If Mr. Hewitt had uttered a single word of remorse regarding this bloodbath, I’d find him easier to praise than to bury.

Shortly after Herbert Matthews of the New York Times made Fidel Castro an international pop star on the front page of the (at the time) world’s most important newspaper, CBS horned in on the act. The February 1957 NYT’s headline article proclaimed that, "Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore Cuba’s Constitution….this amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist.”

Castro was by no means unappreciative but it was, after all, 1957. So the New York Times’ own Walter Duranty’s approach (print media) for celebrating Stalin 25 years earlier wouldn’t cut it for this new-generation Stalin. Indeed, at the time, Cuba (that piteously backward little pesthole the New York Times described in their article) had practically the most TV’s per capita in the world (surpassed only by Monaco, the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom.) Fidel Castro (much like Don Hewitt) perceived the power of that medium before most others. So he wanted his mug and message on the screen — and plenty pronto!

Enter CBS. Two months after enabling Matthews visit to Castro, the same Castro agents planted in New York (2 years later all would frantically flee from Cuba back to the US just ahead of Castro firing squads) contacted CBS, who quickly dispatched their ace anchorman, Robert Taber, and a camera crew to Castro’s camp in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains.

Media folklore, including a recent book by the New York Times’ own Anthony di Palma, describes a spine-chilling, nail-biting, utterly terrifying journey, narrowly and cunningly and courageously, evading Batista’s Gestapo, while en route to Castro’s secret camp in Cuba’s wilderness.

In fact, as any "gallant crusader for the truth" (Columbia School of Journalism’s term for its students) can "uncover" with one Google search, the trips by the US media throng to Castro’s "secret" camp were actually arranged by the US ambassador to Cuba with Batista’s own help! During Congressional hearings, US ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, testified to this under oath.

At one point in 1958, in order to accommodate the media multitudes, Castro’s camp actually had a big, bright sign reading: PRESS HUT. By that time reporters (male and female, young and decrepit) from Look to Life to Boy’s Life had all made the terrifying trek to obtain an interview with the Cuban George Washington/Robin Hood/St. Thomas Aquinas/Davy Crockett.

After his death-defying odyssey to Castro’s camp, CBS’ Robert Taber (later a founding member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee) emerged with a long reel and tape of Castro lies that his editor/producer, Don Hewitt, fashioned into a 30 minute CBS/Castro snow-job titled Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters, that ran on May 19, 1957. Fully half of the "report" consisted of Fidel Castro facing the camera and monologuing into the mic. The liberties, rights and blessings Castro planned for Cuba’s people, as transmitted by CBS, made John Stuart Mill appear like Ivan the Terrible. Regarding Castro’s heartwarming and eye-misting plans for Cuba — nary a rebuttal was to be heard on this blockbuster CBS "investigative report."

Two years later while Castro’s firing-squads murdered hundreds of Cubans per week, Don Hewitt was again on duty. This time he was producer of Edward Murrow’s CBS show "See it Now," which on February 6, 1959 featured an interview with Fidel Castro. By this time Castro had abolished habeas corpus, filled Cuba’s jails with ten times the number of political prisoners as under Batista, and was murdering hundreds of Cubans by firing squad without due process.

But ah! Now he’d be up against the valiant and intrepid pundit/interrogator who, employing his deadly verbal jabs, hooks and uppercuts, had KO’d that arch-villain Joe McCarthy! Better be on your toes, Mr. Castro!

“That’s a very cute puppy, Fidelito!” Murrow tells Fidel’s son, who skips merrily on camera at their “home” in the Havana Hilton and plops on the lap of his loving and pajama-clad Papa. For the record, Castro had no “home” to speak of at the time. He slept in a different place almost every night, wore army fatigues instead of pajamas, and had never provided for his son.

“When will you visit us again?” An (uncharacteristically) smiling Murrow asks a (very uncharacteristically) smiling Fidel. “And will that be with the beard or without the beard?” CBS did not breach a single issue of substance.

Every night during the week that Murrow interviewed him, Fidel, Raul and Che repaired to their respective stolen mansions and met with Soviet GRU agents to button down the complete Stalinization of Cuba. More significantly, that Feb. of 1959, Murrow was fresh from a harangue to the Radio and Television News Directors Association of America, where he blasted television for “being used to delude and insulate us.”

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

The Best of Humberto Fontova

Last week, according to Noyes expose’, "CNN aired a piece of Communist Party propaganda about how Cuba could serve as ‘a model for health care reform in the United States’."

The CNN report included clips from Michael Moore’s Sicko as CNN’s Morgan Neill, on location in a Potemkin Havana hospital, gushed about Cuban healthcare’s "impressive statistics." "Cuba’s infant mortality rates" he reported, "are the lowest in the hemisphere, in line with those of Canada!"

"Amazing!" probably gasped the type of person who watches CNN nowadays (Noyes gets a pass here). Perfect proof of "yes we can!" they probably high-fived. No wonder Colin Powell said "Castro had done some good things for his people!" No wonder Michael Moore catches so much grief from those insufferable Miami Cubans! Before Castro only they could afford doctors, as Cuba’s huddled masses languished in sickness and poverty!

And indeed, according to UN figures, Cuba’s current infant mortality rate places her 44th from the top in worldwide ranking, right next to Canada (the lower the rate the higher the ranking).

What CNN left out is that according to those same UN figures, in 1958 (the year prior to the glorious revolution), Cuba ranked 13th from the top, worldwide. This meant that robustly capitalist Cuba had the 13th LOWEST infant-mortality rate in the world. This put her not only at the top in Latin America but atop most of Western Europe, ahead of France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Today all of these countries leave Communist Cuba in the dust, with much lower infant mortality rates.

And even plummeting from 13th (Capitalist) to 44th (Communist), Cuba’s "impressive" infant mortality rate is kept artificially low by Communist chicanery with statistics and by a truly appalling abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth. This is the hemisphere’s highest, by far. Any Cuban pregnancy that even hints at trouble gets "terminated."

Also noteworthy: according to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the mortality rate of Cuban children aged one to four years is 34% higher than the US (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1,000). But these don’t figure into UN and World Health Organization spotlighted "infant-mortality rates," you see. So the pressure is not on Cuban doctors to fudge these figures — yet.

In April 2001, Dr. Juan Felipe García, MD, of Jacksonville, Fla., interviewed several recent doctor defectors from Cuba. Based on what he heard, he reported the following: "The official Cuban infant-mortality figure is a farce. Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during its first year, the doctors often report he was older. Otherwise, such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job."

More interesting (and tragic) still, the maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost four times that of the US rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1,000). Peculiar how so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba, and how many one- to four-year-olds perish, — while from birth to one year old (the period during which they qualify in UN statistics as infants) they’re perfectly healthy!

This might lead a few people to question Cuba’s official infant-mortality figures. But such people would not get a Havana bureau for their news agency, much less a visa to film a documentary.

Ninety-nine percent of Cubans have no more experience with hospitals like the one Michael Moore featured in Sicko and CNN’s Morgan Neill visited than Moore has with a Soloflex. Most Cubans view these hospitals the way teenage boys used to view Playboy magazine and husbands view a Victoria’s Secret catalog: "Wow! If only. . ."

The Castroite propaganda in Sicko so outraged people cursed by fate to live in Castro’s fiefdom that they risked their lives by using hidden cameras to film conditions in genuine Cuban hospitals, hoping they could alert the world to Moore’s swinishness as a propaganda operative for a Stalinist regime.

At enormous risk, two hours of shocking — often revolting — footage was obtained with tiny hidden cameras and smuggled out of Cuba to Cuban-exile, George Utset who runs the superb and revelatory website The Real Cuba. The man who assumed most of the risk during the filming and smuggling was Cuban dissident — a medical doctor himself — Dr. Darsi Ferrer, who was also willing to talk on camera, narrating much of the video’s revelations. Dr. Ferrer works in these genuinely Cuban hospitals daily, witnessing the truth. More importantly, he wasn’t cowed from revealing this truth to America and the world.

Originally, ABC’s John Stossel planned to show the shocking videos in their entirety, during a 20/20 show. Alas, on Sept. 12th 2007, the 20/20 show ran only a tiny segment on Cuba’s "real" healthcare, barely 5 minutes long and with almost none of the smuggled video footage. What happened?

Well, the Castro regime got wind of these videos and called in ABC’s Havana bureau for a little talking-to, stressing that ABC’s “bureau permit” might face “closer scrutiny” if they showed the blockbuster videos.

ABC (and yes, Stossel, whom we all otherwise admire) wimped out.

Enter Fox News, and Sean Hannity in particular. Your humble servant here contacted Hannity’s producers regarding the smuggled videos and they immediately requested a look. Within hours they jumped on them and produced a blockbuster of a show. Seen here. And here. Fox viewers saw naked patients covered with flies while lying on “hospital beds” consisting of a bare mattress. They saw buildings that would be condemned by the health board of any US municipality serving as “hospitals.” They saw and heard Dr. Darsi Ferrer along with other Cubans who described their inability to obtain something so basic as aspirins.

“Greed,” was the motif of Michael Moore’s Sicko, right? "Greed" is what Obama’s plan will abolish, right?

Well, Fox viewers saw footage of Cubans being told (by regime apparatchiks) that aspirins and other medicines just might be available to them — but only if they paid in US dollars, not the Cuban pesos they held out in desperation.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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Stephen Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro’s Movie, Che, is every bit as slavishly compliant to a script from a totalitarian propaganda ministry. (With apparently a straight face) Soderbergh and del Toro followed a screenplay confected by Castro’s propaganda ministry (Che Guevara’s Diaries), with the forward written by Fidel Castro himself — (“I am not a Communist! I am an Christian Humanist! I am a lover of liberty! 1958)

Soderbergh del Toro and their film crew visited Cuba seven times during their movies’ production and thanked the Stalinist regime’s propaganda ministry profusely in the movie’s credits.

Astoundingly, many facts get in the way of this book and movie. Let’s start with T.J. English’s very title. How the Mob Owned Cuba, and Lost it to the Revolution.

Actually: Cuba’s Gross Domestic product in 1957 was $2.7 billion. Cuba’s foreign receipts in 1957 were $752 million — of which tourism made up only $60 million. Gambling was a small fraction of this $60 million. How could the beneficiaries of that tiny fraction of Cuba’s income OWN the entire country, and “infiltrate its levers of power from top to bottom,” as the author (goaded by his Castroite mentors) claims?!

As far as the mob “owning” a town in the 1950′s, T.J. English definitely had a point — but it was named Las Vegas, Nevada. And I’ve yet to hear a historian-commentator recommend that Nevada undergo a Stalinist slaughter-revolution in order to rectify that revolting and degrading state of affairs.

Another interesting statistic — in 1953, more Cubans vacationed in the U.S., than Americans vacationed in Cuba. “Primarily for the gambling” my parents tell me, Las Vegas, Tahoe, etc. “Primarily for all the cheap prostitutes,” my older cousins tell me, “they swarmed in New Orleans French Quarter — and were much cheaper than Cuba’s ladies of joy.”

Also, there’s no mention by English of how the Castroite nomenklatura has made multiple times that measly portion of that measly $60 million in the 1950′s, in cahoots with Colombia’s cocaine cowboys in the 70′s and 80′s. "We lived like kings in Cuba," revealed Medellin Cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials. "Fidel made sure nobody bothered us."

The cocaine cartel’s deal with Castro made Meyer Lansky’s with Batista look like a nickel and dime gratuity.

It gets better (worse). “The financial largesse that flooded Cuba could have been used to address the country’s social problems” continues the bestselling (and proudly Irish-American) author who lists them while checking off the list his helpful Castroite hosts so helpfully provided:

“High infant mortality” — (in fact, Mr. English, Cuba’s infant mortality in 1958 was the 13th lowest — not in Latin America, not in the Hemisphere — but in the WORLD — lower than Ireland’s.)

“Subhuman housing” — (in fact, Mr. English, Cuba’s per capita income in 1958 was higher than half of Europe’s, including Ireland’s.)

“Dispossession of small farmers” — (in fact, Cuba’s agricultural wages in 1958 were higher than half of Europe’s, including Ireland’s. And — far from huge latifundia hogging the Cuban countryside — the average Cuban farm in 1958 was SMALLER than the average in the U.S.)

"Illiteracy” — (In fact, Mr. English, in a mere 50 years since a war of independence that cost Cuba almost a fifth of her population, Cuba managed 80 per cent literacy and budgeted the most (23% of national expenses) for public education of any Latin American country (more than Ireland, by the way). Better still, Cubans were not just literate but also educated, allowed to read George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara.

You will be shocked to hear that English’s sources (like Jon Lee Anderson’s sources for Che, A Revolutionary Life) are primarily officials of Cuba’s Stalinist regime which English visited often. Indeed, English dedicates his book to one such official, Enrique Cirules, who he calls a “Cuban author.” Fine, I’ll call Julius Streicher “a German author.” and Ilya Ehrenburg “a Russian author. “

The Willion & Morrow published book continues the "Idiot’s Guide" manual in Cuban history by rationalizing Castro’s Stalinist regime from the get-go. "U.S. business owned much of the prime land."

In fact, of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills 1958, only 40 were U.S. owned. And United Fruit — the outfit generally cast as the Boss Hog/Luigi Barzini/J.R. Ewing/Snidely Whiplash/Hannibal Lecter in this episode — owned only a third of these. And according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in 1958 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 13 per cent of Cuba’s GNP.

"44 per cent of Cubans — a higher percentage than Americans — are covered by social legislation," starts a report on Cuba dated 1957. “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker was also among the highest in the world, higher than in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent.”

Prior to Castro, Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages — not in Latin America, not in the hemisphere — but in the world. Cuba had established an 8-hour work-day in 1933 — five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. The much-lauded (by liberals) Social-Democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this till 30 years later.

These aren’t the ravings of a "Cuban exile right-wing crackpot!" (me) this right-wing crackpot is only regurgitating a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba from 1957.

When no New York Times reporters, CNN correspondents, and eminent American Ivy League and Think-Tank scholars are within hearing range, Commies can be extremely frank with each other.

Early in the Cuban revolution, for instance, Czech economist Radoslav Selucky visited Cuba and was rudely awakened: "We thought Cuba was underdeveloped except for a few sugar refineries?!" he wrote when he got home to Prague. "This is false. Almost a quarter of Cuba’s labor force was employed in industry where the salaries were equal to those in the U.S.!"

Now here’s Che Guevara himself in 1961 after he returned to Cuba with his Cuban underlings from a lengthy tour of Eastern Europe: "We’re not going to say we only saw marvels in those countries, " admitted Che who (given their national propensity for sarcasm had undoubtedly heard much scoffing and snickering from his Cuban subalterns about the — to them — pathetic socio-economic conditions in the major capitols of Eastern Europe — that Cuba was supposed to emulate!!)

"Naturally for a 20 th Century Cuban with all the luxuries which Imperialism has accustomed him,” Wrote Che Guevara, “much of what he saw (in eastern Europe) struck him as belonging to undeveloped countries.”

But fear not! As Cuba’s Economics minister, Che Guevara was already plotting on how to wipe those snickers from those Cubans faces!

He (Che Guevara) as Cuba’s Economic Czar, converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland, a huge influx of immigrants and whose workers enjoyed the 8th-highest industrial wages in the world into one that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (again, into a nation of 6.4 million) — an economic feat that defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics. One place where Cuban exiles agree wholeheartedly with Castro and Che is regarding their exalted posts as Third World icons. He and Che certainly converted Cuba into a Third World nation.

We turn now to a United Nations (no less!) study of Cuba circa 1958. "Cuba has a tremendous advantage in national integration over other Latin American countries because of a largely homogeneous white Spanish immigrant base. Cuba’s smaller Negro population is also culturally integrated. Those feudal modes of labor that exist in the rest of Latin America, don’t exist in Cuba. The Cuban campesino does not resemble the one in the rest of Latin America who is tied to the land, and is profoundly tradition-bound and opposed to innovations which would link him to a market economy. The Cuban campesino, in all respects, is a modern man. They have an educational level and a familiarity with modern methods unseen in the rest of Latin America."

PLEASE NOTE!! A professor/U.N. technician named Juan Noyola (Mexican, no less!) wrote the above passage — not me! So bash HIM as a "racist" or a Falangist if you like.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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"Del Toro was fascinated with Che Guevara from the first time he heard his name mentioned in the Rolling Stones song Indian Girl," reads the introduction to an interview with Benicio del Toro last month in Britain’s The Guardian." Of course he found himself fascinated by Ernesto Che Guevara — he loved the Stones, and Emotional Rescue was the first album he’d bought. “I hear of this guy and he’s got a cool name. Che Guevara!” Del Toro as good as swoons when he says it. "Groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics!"

“So I went to a library and I was looking at books, and I came across a picture by René Burri of Che, smiling, in fatigues, I thought, ‘Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!’ “

Well, there you have it. What’s next? Probably a YouTube featuring a weeping, wailing Benicio del Toro titled: "Leave Che Alone!"

Del Toro, who glorifies Che in a current movie, compared him (favorably) to Jesus Christ in an interview with Spain’s El Pais, and to whom he dedicated his Cannes Film Festival "Best Actor" award, speaks for millions of Che groupies. “Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western world,” proclaimed Time magazine in May 1968. "With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious ’60s.”

“1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che,” recounts Christopher Hitchens. “His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model.”

In a famous speech in 1961 Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates” commanded Guevara. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”

And woe to those youths “who stayed up late at might and thus reported to work (government forced-labor) tardily.” Youth, wrote Guevara, ” should learn to think and act as a mass.” “Those who chose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-Imperialist Rock & Roll) were denounced as worthless “lumpen” and “delinquents.” In his famous speech Che Guevara even vowed, “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!”

Tens of thousands of Cuban youths learned that Che Guevara’s admonitions were more than idle bombast. In Che Guevara the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German STASI “consultants” who flooded Cuba in the early 60′s, found an extremely eager acolyte. By the mid 60′s the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today the world’s largest image of the man Benicio del Toro honors on screen and in multiple interviews, adorns Cuba’s headquarters for it’s KGB-trained secret police, a gang of Communist sadists who jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin’s own KGB and GRU.

"Rates," hardly tell the story however. Upon arriving in Havana on January of 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war, Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana’s La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar Hitler’s SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara had one ready made.

In 1961 a 20-year-old boy named Tony Chao Flores took his place at the execution stake, but he hobbled to it on crutches. He’d taken 17 bullets from their Czech machine guns when the Castroites captured him. On the way to the execution stake at the old Spanish fort turned to a prison and execution ground by Che Guevara, Tony was forced to hobble down some cobblestone stairs. Tony tumbled down the long row of steps and finally lay on the cobblestones at the bottom, writhing and grimacing. One of Tony’s bullet-riddled legs had been amputated at the hospital, the other was gangrened and covered in pus. The Castroite guards cackled as they moved in to gag Tony with their tape.

Tony watched them approach while balling his good hand into a fist. Then as the first Red reached him BASH!! right across his eyes.

“I’ll never understand how Tony survived that beating,” says eyewitness former political prisoner Hiram Gonzalez who watched from his window in la Cabana prison. The crippled Tony was almost killed in the kicking, punching, gun-bashing melee but finally his captors stood off, panting and rubbing their scrapes and bruises. They’d managed to tape the battered boys mouth, but Tony pushed the guards away before they bound his hands. Their commander nodded, motioning for them to back off.

Now Tony started crawling towards the splintered and blood-spattered execution stake about 50 yards away, pushing and dragging himself with his hands as his stump of a leg left a trail of blood on the grass. As he neared the stake he’d stop and start pounding himself in the chest. His executioners seemed perplexed. The crippled boy was trying to say something. But his message was muzzled by the gag del Toro’s idol made obligatory for his thousands of execution victims.

Tony’s blazing eyes and grimace said enough. But no one could understand the boy’s mumblings. Tony kept pushing himself, shutting his eyes tightly from the agony of the effort. His executioners shuffled nervously, raised their rifles, lowered them. They looked towards their commander who shrugged. Finally Tony reached up to his face and ripped off the tape Benicio del Toro’s pin-up boy required for his condemned.

The 20 year-old freedom-fighter’s voice boomed out. “Shoot me RIGHT HERE!” roared Tony at his gaping executioners. His voice thundered and his head bobbed with the effort. “Right in the CHEST!” Tony yelled. “Like a MAN!” Tony stopped and ripped open his shirt, pounding his chest and grimacing as his gallant executioners gaped and shuffled. “Right HERE!” he pounded.

On his last day alive, Tony had received a letter in jail from his mother. “My dear son,” she counseled. “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!!” Che’s lackey yelled the command and the bullets shattered Tony’s crippled body, just as he’d reached the stake, 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 grce.

Normally it’s one .45 slug that shatters the skull. Eyewitnesses say Tony required . . . POW!-POW! . . . POW! — three. Seems the executioner’s hands were shaking pretty badly. But they finally managed. The man Time magazine’s hails among the “heroes and icons of the Century” had another notch in his gun. Another enemy dispatched — bound and gagged as usual.

Castro and Che were in their mid-30s when they murdered Tony. According to the authoritative Black Book of Communism their firing squads riddled another 14,000 bound and gagged freedom-fighters. Many (perhaps most) of their murder victims were boys in their late-teens and early 20s. Some were even younger.

Compare Tony’s death to Guevara’s capture: “Don’t shoot!” whimpered the arch-assassin to his 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? Who deserves a Hollywood movie?

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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Our next vice President boasts a lifetime NRA membership and poses for pictures blasting shots from an assault rifle.

Yet her speech writer regards the NRA as: “the powerful, selfish National Rifle Association with its brutal lobbying tactics. You would have to search the Washington offices of the American Civil Liberties Union," he writes, "to find a more truculent and sanctimonious group of people — or for that matter to find grievances less deserving of serious attention."

Governor Palin’s speechwriter, Matthew Scully, quotes Diane Feinstein for some of the above and boasts that he fully agrees with one of America’s most vociferous gun-grabbers and most influential Democrats.

Our next Vice President is a lifelong hunter who fills her freezer and feeds her family with the flesh of hooved mammals that she proudly stalked, killed and field dressed herself. Pictures of her posing next to the violently deceased creatures flood the web and blogospheres.

Yet her speechwriter is an animal-rightist and vegan activist whose book, Dominion, was hailed by PETA in 2003 as their "Book of the Year!" And for excellent reasons. In his book, Governor Palin’s speechwriter denounces hunters as: “assassins … miscreants… bullies and cowards taking out their problems on animals.” Republican speechwriter Matthew Scully denounces the sport of hunting as “a debauchery…an abomination!" Hunting magazines are “the pornography of blood-lust. And like other obscenities today, a multi-million dollar industry…. Sport hunters operate in a subculture like pornographers."

Sarah Palin’s speech contrasted straight-shootin’ rural American values to those of snide Beltway elites. Well, here’s a quote straight from her speechwriter, Matthew Scully: "groups like Ducks Unlimited, Quail Unlimited and Pheasants Forever, far from demonstrating those timeless “rural values” that “urbanites” simply can’t understand — these organizations reflect some of the worst traits of modern society."

For all I know, our next vice president and her speechwriter get along. So I’ll got out on a limb and suggest a few angles to her, based on my own such "discussions," in the event she discusses hunting with her speechwriter. Not that she needs any guidance in this respect. As we’ve all heard, she ad-libbed the most memorable quips from her speech (Hockey Mom/Pitbull/lipstick) during teleprompter sluggishness. At any rate, here goes:

"I guess a hunter is sort of like a hiker or bird watcher except that hunters and fishermen accept responsibilities for nature’s upkeep — as in paying for it. The Pittman-Robertson Act (1937) imposed an excise tax of 10 per cent on all hunting gear. Then the Dingell-Johnson act (1950) did the same for fishing gear. The Wallop-Breaux amendment (1984) extended the tax to the fuel for my boat. Much of this money goes to buy and preserve National Wildlife Refuges. (Governor Palin’s speechwriter, by the way, advocates an end to hunting on Federal Wildlife Refuges, as a preliminary for ending all sport hunting everywhere.)

Notice, to “preserve nature,” they don’t tax Birkenstock hiking boots and Ying-Yang pendants — but DO tax my shotgun. They don’t tax yoga manuals and Tofu tidbits wrapped in recycled paper — but DO tax my 30.06 rifle. They don’t tax binoculars or birding Field Guides with cutesy photos of the red-cockaded woodpecker and spotted owl — but DO tax my rifle scope and the shotgun shells I blast at Mallards before arraying on my grill as Duck-K-Bobs.

Going further, they don’t tax Kayaks and rock-climbing picks and ropes — but DO tax my compound bow, and the arrows that fling from it. They don’t tax mountain bikes — but DO tax my duck decoys and camo jumpsuit.

Ten cents of every dollar I spend on my hunting and fishing toys (I’d cite the total but my wife might read this) funds Federal and State “conservation” programs. From my guns and ammo to my duck calls and decoys, from my rods and reels to my lures and gaffs, from my trolling motor to the very fuel for my outboard — ten cents of every dollar of this horrendous expenditure funds habitat for Spotted Owls, Red Cockaded Woodpeckers, Bald Eagles, Ospreys, Manatees, Snail darters, Black-Footed Ferrets, California Condors, Florida Panthers and Sea Otters.

None of these creatures (from what I hear) make a decent gumbo or even a passable Chili. I must be crazy. But I have no choice. And this avalanche of extorted tax dollars comes ON TOP of those I fork over for the stacks of licenses, and permits, and stamps that state and federal agencies require me to purchase before I set a foot afield or set my boat afloat. Last season these totaled $500.

And all the above is on top of my voluntary dues and assorted donations to such as Ducks Unlimited (but snookums! I thought you LOVED the duck print I brought home at 2:45 AM from the DU banquet/auction? And especially the picture of me with the nice Hooters girl who worked the keg in her camo bikini?)

In total, just last year, hunters and fishermen (NOT birdwatchers, NOT rock-climbers, NOT kayakers, NOT nature-hikers) “contributed” almost $2 billion to purchase and manage wilderness for greenies to frolic in.

We pay our way — in fact, we pay the hikers and bird-watchers way too. But rather than going afield as passive voyeurs, rather than regarding nature as a Disney cartoon, we accept nature’s diktats. We revel in our role as full-fledged participants in her cycle of fang and claw (but add bullets, buckshot, broadheads, treble hooks and gaffs to the primal drama).

For you Scully types, note that The Big Bad Wolf, The Lion King, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger all have eyes that point forward, for the purpose of stalking the sources of their nutrition, whereas Bambi and Thumper have their eyes on the side of the head, to detect and attempt to evade these stalkers. Note that we humans also have our eyes pointing forward, like all predators. Our digestive system (hence, nutritional needs) likewise follow those of lions and tigers and bears. “Fifty percent of the fatty acids that make up the human central nervous system are only available in meat.” That’s not the Beef Council or The Texas Cattleman’s Association. That’s Britain’s Nuffield Institute of Comparative Medicine.

So Mrs Palin could inform her speechwriter that his digestive track is much more akin to the Lion King’s than to King Louie the Orangutan’s, and utterly unlike Bambi and Thumper’s. Governor Palin might mention to her speechwriter that, unlike the herbivores he seeks to mimic, his stomach secretes hydrochloric acid — and for one reason: to digest meat. That acid means the human stomach breaks down Mooseburgers in no time — much faster than his tofu, which is as unnatural a food for Homo sapiens as granola. In fact, cellulose, which makes up the walls of all plant cells, cannot be digested by the human digestive system at all, unlike grilled caribou backstrap, which like all meat ingested by humans, crumbles down in two hours flat.

So, for a human, veganism is an attempt to fool Mother Nature. And as we all know: that’s not nice. Vitamin B-12, for instance, is only available in meat. And according to the Andrews University Nutrition Council (themselves vegetarians who take it in pill form), "Vitamin B-12 is essential for the development of red blood cells and it plays an important role in the normal function of the nervous system. A vitamin B-12 deficiency usually leads to disorientation, depression, mood disturbances, irritability, memory loss, and dementia."

This explains much about PETA and Friends of Animals.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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“We Don’t Need No Stinking Assimilation!"

~ Scoffs Hispanic Group

“Look at what has happened to Miami…You would never know you’re in the United States of America. I worry when I read an interview with the very influential founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, Jorge Mas Canosa, who told the Miami Herald in 1992: “I have never assimilated. I never intend to.”

~ Congressman Tom Tancredo Dec. 2006

The current presidential campaign proves the much-vilified Rep. Tancredo as spot on. With America agog with “Obama-Mania,” with all polls showing most American voters consistently favoring Barack Obama, Miami’s Cuban-Americans brazenly buck the tide, refusing to assimilate to the American political norm, while thumbing their nose at America’s majority political party. This party controls the U.S. legislature, most state legislatures, most state governorships and boasts — by far — the most registered voters in the U.S.

No matter. For decades the mostly foreign-born group that so worries Congressman Tancredo has indeed spurned the ideology and obstinately rebuffed the entreaties of the party embraced by the majority of Americans, the Democratic party. A new poll in campaign-crucial Florida dramatizes this thundering disconnect. Obama gets over 50 per cent of the vote from red-blooded, native-born Americans — but only 21 per cent of Cuban-Americans plan on voting for Obama.

So awed and smitten seems America by the Democratic/rock-star candidate that the audience on Comedy Central refused to laugh at a mild joke at Obama’s expense by host John Stewart. Instead they twittered awkwardly while looking around nervously. "Is it okay to laugh?" the audience’s looks seemed to ask. "Or is it disrespectful? Unhip? Perhaps even blasphemous?"

When Obama visited Miami last month, no such inhibitions restrained the group that so worries Congressman Tancredo. While a huge crowd of their properly-assimilated countrymen clapped deliriously at the Democratic Messiah’s every comment inside the Convention hall, a group of Cuban-Americans marched and waved picket signs denouncing him on the sidewalk outside! The first instance of such irreverence towards America’s most-favored candidate — its political Rock-Star/Messiah — during this campaign!

To add insult to injury, a formal letter drafted by five major Cuban-American organizations referred to Obama’s candidacy as "an affront" to their sensibilities. Nothing remotely of this sort has been mounted by properly-assimilated Americans on any campaign stop by America’s most-favored presidential candidate from sea to shining sea.

These insufferable (and genuine) Hispanics have long snubbed the pied pipers of America’s majority party, along with their allies and cohorts in America’s majority media.

"Mandela Mania Grips America. Ticker Tape And T Shirts For The ANC Leader’s Visit" reported Newsweek magazine in 1990 when the former South African communist/terrorist visited the U.S. According to a report by the Media Research Center, America’s mainstream media "compared Mandela to the Pope, Jesus Christ, and Moses. “A larger than life figure” gushed CNN. “A virtual symbol of freedom,” exulted CBS.

America’s biggest cities all clamored to be included in Mandela’s procession. "Whole cities have felt slighted," said the Newsweek story. "An aide to Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago called the ANC to complain that Mandela was bypassing Chicago. ”

So what happened when Mandela tailored his frantic schedule to grace Miami with a visit?

You guessed it. The people that so worry Congressman Tancredo, with blatant disregard — indeed with studied contempt — for their adopted countries’ coast-to-coast "Mandela Mania," mounted rude demonstrations against the international icon!

Crowds of these excitable, mustachioed people waved placards. Wild-eyed marchers screamed insults. Planes (owned and piloted by Cuban-Americans) even flew overhead fluttering disrespectful banners against America’s honored guest — calling him a "Communist!" and worse!

Miami’s City Commission, buckling to Cuban-American pressure, was even forced to rescind a formal proclamation welcoming and honoring one of the world’s most celebrated figures — a man deluged by ticker tape and deafened by wild acclaim on every visit to the biggest cities in their adopted country! — a man honored with America’s most prestigious civilian award, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom!

More proof that America’s political folkways will remain forever alien to these people. This political and cultural recalcitrance has often goaded America’s majority parties’/media axis to enraged sputterings against them.

"Truly disgusting!" was how Bryant Gumbel characterized them a few years back. Last year Georgetown professor Norman Birnbaum, an advisor to three presidential candidates for America’s majority political party, called them a "truly repellent" group. This past November, one of America’s most influential newspapers (the Washington Post), one that habitually endorses America’s majority political party, ran a cartoon celebrating their expulsion from the U.S. en masse.

In a nation where the mildest, most off-handed — or even unwitting, see "black hole," "niggardly" — mention of ethnic traits commits the professional and social equivalent of a capital crime — the usual watchdogs on ethnic sensitivity (the Washington Post and Democratic party habitually among the most vigilant in this regard) issued nary a peep against the blatant bigotry just mentioned, much less in defense of the vilified ethnic group.

Earlier immigrant groups have all yielded to mainstream American political enlightenment. Though the Reagan Revolution made inroads, over a third of Italian-Americans remain registered with America’s majority political party, along with almost half of Irish-Americans. Jewish-Americans habitually skew 65—85 percent for America’s majority party.

Yet these insufferable Cuban-Americans simply will not see the light — imply will not politically assimilate. All the Kings Horses and All the King’s Men cannot bring them around to follow the lead of the majority in their adopted country and register Democratic.

Even with the third generation registering to vote, a measly 13 per cent of these incurably obtuse and unenlightened people register with America’s majority political party! This is the most diminutive Democratic registration of any ethnic group in the U.S.! And 72% of these troglodytes are registered with America’s minority party (Republican). This is the highest for any ethnic group in the U.S.! — more proof that these octopus-eating, fast-talking, wildly-gesticulating people are genetically wired to buck "Anglo-Saxon" norms, as so shrewdly observed and courageously denounced by Congressman Tancredo.

The 1998 census even showed that Cuban-Americans were 25% more likely to have a college degree than their fellow Americans. So imagine what Democratic drivel their professors tried to ram into their (genuinely) Hispanic skulls! All to no avail! The census also showed that Cuban-Americans were twice as likely to earn more than $50,000 than the citizens in their adopted country.

They don’t educate their children like average Americans, earn wages like average Americans — and especially — vote like average Americans. What more proof do we need that these odd and atavistic people remain outside the U.S. mainstream and refuse to assimilate, and after almost half a century of residency in the U.S., with all the attendant benefits and opportunities!? What INGRATES!!

Congressman Tancredo you’re spot on! Please take note of the above and lead a charge to DEMAND that these people finally ASSIMILATE!! Perhaps with enough pressure applied by red-blooded American leaders like yourself, these shamelessly exotic foreigners will finally see the light, upend their native blockheadedness — and help elect Barack Hussein Obama.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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Louisiana takes many hits as “the northernmost banana republic.” Yuppies and Greenies constitute a rare, exotic and even comical species down here — to the immense benefit of America’s energy needs. "Progressive" and "enlightened" would not be terms Obama’s Bay Area supporters would use to describe the Bayou state’s decision-makers — especially those who made major decisions half a century ago.

Yet these rustics and yahoos spurred more revolutionary "change" in the production of (genuine) energy than any Obama supporter could imagine with all his or her hallucinations about solar panels and windmills.

In energy production, Louisiana has been well ahead of the learning curve for decades, and offers ready proof regarding its much-hyped "perils." The first offshore oil production platforms went up off the Louisiana coast in 1947.

By 1953 Hollywood (no less!) was already hailing the pioneering wildcatters who moved major mountains — technological, logistical, psychological, cultural — to tap and reap this source that today provides a quarter of America’s domestic petroleum, without causing a single major oil spill in the process. This record stands despite dozens of hurricanes — including the two most destructive in North American history, Camille and Katrina — repeatedly battering the drilling and production structures, along with the 20,000 miles of pipeline that transport the oil shoreward. This is the most extensive offshore pipeline network in the world.

In the 1953 movie Thunder Bay, Jimmy Stewart plays the complicated protagonist, Steve Martin, the hard-bitten, ex-navy oil engineer who built the first offshore oil platform off Louisiana in 1947. "The brawling, mauling story of the biggest bonanza of them all!" says the Universal ad for the studio’s first wide-screen movie.

Much of the brawling by Stewart and his henchmen was against the local Cajuns who fished and shrimped for a living. Their livelihood, it seemed obvious at the time, would soon vanish amidst a hellbroth of irreversible pollution. The movie covers a time period of barely one year yet ends on a happy note of conciliation as the fishermen reaped a bonanza almost as big as Jimmy’s itself. The oil structures had kicked in as artificial reefs and made possible a bigger haul of seafood than anything in these fishermen’s lifetimes.

Half a century later, with 3203 of the 3,729 offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico studding her coastal waters, Louisiana provides almost a third of North America’s commercial fisheries. A study by LSU’s sea grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana’s offshore fishing trips involve fishing around these structures. The same study found 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding mud bottoms. That this proliferation of seafood might come because — rather than in spite — of the oil production rattled many environmental cages and provoked a legion of scoffers.

Amongst the scoffers were some The Travel Channel producers, fashionably greenish in their views. But they read these claims in a book titled The Helldiver’s Rodeo. The book described an undersea panorama that (if true) could make an interesting show for the network, they concluded, while still scoffing.

They scoffed as we rode in from the airport. They scoffed over raw oysters, grilled redfish and seafood gumbo that night. More scoffing through the Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. They scoffed even while suiting up in dive gear and checking the cameras as we tied up to an oil platform 20 miles in the Gulf.

But they came out of the water bug-eyed and indeed produced and broadcast a program showcasing a panorama that turned on its head every environmental superstition against offshore oil drilling. Huge amberjack lunged powerfully when speared. They writhed violently as the diver wrestled them to the surface. Schools of fish filled the water column from top to bottom — from 6-inch blennies to 12-foot sharks. Fish by the thousands. Fish by the ton.

The cameras were going crazy. Do I focus on the shoals of barracuda? Or that cloud of jacks? On the immense schools of snapper below, or on the fleet of tarpon above? How ’bout this — WHOOOAA — hammerhead!

We had some close-ups, too, of coral and sponges, the very things disappearing off Florida’s (that bans offshore oil drilling) pampered reefs. Off Louisiana, they sprout in colorful profusion from the huge steel beams — acres of them. You’d never guess this was part of that unsightly structure above.

The panorama of marine life around an offshore oil platform staggers anyone who puts on goggles and takes a peek, even (especially!) the most worldly scuba divers. Here’s a video peek at this seafood bonanza.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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There’s roughly twice as many polar bears in the world today as thirty years ago. But on May 14th U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, invoking the US Endangered Species Act, proclaimed polar bears as a "threatened species." In 1972 the creatures had already lost value in the US when the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited their hunting in Alaska. (And no, it’s not the hunting ban that caused their increased numbers; they proliferated equally in Canada which continued the polar bear season.)

After 1972 US hunters started hunting polar bears in Canada. But Kempthorne’s recent proclamation means that US hunters will be barred by law from bringing their trophy bear skins into the US, so again Polar Bears have lost value. Lately hunters (primarily from the US) have been paying $30,000 for the chance of whacking a polar bear during a grueling hunt in the Canadian arctic on dogsleds and in subzero weather. If successful, then the hunter’s taxidermist landed another $5,000 or so for converting the beast’s epidermis into an infuriatingly politically-incorrect rug for the hunter to display to his politically-correct guests at dinner parties. Generally speaking, the most spirited reactions from guests came after uncorking the eighth bottle of wine.

Most of these guests were usually his wife’s friends from the local Art Council and Kayak Club and spittle sometimes landed on his valuable rug of thick white fur, but without lasting damage. The often lipstick-smeared sprayings quickly evaporated and whatever effort was involved in wiping them up was well worth the spectacle of pulsating veins on pretty crimson-hued foreheads with earrings jangling below from the bobbing motions, along with the slender, perfumed (but always white-knuckled) fists constantly thrust to within millimeters of his nose.

"Ah, but they look so sexy that way!" the hunter would always remark to his glowering wife as she frantically motioned the guests into another room. "Like a woman in a Tango!" the smirking hunter persisted. "In the words of legendary poet, Jorge Luis Borges: ‘The tango shows that a fight may be a celebration!’”

Alas, the hunter’s philosophical reflections were always lost on his guests — not to mention his wife.

At any rate, most of the $30,000 spent by the hunter for his foolproof conversation piece went to Canada’s Inuit (Eskimo) communities whose members had served as his guide, cooks, outfitters, etc., during the hunt. The Eskimos also got the polar bear meat, which has been a historic staple in their diet.

“It’s Inuit food," says Canadian Inuit Jayko Alooloo in an interview with Canada’s CTV, "like cows for you southern people.”

Alooloo also regards the newly-designated status of polar bears as "endangered" as a complete crock.

"They’re actually increasing every year," he says. But what does he know? He only lives amongst them? Whereas, from his Washington D.C. Office, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne relied on computer weather model to predict that in 50 years, due to Global Warming’s effect on arctic ice fields, polar bears will decrease in numbers. My own weatherman’s computer model’s rarely get it right for the next four days. Kempthorne’s nails it for the next fifty years!

Recreational hunters (again, overwhelmingly from the US) pumped $3 million a year into Eskimo communities for polar bear hunts. These Inuit communities get a quota of bear tags (licenses) from the Canadian government to use as they see fit. They can hunt the bears themselves for the meat, and for the roughly $1000 per hide if they sell it. Or they can sell the tag to a recreational hunter for $30,000 — serve as his guide, (i.e. experience most of their culture’s traditional and integral parts of the hunt) and still keep the meat. Only a Federal bureaucrat would miss the implications here.

In fact, these hunts being such an integral part of their culture, a few Inuits elect to retain the tags for themselves to do the killing. The new ruling means that now they’ll probably keep all. A recreational hunt lasts a few days and — like all hunting — does not always climax with kill. But the tag is considered used once it’s sold to a recreational hunter, kill or no kill. On the other hand, Inuit hunters always kill a bear because they have months to fill that tag. So now that US Recreational hunters are barred by US Federal law from bringing home their conversation-piece rug, the Inuits have no choice but to keep their tags, assuring that more polar bears will be killed.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh unveiled his 4-hour Che Guevara Biopic at the Cannes Film Festival last Thursday. One reviewer described the movie as "maniacally anticipated." Variety hailed it as Cannes’ "most-anticipated" film.

But based on reviews thus far, it looks like Soderbergh blew it. After suffering what some critics described as the film’s "butt-numbing" duration, Variety’s Todd McCarthy branded the movie "defiantly nondramatic" and "a commercial impossibility." New York Magazine calls it, "something of a fiasco." Everyone seemed bored if not actually catatonic while viewing the film. Time’s Richard Corliss described Benicio Del Toro in the starring role as "seemingly sedated." Bloomberg news wrote of the "viewers’ bleary eyes."

These reviewers, as usual, miss the point and bash the director unfairly. Director Stephen Soderbergh said flat-out that the purpose of his movie was, "to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out with this person (Che Guevara)."

Well? What did the reviewers expect? As usual, they know very little about the film’s subject. In fact, Soderbergh has accomplished his goal with bells on. As exhibit one, I submit a sample of Che Guevara’s sparkling conversation:

“The past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness — in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily — but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodity relations still persist, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized.”

Splash some cold water on your face and stick with me for just a little more:

“It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel." These passages come straight from the Che diaries that form the basis of the film’s script.

“I have no home, no woman no parents, no brothers and no friends,” wrote Guevara. “My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.”

To everyone familiar with the real Che Guevara it’s abundantly clear that Soderbergh directed masterfully. He was not giving us Jerry Lee Lewis or John Belushi. No honest and educated reviewer can deny him massive kudus for so expertly transmitting this insufferable dork’s personality and presence to a soon snoring audience.

Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro, who stars as Che and shares production credits, actually had an intriguing and immensely amusing theme if only they’d known how to plumb it. Soderbergh hails Guevara as “one of the most fascinating lives in the last century.” Almost all who actually interacted with Ernesto Guevara (and are now free to express their views without fear of firing squads or torture chambers) know that the The Big Question regarding Ernesto, the most genuinely fascinating aspect of his life, is:

How did such a dreadful bore, incurable doofus, sadist and epic idiot attain such iconic status?

The answer is that this psychotic and thoroughly unimposing vagrant named Ernesto Guevara had the magnificent fortune of linking up with modern history’s top press agent, Fidel Castro, who for going on half a century now, has had the mainstream media anxiously scurrying to his every beck and call and eating out of his hand like trained pigeons. Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city that fateful summer of 1955 — had he not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala the year before who later introduced him to Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city — everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, panhandling, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.

Not to be outdone in the trained pigeon department, while making their film, Soderbergh and Del Toro repeatedly visited Havana to coo and peck away as anxiously as Herbert Matthews, Dan Rather or Barbara Walters while the regime tossed out its crumbs. Though rarely meeting with the Maximum Leader himself, the filmmakers, on top of relying on Che’s diaries (edited by Fidel Castro) for the script, also obtained recollections from Che’s widow and many of his former underling executioners. These all currently serve as ministers in a totalitarian regime. "We wanted to show the real character" boasts Soderbergh. Absolutely no chance of any hanky panky with the historical record from these sources!

“I met him (Fidel Castro) for about five minutes,” Del Toro said. “He knew about the project and he said to me that he was very happy (I’ll bet!!) that we had spent so much time researching the subject."

"I’m here in Cuba’s hills thirsting for blood," Che wrote his abandoned wife in 1957. "Dear Papa, today I discovered I really like killing," he wrote shortly afterwards. Alas, this killing very rarely involved combat; it come from the close-range murder of bound and blindfolded men and boys.

"When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart," said a former political prisoner to this writer, "you knew there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara." In fact the one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara’s life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically. Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro skip over these fascinating quotes and Che’s one genuine accomplishment as a revolutionary.

He’s lauded as the century’s most celebrated guerrilla fighter but he never fought in a guerrilla war. "The Guerrilla war in Cuba was notable for the marked lack of military skills or offensive spirit in the soldiers of either side,” that’s military historian Arthur Campbell, in his authoritative, Guerrillas: A History and Analysis. “The Fidelistas were completely lacking in the basic military arts or in any experience of fighting."

“In all essentials Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.” That’s British historian Hugh Thomas.

Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro, obsessively wary of lapsing into the slightest historical inaccuracy, relied on the Castro regime as primary source — and came up with a shoot-’em up war movie! — albeit an apparently boring one.

He’s lauded as a rebel and free-spirit yet he denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible”! He boasted that under his watch “individualism must disappear!” This was no idle boast either. Che Guevara co-founded a regime that jailed more of its subjects than Stalin’s and murdered more people in its first three years than Hitler’s in its first six. In 1959, with the help of KGB agents, the man celebrated by the beautiful people at Cannes helped found, train and indoctrinate Cuba’s secret police. “Always interrogate your prisoners at night,” Che ordered his goons. “A man’s resistance is always lower at night.” Today the world’s largest Che mural adorns Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba’s STASI- and KGB-trained secret police.

Woody Allen or Quentin Tartatino (both at Cannes this year) might have rolled up their sleeves and made this material interesting, if not the character himself, then perhaps whatever malfunction in brain synapses animate his fans.

Alas, taking on Fidel Castro as agent has its drawbacks, as former colleagues all attest: "Fidel only praises the dead." So prior to whooping up his revolutionary sidekick, Fidel Castro sent him "to sleep with the fishes." "Most of the people I met that knew him," says Del Toro, "when they spoke about him, there was a sense that they were talking about a family member that they cared about with infinite love.”

Indeed, Fidel Castro’s expressions of love for his former sidekick must have misted Del Toro’s eyes.

Too bad Soderbergh and Del Toro didn’t interview the former CIA officers who revealed to this writer how Fidel Castro himself, via the Bolivian Communist party, constantly fed the CIA info on Che’s whereabouts in Bolivia. Including Fidel Castro’s directive to the Bolivian Communists regarding Che and his merry band might have also added drama. "Not even an aspirin," instructed Cuba’s Maximum Leader to his Bolivian comrades, meaning that Bolivia’s Communists were not to assist Che in any way — "not even with an aspirin," if Che complained of a headache.

Alas, utterly starstruck by their subject and slavishly compliant to Fidel Castro’s script and casting calls, all these fascinating plots and subplots flew right over Soderbergh and Del Toro’s heads.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.

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In the early 1960′s the law of supply and demand greatly irked Cuba’s "Minister of the Economy" Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "No problemo!" he decided. I’ll simply abolish it by creating a "New Man," with these insufferable Cubans as my Guinea Pigs. The world’s intelligentsia applauded deliriously as 14,000 Cubans were murdered by firing squad, 77,000 drowned or were ripped apart by sharks attempting to flee Guevara’s whim, and half a million were herded into political prisons and forced labor camps at bayonet point. (All of this out of a Cuban population of 6.5 million meaning that Castro and Che’s political incarceration rate topped Stalin’s.)

And wouldn’t you know it? After years of this glorious effort, cheered by everyone from Jean Paul Sartre to George Mc Govern, that doggone law of supply and demand held firm, while Cuba’s per capita income (surpassing half of Europe’s in the 1950′s) plummeted to nudge Haiti’s.

For fear of oil spills, as of 2008, the U.S. Federal government and various states ban drilling in thousands upon thousands of square miles off the U.S. Coast. These areas, primarily on the Outer Continental Shelf, hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This leaves America ‘s energy needs increasingly at the mercy of foreign autocrats, despots and maniacs. All the while worldwide demand for oil ratchets ever upward.

At times you’d swear that Che Guevara’s bloody lesson (not to mention Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot’s) has yet to sink in. And that’s only part of the idiocy. For those who favor evidence over dogma, a lesson in the "environmental perils" of offshore oil drilling presents itself every bit as starkly, though much less murderously. To wit:

Of the roughly 3,700 offshore oil production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 3,200 lie off the Louisiana coast. Yet Louisiana produces one-third of America’s commercial fisheries and no major oil spill has ever soiled its coast.

On the other hand, Florida, which zealously prohibits offshore oil drilling, had its gorgeous "Emerald Coast" panhandle beaches soiled by an ugly oil spill in 1976. This spill, as almost all oil spills, resulted from the transportation of oil — not from the extraction of oil. Assuming such as Hugo Chavez deign to keep selling us oil, we’ll need increasingly more and we’ll need to keep transporting it stateside — typically to refineries in Louisiana and Texas.

This path takes those tankers (as the one in 1976) smack in front of Florida’s panhandle beaches. Recall the Valdez, the Cadiz, the Argo Merchant. These were all tanker spills. The production of oil is relatively clean and safe. Again, it’s the transportation that presents the greatest risk. And even these spills (though hyped hysterically as environmental catastrophes) always play out as minor blips, those pictures of oil-soaked seagulls notwithstanding. To the horror and anguish of professional greenies, Alaska’s Prince William Sound recovered completely. More birds get fried by landing on power lines and smashed to pulp against picture windows in one week than perished from three decades of oil spills.

But forget cheaper oil and less pollution for a second. All fishermen and scuba divers out there should plead with their states to open up offshore oil drilling posthaste. I refer to the fabulous fishing — the EXPLOSION of marine life that accompanies the erection of offshore oil platforms.

“Environmentalists” wake up in the middle of the night sweating and whimpering about offshore oil platforms only because they’ve never seen what’s under them. This proliferation of marine life around the platforms turned on its head every “environmental expert” opinion of its day.

The original plan, mandated by federal environmental “experts” back in the late ’40s, was to remove the big, ugly, polluting, environmentally hazardous contraptions as soon as they stopped producing. Fine, said the oil companies.

About 15 years ago some wells played out off Louisiana and the oil companies tried to comply. Their ears are still ringing from the clamor fishermen put up. Turns out those platforms are going nowhere, and by popular demand of those with a bigger stake in the marine environment than any “environmentalist.”

Every “environmental” superstition against these structures was turned on its head. Marine life had EXPLODED around these huge artificial reefs: A study by LSU’s Sea Grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these platforms. The same study shows that there’s 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding mud bottoms.

An environmental study (by apparently honest scientists) revealed that urban runoff and treated sewage dump 12 times the amount of petroleum into the Gulf than those thousands of oil production platforms. And oil seeping naturally through the ocean floor into the Gulf, where it dissipates over time, accounts for 7 times the amount spilled by rigs and pipelines in any given year.

The Flower Garden coral reefs lie off the Louisiana-Texas border. Unlike any of the Florida Keys reefs, they’re surrounded by dozens of offshore oil platforms.

These have been pumping away for the past 50 years. Yet according to G.P. Schmahl, a Federal biologist who worked for decades in both places, “The Flower Gardens are much healthier, more pristine than anything in the Florida Keys. It was a surprise to me,” he admits. “And I think it’s a surprise to most people.”

“A key measure of the health of a reef is the amount of area taken up by coral,” according to a report by Steve Gittings, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s science coordinator for marine sanctuaries. “Louisiana’s Flower Garden boasts nearly 50 percent coral cover. In the Florida Keys it can run as little as 5 percent.”

Mark Ferrulo, a Florida “environmental activist” uses the very example of Louisiana for his anti-offshore drilling campaign, calling Louisiana’s coast “the nation’s toilet.”

Florida’s fishing fleet must love fishing in toilets, and her restaurants serving what’s in them. Most of the red snapper you eat in Florida restaurants are caught around Louisiana’s oil platforms. We see the Florida-registered boats tied up to them constantly. Sometimes us locals can barely squeeze in.

America desperately needs more domestic oil. In the process of producing it, we’d also get a cheaper tab for broiled red snapper with crabmeat/shrimp topping.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.

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The A&E Network recently produced a Biography show on Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Years back they produced one on Senator “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy. The depictions contrast sharply.

The second mentioned of these historical figures was a freely-elected official who campaigned to remove Stalinist agents that had infiltrated the government of a representative republic. Joe McCarthy launched his congressional inquiry into Communist penetration of the U.S. government at a time when Stalin’s regime had already murdered more people, conquered more nations, and enslaved more of their citizens than Hitler’s regime had managed at its murderous apex. On top of this, Stalin’s regime had recently developed the Atomic bomb.

In 1950 Senator McCarthy claimed to know of 57 Stalinist agents in the employ of the U.S. government. Not a single one of these alleged agents suffered so much as a day in jail, though some lost their cushy government jobs.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was second in command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that outlawed elections and private property. This regime’s KGB-supervised police — employing the midnight knock and the dawn raid among other devices — rounded up and jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed (out of a population of 70 million) in it’s first six.

Can you guess which show The History Channel titled, “Epidemic of Fear”?

The regime Che Guevara co-founded stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 per cent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe. Che Guevara’s regime also shattered — through executions, jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Cuban regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period THREE TIMES as long in Che Guevara’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenytzin suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.

Can you guess which A & E show mentioned, “hundreds of destroyed lives”?

One week into power the regime Che Guevara co-founded abolished Habeas Corpus. Guevara commanded his regime’s prosecutorial goons to “always interrogate our prisoners at night. A man’s resistance is always lower at night.” He boasted that, “we execute from revolutionary conviction!” and that “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” Edwin Tetlow, Havana correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, reported on a mass “trial” orchestrated by Che Guevara where Tetlow noticed the death sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.

Can you guess which show had “The Great Inquisitor” in the title?

In case you haven’t guessed, the answer to all of the above questions is: Joe McCarthy’s.

One signed his name “Stalin II,” professed that “the solutions to the world’s problems lie behind the Iron curtain,” and boasted that “if the nuclear missiles had remained we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City.” He also professed that the victory of socialism was well worth “millions of atomic victims.”

Can you guess which show mentioned, “his idealism will rarely be equaled”?

Immediately upon entering Havana Che Guevara stole and moved into what was probably the most luxurious mansion in Cuba. The rightful owner fled the country barely ahead of a firing squad and a reporter who wrote of Che’s new house in a Cuban newspaper was himself threatened with the firing squad. A year later thousands of Cubans were sent to forced-labor camps on Che’s orders, based on his whim to fashion “a new man,"

Can you guess which show includes the phrase “he never abused his power”?

During a 1961 speech in Cuba, Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” Earlier he had cheered the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the concurrent slaughter of thousands of Hungarians who resisted Russian Imperialism. According to Guevara, these freedom-fighters were all “fascists and CIA agents.”

Can you guess which show described its subject as: “a potent symbol of rebellion, liberation and resistance to imperialism”?

In case you haven’t guessed, the answer to the above questions is: Che Guevara’s

On his second to last day alive Che Guevara ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to the last breath and to the last bullet. With his men doing just that, a slightly wounded Che snuck away from the firefight and surrendered with a full clip in his pistol, while whimpering to his captors: “Don’t Shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” He then groveled shamelessly, desperate to ingratiate himself. “What’s your name, young man?” Che asked one of his captors. “Why what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!”

“So what will they do with me?” Che asked Bolivian Captain Gary Prado. “I don’t suppose you will kill me. I’m surely more valuable alive….And you Captain Prado,” Che commended his captor. “You are a very special person …I have been talking to some of your men. They think very highly of you, captain! And don’t worry, this whole thing is over. We have failed.” Then to further ingratiate himself, “your army has pursued us very tenaciously….now, could you please find out what they plan to do with me?”

Nonetheless The History Channel gushes that Guevara “was valiant until his last moment alive.”

So far, subjective matters. Now on to more objective ones.

Despite numerous attempts, nobody has managed to locate any record of Ernesto Guevara’s medical degree. Shortly after his capture Che admitted to his captor’s commander, Captain Gary Prado, that he (Che) was not a doctor but “had some knowledge of medicine.”

Nonetheless The History Channel refers to Ernesto Guevara as a “newly qualified Doctor.”

It is a matter of historical record that in January 1959 the U.S. gave diplomatic recognition to the Castro/Che regime MORE QUICKLY than they had recognized Batista’s in 1952. State Department records also show that the U.S. imposed on arms embargo on the Batista government and refused to ship arms the Cuban government had already paid for. The official record also documents that U.S. ambassador Earl T. Smith personally notified Batista that he had no support from the U.S. government, which strongly recommended that he leave Cuba. Batista was then denied political asylum in the U.S.

In 2001 while visiting Havana for a conference with Fidel Castro, the CIA’s “Caribbean Desk’s “specialist on the Cuban Revolution” from 1957—1960, Robert Reynolds boasted that: “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas.”

“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State were pro-Castro, except ambassador Earl Smith.” This statement is from former CIA operative in Santiago Cuba, Robert Weicha.

Nonetheless, The History Channel reports that “Che Guevara helped overthrow the “U.S.- BACKED” Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.”

“At his (Che’s) orders around 50 men were executed,” asserts The History Channel

“The Black Book of Communism,” written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy, much less of “Miami maniacs!”) estimates 14,000 firing squad executions in Cuba by the end of the 1960′s. “The facts and figures are irrefutable,” wrote the New York Times (no less!) about “The Black Book of Communism.” A Cuban prosecutor of the time who quickly defected in horror and disgust named Jose Vilasuso estimates that Che signed 400 death warrants the first few months of his command in La Cabana. A Basque priest named Iaki de Aspiazu, who was often on hand to perform confessions and last rites, says Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad during the period. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book “Yo Soy El Che!” that Guevara sent 1,892 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 year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track him down in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk, admitted to “a couple thousand” executions. But he shrugged them off as all being of “imperialist spies and CIA agents.”

Historically speaking, documenting regime murders while that murderous regime remains in power has proven almost impossible. Yet the Cuba Archive project headed by Maria Werlau and Dr Armando Lago have already documented 216 firing squad death warrants signed by Che Guevara, a figure quadrupling The History Channels’. What can possibly account for such a relentless contempt for the truth by The History Channel?

We’ll see in a minute.

“He studied the evidence in each case (of the “50″ executions) with methodical care. The executed were all torturers and murderers of women and children,” asserts The History Channel in their Che Biography.

Well, Guevara’s judicial methods I’ve already mentioned, simply by quoting Che Guevara himself. If “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail” if no defense counsel or witnesses are permitted then just how did Che determine who is “a torturer and murderer of women and children?” The History Channel provides no clue.

But their main source, Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson who is interviewed and quoted extensively through the “documentary," does. This diligent historian got the figure of 50 executed and the accounts of the sterling judicial procedures preceding the executions, from one of the Communist prosecutors himself, Orlando Borrego, who features as major source in Anderson’s book and who is a minister in Cuba’s Stalinist government to this day. Indeed, Anderson wrote his book while living in Cuba using ministers of a Stalinist government as his primary sources. Other sources such as “Che’s Diaries” were edited and published by Castro’s propaganda ministry with the preface written by Fidel Castro himself. Given the subject, perhaps such a thoroughly “revolutionary” form of historiography is fitting. Let’s step back for a second and contemplate it.

Adolph Eichmann, Rudolf Hess, Karl Donitz, Baldur von Schirach and many other Nazi officials were still alive when William Shirer wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Yet these were not Shirer’s primary sources. Therefore, applying contemporary logic as it applies to Cuban history, Shirer’s book should be thoroughly discredited. Anything and everything former Nazi officials had to say should have been taken at face value. Instead Shirer relied on sources such as German exile Fritz Thyssen. This man was “embittered," had an obvious “ax to grind” against the Nazi regime, and should have been discounted as biased and not credible by William Shirer and by all right-thinking people.

Robert Conquest was also derelict in using Ukrainian refugees such as Marco Carynnyk as sources for his book, The Great Terror. From Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov, to Nikita Khrushchev thousands of Stalin’s henchmen were available to Conquest as perfectly reliable sources. For not relying upon them exclusively in his studies of Stalinism, Robert Conquest should be laughed off any lectern. His book consists of nothing but embittered ravings and cheap gossip from people with “an ax to grind.”

Simon Weisenthal, Eilie Weisel and Ann Frank all had obvious “axes to grind’ against the Nazi regime so nothing they said or wrote should be taken seriously. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cardinal Mindszenty, Nathan Scharansky, Vladimir Bukovsky, etc. are all “embittered exiles and cranks” with obvious “axes to grind” against the Soviet regime. So the same applies to them.

The above may sound flippant, but it’s precisely the methodology applied in media and “scholarly” circles when it comes to studying Cuban totalitarianism. The normal rules of historiography — and even of decency, logic and common sense — get turned on their heads, resulting in shows like those on The History Channel.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.

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That Michael Moore got some of his most heated rebuttals on Sicko from CNN bemused many Cuba watchers. CNN, after all, was the first network to receive benediction from the Maximum Leader to open a Havana bureau. For years their Cuba correspondent, Lucia Newman, performed magnificently, amply keeping up CNN’s side of the bargain.

So Havana could not have been pleased with CNN’s recent insolence towards Michael Moore. Any discord between two of Castro’s most dutiful mouthpieces was clearly unhealthy for the regime. But no problemo. As we soon saw on Larry King Live, the spat was a fluke, a regrettable blip in an otherwise even record. Happily for Moore’s Cuban case officers, within days, the matter was quickly patched up. Moore’s threat to become “CNN’s worst nightmare!” proved bombastic and hollow, identical to his films.

The spat originated earlier on Wolf Blitzer’s show when CNN’s medical wiz Dr Sanjay Gupta accused Moore of fudging figures by claiming that Cuba spent $251 per person on health care. Sanjay said the actual figure was $25.

Turned out, Gupta had goofed and Moore was right. How could he not be? He used the figures reported by a Stalinist ministry to the U.N. and confirmed in person by Moore’s Cuban host, the pediatrician Aleida Guevara (Che Guevara’s daughter.).

“In the report CNN says that I fudged the facts,” challenged Moore. “They didn’t find a single fact that I fudged.”

Quite true. Michael Moore did not fudge a thing. And neither did the New York Times’ Herbert Matthews when he claimed in June of 1959 from Havana, “This is not a Communist Revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist.” Castro confided this to Matthews in person and for the record. The New York Times also acquitted Che Guevara from any reddish taint. “It gives me great pain to be called a communist,” bristled the aggrieved Argentine at the crackpot smear.

Soviet GRU agents slept in Che’s (stolen) Havana mansion even as the New York Times transcribed and published Guevara’s pained denials of this malicious Birchite smear.

So if Che Guevara’s daughter confirms to Michael Moore — in person and for the record — that Cuba spends $251 per person a year on health care, then, by golly, CNN (of all people!) should know it’s perfectly true!

As eagerly expected by Michael Moore’s Cuban case officers, Sicko’s screening was the signal for their other propaganda assets to chime in: “Communist Cuba’s universal free health system has achieved low child mortality and high longevity rates on a par with rich nations since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution,” wrote Anthony Boadle from Havana’s Reuters Bureau last week.

An infant mortality rate that plummeted from 13th lowest in the world (lower than in Germany, France, Japan, Israel among many other first world nations) during the unspeakable Batista era to 40th today, that finds most of the nations behind it in 1958 now ahead of it — this rate qualifies as an “achievement” in the lexicon of news agencies that have earned a Havana bureau.

This current infant-mortality rate, by the way, is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0.71, the Hemisphere’s (and hovering among the world’s top five for the past two decades) highest, which “terminates” any pregnancy that even hints at trouble. Cuba’s suicide rate is also currently the Hemisphere’s highest, triple its rate during the unspeakable Batista era.

Of course any foreign journalist who attempted to practice his profession in Cuba would be quickly escorted to the airport in a firm chokehold. Any Cuban who tried anything remotely of the sort would instantly and involuntarily enroll in the regime’s free (though somewhat cramped) lodging, it’s foolproof weight-loss regimen, and get free electroshock treatments to boot.

In case some have forgotten, Cuba is a Communist state almost perfectly patterned on the Stalinist model. I say “almost” because in the early stage Castro and Che deviated somewhat by actually jailing more political prisoners per-capita than Stalin. As such, material rewards are granted exclusively by the state and relentless police-state control is the regime priority.

“Health-care” is important only so far as a function to bamboozle foreign press agencies, academics and filmmakers (which has proven a laughable cakewalk). As such, the rewards issued by Castro’s Stalinist regime to Cuba’s doctors (a monthly salary of $22) are dwarfed by those awarded to the dedicated and intrepid staff of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. These latter and perform the vital functions in maintaining the viability of the Castro fiefdom.

According to the International Labor Organization, during the unspeakable Batista era, Cuba workers were more highly unionized as a percentage of population than U.S. workers and earned the 8th-highest wages — not in the hemisphere — but in the world. Cuba had a higher per-capita income at the time than half of Europe’s, double Japan’s, along with the lowest inflation rate (at 1.4) in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban peso of the time was valued slightly higher than the U.S. dollar and was fully backed by Cuba’s Gold reserves. My parents paid $3.50 a month to a private-sector HMO for full health care coverage for their entire family during the 50′s.

For Cuba’s indigent (or those who preferred buying a couple bottles of Rum or lottery tickets with their $3.50) the unspeakable Batista regime maintained the Calixto García, Reina Mercedes, Emergencias, Hospital de Maternidad, and El Infantil hospitals — all providing what socialists term free health care, in the manner of New Orleans Charity Hospital.

The U.N.’s World Health Organization has a fetish for infant-mortality figures, regarding them as the be-all and end-all of nation’s health index. As such, Castro, whose fiefdom was awarded a prestigious UNESCO award in 2000 — is absolutely anal (Ha-Ha!) in reporting carefully doctored (shall we say) figures on Cuba’s infant-mortality rate to the WHO. And Michael Moore Sicko relies on these U.N. figures exclusively.

In April 2001 Dr. Juan Felipe García MD, of Jacksonville, Florida, interviewed several recent doctor defectors from Cuba. Based on what he heard his report may discomfit some Sicko fans. “The official Cuban infant-mortality figure is a farce,” asserts Dr. Garcia. “Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during its first year the doctor often reports he was older. Otherwise such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job.”

A samizdat smuggled out of Cuba in January 2003 by Mario Enrique Mayo reported that Dr Olga Oropeza from Camagüey province was severely reprimanded by her hospital chief Leonardo Ramirez for delivering a premature baby. “That could raise this hospital’s infant-mortality rate!” Ramirez berated the terrified woman.

According to a report by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the mortality rate of Cuban children aged 1 to 4 is 34% higher than the U.S. (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1000). But these don’t figure into U.N.-spotlighted “infant-mortality rates,” you see. So apparently the pressure (so far) is not on Cuban doctors to fudge these figures.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons also reports that the current maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost FOUR TIMES the U.S. rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1000). Peculiar (and tragic) how so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba? And how many 1—4 year olds perish, while from birth to one year old (the period during which they qualify in U.N. statistics as infants) they’re perfectly healthy?

This might lead a few people to question Cuba’s official infant-mortality figures. But such people would not get a Havana bureau for their agency or network, much less a visa to film a documentary in Fidel Castro’s fiefdom.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.

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The cover of the current Rolling Stone magazine features mega movie star Johnny Depp hugging mega rock star Keith Richards. In the world’s top-grossing movie of the moment these two “blood brothers,” as Rolling Stone calls them, team up as father-son. Throughout the RS article, Depp, who moved to Hollywood as an amateur rock guitarist only to see his fortunes blossom elsewhere in the entertainment industry, gushes about the Rolling Stones, and Keith Richards in particular, as his ” models, inspiration,” etc. etc.

Hanging from Depp’s neck during the Rolling Stone photo shoot is his famous pendant with the face of another “counter-culture” legend who serves as a wellspring of Depp inspiration: Ernesto “Che” Guevara. A few years ago in a Vibe magazine interview Depp proclaimed his “digging” of Che Guevara.

As a rocker-hipster fan of Che Guevara Johnny Depp has plenty of company.

“Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western world,” proclaimed Time magazine in May 1968. With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious ’60s.”

“1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che,” recounts Christopher Hitchens. “His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model.”

“1968 was the onset of a totally new age, with a new conception of how people should be: they should not to be governed by authorities from above.” Gushed Kai Kracht, West Germany’s version of Abbie Hoffman. We studied the great revolutionaries of our century: Lenin, Mao, Che (apparently none of these governed from above!) we wanted to learn from their success. Our revolution was young, and full of groovy slogans.”

Oddly, considering his profession and lifestyle, Depp’s Pirates “blood brother” Keith Richards, seems immune to (or perhaps simply oblivious of) Che-Mania. The Stones, after all, in their classic Sympathy for the Devil cast Lucifer as directing Che’s mentors, models and early suitors — the Bolsheviks: “Stood around St Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change…killed the Czar and his ministers….Anastasia screamed in vain.”

Had Johnny Depp been born two decades earlier and in Cuba and attempted the lifestyle of a U.S. teenager or campus rebel, his “digging” would have been of a more literal nature. Depp would have found himself digging ditches and mass-graves in a prison camp system inspired by the man glorified on his little pendant. Had his digging lagged, a “groovy” Czech machine-gun butt might have shattered his teeth or perhaps some “groovy” Soviet bayonets slashed his buttocks.

In a famous speech in 1961 Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates” commanded Guevara. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”

And woe to those youths “who stayed up late at might and thus reported to work (government forced-labor) tardily.” Youth, wrote Guevara, ” should learn to think and act as a mass.” “Those who chose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-Imperialist Rock & Roll) were denounced as worthless “lumpen” and “delinquents.” In his famous speech Che Guevara even vowed, “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!”

Tens of thousands of Cuban youths learned that Che Guevara’s admonitions were more than idle bombast. In Che Guevara the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German STASI “consultants” who flooded Cuba in the early 60′s, found an extremely eager acolyte. By the mid 60′s the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were identical.

Today the world’s largest Che Guevara image adorns Cuba’s headquarters for its KGB-trained secret police. And Johnny Depp seems delighted to flaunt this emblem from his pendants, shirts and kerchiefs.

Johnny Depp also “digs” Jack Kerouac’s famous and free-spirited travelogue. “On The Road was my bible for years,” boasts Depp. Yet from his t-shirts to his pendants to his bandanas, Depp habitually flaunts the emblem of a regime that imprisons anyone who attempts travel from one Cuban province to the other without proper police-state “papers,” and machine-guns anyone who tries to travel abroad.

The world’s most famous Rock & Roll publication features the guitarist for the world’s most famous Rock & Roll band, while Rock & Roll fan Johnny Depp proudly sports the face of a Stalinist Police Chief whose KGB-trained goons herded rock and roll fans into prison camps for the crime of being rock and roll fans.

“I bet you were expecting a Hollywood putz,” boasted Depp to his obsequious Vibe magazine interviewer who seemed dazzled by Depp’s penetrating sagacity. “Bet you expected some f**cking commodity without a brain in his head!”

Nothing of the sort, Mr. Depp. Even in Hollywood, you tower as an exceptional intellectual commodity.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.

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His writings revealed a severely troubled young man. “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”

The term “hatred” was a constant in his writings: “Hatred as an element of struggle”; “hatred that is intransigent;” “hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine.”

His deranged fantasies included a continental reign of Stalinism. To achieve this ideal the troubled youth craved, “millions of atomic victims.”

The troubled young Argentine was aloof and contemptuous towards everyone around him: “I have no home, no woman, no father, no mother, no brothers. My friends are friends only when they think as I do ideologically.”

Fortunately for the troubled young Argentine, while a vagabond in Mexico City, he had the good fortune to meet an exceedingly shrewd judge of the human psyche. This judge, a Cuban exile, properly diagnosed the Argentine’s psychosis and made an “intervention” in the nick of time, channeling the troubled youth’s talents and yearnings toward ends considered constructive by the worldwide intelligentsia: establishing Stalinism.

Shortly the Argentine found himself gainfully employed in Cuba. His raging bloodlust was amply indulged in the extermination of anti-communist Cubans, a species of mammal that enlightened opinion worldwide considers an insufferable pest.

At first the troubled young Argentine took an active role in the mass murder of defenseless Cubans, shattering the skulls of the convulsed victims with a blast from his own pistol. But given the volume of these murders the task proved fatiguing and the Argentine soon appointed Cuban henchmen to better facilitate the serial bloodbath.

Not that he distanced himself from the slaughter. In fact, he took such a keen delight in the murder process that a special window was constructed in his office allowing him to watch and gloat at the orgy of bloodletting in the field below his office.

In this process the Argentine was helping his Cuban mentor establish a personal fiefdom that would prove quite enduring, to put it mildly. Alas, the (live) Argentine’s usefulness to his mentor would prove nowhere near as enduring and soon his “martyrdom” was skillfully arranged.

No sane person would wear a Che T-shirt. No decent person would tolerate one in his surroundings. But Che’s Guevara’s image is considered the most reproduced image of the century, gracing everything from T-shirts to posters, from thong undies to skateboards, from cellphones to infant “onezies.” Hollywood hails him in blockbuster movies and Time magazine celebrates him among the “heroes and icons” of the century, alongside Mother Theresa.

Any serious analyst of Che’s “guerrilla” campaigns cannot escape the conclusion that Ernesto Guevara was actually incapable of applying a compass reading to a map. Yet seemingly sane historians place him alongside Mao Tse Tung of (the 8 thousand mile) “long march” fame.

In scope, range and duration the Che Guevara farce far surpasses any other in modern history. In comparison, The South Sea Bubble was a chump operation. Only the modern era’s master huckster and media manipulator — with the eager aid of his ever-faithful accomplices in the Western media, academia, publishing and filmmaking — could have created a masterful guerrilla warrior and secular saint out of this sadist, coward, and epic idiot.

Fidel Castro’s influence over the Western "intelligentsia” can only be described as magical, and renders any public evaluation of his regime among the smart set completely devoid of logic. To wit:

He jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin and refuses (unlike Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile and Somoza’s Nicaragua) to allow Amnesty International or the Red Cross to inspect his prisons. Yet Cuba sat on the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee and upon visiting New York as the U.N.’s keynote speaker in 1995, Newsweek magazine hailed Castro as “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” and Time as “The Toast of Manhattan!” referring to the social swirl that engulfed him and the autograph hounds who mobbed him from among New York’s smart set.

His legal code mandates 2 years in prison for anyone overheard cracking a joke about him. Yet Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase sing his praises.

He abolished Habeas corpus while his chief hangman (Che Guevara himself) declared that “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” Yet Harvard Law School invited him as their guest of honor, then erupted in cheers and tumultuous ovations after his every third sentence.

He drove out a higher percentage of Jews from Cuba than Czar Nicholas drove from Russia. Yet Shoah Foundation Founder Stephen Spielberg, considered his dinner with Fidel Castro, “the eight most important hours of my life.”

He’s a lily-white European soldier’s son who forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Blacks served as President of the Senate, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, the grandson of slaves, and born in a palm-roofed shack). Then jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro’s dungeon’s than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa’s). Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90 percent black while only 9 percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black. He sentenced other blacks (Dr. Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20-year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King in a public square. Yet he’s a hero to the Congressional Black Caucus and receives frequent accolades and even passionate bear hugs from Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson.

He converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians. Yet, Colin Powell and the London Times, (owned by Rupert Murdoch) have recognized “the Castro Revolution’s achievements.”

In brief, except among “right-wing crackpots,” Cuba is ritually discussed, not with facts or reasoned observations, but with handy (and bogus) clichs.

Che Guevara’s delight in slaughtering Cubans was made possible only because these Cubans were completely defenseless at the time. Bound and blindfolded was his preference. And in that very manner they were lined up in front of his firing squads. In other settings featuring firearms (held by others) the troubled Argentine quivered with fear.

On Oct. 8 1967, for instance, upon finally encountering armed and determined enemies, Che quickly dropped his fully-loaded weapons. “Don’t shoot!” he whimpered. “I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

His Bolivian captors viewed the matter differently. In fact they adopted a policy that has since become a favorite among Americans who encounter (so-called) endangered species on their property: “Shoot, shovel, and shut-up.”

Justice has never been better served.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.

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Thirty-nine years ago this week, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it’s here.

“Executions?” Che Guevara exclaimed while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1964. “Certainly we execute!” he declared, to the claps and cheers of that august body. “And we will CONTINUE executing as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the revolution’s enemies!”

According to the Black Book of Communism, those firing-squad executions had reached around 10,000 by that time. Sloboban Milosevic, by the way, went on trial for allegedly ordering 8,000 executions. The charge against him by the same U.N. that deliriously applauded Che Guevara’s proud proclamation was “genocide.”

"I don’t need proof to execute a man,” snapped Che to a judicial underling in 1959. “I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him!”

The “revolution’s enemies” bound, gagged and murdered by Che and his henchmen were among the most enterprising and valiant fighters of the 20th century ranking alongside the Hungarian Freedom Fighters. They fought just as valiantly, as desperately — and, ultimately — just as hopelessly. They fought to the last bullet and usually to the death.

The few survivors live today in places like Miami and New Jersey and qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history. But you’ll look for their stories on the History Channel and PBS and in the New York Times, etc., in vain. They fought the Left’s premier pinup boys, you see. So their heroism doesn’t qualify as politically correct drama.

On the contrary, Time magazine honors Che Guevara among “The 100 Most Important People of the Century.” Not satisfied with such a measly accolade they list him in the “Heroes and Icons” section, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. From here the ironies only get richer.

The most popular version of the Che T-shirt and poster, for instance, sports the slogan “Fight Oppression” under his famous face. This is the face of a man who co-founded a regime that jailed more of its subjects than did Hitler’s or Stalin’s and declared that “individualism must disappear!” In 1959, with the help of Soviet GRU agents, the man celebrated on that T-shirt helped found, train and indoctrinate Cuba’s secret police. “Always interrogate your prisoners at night,” Che ordered his goons. “A man’s resistance is always lower at night.” Today the world’s largest Che mural adorns Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba’s KGB- and STASI-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.

“Iron” Mike Tyson used to end fights with his arms upraised in triumph. In 2002 he got a huge Che tattoo on his torso, visited Cuba, and has been consistently and horribly stomped in fight after fight ever since, a process perfectly mimicking the combat record of his tattoo idol. Che was indeed proficient at smiting his enemies, Mike, thousands of them, but only after they were bound, gagged and blindfolded — and I’m afraid the National Boxing Federation won’t allow this.

When the crowd of A-list hipsters and Beautiful People at the Sundance Film Festival (which included everyone from Tipper and Al Gore to Sharon Stone, Meryl Streep and Paris Hilton) exploded in a rapturous standing ovation for Robert Redford’s The Motorcycle Diaries, they were cheering a film glorifying a man who jailed or exiled most of Cuba’s best writers, poets and independent filmmakers while converting Cuba’s press and cinema — at Czech machine-gunpoint — into propaganda agencies for a Stalinist regime.

Executive producer of the movie Robert Redford (who always kicks off the film festival with a long dirge about the importance of artistic freedom) was forced to screen the film for Che’s widow (who heads Cuba’s Che Guevara Studies Center) and Fidel Castro for their approval before release. We can only imagine the shrieks of outrage from the Sundance crowd about “censorship!” and “selling out!” had, say, Robert Ackerman required (and acquiesced in) Nancy Reagan’s approval to release HBO’s The Reagans that same year.

Che groupies are many and varied. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, marvels at Che’s “untamable defiance” and assures us in the same New York Times article that “Che was no hypocrite.”

The noted historian Benicio Del Toro, who will star as his hero in a Hollywood biopic due next year, says that “Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked the talk. There’s just something cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him.”

More than his cruelty, megalomania or even his epic stupidity, what most distinguished Ernesto “Che” Guevara from his peers was his sniveling cowardice. His groupies can run off in a huff, slam their bedroom door and dive headfirst into their beds sobbing and kicking and punching the pillows all they want, but Che surrendered to the Bolivian Rangers voluntarily, from a safe distance, and was captured physically sound and with a fully loaded pistol.

One day before his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara for the first time in his life finally faced something properly describable as combat. So he ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to the last breath and to the last bullet.

A few hours later, his “untamable defiance,” lack of hypocrisy and “walking of the walk” all manifested themselves. With his men doing just what he ordered (fighting and dying to the last bullet), a slightly wounded Che snuck away from the firefight and surrendered with a full clip in his pistol, while whimpering to his captors: “Don’t Shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

His Bolivian captors begged to differ.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” by David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

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Whoever doubts Fidel Castro’s demise — political if not physical — need look only at Hugo Chavez’s recent monkeyshines at the United Nations. If Castro is sentient, he’s furious. The organ grinder gets laid up, the leash comes off, and in no time the monkey makes a mess of things. Chavez even provoked harsh words from Charlie Rangel!

In Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel, Fidel Castro has his main booster (of many) in the U.S. Congress. Sure, the accolades from Harry Belafonte, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, Ted Turner, Dan Rather, George Mc Govern, etc., are all nice. But Charlie Rangel provides more than mere attaboys. He’s also there to facilitate Elian’s return and to bear-hug Fidel during his last visit to Harlem.

In Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro has his main financial booster. Sure, the accolades from Britain’s Galloway, Spain’s Zapatero, Argentina’s Kirchner are all nice. But given recent oil prices, the 100,000 daily barrels of essentially free oil from Chavez actually surpasses in value the daily subsidies from Cuba’s former Soviet patrons. Sitting atop all that oil, Hugo is positioned to put his money where his anti-Yankee and pro-Cuba mouth is.

So, a falling out between these two Cuba friends and benefactors cannot help the Castroite cause — and would have never come to pass if Castro was still in a position to mentor his Venezuelan suitor.

“Holding up Chomsky’s book was the right idea, Hugo,” a healthy Castro would have advised. “That’s the beauty of this type of thing, Hugo. So many American pinks and reds are so eager to echo our ravings that there’s absolutely no need for us to mouth them ourselves, you idiot! From Norman Mailer to Susan Sontag and from Saul Landau to Michael Moore, I’ve relied on such people to mouth or echo my ravings for decades! Every car-salesmen gets taught this the first day on the job: don’t say it yourself, you idiot! Let the customer/prospect say it! Or use an endorsement from one of his friends! Every rookie ambulance-chaser knows you only ask a question if you know you’ll get the right answer! Shoulda phrased your Bush-Bashing as questions, you idiot! 98 per cent of the Assembly woulda joyfully yelled the answers! You idiot!

Now look what you’ve done! Prominent Democrats, my historic allies, the same party that provided my Mutually-Assured-Protection with the Kennedy-Khruschev deal — this same bunch, are speaking against you from Rangel to Pelosi to Schumer! It takes a lot to get Democrats riled up against a Latin leftist — and here you’ve managed it, you idiot!

Chavez might have taken a cue from the Cuban Maestro’s own visit in 1995 to New York (a city he twice tried to incinerate. See full documentation in Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant) for the U.N.’s 50th anniversary festivities. “The Toast of Manhattan!” crowed Time magazine about Castro’s reception by the General Assembly and later by Manhattan’s Beautiful People.

“The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” read a Newsweek story that week, referring to the social swirl that engulfed Castro. After Castro’s whooping, hollering, foot-stomping ovation in the General Assembly, he was fted by New York’s best and brightest, hobnobbing with dozens of Manhattan’s glitterati, pundits and power brokers.

First, there was dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters, all jostled for a brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro’s every comment.

All clamored for autographs and photo ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass killer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.

“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the bearded Cuban man of the people to the smiling throng that surrounded him.

“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee.

And the mass murderer 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 Manhattan celebrities and power brokers.

Fidel’s reception at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 was no less rapturous. Afterward, he made his way to Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where pastor Calvin Butts gushed: “It is in our tradition to welcome all who are visionaries, revolutionaries and who seek the liberation of all people. God Bless you, Fidel!”

“The mainly African American audience, which included New York Democratic representatives Charles Rangel and Nydia Velasquez, enthusiastically greeted the Communist leader with a ten minute standing ovation,” reported People’s Weekly World. “Chants of ‘VIVA FIDEL!’ resounded from the rafters.”

Harlem’s delirious ovation for the incarcerator of the century’s longest suffering black political prisoner rose to the level of an earthquake — to a hurricane. The very walls and rafters shook with shrieks of “FIDEL! VIVA FIDEL!!” Elombe Brathe, head of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and chair for the meeting, asked the audience, “Who would you rather come to Harlem? Fidel or Giuliani?”

“FIDEL!” They erupted. “FIDEL! VIVA FIDEL!” Then, with Congresswoman Maxine Waters looking on in rapture, Charlie Rangel waddled up to the podium beside the Great One. Fidel — oomph! — finally caught his breath, beamed and returned the rotund senator’s mighty bear hug.

Chavez, scurrying from a hostile New York with Rangel’s carping ringing in his ears, can only read these stories and weep. For simply saying the U.N. “smelt of sulfur,” Chavez was censured by New Yorkers. After trying twice to make the entire city smell of charred flesh, his former mentor, Fidel Castro, got a reception to shame Simon and Garfunkel’s in Central Park.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” by David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

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Unlike the Chevy Chase-ism about Franco, I refer only to Fidel Castro’s political reign. Alas, Maximum Brother, Raul, will run a good facsimile of his incapacitated brother’s regime. Many say Raul has been running Cuba — the nuts and bolts of the thing — for several years now, with Fidel (as always) in the more exalted (and fun) role of figurehead loudmouth and chief charmer and bamboozler of foreign celebrities, dignitaries, historians — and especially — reporters.

As I wrote last week, this succession didn’t start with Fidel’s surgery two weeks ago. It had started weeks earlier with the Cuban press playing up Raul and his crony generals as combination Poppa Smurfs and Bill Gates’s. Naturally, much of the international press picked up on the campaign, no questions asked. Traditionally Raul lived in the shadows, the Cuban press pointedly ignoring him and his henchmen. A staple of Communist regimes is rendering persons as “un-persons” with the rise and fall of political fortunes. This happened to Trotsky after Stalin’s rise, to Stalin after Khrushchev’s rise, to Khrushchev after Brezhnev’s rise.

The Cuban case involved the identical thing — but in reverse order. Raul went from un-person to first person. No need to read Cuba’s propaganda ministry press. Simply run from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from the London Times to Le Monde, from El Pais to Der Spiegel and gape at Raul Castro’s manifold talents and virtues. For many Cuba-watchers, Raul’s play-up in the press was the tip-off. The surgery simply sped things up a bit. They knew Fidel was on his way out. He might be exiting a little sooner than thought, that’s all.

The international media has a long history of eating from Castro’s hand like trained pigeons. I’ll even skip the Herbert Matthews—New York Times case as too well known to merit more commentary. Let’s fast forward a few months to a CBS interview of Castro by Ed Murrow. For the record, The Museum of Broadcast Communications regards Murrow as “the most distinguished and renowned figure in the history of American broadcast journalism.” Murrow’s canonization was capped with the movie “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which depicts his piling on the already multi-smeared and vilified Joe McCarthy as an act of immense integrity and valor. David Strathairn’s portrayal of Murrow’s grave frown, complete with his stentorian jabs at the already cornered McCarthy, drove the Mainstream Media and critics gaga. The movie earned six Oscar nominations and loud accolades everywhere from the New York Times to Variety to Rolling Stone.

For the record: By the time Murrow interviewed Castro on February 6, 1959, Castro had abolished habeas corpus, filled Cuba’s jails with ten times the number of political prisoners as under Batista, and murdered hundreds of Cubans by firing squad without due process.

“That’s a very cute puppy, Fidelito!” Murrow tells Fidel’s son, who skips merrily on camera at their “home” in the Havana Hilton and plops on the lap of his loving and pajama-clad Papa. For the record, Castro had no “home” to speak of at the time. He slept in a different place almost every night, wore army fatigues instead of pajamas, and had never provided for his son.

“When will you visit us again?” An (uncharacteristically) smiling Murrow asks a (very uncharacteristically) smiling Fidel. “And will that be with the beard or without the beard?”

Every night during the week that Murrow interviewed him, Fidel, Raul and Che repaired to their respective stolen mansions and met with Soviet GRU agents to button down the complete communization of Cuba. When Ed Murrow “interviewed” Castro, Joe Mc Carthy’s gallant nemesis was fresh from a harangue to the Radio and Television News Directors Association of America, where he blasted television for “being used to delude and insulate us.”

And it’s far from over. Last week the London Times paid its respects to Mr Castro’s legacy. The Times is considered one of the world’s wisest and most respected newspapers, so it gives the “mainstream,” or even the respectably conservative, view on Fidel Castro. “Castro has some real accomplishments to point to,” claims the Rupert Murdoch owned London Times. “Under his rule, the impoverished Caribbean island has created health and education systems that would be the envy of far wealthier nations … and there is near full literacy on the island.” From London to Tokyo, from Paris to Bangkok, from New York to Madrid — this claim echoes through every media mention of Castro.

For the record: In 1958, that “impoverished Caribbean island” had a higher standard of living than Ireland and Austria, almost double Spain and Japan’s per capita income, more doctors and dentists per capita than Britain, and lower infant mortality than France and Germany — the 13th-lowest in the world, in fact. Today, Cuba’s infant-mortality rate — despite the hemisphere’s highest abortion rate, which skews this figure downward — is 24th from the top.

So, relative to the rest of the world, Cuba’s health care has worsened under Castro, and a nation with a formerly massive influx of European immigrants needs machine guns, water cannons and tiger sharks to keep its people from fleeing, while half-starved Haitians a short 60 miles away turn up their noses at any thought of emigrating to Cuba.

In 1958, 80 percent of Cubans were literate. During its war of independence near the turn of the 20th century, Cuba was utterly devastated, losing a quarter of its population. So Cuba’s achievements in national prosperity, health, and education came practically from scratch and in only slightly more time than Castro’s stint in power. Can any sane person claim that, given that record, literacy would not have been eradicated in a few short years?

Better still, Cubans today would be not just literate but also educated, allowed to read George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara. A specimen:

“To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane — or, vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research — we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, and to the cause of humanity.”

I quote “this intellectual, this most complete human being of our time” (Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of Che Guevara) exactly. Cuba’s prisons aren’t its only torture chambers. With such reading assignments, Cuba’s classrooms amply qualify for an inspection by Amnesty International.

Without Castro, Cuba’s full literacy would have come about probably as quickly — and without firing squads, mass graves, and a political incarceration rate higher than Stalin’s. Most countries in Latin America with lower literacy rates than Cuba had in 1958 have done just that.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” by David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

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So what’s going on in Cuba? Nobody has seen nor heard from either Fidel or his supossed successor, Raul, in over a week and all foreign reporters are barred entry to the island. In the meantime, Cuba’s military is on combat alert and reservists are called up island-wide. The neighborhood spy and snitch groups (Committees For The Defense of the Revolution) are much more vigilant and obnoxious than usual. The goons of the Rapid Response Brigades (Cuba’s version of early Nazi Germany’s S.A.) roam the streets with chains and pipes menacing to shatter the teeth or chain-whip any malcontent or backslider.

Stalinist Cuba’s entire repressive apparatus is locked, loaded and poised.

The best guesses from the best sources, primarily the multinational staff of reporters and analysts of La Nueva Cuba, point to a possible power scuffle that has the regime very tense. “We’re worried,” said the head of Cuba’s Conference of Catholic bishops, José Félix Pérez Riera. “Things are calm on the surface for now. But we’re still very worried.”

Raul Castro heads Cuba’s Armed Forces. Ricardo Alarcon is “President” of Cuba’s “National Assembly” Signs point to some behind the scenes (granted, in Cuba everything’s behind the scenes) scuffling between Alarcon and his gang, against Raul Castro and his henchmen.

In plainspeak: the Communist geeks might be having it out with the Communist hoods to see who’ll run Cuba. The groups overlap slightly. Not all the geeks are with Alarcon and not at all the hoods are with Raul. In June when Raul addressed a military audience during military maneuvers he wore a bulletproof vest under his shirt, proof he’s not completely convinced of their loyalty. But rather than bore you with a list of three-word names that mean nothing I’ll leave it at that. There’s much speculation that the now famous “succession testament” of last Monday was authored — not by Fidel at all — but by Raul.

That Ricardo Alarcon’s name (by most estimates Cuba’s highest ranking civilian) was conspicuously absent from the document lends more credence to the theory of Raul’s authorship. Here’s proof that, regardless of what all those Academic “experts” babble and scribble, the highest ranking civilian in Cuba has less governmental authority than a dog-catcher has in Miami. Cuba’s military runs Cuba and has done so for years. If the term “Military dictatorship” ever fit a Latin American nation, it’s Cuba.

But I defy you to find the term in any MSM article on Cuba. I also defy you to find this term absent from any MSM article on Pinochet’s Chile, which was overwhelmingly civilian and robustly free-enterprise.

Last week’s “succession document” read on Cuban TV is proof that Cuba’s National Assembly is not a legislature but a joke, laughed at by everyone except academic “experts” and Think Tank soothsayers. Naturally these are the wizards we’ll see trotted out on TV and see quoted in the New York Times over the next few weeks.

This succession has acually been in the works for several months now. Raul Castro’s first official act in Jan. 1959 was lining up 100 potential regime opponents in front of a ditch and having them machine gunned and bulldozed into a mass grave. By the end of the year he had signed off on 550 murder warrants. As a rebel he was fond of shattering the victim’s skull with the coup de grace blast himself, much like his chum Che Guevara. So a little PR work was clearly needed. Starting in June the Cuban press commenced with the makeover. Raul the lovable grandpa and family man was the motif, which was expanded to include his crony Generals. Read these pieces and you’ll realize that, compared to Raul and his cronies, both Ward Cleaver and Ozzie Nelson were hopelessly dysfunctional dads.

Cuba’s military is fat and happy — has been for decades. They run Cuba. The only thing properly describable as an “industry” in Cuba (tourism) is run primarily by Cuba’s Generals. They also run the export industries. Ottoman Sultans would envy the life of these gentlemen. Among these Red robber-barons is Raul Castro’s favorite son-in-law, Col. Luis Alberto Rodríguez. Defectors report how their former colleagues, including Raul himself, syphon millions into Swiss Bank accounts. These gentlemen have the most at stake in this tense drama. If anyone craves a successful succession to Raul-rule, it’s these high-rolling graduates of Cuba’ Military Academy, and not just because of fiduciary considerations.

Tito Rodriguez Oltmans, a former Cuban freedom-fighter and political prisoner, watched many of these men, as young cadets, perform one of the requisites for graduation from Cuba’s military academy of the time. “They were all armed with Belgian .308 caliber FALs as they lined up for the firing squad” recalls Mr Rodriguez, a prisoner in La Cabana prison in the early 1960′s. “Every evening the cadets would be bused in from the Managua army base and the Mariel naval base near Havana. As darkness fell the condemned patriot — shirtless and gagged — would be dragged to the execution wall and bound. The cadets would line up only four meters in front of the patriot and all had loaded weapons.”….. FUEGO!

A brief aside: historically and almost universally, most members of a firing squad shoot blanks, to assauge their conscience. But such assuaging would contradict the Cuban firing squads’ most vital purpose, secretly named “El Compromiso Sangriento” (the Blood Covenant.) This tried and true Soviet scheme was presented by Soviet GRU agent Angel Ceutah to Che Guevara just days after he and Fidel entered Havana in January 1959. The scene was a meeting at Che’s palatial (and recently stolen) estate in Tarara just west of Havana. Every candidate for officer, suggested Ceutah, would take his place in a firing squad and pull the trigger with live ammo.

In front of a gen-you-wine Soviet GRU agent, Che(who often signed his name Stalin II) was breathlessly starstruck — probably hyperventilating. As chief commissar for Cuba’s new military and death squads, Che immediately embraced the idea. He was probably whooping and high-fiving with Ceutah in the process, coughing and wheezing while frantically fumbling for his asthma inhaler.

So let’s see here: a policy suggested by a Soviet butcher and adopted by an Argentine flunkie of murdering Cuban patriots, instantly became government policy in newly “nationalist” Cuba. I defy anyone to read any of the current crop of MSM articles or listen to one of the current crop of MSM interviews with the usual academic wizards that doesn’t stress how the Bush team mustn’t in any, any, any manner whatsoever even appear overbearing towards Cuba because of the prickly “nationalist” sentiments of Cuban “leaders.”

The point of the Blood Covenant was to bond the murderers, especially those in line for future leadership, with the murderous regime. The more shooters the more murderers. The more murderers thus manufactured, the more people on hand to resist any overthrow of their system. After thousands of firing-squad murders Cuba’s officer corps was plenty “bonded” to the regime. The fanatical and suicidal resistance by Hitler’s SS troopers against the advancing Red Army to the bitter end saw the same theme at work.

As I write, Raul and his crony generals fear the same potential retribution from any resistance that might sprout in their fiefdom. Not that armed resistance is even remotely possible in Cuba, unless it came from a few disaffected Generals or from Ramiro Valdez, who heads Cuba’s Secret police. Recall that Don Tattaglia resented Don Corleone’s hogging of certain privileges in their joint gangster fiefdom. The same thing among the same types is possible in Cuba.

Not that these high-rolling crooks would fight anything like the S.S. fought, or even like Clemenza and Sonny fought. The very notion is laughable. The Castroites’ cowardly clown-shows at the Bay of Pigs (40,000 Castroites barely defeating 1400 freedom-fighter and only after the latter were stabbed in the back, abandoned and had expended their last round)and in Angola (50,000 Castroites against 5000 South African troops, also without outside support of any kind) give a clue.

Stay tuned, this could get interesting.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” by David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

If improved health-care justifies Cuban Stalinism shouldn’t it justify African segregation? I don’t claim it does. I simply ask.

At any rate, does any moderately sober person out there think public schools in New Orleans, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit and Watts would stock my book with that unconventional claim about South Africa in their libraries?

Yet my book would be reporting facts completely verifiable by U.N. statistics.

Well, two children’s books, one titled Let’s Go to Cuba another Cuban Kids that depict Castro’s fiefdom as a combination Emerald City and Willi Wonka’s Chocolate Factory are currently stocked in Miami-Dade public school libraries. Some American parents of Cuban heritage in Miami saw that these books were crammed with the usual academic lies about Cuba, but in BigBird-speak for 9-year-olds. So they filed a complaint with the Miami-Dade school board who voted to remove one of the books.

The ACLU claims to be scandalized and filed suit to retain the book. “Today’s precedent — if allowed to stand” said the ACLU attorney, Howard Simon, “opens the door to yank virtually any book off the shelf of a school library at the whim of a single parent and a school board judgment that there is some inaccuracy or omission in a book.”

A little perspective: between 1990 and 2000, the American Library Association documented more than 6,000 protests against school books in public school libraries by American parents. For every protest actually recorded, they estimate that four or five go unreported. The door the learned Mr. Simon so dreads to hear creak open was yanked open long ago. It was propped open with a sturdy door-stop by a Supreme Court ruling in 1982 where none other than William Brennan wrote that local school boards had “broad discretion in the management of school affairs,” adding that if they removed a book based on it’s "educational suitability" or because the books were "pervasively vulgar," such actions “would not be unconstitutional.”

Granted if we endeavored to remove every asinine book from public school curriculums we’re in for a task to cower Sisyphus. But hey, it’s a start!

According to the American Library Association, over the past two decades, every single year sees between 400 and 600 such schoolbook protests in the U.S., much of it over material considered “racially insensitive” as when The Adventure’s of Huckleberry Finn were yanked from an Illinois school. The Tales of Uncle Remus and Little Black Sambo (though about low-caste Asian Indians rather than Negroes) also bit the dust long ago.

In brief, attempted “book bannings’” identical to the one in Miami-Dade, have occurred at a rate of over one a day for past two and half decades from sea to shining sea. In most of these the ACLU and New York Times have been conspicuously mum.

But AH! Just let those insufferable right-wing Cuban-Americans try it! Then the ACLU promptly blasts its bugles, their media cronies affect grave frowns, and cries of “censorship!” and “book- banning!” flood the airwaves and headlines. “Miami-Dade School Board Bans (italics mine) Cuba Book” headlines the New York Times.

Heaven knows Castro gets enough free publicity and soft-soaping from the worldwide Media /Academia axis as it is. Some Miami-Dade taxpayers have simply balked at subsidizing any more of this malignant idiocy, as millions of taxpayers throughout the U.S. for decades have balked at subsidizing everything from Heather Has Two Mommies to Huckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye to Harry Potter — usually without objection from the ACLU and the New York Times — indeed often with their accolades.

How the Miami parents’ objections amount to a vile and unprecedented lust to “censor!” and “ban!” while all the others amount to spreading “tolerance” and “sensitivity” and “upholding community values” might be best explained by George Orwell who coined the term “Newspeak.”

In choosing its books, a public school library is in effect “banning” all others, which include all of mine by the way…… Come to think of it?…..Every single college I attended (LSU, UNO, Tulane) — my own HOME STATE Colleges — the very Colleges whose diplomas I hang in my office — “BAN” every SINGLE ONE of my books! Do you see ME getting all indignant?! You see ME getting all bent OUTTA SHAPE and wailing about the first amendment and CENSORSHIP??!!..HECK NO!…I’ll have them know some of my books have been picked up by EUROPEAN publishers, translated and appear in MADRID’S RITZIEST bookstores and libraries! Spain’s former FIRST LADY did the Madrid BOOK READING!! — You HEAR THAT!!!…But you SEE ME running to the ACLU moaning and bitching because some PASTY-FACED PINKO professors in some TWO-BIT, freshwater colleges in some HICK state refuse to stock MY BOOKS!!??…..HECK NO!!!!!.. Do you see ME ranting and …..???!!!”

“Calm down, honey!…please…calm down now. Here…..and in a frosted mug and everything.” (My darling wife often comes to the rescue at these moments.)

Now where were we?……Okay, as all know, Mencken’s reporting on the Scopes trial makes for delicious reading. Little remembered is that Mencken, the free-speech fanatic, was, legally speaking, in full agreement with the prosecution. “The Tennessee anti-evolution law, whatever its wisdom,” wrote Mencken, “was at least constitutional…the yahoos of the state had a clear right to have their progeny taught whatever they chose.” This was local government in action, the principle of States’ Rights at work.

The ACLU doesn’t like those principles at work — at least in South Florida.

“The Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world,” rhapsodized the ACLU’s founder, Roger Baldwin, after a visit to the Bolshevik fiefdom. “Today I saw fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land.”

But that was early in the game, you say. Nobody knew how Bolshevism would play out. It was an honest mistake. Come on, cut the guy some slack.

Actually Baldwin wrote this in 1934. He greatly admired Stalin’s Russia.

Frank Bolanos the Cuban-American School board member who urges the “book-banning,” according to the New York Times and ACLU, seems to appreciate the U.S. constitution better than most of his native born journalistic and legal opponents with their multifarious and glittering LLD degrees. “This is not a First Amendment issue,” Bolanos wrote. “Censorship occurs when government refuses to allow people to purchase material, not when it refuses to provide that material at no charge.”

Mr. Bolanos, again unlike his illustrious and mega-credentialed native-born foes, also appreciates America’s founding fathers and quotes Thomas Jefferson “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

Alas, by bringing up Thomas Jefferson in attempting to influence the ACLU and the teacher’s unions, Mr. Bolanos erred grievously. The ACLU’s founder and guiding light proved in his proud pronouncements that he much preferred Stalin. And the teachers’ unions probably think Thomas Jefferson was the latest runner-up on American Idol.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” by David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

Fine, let’s survey his record regarding minorities, anti-government demonstrators and labor rights. First off, Che didn’t think much of Mexicans. Perhaps our Senatorial magnificoes who voted for amnesty last week should stifle all the pious gurgling about “hard-working migrants seeking to better their lives” blah..blah and simply quote Che himself while referring to the nationality mostly waving those Che placards and banners as: “a band of illiterate Indians.”

In 1956 while residing in Mexico and training with the Castro brothers for their “invasion” of Cuba, Che Guevara sneered at his hosts in those exact words. So recalls one of his military trainers, the Cuban, Miguel Sanchez. Wonder if “Chicano activists” know this? Probably not. They were too busy waving Che banners at the marches.

Che also delighted in belittling blacks. “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving,” that’s Che himself in his celebrated Motorcycle Diaries. Can’t imagine how Robert Redford omitted this from his charming movie.

Sanchez recalls how Che constantly tormented the black Cuban rebel, Juan Almedia. “Almedia would get furious!” says Sanchez. “So finally I told him: look Juan, if Che keeps calling you “el negrito,” turn around and call him “El Chancho” (“The Pig”; among the bourgeois debauchments most disdained by Ernesto Guevara were baths.) Sanchez reveals all this in the fascinating documentary “Che; Anatomia de un Mito.”

Wonder if Jesse Jackson knows this? Probably not. He was too busy bellowing “VIVA CHE!” while in Havana in 1984.

Never lacking in a sadistic sense of humor, a few years back Castro appointed Juan “el negrito” Almedia as the head of Cuba’s “Commission to Perpetuate the Memory of Commander Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.” This commission offers dedicated assistance to all visiting and “scholarly” Che Biographers. Yet somehow, none of the resulting Che biographies seem to perpetuate any memory of Che’s insults to Juan Almeida.

In his diaries Che also referred to Bolivian villagers as “animalitos” (little animals). Wonder if Evo Morales has read them? Probably not. He’s been too busy ribbon-cutting Che monuments in every Bolivian village.

Funnier still, the last immigrant march involved Che-shirt wearing migrants playing hookie from work. Fine, let’s look at their idol’s view on the matter. When Che became Cuba’s Minister of Industries in 1961 (and promptly wrecked Cuba’s Industries), among the most serious “crimes against revolutionary morals” was “laziness.” “In a collectivist society, where man works for society,” Che explained in Cuba’s official newspaper Revolucion, “loafing must be considered a crime, just like robbery! Our struggle against loafers, absenteeism and parasitism has reached tremendous proportions!”

As evidenced by the tens of thousands crammed into Cuba’s prison camps at the time. Che himself christened the first and most notorious of them at Guanacahibes, Cuba’s version of Siberia, but featuring broiling heat rather than cold. These camps were crammed to suffocation when Che discovered that — hold on to your Che-shirts Carlos Santana and Johnny Depp! Hold on to your Che beret Madonna! — people prefer working for wages rather than for free!

“Che is not only an intellectual — but the most complete human being of our time!” hailed a smitten Jean Paul Sartre in 1961. Yet Che’s towering intellect was completely confounded by this astounding revelation. Alas, his “new man” was going to take a little doing. The result was hundreds of thousands of Cubans crammed into concentration camps and an economy formerly stronger than half of Europe’s nations, crumpled into a smoldering ash heap.

Wonder if AFL-CIO “activists” know this? Probably not. They were too busy erecting Che billboards during May Day.

The Soviets ended up pumping the equivalent of eight Marshall Plans into Cuba. And Cuba was not a war-ravaged continent of 300 million in 1960. It was a nation of 6.5 million who’s citizens formerly earned more than Taiwan’s, Japan’s and Spain’s. The Soviet’s largesse resulted in Cuba’s living standard repelling Haitians even 40 years later. This defies — not just the laws of economics — but the laws of physics. The results of LBJ’s “War On Poverty” seem spectacular in comparison. Maybe Jack Nicholson’s right? Maybe Castro’s some kind of “genius” after all?

In the mid 1930′s Stalin issued a decree “against individuals who refuse to participate in collective effort and leading an antisocial and parasitic life.” (I.e., people who resist slavery.) Siberia’s GULAG was soon flooded with victims. Che must have taken note. He emulated the procedure perfectly and the barbed wire, machine gun towers and guard dogs at Guanacahibibes took care of the resulting flood of Cuban “individualists” and “antisocial miscreants,” as their criminal charges read.

“Individualism must disappear!” thundered this t-shirt idol of “do-your-own-thing” Bohemians in a 1961 speech in Havana. Interestingly, the cheeky Ernesto Guevara’s signature on his early correspondence read: “Stalin II”

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” By David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

This year Forbes raised his ranking to the world’s 7th richest head of state, with an estimated fortune of $900 million. “Repugnant slander!” Castro thundered on Cuban television (all twelve of them) this week. The “President” of Cuba’s National Bank, Francisco Soberon, also chimed in:

“The Cuban revolution and its Maximum Leader are an example of honesty and ethical conduct in this chaotic and corrupt world into which the empire has cast humanity,” he added.

Actually, Castro has a point. He has no business being lumped in with measly millionaire chumps like Mobutu Sese Seko and Queen Elizabeth. Forbes admits that its estimate of Castro’s wealth is “more art than science,” and is based on his partial ownership of state enterprises, among them the Havana Convention Center, the Cimex retail conglomerate and Medicuba. But as Cuban-American scholar Eugenio Yanez asks: why not include many other, and much larger, Cuban state enterprises like Cubatabaco, Artex, Cubacatricos, Cubatecnica, Gaviota, Acemex, Cubatur, Antex, Caribat, Cubatur, and many more? The list is much longer than those singled out by Forbes.

Another method used by Forbes was calculating that Castro owns roughly ten per cent of the Cuban GDP. Why only ten per cent?

All enterprises in Cuba are state enterprises, including so-called “joint-ventures” with foreign investors, as shown by a Miami Herald headline from June of 2005: “Many Foreign Investors Being Booted Out of Cuba” it read.

“It’s outrageous!” the Herald quoted a Spanish businessmen leaving Cuba. ”I’ve gone through endless meetings for more than a year with no result in terms of recovering our investment!”‘ he whimpered.

“What I can’t accept,” wailed another European businessman, ” is simply being booted out of here with no solid guarantee I will ever get my money back!”

Our hearts bleed for these unfortunate gentlemen. Also notice: the investors were being booted out of Cuba. But the investments remained, as did those of the 5,911 businesses valued at close to $2 billion stolen at gunpoint from U.S. owners and investors in 1960. A few owners who resisted like Howard Anderson, who had his Jeep dealership stolen, and Tom Fuller, whose family farm was stolen, were promptly murdered by Castro and Che’s firing squads.

Interestingly, new Bolivian president Evo Morales had a lengthy meeting with Fidel Castro just last week. Immediately upon returning to Bolivia, Morales announced the “nationalization” (looting) of all the foreign-owned (primarily Brazilian) natural gas companies in Bolivia. Rafael Dausa, Cuba’s brand new ambassador to Bolivia, is among Cuba’s highest ranking intelligence officers.

Fidel Castro is officially Cuba’s Chief of State, Head of Government, Prime Minister, First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Bank President Francisco Soberon didn’t refer to him as the “Maximum Leader” for nothing. So why does Forbes only estimate his control of Cuba’s GDP at ten-per-cent? “The right to enjoy and to dispose of things in the most absolute manner as he pleases,” is how a legal dictionary defines property. To “dispose” is the key phrase in the legal definition of property. In brief: something is genuinely yours only if you have the right to sell it. As such, Castro owns 100 per cent of Cuban enterprises along with the full fruits of the labor of his 11 million subjects.

Article 33.1. of the Cuban “Constitution” states: “The workers in joint ventures who are Cuban shall be contracted by an employing entity proposed by the (Cuban) Ministry of Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation, and authorized by the (Cuban) Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

Article 33.4. states: “Payments to Cuban workers in Cuba shall be made in national currency, which must be obtained beforehand from convertible foreign currency.

In other words, say the Cuban Ministry of Labor decides that the salary for your Cuban laborers (who are forbidden under penalty of prison or firing squad from striking) is 100 pesos a week. Then you would pay 100 dollars or Euros per laborer to the Cuban government (of which Castro is Maximum Leader.) The government stashes this currency and pays the hapless Cuban worker 100 worthless Cuban pesos, which varies in value from 15-20 per U.S. dollar. In the Dark and Fascistic Batista Age the Cuban peso was always interchangeable one to one with the U.S. dollar. Elsewhere they call this chattel slavery. Neither Red China nor Red Viet-Nam have such mandates for foreign investors.

A Cuban resident is most valuable to Castro when he wants to escape Cuba. This writer’s family paid $15,000 to get a cousin out of Cuba in the early 60′s. This was not an easy amount for destitute refugees to round up at the time, but the firing squads were working triple shifts and Cuba’s prisons were filled to suffocation. You weren’t only paying for a loved ones’ freedom, you might also be paying for his (or her) life. Armando Valladares, who somehow escaped the firing squad but spent 22 torture-filled years in Cuba’s Gulag, described his trial very succinctly: “not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me.” Valladares had been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk.

One day in early 1959 one of Che’s Revolutionary Courts actually found a Cuban army captain named Pedro Morejon innocent of the charge of “war-criminal.” This brought Che’s fellow comandante, Camilo Cienfuegos to his feet. “If Morejon is not executed,” He yelled. “I’ll put a bullet through his head myself!” The court reassembled frantically and quickly arrived at a new verdict. Morejon crumpled in front of a firing squad the following day. As Castro’s chief executioner, Che Guevara, explained it: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” So you can see the sense of urgency of getting a relative out, especially if the authorities had set their sights on him as a counter-revolutionary. Elsewhere they call such a judiciary process at the hands of dictators, “death squads.”

Most Cuban-exile families can relate similar cases of ransoming relatives. Elsewhere they call this “kidnapping and extortion.”

Cuba’s campesinos (country folk) were among the first to learn the bitter lesson of ownership in Castro’s Cuba and consequently rise in arms against Castroism. In 1959 with cameras rolling, flashbulbs popping and reporters scribbling, Castro’s much-lauded “Institute of Agrarian Reform” made a big show of handing out land “titles” to thousands of beaming campesinos.

Soon these new “owners” learned they were prohibited from selling “their” land. More interestingly, the produce grown on “their” land could only be sold to the government. More interesting still, the price paid for “their” produce was the government’s whim. Elsewhere they called this “serfdom.”

Castro quickly ended the charade and all agricultural laborers were herded into granjas, i.e. collective farms identical to Soviet kolkhozes. Indeed, Soviet agricultural “advisors,” still flush from their success in the Ukraine, had been advising Cuba’s INRA (Institute of Agrarian Reform) from day one. The Cuban campesino’s desperate, bloody and lonely rebellion against their enslavement spread to the towns and cities and lasted from late 1959 to 1966. Castro himself admitted that his troops, militia and Soviet advisors were up against 179 different “bands of bandits” as they labelled these freedom-fighting rednecks. Tens of thousands of troops, scores of Soviet advisors, and squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers finally extinguished the lonely Cuban freedom-fight. Elsewhere they call this “an insurgency.”

This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America’s shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you’ll read about it in the MSM and all you’ll learn about it from those illustrious Ivy-League Academics. To get an idea of the odds faced by those rural rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of “Scarface.” Enrique Encinosa documents this heroic rebellion in his superb book, Unvanquished. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” was how one of the few surviving rebels described their insurgency.

In 1962 the Kennedy-Khrushchev swindle that “solved” the Missile Crisis — not only starved these freedom-fighters of the measly aid they’d been getting from Cuban-exile freebooters (who were rounded up for violating U.S. neutrality laws) — it also sanctioned the 44,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. Elsewhere they call this “foreign occupation.”

A few years earlier, with Castro’s rebels skirmishing against (mostly bribing, actually) Batista’s army, U.S. reporters had swarmed into Cuba’s hills lugging cameras and tape recorders for fawning interviews with the gallant Fidel and his strutting rebel comandantes. Print reporters from Herbert Matthews of the New York Times to Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, TV figures from Robert Taber of CBS to Ed Sullivan, all interviewed (soft-soaped) the Cuban Robin Hood for the folks back home. Even a reporter for Boy’s Life magazine made the scene.

All this coming and going by foreign press agencies was somehow managed while Cuba suffered under “a stifling and murderous dictatorship!” or so these reporters and commentators constantly reminded their gaping audience. To accommodate the media mob, Castro’s people camp finally assembled a separate building at his campsite with a sign “Press Hut.”

Came a genuine rebellion against a genuine dictatorship — and one involving ten times the number of rebels (and casualties) as the one against Batista as well as lasting twice as long — and nary an intrepid reporter was to be found anywhere near Cuba’s hills. Not that these “valiant crusaders for the truth,” as Columbia School of Journalism hails their noble profession, weren’t in Cuba. From Laura Berquist of Look Magazine to Jean Daniel of The New Republic to Lee Lockwood of Life they were all in Havana lining up for fawning “interviews” — not with the rebels this time — but with their jailers and assassins, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

If the Britain in V for Vendetta bordered Castro’s Cuba she’d be mobbed with grateful political refugees who’d scale walls to bask in her relative freedom. At one point in 1961 one of every 18 Cubans was a political prisoner, a higher ratio than in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

Castro can dispose of every business on his captive island in any manner he chooses. He can do the same with his every Cuban captive. He can just as easily rent them out as slave labor, as sell them for ransom, as jail them, as shoot them. Forbes lists only the tiny-tip of the Castro-wealth iceberg.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” By David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

Earlier, many film festivals refused to screen it. Now many Latin American countries refuse to show it. The film’s offenses are many and varied. Most unforgivable of all, Che Guevara is shown killing people in cold blood. Who ever heard of such nonsense? And just where does this uppity Andy Garcia get the effrontery to portray such things? The man obviously doesn’t know his place.

And just where did Garcia get this preposterous notion of pre-Castro Cuba as a relatively prosperous but politically troubled place, they ask? All the Cubans he portrays seem middle class? Where in his movie is the tsunami of stooped and starving peasants that carried Fidel and Che into Havana on it’s crest, they ask? Where’s all those diseased and illiterate laborers and peasants my professors, Dan Rather, CNN and Oliver Stone told me about, ask the critics?

Garcia — that cinematic bomb-thrower — has seriously jolted the Mainstream Media’s fantasies and hallucinations of pre-Castro Cuba, of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general. In consequence, the critics are unnerved and disoriented. Their annoyance and scorn is spewing forth in review after review.

Garcia blew it. If only his characters had spoken with accents like John Belushi’s as a Saturday Night Live Killer Bee! If only they’d dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they’d behaved like Cheech and Chong! If only they’d mimicked the mannerisms and gait of Freddie Prinze in Chico and the Man! If only the women had piled a roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen Miranda in Road to Rio! If only the cast had looked like the little guy who handles my luggage when I visit Cancun! Or the guys who do my lawn! Everybody knows that’s what Hispanics look like!

If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in salt mines like Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad or getting lashed by a vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a living like Ratso Rizzo!

“In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly fought,”sniffs Peter Reiner in The Christian Science Monitor. The Lost City misses historical complexity.”

Actually what’s missing is Mr. Reiner’s historical knowledge. Andy Garcia and screenwriter Guillermo Cabrera Infante knew full well that “the working poor” had no role in the stage of the Cuban Revolution shown in the movie. The Anti-Batista rebellion was led and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba’s middle — and especially, upper — class. To wit: in August of 1957 Castro’s rebel movement called for a “National Strike” against the Batista dictatorship — and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. The “National Strike” was completely ignored.

Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their “liberators,” reporting to work en masse.

“Garcia’s tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few,” harrumphs Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice. “Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reasonu2014or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.”

What’s “absolutely absent” is Mr Atkinson’s knowledge about the Cuba Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that “moneyed 1 per cent,” and especially his “peasant revolution” epitomize the clichéd idiocies still parroted by the chattering classes about Cuba.

“The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips,” snorts Stephen Holden in The New York Times. “Political dialogue in the film is strictly of the junior high school variety.”

It’s Holden’s education on the Cuban Revolution that’s of the “junior high school variety.” Actually it’s Harvard Graduate School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba are heard in Ivy league classrooms than in any rural junior high school.

“It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution,” complains Rex Reed in the New York Observer.

You’re better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth Society but nonetheless I’ll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by America’s most prestigious academics and its most learned film critics. I’ll even stay away from those “crackpots” and “hotheads” in Miami. In place of those insufferable “revanchists” and “hard-liners” I’ll use a source generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types, the United Nations.

Here’s a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957 : “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” it starts. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a higher percentage then in the U.S.”

In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages in the world. In the 1950′s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an 8 hour work-day in 1933 — five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. Add to this: one month’s paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) Social-Democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this till 30 years later.

And get this Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchel, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies — Cuban women got three months paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930′s. Cuba, a country 71 per cent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S.

The Anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself.) Here’s the makeup of the “peasant revolution’s” first cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the Anti-Batista fight: 7 lawyers, 2 University professors, 3 University students, 1 doctor, 1 engineer, 1 architect, 1 former city mayor and Colonel who defected from the Batista Army. A notoriously “bourgeois” bunch as Che himself might have put it.

By 1961 however, workers and campesinos (country folk)-made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. And boy, would THAT rebellion make for an action-packed and gut-wrenching movie! If by some miracle it ever got made you can bet these learned critics would pan it too. Who ever heard of poor country-folk fighting against their benefactors Fidel and Che?

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden also sneers at Garcia’s implication that ” life sure was peachy before Fidel Castro came to town and ruined everything. “

In fact, Mr Holden, before Castro “came to town,” Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off Hammerheads and Tiger Sharks .

The learned Mr Holden is also annoyed by “buffoonish parodies of sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders.” Apparently, Communist apparatchiks should be properly depicted as somewhat misguided social workers, or as slightly overzealous Howard Dean campaign staffers.

It’s no “parody,” Mr Holden, that the “apparatchiks” Garcia depicts in his movie incarcerated and executed a higher percentage of their countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his apparatchiks jailed and executed in their first three years. As well complain that the guards and police in Schinldler’s List, Julia or The Diary of Anne Frank come across as hackneyed caricatures. Instead let’s portray them with more “complexity,” as misguided idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working class from its subserviance to snooty barons, who eradicated Germany’s unemployment and who ended Germany’s national humiliation at the hands of Europe’s premier Imperialist powers.

Andy Garcia shows it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a rebellion not a revolution. Cubans expected political change not a socio-economic cataclysm and catastrophe. But I fully realize such distinctions are much too “complex” for a film critic to grasp. They prefer boneheaded clichés. Garcia might have followed the laudable examples of “historical complexity” and “accuracy” shown in previous movies on Cuba. Take two that these critics compare (favorably) to The Lost City, Havana and Godfather II.

In Havana, the brilliant director Sydney Pollack casts Fulgencio Batista with blond hair and blue eyes. In fact Batista was a Black. In Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola, to show Havana streets on New Years Eve 1958, casts more people than marched in Los Angeles last week and depicts them in a battle scene right out of Braveheart. In fact Havana streets were deathly quiet that night.

I don’t presume to the exalted position of a film critic. So I don’t comment on the dramatic and cinematic criticisms made by these august critics. I’m not saying, or even implying, that The Lost City is a better movie than the Godfather II. I’m simply criticizing the critics on their criticism of The Lost City’s historical accuracy. In these reviews we see — in all it’s classic splendor — the Mainstream Media’s thundering and apparently incurable stupidity on matters Cuban.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] is the author of Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you’ll never forget.” By David Limbaugh. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart says, “Humberto Fontova has done a great service to all those who wish to discover the truth about the only totalitarian dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.”

You’ll recall how on prime time TV in 1986 the famous archeologist, Rivera, hosted and narrated the excavation of Al Capone’s secret tomb. During the show’s lengthy foreplay, the panting host hinted that — among a stash of many other fascinating curiosities — Capone’s crypt contained: "the bones of those who annoyed him!"

In fact, while digging through all the dirt they found more dirt. They found nothing related to Capone. The show was a gaffe from start to finish. Geraldo handled it masterfully. His tap-dance shamed Ashley Simpson’s on Saturday Night Live. "A silly high-concept stunt that failed to deliver on its titillating promise," Rivera himself described it in his autobiography. This being America, the show earned the highest ratings for a syndicated special in TV history and catapulted Rivera to media stardom beyond the wildest dreams of even Donald Trump. Ashley Simpson take note.

But we were talking about Jesse "Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I’ve ever met! Viva Fidel!" Jackson. After the (mostly black) New Orleans refugees were evacuated from those "slaveship hulls," Reverend Jesse Jackson quickly rummaged up another angle. "Katrina destroyed its victims’ homes," he wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "we shouldn’t let the administration make them exiles from their own city!"

Jackson now implied that the crafty and racist Bush administration was busing these people into: "permanent exile." For the first month after the storm, we’d heard that not evacuating people from New Orleans was a racist plot. Then it turned out that the evacuation itself was a racist plot — a vast white-wing conspiracy to ethnically cleanse New Orleans, to turn it white again.

"Karl Rove is a political reconstructionist who wants to change the character of Louisiana politics." Jackson declared. "When Bush promised to remove the legacy of racism in New Orleans, he meant he’d remove the poor who were victims of that racism. Bush isn’t planning urban renewal, he’s planning urban removal. The administration has given the victims of Katrina a one-way ticket out with no plan for their return."

Apparently, when those racist Republicans finally caught on, they devised an ingenious scheme to return New Orleans to the historic role Mick Jagger celebrated in Brown Sugar (Gold coast slaveship bound for cotton fields, sold in the market down in New Orleans.) But ah! You’ve got to wake up pretty early in the morning to put something over on Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/Push operatives. They’re not falling for it. So they quickly mobilized to foil this Republican villainy.

"They’re trapped in those rescue camps," Jackson explained his humanitarian campaign to the media. "They (the New Orleans refugees) should have the right to return and priority in jobs and housing." And so he led over 200 of these "trapped New Orleanians" in a five-bus caravan that started in Chicago wound through St Louis, Memphis, Mobile and Jackson and finally pulled up to New Orleans on October 11th.

"Their accents don’t sound right for New Orleanians," noted New Orleans natives Shantell and Woodrow Arnold after they boarded one of the Rainbow/Push buses in Jackson Ms. The buses landed amidst much fanfare and the local TV and radio stations were on hand to interview the multitude of returning "New Orleanians."

But the accents didn’t sound right to the media people holding the mics either. They went from one returnee to the other, frantically seeking an actual New Orleanian. Turned out, exactly 14 of the 200 people were from New Orleans. And when the rest of the bus riders discovered the state of local conditions 75 per cent of them promptly boarded the buses and fled back to their homes in Memphis, Chicago, Mobile, etc. "It was hard to convince displaced residents to return home," finally admitted Denise Dixon, national field organizer for the Rainbow/PUSH coalition.

But nary a peep issued from Reverend Jackson regarding the discrepancy, nary a hint that something other than a racist Republican plot to ethnically cleanse New Orleans was at work.

One of the precious few New Orleanians on a returning bus did have a comment for the local media. "One person can change their community!" declared Travis Houston to the local Times Picayune." One community can change a city! One city can change a nation — and one nation can change the world!"

Jesse himself could not have put it any better. But that’s where the resemblance ends. According to local media, Mr. Travis signed on with a clean up crew and toils daily, which is to say: he works for a living.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

From many eye-witness accounts Che’s own victims conducted themselves much differently on their last day alive. "Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!" "The defiant yells would make the walls of La Cabana tremble," writes eyewitness Armando Valladares.

Outside of Havana and in the countryside Che’s murder victims often faced the firing squads untrussed, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. "Aim right HERE!" was a favorite among some of the these as they reached below the belt. This was a favorite, they say, of the campesinos Castro and Che’s firing squads were murdering during the Escambray rebellion. "Cause y’all ain’t got any!" yelled these Cuban rednecks right before the volley shattered their bodies.

Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.

On Christmas eve 1961 Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding "bandits" (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the theft of their land) When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant.

Traditionally, firing squads have only or two of its members with loaded guns. The rest shoot blanks. Not Castro and Che’s. In these, all ten members shot (and still shoot) live ammo — all ten bullets rip into the staked hero or heroine. This incorporates more members into Castro’s criminal organization, more members to resist desperately any overthrow of the system with the consequent settling of accounts.

Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.2 million. According to the human Rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison camps. At one time during 1961—62, 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses islandwide. This makes Castro’s political incarceration rate higher than Stalin and Hitler’s.

"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"

This is from Che’s famous Motorcycle Diaries, recently made into a heartwarming movie by Robert Redford. It seems that Mr. Redford omitted this passage from his touching film. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of defenseless men (and boys.)

In actual combat (puerile skirmishes, actually) his imbecilities defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted" Guevara, Groucho Marx in Duck Soup comes across like Hannibal. The century’s most famous guerrilla fighter in fact never fought in anything properly describable as a guerrilla war (see, Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant). When he finally started getting a tiny taste of one in Bolivia he was promptly routed.

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," declared the Cuban Revolution’s 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."

By the way, exactly a month after this declaration by his chief executioner, Castro received an engraved invitation: Harvard Law School was asking the honor of his presence to address them. "Castro visit triumphant!" blared the Harvard Law Record on April 30, 1959. "The audience got what it wanted — the chance of seeing the Cuban hero in person, if not at as close a range as might have been desired!"

Castro brought the house down, the very roof shook with the cheers and whoops of the faculty and student body at the world’s most prestigious institution of Western jurisprudence.

One defector claims Che signed 400 death warrants during the first month of the Cuban Revolution. Another says over 600. 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.

The scope of Che Guevara’s mass murder is unclear. The exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. The number of men (and boys) who Che sent, without trial, to be bound to a stake and blown apart by bullets runs from the hundreds to the thousands. And the mass executioner’s T-shirt adorns the very people who oppose capitol punishment — as Harvard Law School’s faculty certainly did while clapping, hyperventilating and throwing their panties at Castro on stage.

Che’s image is particularly ubiquitous on college campuses. But in the wrong places. He belongs in the marketing, PR, and advertising departments. His lessons and history are fascinating and valuable, but only in light of P.T. Barnum. One born every minute, Mr. Barnum? If only you’d lived to see the Che phenomenon. Actually, 10 are born every second.

His pathetic whimpering on his last day alive: "Don’t shoot!" I’m Che!" I’m worth to you more alive than dead!" proves that this murdering swine was unfit to carry his victims’ slop buckets.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

Finally a FEMA official proclaimed: “NO!” Many of the boats were deemed unfit to be used. They could not help rescue desperate people. These boats may have been perfectly seaworthy and had able-bodied owners perfectly anxious to donate their efforts to the rescue — what they lacked were: THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF LIFE PRESERVERS. One per potential rescuee presumably, as required by Coast Guard. Even ghastlier, the FEMA folks explained, some rescuees may have been forced to sit on the floors of some boats, which were also deficient in number of seats, one per rescuee, presumably again.

So instead let’s allow people to drown, hunh, Mr. FEMA person!

Then the few volunteer boats who passed the inspection were only allowed to rescue people until nightfall. The swamp tour owner defied the order and brought out 100 (very grateful) people that night on his own.

Another acquaintance owns a food wholesale business. He offered the $2.5 million worth of food in his warehouse to feed desperate hurricane victims. Four Army helicopters started revving their rotors, prepared to fly in and start hauling out the food.

Then an FAA official stepped in and nixed the mission. The food warehouse, you see, was located within a mile of a NASA facility… Heard about many, many more such bureaucratic idiocies which I’ll report in due course. I’m still digging out myself.

My sister-in-law was in a New Orleans Hospital when savages broke in and started looting, raping. She was helicoptered out in the nick of time. She mighta been a U.S. embassy worker in Saigon circa May 1975, or even a Rolling Stone at the Altamont Speedway circa December 1969. Some hideous stuff went on down here.

As for us, the extended Louisiana Fontova’s (17 of us) evacuated to my brother’s (very large, thank God) home in Houston for the storm. We’re back now, but found our house demolished. My parents house closer to New Orleans flooded, but not to the roof, only a few inches, just enough to ruin carpets, some furniture, sheetrock, etc. We’re all camping out at my sister’s house three blocks away from mine that somehow escaped major damage.

So some Fontova’s are refugees again?

Big deal! We did it before, with a major difference: you can buy insurance against Katrina. None was offered against Castro. So this is a breeze. No power down here yet. But we’re eating well using propane burner and Bar-B-Cue on much of the fish and game we pulled from the freezer, which was still cold. Heck, outside cookery on fish and game was pretty much how we always ate.

Alas, those vicious, hateful rednecks came through again. A huge crew of them with chain saws, bobcats, tarps, and brawn descended on my property and cleared a path for us to enter the house, then cleared out much of the downed timber and hauled off part of my detached roof. They brought food, water — most importantly hope and good cheer. They descended from Nashville and Tulsa and belong to a First Baptist congregation which has a church in our neighborhood to which we DON’T belong.

No matter. They were helping EVERYBODY and ANYBODY in trouble. Unreal….much more to come, amigos, when I get better situated and some electricity.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

My entire family came rushing into the den when I exploded — not in rage — but in mirth. “WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE!” Eric was singing.

“EXACTLY, Eric!” I roared “You NAILED IT, amigo!” That was the exact refrain from 6.3 million Cubans (Cuba’s population in 1959) when Fidel and Che took over.

The fiendishly clever Cuban-American National Foundation itself might have produced the show, or slipped him the song list to expose Burdon as a jackass. Che provoked the biggest political exodus in the history of the western hemisphere. Yet the thundering irony was lost on Eric, not to mention the PBS producers.

When your professor calls Che a “guerrilla fighter” he’s correct, but unwittingly. The term “Indian fighter” was used for cowboys who fought against Indians right?

Well, did your history prof tell you that one of the bloodiest and longest guerrilla wars on this continent was fought — not by — but against Fidel and Che, and by landless peasants?

Didn’t think so. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s Kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway. Had these rebels gotten a fraction of the aid the Afghan Mujahedeen got, the Viet Cong got — indeed that George Washington’s rebels got from the French — had these Cuban rebels gotten any help, my kids would speak Spanish and Miami’s jukeboxes today would carry Tanya Tucker rather than Gloria Estefan.

Che had a very bloody (and typically cowardly) hand in one of the major anti-insurgency wars on this continent. 80 per cent of these anti-communist guerrillas were executed on the spot upon capture, a Che specialty. For my book I interviewed several of the lucky former rebels who managed to escape the slaughter. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” I titled the chapter, using the phrase one used to describe their desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through their proxies Fidel and Che.

In 1956 when Che linked up with Fidel, Raul, and their Cuban chums in Mexico city, one of them (now in exile) recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as “Fascists!” and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.

In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. He had a hand in the following: “Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits.” At one point in 1962, one of every 17 Cubans was a political prisoner. Fidel himself admits that they faced 179 bands of “counter-revolutionaries” and “bandits.”

Mass murder was the order in Cuba’s countryside. It was the only way to decimate so many rebels. These country folk went after the Reds with a ferocity that saw Fidel and Che running to their Soviet sugar daddies and tugging their pants in panic. That commie bit about how “a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people, etc.” fit Cuba’s anti-Fidel and Che rebellion to a T. So in a relocation and concentration campaign that shamed anything the Brits did to the Boers, the gallant Communists ripped hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their ancestral homes and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba. I interview several of these “relocated” families too.

One of these Cuban redneck wives refused to be relocated. After her husband, sons, and a few nephews were murdered by the Gallant Che and his minions, she grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip and took to the hills. She became a rebel herself. Cubans know her as La Nia Del Escambray.

For a year she ran rings around the Communist armies sweeping the hills in her pursuit. Finally she ran out of ammo and supplies and the reds rounded her up. Amazingly, she wasn’t executed (Che must have taken that day off.) For years La Nia suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons, but she lives in Miami today. Seems to me her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of “Women’s Studies,” for a Susan Sarandon role, for a little whooping up by Gloria Steinem, Dianne Feinstein and Hillary herself.

Think about it: here’s that favored theme for Hollywood producers and New York publishers — “the feisty woman.” Well, they don’t come much feistier than Zoila Aguila, her real name. Had she been fighting, say, Somoza or Pinochet, you can bet your last penny Hollywood and New York would be ALL OVER her story. Instead she fought the Left’s most picturesque poster boys. So, naturally, nobody’s heard of her.

Your professor, the fool, probably thinks Fidel and Che were guerrillas. Few fables get as much currency. Next week we’ll blow that fable sky high.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

Property is one thing, innocent lives another. An Earth First! Journal boasts: “Life is sacred, but many of us doubt that multinational takeover artists who liquidate old growth forests to pay off junk bonds qualify as Life-forms. Such Robotoids, should be classed with damns, dozers and drillers. A ‘Hit List’ is available upon discreet inquiry.”

In April 1995 the president of The California Forestry Association, Gil Murray, a husband and a father of three, was blown apart by a nail bomb sent to his office by Unabomber Ted Kazcynski. The Unabomber had lifted Murray’s address from that very “Hit-List.” After his conviction as a serial murderer the Earth First Journal included Ted Kazcynski among “political prisoners who deserve our support,” because, “they are in there for us.”

Earth First founder Dave Foreman wrote, “The blood of timber executives is my natural drink, and the wail of dying forest supervisors is music to my ears.” A charming cartoon in the same Journal says: “Trees are for hanging. Kill a developer.”

Last year an executive of Forest Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company in Laurel NY, had his home and his family vehicles repeatedly spray-painted with “Puppy-Killer! and “Murderer!” by Animal Liberation Front “activists." These “activists” also posted the executives phone number, license plates and bank account on the ALF website. Finally on May 9, 2005 the “activists” followed the executive’s wife to her workplace, again vandalized her car and stole several credit cards. They used these to buy $20,000 in Travelers Checks that were sent to a number of “charities.”

A post on the ALF website stated “If we find out a dime of that money granted to those charities was taken back we will strip you bare and burn your (expletive)!”

The revelation that from July 1998 through 2003, PETA killed 12,473 dogs and cats at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters was also worth a sour chuckle. People donated these pets to PETA thinking these tender hearted souls would find them homes. Instead they gassed them to death. PETA claimed it had no choice, for financial reasons. They just couldn’t house and feed the creatures indefinitely. Yet PETA reported $29 million in income last year. Where does it go? It goes towards media stunts and legal fees for animal rights terrorists and vandals, that’s where.

All in all, I prefer laughing at the less rabid among greenies, though the lines between the radical (ELF, ALF, Earth First) and the moderate (Sierra Club, GreenPeace, PETA) groups gets increasingly fuzzy. “Earthworms are far more valuable than people,” declares Sierra Club Board member and Greenpeace founder Paul Watson “The world will be a much nicer place without us humans.”

“Humans have grown like a cancer!” says PETA head, Ingrid Newkirk “We’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth! There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. Would I rather the research lab that tests animals is reduced to a bunch of cinders?” she raves on. “Yes! I will be the last person to condemn ALF. Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all mammals.”

PETA vegetarian campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich says “blowing stuff up and smashing windows — is something PETA doesn’t do — but I do advocate it.”

Besides marveling at their writings, utterings and media monkeyshines, I’ve dealt with these people face to face in some media monkeyshining of my own, mostly on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect where I was a regular guest during the final year of the show, appearing four times. Maher isn’t just a PETA member — he’s on PETA’s board of directors. So he always invited a mob of his Hollywood greenie chums to lynch me.

“Tonight’s guests include the bloodthirsty assassin and fascist Humberto Fontova — ‘sic him!” It’s one thing to have a host — Chris Matthews or Tim Russert — as adversary. It’s another to have the entire panel snarling and lunging for your throat as on Crossfire or the McLaughlin Group. It’s even MORE fun to have the host, the entire panel and even the studio audience howling for your head, as I had on Politically Incorrect.

The illogic and absurdity of their rantings — even by Hollywood star and starlet standards — was something to behold. Ah yes, California: a place where you’re denounced for spearfishing — by the patrons of a sushi bar! Here were (the late) James Coburn, Tom Green, Florence Henderson, among others, gnawing on buffalo wings and salmon croquets in the greenroom, then going on stage to bash me for hunting ducks and spearing fish.

“The difference between you and me, James,” I chuckled at an enraged Coburn. “Is the difference between Don Barzini and Mikey Corleone.” Coburn sat back and glowered at me. “Others pulled the triggers, but Barzini put the hit on Don Corleone, remember? Just like you put a hit on a cuddly creature every time you buy meat. Now recall McCluskey’s and Sollazo’s fate in that restaurant. Mikey insisted on carrying out his own hits. That’s me. I do my own dirty work. Those mallards and grouper I hunt down, assassinate then eat, are no deader than the chicken and salmon I watched you eat fifteen minutes ago. And until I whacked them, they lived a much more enjoyable life than the chicken you’re still digesting. Me, I revel in the role nature handed me, predator — no guilty conscience about it whatsoever. You hand off the responsibility to a slaughterhouse worker. Fine, that’s your business. But don’t get all smug about it. You’re as culpable for that chicken’s death as I am for the duck’s. But unlike you — I look nature’s cruel mandates right in the face!”

Naturally Bill went right to a commercial break after my outburst.

“This is too damn easy,” I finally told Bill. “I’m a hunter for heaven’s sake. I like a challenge, some sport. Get me on here with some vegetarians next time. That’ll make my job harder.”

“‘A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,’ says PETA” I raved on another show at Maher himself. “Fine, but rats, pigs and dogs all hunt and kill other animals. Yet you PETA people want to deny the boy the same role. You contradict your own doctrine.”

“My dog doesn’t hunt!” shouted former Talk Soup host John Henson from beside me.

‘No John,” I laughed. “That’s because you pay someone to kill a wild horse, grind it up and put it in a can for him. You do this every time you buy dog food, amigo.”

“Yeah Right!” sneered Tom Green. “Pigs hunt?”

“Yes Tom,” I said rolling my eyes. “In fact wild pigs eat their prey — rabbits, snakes, birds — alive. Granted you wont learn this from a stool at Starbucks. Get out in the woods and you’d see it…..And you out there!” I said pointing at the booing, snarling studio audience.” What do you animal rightists feed your cats, hunh? Many of you love cats, right? Feed it vegetables and you can be locked up for animal cruelty. You’ll starve it to death. Feed it cat food and you’re paying for the murder of chickens, fish, pigs, cows, etc. So go ahead, feel all smug. — and another thing! You gals like those bee-stung lips and wrinkle free faces, right? Well, where the hell you think collagen comes from? I’ll tell ya: murdered cows! And that lipstick on your bee stung lips — the glycerine in them also comes from boiling the corpses of murdered cows! And the Lanolin in your hand cream and in the suntan lotion you wear on Venice Beach — murdered sheep this time! And that film in the cameras you use to photograph spotted owls and old growth redwoods — glycerine again, from murdered cows again! And the transmission and brake fluid in the Volvos you drove here in — murdered and boiled cows again!”

Then I turned back to the camera. “And Oprah — you out there? Your crack about never eating another hamburger made you the Animal Rights poster girl. Well, cows are murdered and boiled for the ingredients in hair straightener too!”

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

I tried to ignore it. But the voice erupted again, louder this time. No mistaking it now: my old “friend” Wes from LSU. “Doug Neidermeier” we’d nicknamed him. Quite appropriately, the nickname was coined by Pelayo during a Toga party. I flipped the spout, took a hearty gulp (mostly foam, it turned out) and made my way through the party-goers, ducking my head and trying to avoid Wes. I could hear him snickering and noticed him pointing at me as I made my way into the den, where I bumped into a heavily perfumed woman in a LSU sweatshirt and cap. She caught my eyes, I looked down and my stomach froze.

Her eyes and lips narrowed. “The Deerslayer!” she snarled.

“That’s HIM alright!” yelled her husband, still taunting me from behind.

Ye-GAWDS! I thought. Yoko TOO! Pelayo had coined her nickname too, and at the same party. She looked nothing like Yoko Ono, more like Margaret Houlihan, which we instantly dubbed her when Wes first brought her to a party. Shortly her true personality began to manifest. She evolved into a hideous, rumor-mongering, backstabbing witch and broke up the old gang. The moniker was perfect. I guess every gang of chums has their Yoko. Priscilla was ours. For years afterward whenever an old chum would ask “Seen Wes? What happened to ole Wes?” We’d answer: “He got Yoko’ed”

The term clicked instantly. My stomach was in a knot and my mind swirled with ugliness as I turned and made my way back to the pool area. Why these people? And why today? I had no idea they’d be here. My mood was ruined.

The memories of my last confrontation with Neidermeier and Yoko were ugly and fresh. At a New Years’ party Artie invites me to his deer-lease for the last week-end of the deer season.

“We’ll blast everything and ANYTHING!” Artie gasped with a conspiratorial wink and smirk. “Man, I need me some venison. Ain’t shot deer one this season. Gail’s ‘complainin about all the money I poured into this damn lease — and I ain’t got SQUAT to show for it! But this week-end, I hear, I’ll have the lease to myself. No one else is going. None of that “gotta be an 8-point or better” stuff that Wes, the club President…”

“Wes?!” I snorted. “How’d you get mixed up in a deer-club with that a–hole?”

“Gettin hard to get in a club lately, man, especially one close-by. I ain’t into that driving five hours to Alabama or Mississippi, much less the eight hours to Texas, bit anymore. Wes’ club’s only an hour drive for me. Dues are sky-high and the ole lady bitched a bit. But what the hell? No higher than what she pays for that stupid health club! Hell, she don’t go there to exercise, anyway. It’s been eight months and I sure ain’t noticed any change in her bloomer size? She goes there ’cause it’s the place to go now, to meet her friends, to chat, to gossip. That kinda stuff. ‘You got room to talk,’ she tells me. ‘Like you go to the deer-camp to hunt! Hah! Then how come you never bring home any meat? You go to booze and play cards,’ she says. ‘Fair enough’ I sayz. ‘So we’re EVEN, then!’ “

“Thing is, it’s those stupid club rules that deprive me of meat.” Artie continued sourly. “Wes and all his dilettante buddies in this club follow those antler rules where it’s gotta be eight-point or better to shoot. You know how all the hoity-toity clubs are into that stuff now. Me, I just want’ some meat. I guess I coulda joined another club — but I couldn’t find one. There ALL into that big antler BS nowadays. That’s why I’m pumped about next week-end, amigo. None of those jerks will be there to enforce that stuff! Humberto, for us next week: if it’s brown — it’s DOWN! Gail will finally see me bring home some meat!”.

“Yeah you rite!” I accepted instantly, with a whoop and a toast. “Man, I ain’t been ‘huntin since I got busted up. My family’s been starved of venison all season! So let’s go! Let’s whack ‘em ‘n stack ‘em!”

“I know you still ain’t walking well, Humberto. But no problema, I got two ATVs over at the camp. You can use one.”

I hadn’t been on Artie’s deer stand for 45 minutes on a cold drizzly evening the following week when the deer ambled into the food-plot. “Good God!” The shakes started. It even had horns!..”Maybe? …JUST maybe I might be able to follow the rules?” I was thinking as I raised the scope.

Naw, a big-bodied spike. Still I was pumped — even more pumped, in fact. As we all know, breaking rules adds spice to any endeavor. Artie said to blow-away ANYTHING. We’d split the meat. Great. The crosshairs wobbled crazily and the deer was on the very edge of a briar thicket when I finally jerked the trigger, “PE-TAAOOW!!” The spike flipped like a head-shot rabbit. Then he started kicking..kicking…more kicking. Mud and leaves going everywhere. I got nervous and frantically worked the bolt, chambering another round. But when I raised the scope I finally focused my good eye (left one now) through it, I saw he was finally expiring. Another kick..another leg jerking over the briars. Finally the briars were still.

I was a basket case as I clambered down the ladder. My knees were almost knocking as I walked over the muddy food-plot towards the brown that was down. I got to him and let out a crazed whoop. I’d hit him high in the neck, though I was aiming behind the shoulder. No matter. I was seriously pumped. Now we had some scrumptious meat on our hands. I was sitting on a log gathering my wits when I heard the ATV approaching. That’s Artie for ya, I thought. We got some meat now he’s ready to head back to the camp and start boozing it up. Fine with me.

Then it came around the bend — but this ATV was Green? Artie’s is RED!….And the guy now walking across the food-plot was much taller, and dressed in L.L. Bean?! Artie had been wearing his usual Wal-Mart/Army surplus duds?

He was halfway to me when he yelled out, “Got one?” It was Neidermeier himself! The deer-club President!

“NO!” I stood and blurted, shaking my head vigorously.

“Who’s that?” He said as he picked up the pace. “That YOU?….Humberto?….What on earth?”

“Sure is, Wes!” I smiled feebly while my stomach received an icy jolt. “Artie and I just got up. Man, how ya been! Been a long time, amigo!” My smile was rigid and transparently fake as he walked up. “Artie told me you were his club’s president. I told him we’re old friends!” Then I extended a hand, that was shaking a bit.

“Strange,” he said as he walked up, not smiling, and ignored my outstretched hand. “Artie didn’t say ANYTHING about any GUESTS this week-end? He knows we have a policy where any guests have to…..”

“It was a last minute thing,” I stammered. “Ha-ha!” My bent smile remained but my turgid eyes gave it away.

“Well, what-ya got?” Wes asked with his eyes narrowing.

“NOTHING!” I snorted while kicking the ground disgustedly. “Shot at a doggone Coyote and missed.”

“That so?” Wes pursed his lips.

“Yeah man,” I grimaced. “That sucker came BOOKIN’ through here, ‘chasin’ a rabbit. I mean that sucker was SHAGGIN’. I popped off a shot just he cleared the plot. (I pointed in the OPPOSITE direction from where the deer lay) Looked it over but no blood or anything…I’m about ready to head back to the camp anyway. Whadaya say we head back? I brought some dynamite Gumbo ‘fixins. Made the roux at home. Now I just gotta fry up some……”

“Let’s have a look,” Wes said as he walked OPPOSITE from where I’d pointed. He had me pegged. He didn’t believe a word I said.

Neidermeier found my deer. He brought it back to the camp himself, where his wife Priscilla and two other obnoxious couples were playing cards and gabbing. Things got ugly that night. “Well!” Artie finally shot back at Wes. “Nobody told me Yoko was coming EITHER!..I thought…..”

“WHO?!” Wes asked the question with an angry frown and I shot a look at Priscilla in time to see her flinch and grow bug-eyed. She knew about her nickname but had always blamed it on ME, rather than Artie or Pelayo. Now it ignited ugly memories.

Things got uglier and uglier as the night progressed and the booze emptied. More details on the ugliness next week.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

At 11:30 PM that night (my favorite bike-riding time) I was thrown from my bicycle and plunged off a tall bridge, bounced off sharp steel girders on the way down and finally landed face and (unhelmeted) head first, twenty feet below on jagged boulders. Amazingly someone was walking their dog on the bike trail at that hour. They noticed a bicycle on the ground near the railing and peered over. There I lay, unconscious and bleeding heavily. I’d been down there for twenty minutes. Had that person not happened along…..?

Anyway, finally at the emergency room we learned the results of my midnight ride: fractured skull, subdermal hematoma, smashed eye and orbit, 8 inch gash in forehead with cracked skull exposed, leg and hip broken in 6 places, 5 ribs broken along with arm and hand. Various internal injuries. The first few days in intensive care the speculations ran to survival. We cleared that one. Then came speculations about paralysis, life in a wheelchair (considering my hobbies, not a happy prospect.) We cleared that one. Then came speculations concerning severe brain damage from the horrific trauma to the head (I write and speak for a living, again not a happy prospect.)

And here’s were the therapists got REALLY worried. “Here,” one said while handing me a notebook as I lay in my hospital bed. “Just write us a paragraph about what you see in this drawing.”

“Sure,” I groaned. “No problema.” The picture was a cutesy family pic-nic on a lakeshore. A smiling Mom and Dad, two kids frolicking. “This poor guy,” I started writing, “is miserable. There’s a Honky-Tonk just behind that hill and he longs — with every fiber of his being — to be in it, first whooping it up with the pole-dancers , then settling in front of the video poker machine with a double-crown on the rocks. The poor woman is on the verge of slapping the kids silly because they just finished feeding the sandwiches she lovingly prepared and packaged, to some turtles. And the little boy just crippled a duck by heaving a brick at it while it competed with the turtles for a sandwich scrap.”

“Here ya go,” and I handed it back. One frowning therapist quickly handed it to the other who frowned even harder. They were silent for a second and Shirley got worried. “What’s wrong?” She blurted. “Is he…?”

“Well, here. ” And they handed her the booklet.

“Then he’s fine!” Shirley erupted after a quick glance. “Back to normal!”

The Therapists gaped. “He’s fine, I tell you!” Shirley blurted again. “Don’t worry. Oh, he’s deranged alright. No doubt about that. But that has nothing to do with this accident. He was born that way. Here…” and she rummaged behind my bed where I had copies of Helldiver’s Rodeo and Hellpig Hunt. She handed the books to the therapists. “Open any page and read. You’ll see. He’s back to normal for sure!”

Just then the doctor walked in. “Hiya sport!” he beamed. “Ah! Got your books here. I read ‘em both. “

“Good,” Shirley said. “Then maybe you can explain to these therapists that Humberto’s fine in the head. They seem a little worried because of what he just wrote in their booklet.”

“Let’s see here, ” and he leaned over and read. “Yep! That’s Humberto! I’d say he’s doing great. Now let’s have a look at that wound, old sport.”

Almost a month later I was finally home. Amazingly, this past Christmas season, barely three months after the bashing, I found myself not just merrily celebrating the Holidays along with my book’s completion, along with my dad’s 78th Birthday, along with my 26th wedding anniversary, along with my parents 55th anniversary, along with my daughter’s engagement — but dancing at the multifarious and raucous celebrations!

And I’m talking everything from the Hustle and Bump to the Boot-Scootin-Boogie and Cha-Cha-Cha! I was on a crutch and wearing an eye patch — so, okay, I wasn’t exactly John Travolta. But STILL!

And these rollicking festivities also found me as engaging, witty, erudite, sparkling, talkative boisterous….Hunnh? — Oh Hi, honey (My darling wife often reads over my shoulder, making helpful suggestions.)

“A bit wordy, Humberto….just write as obnoxious as ever.”

“Thanks honey!” You get the point, amigos. Thanks to a chorus of prayers, thanks to a positively suffocating avalanche of moral (and physical) support from my family and a crowd of — not fairweather, by any means! — friends, I find myself joyfully back at it. Heck, I even managed a week-end duck-hunt/booze/food-fest at my chum’s duck-camp last New Years week-end. But more on that extravaganza next week.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.

“Prize for scariest costume” read the new party invitation. Fine, I thought. They’ll get one with bells on.

I was hellbent on winning but the competition would be ferocious. Shirley kept me informed on all costumes the gang had in the works: Freddy Krueger, Regan from the Exorcist, a hideous rendition of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hillary Clinton, even a scowling Rosie O’Donnel, which was widely rumored to be a shoo-in for the prize.

“They’re wasting their time,” I snorted at my wife. “Mine’s ten times as scary and a cinch to make.”

When we arrived the guests were all in the backyard around the pool, enveloped from the waist down in artificial fog from some machine Artie rented. He’s always been a stickler for details. I opened the back door and Pelayo (Frankenstein’s Monster) was the first to spot me. Even through his mask I could see his eyes bug. “RUN FOR IT!” he bellowed and shot off, leaving a swirling billow of smoke.

Artie (Count Dracula) looked over next. He froze in panic. Then Shawn (The Mummy — and yes, I spelled his name correctly. That’s how Cajuns spell it) looked over — and even through all that gauze I could see him gape. “LET’S GO!” Artie exploded. And every male in the backyard looked over, dropped their drinks and scrambled through smoke like panicked rats, hurdling chairs and azaleas, dodging tables, clearing the Jacuzzi — and keg in stunning leaps. Remember O.J. in that Hertz commercial? Remember Gale Sayers on any Sunday?

Chumps compared to this gang. Frankenstein’s supposed to plod along clumsily with his arms out front, right? Well, this one, even in his huge platform boots, looked like Michael Jordan running a fast break, covering a good fifty feet in three kangaroo-like bounds. Dracula creeps slowly and stealthily towards his sleeping victim, right?

Well, this one had his cape flapping furiously behind him as he galloped down the driveway then — Whooosh! — dodged sharply to the left as he passed a garbage can. The Mummy himself looked like a spider monkey on speed as he scrambled over a ten-foot fence. Instinct had kicked in big time, and all for the “FLIGHT!”

“Geezuz!’ I thought. “Maybe I went TOO far with my costume?”

I’d dressed as a game warden, you see. Yes sir, I was wearing a gen-you-wine Louisiana. Wildlife and Fisheries uniform, complete with the shiny, nerve-jangling BADGE and the big heart-stopping ENFORCEMENT DIVISION emblem.

Nothing in our glorious youth clamped that icy clutch around the guts like a surprise encounter with this get up. Nothing provoked more panic, more scrambling through the brambles, more bolting through the briars, more mad dashes through the canebrakes, more boring out of outboards, more stomping it to the floor of trucks, more revved engines and spinning, squealing wheels — than the sight of this get-up.

Alas, that panic (like all panic) was always mixed with a thrill — and that thrill increased in direct proportion to the distance our scrambling legs or Artie’s Gumbo mudder tires put between us and the wardens. There was no outrunning them in a boat — not in Bayou country. We knew better. Down here those enforcement boats are souped-up to outrun an F-14. They ain’t dumb. They know what they’re up against.

Obviously I exaggerate regarding the reaction. But I did run away with first prize for scariest costume. It wasn’t even close.

All regions and cultures have their hobgoblins. Central Europe its Vampires and Werewolves. The Pacific Northwest its Sasquatch. The Himalayas its Yeti. Well, over the generations nothing in Bayou country has caused more storytelling and anxious gaping around campfires than the sight of that little “Enforcement Division” emblem.

And for some reason, we never have any of those “deer infestation” problems down here. Last year in the U.S., according to an insurance industry report, 1.5 million Americans smashed their cars into deer. 150 of these motorists died, 10,000 were injured and total property damage ran to $1.1 billion.

But fear not! The experts and wizards have brainstormed and hatched a solution. “Be aware of your surroundings,” say the guidelines put out by State Farm Insurance. “Look well down the road and far off to each side.” (Indeed, that was rule one when, as teenagers, we’d venture out in Artie’s truck with the scoped 22 Magnum.) “At night, use your high-beam lights if possible to illuminate the road’s edges.” (We found that a Q-bean works better for this). “Be especially watchful in areas near woods and water. If you see one deer, there may be several others nearby.” (Yeah you rite, State Farm! We learned to work that rifle bolt FAST!)

At any rate, Louisiana cuisine and culture simply will not allow us to figure very big in those Insurance industry statistics. The only thing deer “infest” down here are our B-B-Q grills and gumbo pots.

Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He’s the author of the newly-published Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, as well as The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle-Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up and Helldiver’s Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher’s Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.