Humberto Fontova: When Fidel Castro Dictated to the Old U.S. Media

We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital -- propaganda is the heart of all struggles. (Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954)

A foreign reporter -- preferably American -- was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda. (Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his diaries.)

In all essentials Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign fought in New York and Washington. (British historian Hugh Thomas)

Fought and handily won, I might add, as already explained here.

But even after the victory, Castro's U.S. public relations auxiliaries remained on call and primed for duty. By the time of Castro's delirious, deafening, foot-stomping reception at Harvard Law School and Washington, D.C.'s National Press Club (most of whose members oppose capital punishment) in April 1959, Castro's firing squads had slaughtered 1,168 men -- and boys, some as young as fifteen. And for months, Fidel, Raul, and Che had been repairing to their respective stolen mansions nightly to meet with Soviet G.R.U agents and button down the Stalinization of Cuba.

"The Cuba of Fidel Castro today is free from terror." That's from blond bombshell Dickey Chapelle in a Reader's Digest (yes, even the normally sensible R.D. proved susceptible to Castro-mania) story of April 1959. Close to two thousand men and boys had been murdered by firing squads without trial by this time. And thousands of women were locked up, mostly for the political crime of being the wives, daughters, and mothers of the executed men. Most of these women were of humble background, and many were black. This Stalinist horror of jailing and torturing women and girls was utterly unknown in our hemisphere until it was installed by the man gushed over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and Oriana Fallaci. (Yes, even the subsequently sensible Fallaci, a lifelong leftist, had her youthful fling with Castro-mania.)

"Civil liberties have been restored in Cuba and corruption seems to be drying up," continued Chapelle's Reader's Digest story. "These are large steps forward, and they were made against fearful odds."

"Castro is honest," reported Newsweek magazine on April 13, 1959. "And an honest government is something unique in Cuba....Castro is not himself even remotely a Communist."

"We can thank our lucky stars Castro was no Communist." William Atwood in Look magazine, spring of 1959.

Many Cubans saw no reason for such thanks. One day in May 1959, only five months after the triumph of Castro's glorious Revoluci ón, Castro's own Air Force Chief, Major Pedro Diaz-Lanz, told his friend Eddie Ferrer, "I've got to tell the Americans and the world what's going on here and start the fight against these communists. Everybody seems asleep."

A week later Diaz-Lanz resigned his post and declared publicly that Castro's civilian government was a hollow sham, nothing but a front for Soviet-trained Communists who were running the show behind the scenes, especially in the crucial functions of the military and police. Diaz-Lanz then bundled his wife and kids onto a small boat and escaped to Miami just ahead of a firing squad...

... In 1964, LBJ decorated this filthy propagandist and smear-artist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom (italics mine). "The desire for individual dignity and freedom is in the genes of all mankind," proclaimed McGill during the solemn ceremony. Yes, Mr. McGill -- and amazingly enough, even in Cuban genes. Ask the thousands of Cubans riddled by firing squads yelling "¡VIVA CUBA LIBRE!" while you carried water for and chummed it up with their murderers.

In wistful moments, I imagine Rush, Beck, Hannity, etc. on the U.S. media roster when Pedro Diaz-Lanz burst upon the U.S. political scene with some pretty important revelations....