Free Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova

Castro’s own inflated figures) it’s twenty-fourth in the world . And this with 60.4 percent of Cuba’s pregnancies ending in abortion (which skews infant mortality rates downward). In 1957, Cuba had twice as many physicians and teachers in relation to population as the U.S. It ranked first in Latin America in national income invested in education and its literacy rate was 80 percent. In 1958, Cuba even had more female college graduates (to scale) than the U.S.
    “Before Fidel, Cubans were already among the healthiest and best-educated people in the world—and it didn’t require Hitler-level political executions and Stalin-level gulags to achieve. Back in the mid-1960s, my father, a Cuban scholar and political figure of wide reputation, the man who would have been Cuba’s president with honest elections, wrote a manuscript seeking to set the record straight about the Cuban revolution. In it, he stressed many of the things I’ve just catalogued. Well, no U.S. publisher would touch it.
    “But the president of one of America’s biggest, most prestigious publishing houses at the time (a man who had never been in Cuba, by the way), had the courtesy to respond to my father in a curt rejection letter. ‘Mr. Márquez-Sterling,’ he wrote, ‘You certainly have peculiar notions about Cuba.’
    “So here’s an American who got all his information about Cuba from Herbert Matthews of the New York Times , Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune , and Jack Paar, responding this way to the man who had lived in Cuba his entire life, whose family had been involved in Cuban politics for two centuries, who helped draft the Cuban constitution of 1940, and who probably won her last elections!
    “Like I said, given the wholesale ignorance—let’s be polite and call it that—on Cuban matters, given the enormous success of Castro’s propaganda offensive on these matters—you want to pull your hair out sometimes!”
    Well put, Mr. Márquez-Sterling. I know exactly what you mean. It reminds me of my old college history prof, Dr. Stephen Ambrose: “Castro threw out an SOB and liberated Cuba.” Liberated Cuba from what? There were no ration cards or food shortages under Batista.
    There was no totalitarian control of the media. I’ll quote a U.S. State Department document here: “It is no exaggeration to state that during the 1950s, the Cuban people were among the most informed in the world, living in an uncharacteristically large media market for such a small country. Cubans had a choice of fifty-eight daily newspapers during the late 1950s, according to the UN statistical yearbook.” It is true that newspaper articles were occasionally subject to modifications at Batista’s behest. More seriously, as in the case of Manuel Márquez-Sterling, some of Cuba’s cheekier reporters were occasionally jailed or manhandled by Batista goons. But Batista’s censorship was an on-again, off-again type of thing.
    Batista didn’t control what Cubans learned in school. He didn’t decide who they worshiped, what they earned, where they traveled or emigrated. Recall Jeane Kirkpatrick’s book Dictatorships and Double Standards , in which she distinguishes authoritarian from totalitarian rule: “Authoritarian regimes do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. . . . Totalitarian regimes claim that the state has jurisdiction over the whole of society—that includes religion and family, the economy. The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don’t at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. They believe that everything is Caesar’s—the government should claim it and control it.”
    Well, Batista probably didn’t even qualify as authoritarian . He was certainly no Franco or Pinochet, or even a Stroessner