Free Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova Page B

fiends] or Batistianos.” This was a July 26 Movement’s (Castro’s group) operative talking. He was signing up an American volunteer named Neil McCauley for Castro’s rebel force in 1958.
    Castro’s regime replaced a government where Cuban blacks served as president of the senate, minister of agriculture, chief of the army, and as head of state. 8 Nowadays Cuba’s jail population is 80 percent black, its governmental hierarchy 100 percent white. Only 10 percent of the Communist Party’s central committee is black (and Cuba’s most prominent political prisoner, Oscar Biscet, is black). In April 2003, three black Cubans “hijacked” a ferry and tried to escape to Florida. They were captured, given a summary trial, and executed by firing squads. Castro responded to the outrage of Cuban exiles with, “What’s all this fuss about me shooting three little negritos?” 9
    “I never saw a black face on my official three-day tour of Cuba,” says talk-radio host and columnist Lowell Ponte. “And that was a Potemkin tour back in 1977. I was a visiting journalist for the Los Angeles Times . Surely you’d think they’d try to snow me—like they snow so many others? Problem was, they were showing me around only to high government officials—and the Communists simply couldn’t find one who was black!
    “But finally they dragged one out. He was a principal at a school, where the little kids, after their Communist indoctrination, all went to work in a battery factory where their hands and arms were all exposed repeatedly to acid. . . . Try this any place else in the world and we’d have Oprah, Katie, Eleanor Clift, Rosie, the whole bunch, up in arms about ‘child labor, child slavery.’ Castro, naturally, gets away with it.”
    The corruption and sporadic brutality of Batista’s regime rankled Cuba’s middle and upper classes. “We didn’t care who overthrew Batista as long as somebody overthrew Batista,” said pre-Castro Cuba’s wealthiest man, Julio Lobo. “I’ll take complete chaos over Batista’s rule.” Lobo owned fourteen sugar mills, several Cuban banks, and Havana’s baseball team. He said this while being interviewed by British historian Hugh Thomas. In the late 1950s, Lobo bankrolled Castro’s July 26 Movement (perhaps partly as protection money to keep Castro’s “guerrillas” from burning his cane fields and blowing up his sugar mills). Three months after Batista’s overthrow, Lobo presented Castro’s government, in a public ceremony, with a check for $450,000 as a goodwill gesture (or perhaps as more protection money against the confiscation affecting many of his competitors).
    Exactly one year after this gesture of revolutionary goodwill, Lobo received a request on government stationery from the new head of Cuba’s national bank, the noted economist Che Guevara. The legendary revolutionary wanted a word with the legendary businessman. At the midnight meeting, Guevara offered Lobo a government post as minister of agriculture. As a perk, Lobo could keep one of his fourteen mills and even his house. See? Guevara smirked. So much for those rumors about me as some rigid Marxist ideologue!
    Julio Lobo asked for a day to think it over. He scooted out of Cuba the following night, without even packing a toothbrush. Castro and Che’s offers were often the kind you couldn’t refuse.
    “We know now that Castro was trained as a Communist in 1946 and 1947 in the Russian embassy in Cuba.” This was Julio Lobo in exile, giving the commencement speech to LSU’s graduating class in 1963 (he was an alumnus). “We now know that Castro was sent to Bogotá to disrupt the Conference of Prime Ministers in 1948, where he took a very sinister participation, killing with his own hands several people.... Books give so many details about Castro’s Communist activities during that period that it is incredible that he was not only not prevented but actually aided and abetted in the process of taking over