Humberto Fontova - Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant

Table of Contents

To Cubas greatest generation: the freedom fighters, living and dead, of
Brigada 2506, the Escambray Rebellion, and all the rest who fought Com-
munism; and to the parents who sacrificed all to bring us to America, most
especially to my own parents, Humberto and Esther Maria.

PREFACE

Cuba is only ninety miles away, but very few Americans know that a Communist tyranny that rivals North Koreasand that had nuclear weapons decades before North Korea didis just off the coast of Florida. The history of Castros revolution is known to everyone personally in little Havana in Miami. But it is virtually unknown beyond thereor at least the truth about it is unknown. So liberals, and the liberal media and liberal Hollywood, get away with the most outrageous lies about Cuba and Cuban Americans. This book is meant to bust their myths with truth.

Its also a book to express gratitude to the thousands who put their lives on the line to fight Communism in Cubaand to the United States that has given us, as exiles, the warmest welcome anyone has ever received. The process of becoming Americans wasnt easy for our parents, who came with no money, no prospects, and no English. They had to succumb to such barbarisms as forsaking siestas, dining before 10 p.m., and Dios mio! watching their children date without chaperones. But their children were spared the horrors, humiliations, and degradationsthe firings squads and prison campsof life under the Communists. In America today, these Cuban parents number in the hundreds of thousands. You might call me and my Cuban American contemporaries Americas luckiest generation; our freedom, prosperity, and happiness resulted from the sacrifices of two different (though always considered brother) nations greatest generations: our parents and the Americans, the World War II generation, who welcomed us. This book is a small way of saying thanks.

Humberto Fontova
New Orleans, Louisiana, December 27, 2004

CHAPTER ONE

THE TERRORIST NEXT DOOR

On Saturday morning, November 17, 1962, FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., took on all the trappings of a military command post, according to historian William Breuer. As well it might. The night before, an intelligence puzzle had finally come together and revealed a criminal plot that staggered the G-men. These were agents who had foiled Nazi plots to blow up American oil refineries in World War II. They had fought Soviet agents for two decades. They werent easily impressed, but they were worried now.

They hadnt slept in thirty-six hours. They were haggard, red-eyed, seriously wired, and super tense. Time was nearing to swoop down on Fidel Castros plotters. Raymond Wannall and Alan Belmont sat in an office just down the hall from that of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Belmont was Hoovers second in command. Wannall was head of the bureaus intelligence division. They had special agent John Malone, who ran the New York field office, on one phone line. On other lines they talked with FBI agents in Manhattan who were trying to keep surveillance on the ringleaders of a massive terrorist plot.

The intelligence was hair-raising. Agents of Fidel Castro had targeted Manhattans busiest subway stationsincluding Grand Central Stationfor rush hour explosions. This was no chump operation. Nor was it a military operation. It was something the United States didnt know much about in 1962: terrorism. The plotters planned the fiery death and maiming of thousands of New Yorkers. More evidence came in showing that the subway wasnt the only target: Gimbels, Bloomingdales, Macys... twelve detonators... several major incendiaries... five hundred kilos of TNT. Blasts are timed for the Friday after Thanksgiving , came the latest intel. Five hundred kilos of TNT primed to hit on the busiest shopping day of the year. A day when parents take their kids to meet Santa Claus.

Keeping the Cuban suspects under physical surveillance all that night of the seventeenth without their knowing they were being watched put an enormous burden on those New York field agents, Raymond Wannall later reported to the New York Times . But they managed it with great skill. These were J. Edgar Hoover menthere were no acceptable excuses for any intelligence or security breakdown in those days. The old man simply wouldnt stand for it.

Notice the date again, November 1962. It was just weeks after the Cuban missile crisis, and the country was still badly rattled.

With the terrorist plot unfolding, J. Edgar Hoovers FBI realized we were looking down the barrel of a genuine threat from the same placeCuba. As proof, there was none of the saber-rattling of the Cuban missile crisis. Thats for bluff. And as Ernest Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon about bulls that snort and paw the ground, an animal bluffs in order to avoid combat.

Khrushchev wanted peace; Castro didnt. True, in 1957 the redoubtable New York Times had passed along his heartfelt message, You can be sure that we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people.

But heres the same Fidel Castro confiding in a letter to a friend a month later: War against the United States is my true destiny . When this wars over Ill start that much bigger and wider war.

My dream is to drop three atomic bombs on New York, snarled Raul Castro, Fidels brother, in 1960. And dont forget, Raul Castro is almost assuredly Fidel Castros successor. Atomic bombs might have been a tad ambitious, but Fidels 1962 bomb plot was serious enough. The March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all ten of them, killed and maimed almost two thousand people. The al Qaedalinked terrorists used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT, roughly ten kilos per blast. Rafael del Pino, who once headed Castros air force and defected in 1987, has confirmed that Castros 1962 bomb plot involved five hundred kilos of TNT , among other explosives and incendiaries.

The head Castroite terrorist of the 1962 plot was Roberto Santiesteban. He workedsurprise!at the United Nations, where fellow conspirators Jos and Elsa Gmez were also to be found. Santiesteban had arrived in the U.S. on October 3, 1962, on a diplomatic passport and served as aide to Castros UN ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Two other conspirators were Marino Suero and Jos Garca, both Cuban immigrants, naturalized Americans, who lived in New York and ran a costume jewelry shop in Manhattan. Their shop was the plotters headquarters and storage facility. Suero and Garca also belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The FBI had already outed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as a Castro-funded front group. Its membership rolls would later include Lee Harvey Oswald, a name everyone would know in a years time, as well as CBS correspondent Robert Taber (he became the Committees executive secretary), leftist filmmaker Saul Landau (now a professor in California and an adviser on several CBS and PBS specials on Castro), and The Nation magazine co-owner Alan Sagner (whom President Clinton appointed as head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1996).

The FBI knew that the Cuban plotters were to meet that night of November 17 in Garcas shop on West 27th Street, in the heart of Manhattans garment district. Hey, wait a minute! you say. Howd the FBI know this? Howd they have them pegged? The answer is: moles. The FBI penetrated the Castroite group. Bureaucratic types call it HUMINT (human intelligence). Remember, this was J. Edgar Hoovers outfit. This was the FBI well before the Frank Church Committee and Jimmy Carter gelded it.

Got Suero and Garca in sight, reported John Malone on the phone to Alan Belmont in Washington, D.C. Can arrest them easily.