Fidel Castro: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

Fidel Castro: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Hollywood and America's leftists love him, many even grovel at his feet, chanting hymns of praise for this hemisphere's most blood soaked mass murderer. To them Fidel Castro is a liberator, a champion of liberal values who has made Cuba a paradise.

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Just listen to them gush:

Viva Fidel! Viva Che! Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I've ever met." Jesse Jackson

Meeting Fidel Castro were the eight most important hours of my life." Steven Spielberg.

"Very selfless and moral. One of the world's wisest men." Oliver Stone

"Cuba's Elvis." Dan Rather

"A Dream come true." Supermodel Naomi Campbell

"Socialism works. I think Cuba can prove that." Chevy Chase

"Castro is an extraordinary man. He is warm and understanding and seems extremely humane." Gina Lollobrigida

None of these latter day useful idiots, as Lenin would have called them, are either ignorant of, or willing to ignore the real nature of Fidel Castro, this "extremely humane" dictator who stands once again exposed as the American-hating, homicidal communist brute he is in a remarkable new book, "Fidel – Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant." (Regnery Publishing, 256 pgs.)

Cuban-born and U.S.-raised author Humbert Fontova's expose of Castro – and the useful idiots in the U.S. who helped him gain and keep power - shatters the myths that surround Castro which have been so lovingly crafted by the media and embellished by his adoring cadre of Hollywood liberals. These celebrities go on worshipful pilgrimages to the communist paradise and ignore the pitiful state of both the people and the economy, which, as the overwhelming majority of Cubans know, is in shambles.

Along the way, the author exposes a whole host of shocking facts, ignored by both the media and members of Castro's fan club. There is, for example, the 1962 bomb plot aimed at New York that involved an arsenal of arms, munitions, several major incendiary explosives, 12 detonators and a massive 500 kilos of TNT.

Castro's terrorists, Fontova reveals, "planned the fiery death and maiming of thousands of New Yorkers." Among their targets were the city's subways, department stores like Gimbles, Bloomingdales and Macy's. Blasts were timed for the Friday after Thanksgiving - the busiest shopping day of the year - when swarms of shoppers would have been jamming stores.

Thanks to J. Edgar Hoovers's FBI, a far cry from today's feckless bureau, the plotters were rounded up and jailed before they could execute an act of terrorism that would have made 9/11 the second (and probably less deadly) act of terrorism against the U.S. homeland.

Fontova chronicles Castro's rise to power, showing how the media, elements of the U.S. State Department, certain members of Congress and other acolytes of liberalism helped drive Batista from power and install the Castro dictatorship.

While Castro's apologists in the U.S. incessantly denied that Castro was a communist working under the discipline of the Soviet Union, there was ample public evidence that he was indeed a long-time Kremlin agent. Fontova cites Castro's intimate involvement as an organizer of the infamous 1948 Bogataza riots in Columbia where "Communist-led mobs went berserk, looting burning and killing more than 5,000 people."

Long before he began his revolt in Cuba, Castro's involvement in this Communist-led act of terrorism was widely known in the U.S. and ignored by the media.

Among the other revelations:

A pair of Clintonista generals, Charles Wilhelm and Edward Atkensen, cozied up to Castro, visiting him and his brother Raul. Wilhelm praised a 1999 Department of Defense report that concluded that "Cuba is no longer a threat to the U.S." Said Wilhelm: "No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to forment any instability in the Western Hemisphere." Two years later, it was revealed that the DOD report was written by the department's Cuba specialist, Ana Belen, who was exposed as a Castro spy.

Castro's use of the U.S. media, which helped him gain and hold power, continued and was evident as recently as the Elian Gonzalez case in May 2000. That's when Dan Rather allowed Clinton lawyer Gregory Craig - representing Elian's father, Juan Miguel, and in effect acting as Fidel's attorney in the case - to "stage-manage" Rather's interview with Juan Miguel, feeding Rather the questions he was asking.

While Hollywood sang the praises of Castro's Cuba as a socialist paradise, the Tinseltown celebrities didn't bother to notice that under the hated Batista regime, Cuba had the second highest per capita income among all Latin American nations. In 1958, the International Labour Organization said that the average daily wage for a Cuban agricultural worker was $3.00, compared to the wages in France ($2.73), Belgium ($2.76) and West Germany ($2.73).

Newsweek's ultra-liberal columnist Eleanor Clift gushed that "to be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S." in spite of the fact that Castro has turned the once-prosperous island into a depressed Third World nation where only the communist cadre lives well.

In 1842, the food ration for slaves in Cuba was far higher than it is today under government rationing. In 1842 slaves got 8 oz. of meat, chicken and fish, while under the Castro government the ration is a starvation level 2 oz. The 1842 ration for rice was 4 oz. Today it's 3 oz. In 1842, it was 16 oz of starches. Today it's 6.5 oz. In 1842 slaves got 4 oz of beans. Today Castro's enslaved people get 1 oz.

The book is an eye-opener for anyone not familiar with the truth about Fidel Castro and his burning hatred of the United States. Fontova explodes myth after myth, showing for example the phoniness of the Kennedy administration's alleged courageous "victory" in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which he shows was a stunning defeat of the U.S.

For those of us who stood in the trenches in the cold war against Fidel Castro in the 1960s when we tried to tell America the truth about the communist dictator and were portrayed as right-wing crazies for our efforts, the book is a vindication.

It was a long time coming, but it was worth waiting for.

Read "Fidel - Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant." CLICK HERE for NewsMax's FREE Offer!

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