ramallah are proof of the Castro-executed Soviet victory over morality and over truth.

Fidel Castro’s Admirers: The Dunce, the Coward, and the Criminal

Why Castro’s apologists aren’t worth talking to

By Mario Loyola — November 29, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuba's President Raul Castro shake hands during their first meeting on the second day of Obama's visit to Cuba, in Havana March 21, 2016.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Since my first days at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I have argued with a lot of people about a lot of things. But I don’t argue about Fidel Castro, who finally died at long last on Saturday. The reason is partly personal; my mother left Cuba at the age of 13 with her family after Castro’s terror unfolded across her happy homeland. But the main reason is that the dictatorship of Fidel Castro does not raise any issue on which reasonable people can disagree.

There are basically three kinds of people who say nice things about Fidel: (1) those too ignorant or too stupid to have the first clue what they’re talking about; (2) cowards for whom everything is morally equivalent; and (3) those who know what Fidel did and are depraved enough to defend it anyway.

People in the first category don’t need my help defeating themselves. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau might as well have been wearing a dunce cap and a “kick me” sign when he claimed in a statement that even Castro’s detractors recognize Fidel’s “tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’” As a bonus, he hailed Castro as Cuba’s “longest serving president,” as if that were a laudable achievement for a dictator.

In the competition for Maximum Idiot on the subject of Cuba, Irish president Michael Higgins wasn’t far behind Trudeau (Castro believed not only in “freedom for his people but for all the oppressed and excluded peoples on the planet”), and Dr. Jill Stein wasn’t far behind that (Castro was a “symbol of the struggle for Justice in the shadow of empire”). These people are like college kids who wear Ché Guevara T-shirts: They have no idea what they’re saying, and nobody expects them to. Some people think that eulogies like these reveal the despotic left-wing tendencies of those who make them. I take a much more charitable view: They’re just stupid. If they knew only 5 percent of the reality of Castro’s dictatorship, they would be horrified.

The same cannot be said of people in the second category, moral cowards such as Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter’s drivel about “fondly” remembering his visits with Fidel and Fidel’s “love of his country” was thoroughly familiar to anyone who knows Carter, the shining example of Dean Acheson’s observation that moralizing and being moral aren’t the same thing. For those who aren’t familiar, Jimmy Carter is a former American president who thinks that he’s no better than any other sinner, and neither are you, and so we’re all the same as Fidel in God’s eyes. He’s not ignoring Castro’s dictatorship because he’s unaware of its existence. Rather, he doesn’t think he or anyone else is in a moral position to judge Castro’s dictatorship, so he politely declines to mention it.

This moral cowardice was distilled to its purest form in the empty and thoroughly worthless White House statement. As you might expect, Obama’s statement was excessively wordy and mostly about himself. Here’s the bit about Castro:

We know that this moment fills Cubans — in Cuba and in the United States — with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.

The reference to Fidel’s “enormous impact” in “altering” the lives of millions in “countless ways,” was sterilized of any moral judgement. Cruel dictatorship? Who’s to say? History will judge. The latter was a subtle reference to one of Castro’s favorite phrases, “La historia me absolverá,” but the reference is so subtle, I’m not sure even an expert in reading between the lines could tell what it means, or that it means anything. At the end of the day, the statement tells us nothing about Castro but a great deal about Obama, the intellectual whose congenital narcissism makes it impossible for him to pick any side in a moral argument, except when he is the subject of it. It’s the response you’d expect from someone who thinks he’s being high-minded and even-handed when he blames the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on both sides equally. Such people speak out against violence and human-rights abuses only when their personal political enemies can somehow be blamed, and almost never on principle.

That helps explains the New York Times’ appalling double standard in its obituaries of right-wing Augusto Pinochet (“brutal dictator” and “notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption”) and Castro (“fiery apostle of revolution” who “defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader.”) Then again, the New York Times deserves a special place in the pantheon of Cuba’s tormentors, having done more than any other institution to burnish Castro’s image as a romantic democratic revolutionary in the critical early years when Castro might still have been stopped. The shame of New York Times columnist Herbert Mathews’s adoring portraits of Castro hangs over the paper still, but as their obituary of Castro shows, the New York Times is too vain for shame. So much for them.

By far the most poisonous of Castro’s apologists are those in the third category, those who know what Castro did and justify it still. It is the Cuban people’s cross to bear that most people in this third category are compatriots and friends — the Cuban Communists themselves, and their close allies in the dictatorships of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

These are not to be confused with more well-meaning Castro supporters across Latin America. Castro was a master propagandist, and the David-and-Goliath narrative (with imperialist Yankees in Goliath’s part) is viscerally irresistible. But most Mexicans and Brazilians who sympathize with Castro are really just in love with a Ché Guevara T-shirt. They see the huge crowds that gather for Castro’s funeral and don’t realize that most are there for the free food they have little hope of getting otherwise, many of them afraid of being noticed anywhere else. Most of those Latin Americans fall in the first category: Very few know anything about Castro’s dictatorship, and fewer still defend it.

The dictatorship’s real defenders know what Castro did. They know about the Seguridad del Estado, the pervasive terror police that proudly took its name from Stalinist East Germany’s Staatssicherheit (“Stasi”). They know about the wretched political prisons, from which once healthy men would be released after just a few years on the verge of death. They know about the state-organized mobs that ransack old ladies’ houses because their children dare to criticize the regime. They know about the book clubs that meet in secret by candlelight, to read forbidden texts on pain of indefinite detention. They know that police harass and arrest people for wearing T-shirts that say “Change.” They know the desperate material privations that have pushed tens of thousands of wives to prostitution. They know about how Castro’s megalomaniac insistence on the socialist revolution produced a dystopia of everyone-for-himself. They know about the deprivation of the most basic freedoms of speech and movement. They know Castro was a sadist who delighted in ordering people to arrest their best friends, among many other tortures, humiliations, and crimes. They know that Castro’s Cuba is an island prison. They know all those things, and still they defend Castro.

I don’t talk to those people because they are my enemies. I would vastly prefer to engage them in a venue more appropriate for non-verbal communication — such as a battlefield. All three groups have this in common, however. They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned.

There were celebrations in Miami after Castro died, but there was precious little to celebrate. Castro died in the comfort of old age, with all his sins on his head, leaving behind a Stalinist dictatorship that has already outlived Stalinism by many decades. As one uncle said to me yesterday, “We lost, and he won.” For the moment, that’s the truth. All I can hope is that the ingenuity and joyful spirit that comes so naturally to Cubans will outlive Castro’s dictatorship in the long run, and bring a future of hope and prosperity and freedom to that long-tormented people.

Meantime, to those Americans and others around the world who stood up to Fidel Castro, who took my family in, protected them, and treated them with dignity, I offer my deepest and sincerest thanks. Only a very few of you can begin to imagine the infinite calamities of Castro’s dictatorship. But you knew that the millions who risked and sacrificed everything to escape Cuba were the victims of one of the 20th century’s great crimes against humanity.

On their behalf, and even more on behalf of all those who suffer under Castro’s dictatorship to this very day, thank you. Let’s keep hoping and working for the day of Cuba’s liberation.

—Mario Loyola is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Competitive Federalism at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and a contributing editor to National Review.