Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova Read Free Book Online Page A

Guevara’s Internationale. Their dad collapsed from the same volley alongside them.
    Hiram Gonzalez was finally released from Castro’s dungeons twenty years after the execution of Tony Chao Flores, and he could finally tell Tony’s story. Enrique Encinosa’s book Unvanquished: Cuba’s Resistance to Fidel Castro gives a stirring roll call of the Cuban patriots murdered by the Castroites. When will liberals stopping fawning over the leader of Cuba’s Murder, Incorporated? When will there be a concert—“Rock for Cuba Libre!”—where Tony Chao Flores’s picture, rather than Che’s or Fidel’s, is the icon? When will Tony’s story, or that of his fellow Cuban heroes, be made into a major Hollywood motion picture?
    Instead, in January 2004, Robert Redford’s film on Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries , received much praise and a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival. 3 They say this was the only film so raptly received. I wonder how many of those applauding the film on Che Guevara oppose capital punishment, unlike Che himself, who used it against men like Tony Chao Flores? Are there any psychiatrists in the house?

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    FIDEL’S SIDEKICK: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIST CHE GUEVARA
     
    “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
    “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
    “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
    “I won’t!” said Alice.
    “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. 1
     
    They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted Alice’s Wonderland, a place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward. If only Carroll had lived long enough to visit Cuba in 1959.
    “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, Che Guevara. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón !” 2
    “We don’t need proof to execute a man—we only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. Our mission is not to provide judicial guarantees. Our mission is to make a revolution.” 3
    For the first year of Castro’s glorious revolution, the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara was his main executioner, and he executed at a rate that would have done any rival Communist—or National Socialist—proud.
    Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than twenty thousand political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached two thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves who were killed during the “Night of the Long Knives.” Another murderous episode, the Kristallnacht , which horrified civilized opinion worldwide, caused a grand total of ninety-one deaths. This in a nation of seventy million.
    Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed five hundred death warrants, another says more than six hundred. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book Yo Soy El Che! that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book Che Guevara: A Biography , Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first few years of the Castro regime. For certain, the first three months of the Cuban revolution saw 568 firing squad executions—even the New York Times admits it—and the preceding “trials” shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades.
    Vengeance—much less