Humberto Fontova
Friday, Aug. 15, 2003

Aug. 13 was Fidel Castro's 77th birthday.

My cousin Pedro's birthday also comes this month. But the last one he celebrated was his 18th. That was in 1961, the year he fell into the custody of Fidel "Helluva Guy" Castro's secret police, for "questioning." Pedro was a frail, mild-mannered boy and member of the youth group Catholic Action.

I was only 7 years old but still recall the phone call. Four decades later the anguished screams from my mother, grandmother and sisters still echo in my head. My aunt was silent, however. She'd fainted while holding the phone. The voice had instructed her to come claim her boy's corpse.

My father went instead (Aunt Maria was a widow). Remember the stricken Vito Corleone as he lifted the blanket over Sonny? "Look what they did to my boy," he stammered. "Please do everything you can, " he implored his mortician friend. "I don't want his mother to see him this way."

My father said much the same for his favorite nephew. I'll leave it at that. You get the picture. Even at the wake my aunt could barely recognize her only child. Till her death in 1993 in New York, she never fully recovered psychologically. Once at a demonstration in New York this saintly woman, a Catholic social worker in Cuba, was denounced as a "Worm!" and "Fascist!" by jeering Charlie Rangel and Jose Serrano supporters.

Scholar Armando Lago has confirmed that my cousin Pedro has a minimum of 110,000 co-victims. I wish I could do them all justice here. One day we will. Aunt Maria had (and has) hundreds of thousands of grieving sisters at the hands of Ted Turner's fishing buddy and Diane Sawyer's cuddle bunny .

Yet I never see them interviewed on network TV, though I’m always seeing people sniffling and clearing their throats during interviews. Seems TV people like that sort of thing. Instead, I keep seeing the murderer himself asked things like "What is your favorite color, Mr. President?" I also saw the mass murderer's office featured on CNN's "Cool-Digs!" segment.

Alejandro Del Valle would have been 64 this year, but he died at 22 the same year as my cousin. Three weeks before his death, Alejandro parachuted into what seemed like the very jaws of death at the Bay of Pigs. With his last handful of bullets he led his horribly outnumbered men into a charge against Stalin tanks that scrambled away in panic.

Somehow Alejandro survived the battle. With his ammo expired and 50,000 Red troops combing the long-doomed beachhead, Alejandro jumped on a rickety sailboat with 22 others from his band of brothers and shoved off. The first day at sea their fury made them forget their wounds, their thirst and the scorching sun. They spent it raging and cursing the betrayal by their "allies."

By the eighth day, five of the men had died from their wounds, from thirst and from exposure. All received a burial at sea from their dazed comrades. By the 10th day in the unrelenting sun without food or water, three more had perished.

By the time a freighter picked them up, 18 days after setting off from the doomed beachhead, 10 had died slowly and agonizingly, including Alejandro. Dehydrated, starved, horribly sunburnt and probably delirious, Alejandro had leaped overboard with a knife to battle a huge shark that had followed them for a day. He thought the raw flesh might feed his slowly starving men.

The shark escaped and Alejandro was hauled aboard, where he lay down in a hollow-eyed daze and said nothing as night closed in.

Next morning, Alejandro's comrades found him dead. He'd expended his last reserves of strength against the shark.

The Apaches dispatched their most hated enemies by staking them in the sun. Mel Gibson will soon show that death by crucifixion worked as cruelly.

Roughly 50,000 Cubans have died like those young heroes. That's an estimate. Many probably died more quickly. Hammerheads and bull sharks make quick work of their prey. Tiger sharks don't dally at a meal. You've seen it on the Discovery Channel. "Nature's perfect killing machine," the narrator deadpans during a close-up of those teeth.

He'd be loath to admit it, a proper '60s person with his Che T-shirts and all, but Eric Burdon of the Animals wrote a song that resounds with many Cubans: "We gotta get outta this place ... if it's the LAST thing we EVER do!"

The last thing, indeed, for 1 in 3.

"Dentuso" (toothy one)! Hemingway's Old Man snarled while whacking those sharks with his oar. "Cabrones!" he said as they ripped and mangled his marlin. Dentuso's teeth have the same effect on thirst-crazed humans dangling helplessly in the water as on the Old Man's marlin.

A consistently hot item on Cuba's black market is used motor oil: poor man's shark-repellant, they say. Perhaps for a few minutes. I suppose when desperate we all cling to false hopes. And people get no more desperate than for a chance to flee from the handiwork of Norman Mailer's and Oliver Stone's hero.

Say that, by a small miracle, their recklessness pays off and they sight land. Can any of us, sitting in our dens with a brewskie and the remote, imagine the elation? No, it's not a touchdown by our team. No, the bachelorette didn't pick the one we thought cutest. No, the Terminator didn't just vanquish the bad guys. It's: "I'm delirious with thirst and hunger and fatigue, I'm covered with second-degree burns and totally destitute. But, Gracias a Dios, that's AMERICA on the horizon!"

Well, here's comes the U.S. Coast Guard. Now it's back to Castroland – and worse persecution. The same day Del Valle set off in the sailboat from the Bay of Pigs, 100 of his captured comrades from the invasion were jammed into a tractor-trailer for transport to prison in Havana. "No Mas!" yelled the desperate men from inside the truck. "No more FIT!! POR FAVOR!!"

They were struck with gun butts, jabbed with bayonets, spit on and jammed in tighter. "Men are DYING in here!" more yells. "They're being CRUSHED!"

"GOOD!" Snarled the Castro commander. "That'll save us the bullets to SHOOT YOU!"

BLA-A-A-A-A-A-M! and he emptied a Czech machine gun through the truck, just over their heads (the only shots this gallant comandante fired the entire battle).

More bayonets jabbed and 50 more captives were shoved in. It took 20 Castro soldiers huffing and puffing to finally jam the doors shut and muffle the screams.

It was an eight-hour drive to Havana in the scorching tropical sun. We hear horror stories of prisoners hauled off in cattle cars. Well, these men dreamed of a cattle car. Those allow air. This was a rolling oven. Soon the yelling stopped and the gasping started. No vents in this trailer; only the bullet holes let little wisps of air into the sweltering death chamber.

The Brigadistas beat vainly on the walls. With their last reserves of strength they rocked back and forth, trying to tip the truck over on the bumpy roads. Sweat and excrement sloshed at their boots. The stronger captives lifted their weaker or wounded comrades toward those bullet holes for a precious gasp.

Finally the only effort in the chamber was gasping. "Could Dante's inferno be worse?" asked a survivor years later. Eight agonizing hours later they finally opened the trailer's doors in front of the prison camp. When all had stumbled out, 10 remained on the filthy floor. They were dead.

As always, whatever stumps the Castroites in open battle they always manage against the helpless and unarmed. The commander who ordered this, Osmany Cienfuegos, was recently Cuba's minister of tourism. Hope you enjoy your Cuban vacations, amigos.

Firing squads – "FUEGO!!"– are much quicker than any of the above. So perhaps the 18,000 Cuban (and a few score American) boys staked and blindfolded before them were actually among the luckiest of Jesse Ventura's charming host's victims? Perhaps Steven Spielberg's and George McGovern's pal actually did them a favor?

It wouldn't surprise me to see Stevie and Georgie claim this. Nothing surprises me from that bunch anymore.

After all, according to George "peace candidate" McGovern, his pal Castro – the man who panted and salivated at getting his hands on nuclear missiles, the man who but for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest would have launched 43 intermediate-range nuclear missiles at the U.S. – this same man, is actually "very shy, sensitive and likable."

And according to Oliver Stone, he's "a man who cares deeply for his nation and his people." ("His" INDEED, Ollie!)

"If the missiles had remained," Che Guevara told the London Daily Worker in November 1962, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims."

Che iconography on T-shirts and posters remains very popular today, especially among peace activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators.

"Fidel's feeling of hatred for this country cannot even be imagined by Americans." That's Juanita Castro, Fidel's own sister, testifying to the House Committee on Un-American Activities after defecting in June of 1965. "His intention – his OBSESSION – is to destroy the U.S!"

"Say hello to my little friends!" Fidel had dreamed of yelling at the hated Yankees right before the mushroom clouds. "Damn that fuddy-duddy Khrushchev!" He raged for years afterward.

As I write, Cuba jams our satellite broadcasts into Iran using technology acquired from China, which acquired it from the Clinton administration. Two days after 9/11 the Defense Department's top Latin American expert (Ana Belen Montes) was arrested by the FBI as a Castro spy. The "Wasp network" of 10 Castro spies arrested in Miami in '99 had, among other goodies, the names and home addresses of the U.S Southern Command's top officers.

Castro's cold war is not over – and he still dreams of turning it hot.

Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, "Gulag," that, all told, 18 million people passed through Stalin's prison camps. At any one time, 2 million were incarcerated. That was out of a Soviet population of 220 million.

Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.5 million. According to Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro's prison camps. Punch your calculator … see that? Turns out that calling Castro a "Stalinist" actually downplays his repression.

But no problem. Few liberals call him a Stalinst. Instead they call him "charming," "likable" and "one hell of a guy!"

In March 1996 when Castro addressed the U.N. ( to a raucous, foot-stomping ovation, naturally) on its 50th birthday, David Rockefeller asked the honor of his presence for a celebrity-studded dinner at his Westchester county estate.

"My pleasure," responded Castro. And after holding court for a rapt Rockefeller along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House's Harold Evans, he flashed over to Mort Zuckerman's Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Bernard Shaw, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters all jostled for a tryst, cooing and gurgling to his every syllable.

And the Lider Maximo had barely scratched the surface of his fan club. According to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, on that visit Castro received 250 dinner invitations from American celebrities and power brokers. Many a millionaire, pundit and socialite who narrowly escaped incineration at his hands 36 years earlier now pouted at his RSVP.

Last year at that Missile Crisis reunion and "workshop" in Havana, a beaming Robert McNamara hailed his charming host a "great statesman" for his conduct during the crisis.

Kafka and Fellini, force-fed hallucinogenics and locked in a room to brainstorm, couldn't dream this stuff up. Friends … I give up.

Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in history from Tulane University. He's the author of "Helldiver's Rodeo," described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher's Weekly, "A must-read!" by Booklist, and "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

You may reach Mr. Fontova by e-mail at hfontova@earthlink.net.

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