4108 The Untold History of Che Guevara | Humberto Fontova and Stefan Molyneux
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a Marxist revolutionary who fought in the Cuban revolution and occupied several high-ranking positions in Fidel Castro's government. His picture and image have become one of the most widely recognized symbols of rebellion in the world today. Humberto Fontova joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the horrifying story of his family attempting to flee Cuba in 1961, the dangerous myths about the Cuban revolution and the shocking truth about Che Guevara.Humberto Fontova is a popular columnist and the author of several books including "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," "The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro" and "Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him."Website: https://www.hfontova.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/hfontovaYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. I'm here with Humberto Fontova.
He is a popular columnist and the author of many books, including, this is a bit of a spoiler, Fidel, Hollywood's favorite tyrant, and The Longest Romance, the mainstream media, and Fidel Castro, as well as exposing the real Che Guevara and the useful idiots who idolize him.
You can check out his website at H-F-O-N-T-O-V-A. That's hfontova.com and twitter.com forward slash hfontova.
Those links will be in the lower bar.
Umberto, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Hey, man, it's great to be here.
You can't do enough of this stuff, trying to get the truth out there.
Oh, I hear you. Thanks for that.
It is wild. I mean, I did a presentation on Che in the past, which has got quite a lot of views, and you gather together information that is truly mind-blowing.
It's an appalling read, an instructive read, and I find when I read this kind of stuff, Umberto, that I end up coming out on the other side with a very different relationship.
To my own culture, to mainstream media, to Hollywood artists, to musicians, to everyone who proudly...
Do you want to just shimmy up for a second?
Show us your shirt so that people can see.
There we go. There we go.
And yeah, cold-blooded killer.
Horrendous stuff. So what was your first...
I mean, I know you've got family history, but what was your first introduction into the evils of communism under Castro?
Well, I was born in Cuba.
Let's see. And I left...
In 1961, when I was seven years old.
My father was a political prisoner.
They grabbed him at the airport.
Commies love to do this.
They do this. We had everything set up.
Me and my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister.
I'm seven. My sister's eight.
My brother's four. We're leaving.
We're getting ready to board the plane to come to the US and freedom.
Soldiers come out.
They grab my father and drag him off through some doors.
And my mom It's freaking because that was in October of 61, hundreds of men and boys were being shot daily, weekly, at the primary squad.
So my mom saw the soldiers dragging off my mom, you know, to him, where's he going?
And my mom says, well, Humberto, my dad's name, if you can't come with us, then we're not leaving either.
Imagine a woman leaving. My dad, they're putting him through the doors right there.
My dad turns around and says, you are leaving because whatever happens to me, and we thought he was going to the firing squad, I don't want my children growing up in a communist country.
Boy, and that really got mad.
The guards crossed, because see, Castro didn't admit he was a Marxist-Leninist.
Till December of 61.
And this was October, so that really got, but I mean, all you had to do was look around and saw what was going on.
So my dad was dragged off.
My mom somehow sucked it up, grabbed us.
Kids were leaving on our fun vacation.
So we got on a plane, came to Miami where we already had relatives.
And I just remember a plane full of Mainly women and children because they were grabbing the men because they were the ones involved in the resistance.
We get to Miami and we get to my aunt's house.
My mom picks up the phone and calls Cuba.
And I just remember I was seven years old.
My mom said, you know, where's Humberto?
What happened? And I just remember saying, oh, no, she drops the phone and she fainted.
And my aunt rushed up.
One aunt was helping my mom pick up the phone.
She goes, oh no!
What they had heard was that my dad was at La Cavaña Prison, which is where the firing squad marathons are going on.
So imagine my mom said, Okay, I'm in a country without a penny in my name because the communists stole every penny from everyone who left Cuba.
Well, they stole it from people in Cuba, too.
But the minute you left, they grabbed everything, your house and everything.
That's an amazing thing.
Michael Moore says, those rich Cubans grabbed their assets and left Cuba and hit Miami.
Folks, every Cuban that hit the U.S. or Canada or wherever came with the clothes on their back.
So my mom's thinking, on top of all that, I'm now a widow.
Well... We sucked it up.
We came to New Orleans, where I live now, where we had closer relatives, and been there a couple months.
All of a sudden, my mom picks up the phone and she screams again.
I know, and I remember that.
But this was a scream of joy.
It was my father calling from New Orleans International Airport.
Can someone come pick me up, please?
They had let him out, which is an interesting story in itself.
My nanny, We had helpers in the house, and that had been a secret member of Castro's underground during the rebellion.
So now she was a part of the government.
And when she heard that that grabbed my dad and he was potentially going to get shot, she says, you let that man go immediately?
They treated me.
She was my black lady.
They treated me like family.
They never mistreated me.
You let them go. And that's what got them out.
And that's why me and my dad are going fishing tomorrow morning and with his grandchildren.
Ours had a happy ending, Stephan.
But tens of thousands of Cuban stories did not have happy endings.
And even within your own family, as you talk about in the book, there are nuclear shadows on the wall, so to speak, of people who didn't make it out and who did get shot.
You can sit on any street corner in Miami, Florida, Union City, New Jersey, and every third male or female that walks by that's over the age of, say, 60, will have had a relative murdered, tortured.
We're talking about a regime that tortured an Jail political prisoners at a higher rate, not in absolute numbers, obviously, than Stalin's regime.
At one point in 1961, one of every 16 Cubans was a political prisoner.
Castro murdered more political prisoners in his first three years in power by firing squad primarily.
Then Hitler murdered in his first six.
I'm obviously referring prior to the Holocaust, but still, Dachau was running, Buchenwald was running, and Nazi Germany was an international pariah already by 1939.
Well, Castro killed more political prisoners—murdered, I shouldn't say murdered—murdered than Hitler did by the time he was a pariah, and yet he's an international hero.
Well, and you point out in the book, if I remember the numbers correctly, Umberto, it was 200 out of a population of over 200 million Russians, about 2 million were kept up in the gulag, which is a 1% rate, which is terrible and terrifying enough.
But compare that to what's going on in relative numbers in Cuba.
Yeah, Cuba is a nation of 6.4 million people.
In 1961, 62 in the early 60s.
So if you put your pencil, your calculator to that, you will see that his rate of incarceration and torture was as high as Stalin during the Great Terror.
You know, and most people are completely annoyed.
You see what happens with this thing, Stephan?
And heaven knows, I've been at this game, you know, for 20 years and arguing with people about this.
But there's the ignorance of that murder.
And please, let's not forget about people who died trying to escape.
Most people, you talk even to liberals, and you say, East Germany, oh, gosh, that was a terrible place, Stefan.
My goodness, look at the people who died trying to escape it over the Berlin Wall.
Everybody was trying to get out of Germany.
That's obviously a terrible place.
Even a liberal will admit it.
How many people realize, how many of our viewers realize That 20 times as many Cubans died trying to escape Castro and Chez Cuba as East Germans died trying to escape.
About 180 to 220 East Germans died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall.
Horrible, horrible.
An estimated 20,000 to 22,000 Cubans died trying to escape Cuba.
Now, some of our viewers will go, well, so what, Umberto?
Latin Americans are always trying to sneak out of Cuba, out of Latin America.
I mean, look at the Mexicans over the border, they're dying to death.
What makes you guys so different?
I'll tell you what makes it.
Prior to Castroism, People used to be as desperate to enter capitalist and prosperous Cuba as they later became to exit.
Prior to Castro, Cuba took in a higher percentage of immigrants, primarily from Europe, As a percentage of population than the United States, and that includes the Ellis Island years.
Cuba is very similar to Canada, the US, and Argentina.
It was a nation of European countries.
Immigrants primarily.
So you had a nation where people were as desperate to come in as they later became to leave, and yet you can't convince people that there might be something wrong with Castroism.
Well, let's put that in context as well.
So the political slaughter that occurred after Castro and his blood henchman Che took over, Would be the equivalent of about three million people being murdered in the United States by population.
And people really need to sort of let that seep into their bone marrow.
That is three million people equivalent in the U.S. lined up, tortured, raped, shot, women, children, men, just row after row, day after day, three million people toppling with shattered skulls into shallow graves.
And you mentioned about the information in my book, The horrifying thing about this, but it's in a way, it's good for historians, that my book was based on eyewitnesses, primarily, people who lived the Cuban Revolution.
And this is a great historical resource.
They lived, they're alive. The longest suffering political prisoners in modern history, male and female, suffered in Castro's Gulag and Chase, and many of them are living in Miami primarily today, yet they are completely ignored by the media.
I tap that resource, you know?
Many of them are family members, friends from Cuba and so forth, but I tap that resource.
But anyone can do it, and that's why people are so shocked.
Let me tell you, when I publish these books, these are big publishers, Penguin, Putnam, Random House and stuff, they have big legal departments, and they weren't as shocked as readers when they read my books to say, Where's this guy coming up with this stuff?
And believe me, I spent a lot of time with the legal departments of the world's biggest publishers on conference calls.
They're going, murder? Where's this from?
This can't be true. This can't...
Look at the footnote, baby.
Look at the footnote.
And I ended up not having to change a single item from my manuscript.
I had to change the wording a little bit.
But that was proof that everything in my books and things are going to be...
People are going to be hearing things from me today.
They're going to go, that can't be true.
Folks, it's documented.
It's documented. So let's start with...
The myth. Because, I mean, we want to sort of connect with the people who believe the falsehoods and then correct them as best we can.
And the myth goes something like this.
So, you know, prior to the revolution, there were these terrible white people in general who were in charge of the land and worked people like slaves and they had no opportunity for progress.
And there were these big giant, you know, the United Fruit Company was evil and foreigners owned all the farms and foreigners owned everything.
And then what happened was these wonderful Robin Hoods wrote in, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs.
A few dozen people got killed after legitimate and lawful trials, they might say.
And then what happened was there was a redistribution of income.
There was socialized health care.
There was all these wonderful opportunities.
And a few disgruntled capitalists tried to get out because they couldn't stand seeing the workers' paradise coming to fruition.
Now, the Cuba before the revolution is like a country that nobody even remembers anymore.
So let's go over a little bit of how it was doing from the 1930s onwards up until the revolution.
Yeah, well, that's part of it, too, because people say, well, so what if Cubans can't vote, you know?
Prior to cancel, Cuba was one of these SH whole countries, and at least now they have free healthcare, Stephan, right?
So a big part of this mythology is that people don't realize, Cuba, there's a report from the International Labor Organization, which is a part of the United Nations, from 1957.
And it said, one feature of Cuba is a large middle class.
Cuban workers are more unionized in proportion to population than U.S. workers.
In 1958, Cuba had the 13th lowest infant mortality rate in the world, lower than much of Europe.
When Castro took over in 1958, The Cuban embassy in Rome, Italy, had a backlog of 12,000 Italians clamoring to immigrate To Cuba!
This was in 1958, and that's all you really need to know.
Are people trying to get in the country or trying to get out of it?
Cuba had a higher, and this is fully documented, standard of living than much, probably half of Europe at that time, mostly Southern Europe.
You know, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and of course, Eastern Europe.
But they had a lower infant mortality rate at that time than even places like East Germany and France.
So, I mean, they started, and think about it, that Castro and Che had a golden goose land in their lap.
If these guys were of the same ilk of, say, Batista, as people say, or Samosa, or Suharto in Indonesia, or Marcos, you know, a two-bit dictator, they could have just said, hey, we're going to leave this in place, and we're just going to be a two-bit dictator for But no, no, no.
They wanted the power of a Stalin or a Mao.
And this is where a lot of people get it wrong.
They say, well, Bernie, you know, if we just open up Cuba to tourism and investment, that'll just undermine...
No, folks. No, folks.
It's been tried because these guys grew to young adulthood and In a capitalist system, they know what it looks like, and there were all abject failures in it.
And so right now, anytime there's the slightest little sprouting of capitalism in Cuba, a restaurant gets too big, They mow it down.
Yeah, that tall poppy syndrome, right?
It's the nail that sticks up and gets hammered down.
So just a little bit of data here.
So in the average wage, as you point out, eight-hour day in Cuba is higher than that for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, and Germany.
This is 1957, of course, prior to the revolution.
Cuban labor receives 66.6% of gross national income.
In the US at the time, the figure was 68%.
In Switzerland, 64%.
So labor is receiving more value in Cuba from the GNP, or gross national income, than Switzerland.
And the farms were relatively small.
This is 1958, so it's just a year later.
140 acres of farm in Cuba is the average versus 195 acres in the US. And they have almost 160,000 farms out of 6.4 million people and only 34% of the Cuban population is rural.
So you have an urbanized, educated, elite population.
You have very high productivity in the soil.
You have a number of fairly small...
Farms, the majority, significant majority of the farms are owned by Cubans, not by foreigners.
So this, you know, evil fruit company disaster fest, you know, where they think it's like some modern iPhone factory in China.
The data does not support it.
And this also goes to show that when a country is doing economically very well, that's when you really face a great deal of danger.
Because as you say, it's the golden goose.
This is why people want to grab these riches.
I'm telling you, and like I say, they could have just left that in place.
Look, I'm going to say, but no, I'm telling you, and they methodically, deliberately, people call it, you know, typical socialist mismanagement.
You know, the famous quip, hey, if the communists were to take charge of the Sahara Desert, they would soon be assured.
No, folks, I keep stressing to people, what happened in Cuba was expert management.
Given the goals of the managers, which was absolute power, they knew they had to destroy any capitalist that was out there that was semi-powerful.
It was not mismanaged, folks.
It was expertly managed.
And they really did, very quickly after the revolution, I think, Humberto, become what they claimed to despise, which seems to be a very strong habit of totalitarians, particularly leftists.
Because, you know, Che Guevara portrayed as a man of the people who lived in a hut.
Well, let's hear a little bit about the house that he took over right after the revolution.
Oh, my goodness.
You know, Time magazine had an encomium to Che, man of the century, and so forth.
Hero and icon of the century.
Oh, you know, one of the most admirable things about Che was his denial of material.
Folks, he moved in to what was considered, if not the...
Most luxurious. Among the top 10 luxurious homes in Havana.
It had fountains.
It had parrots.
It had an aviary.
And a yacht dock. A yacht dock, you know, just like all proletariats should have.
A dock. And folks, this is 1959.
Please remember. First week of 1959.
Remote controlled television.
Ten foot wide television.
In 1959, folks, Che Guevara moved into this place after threatening the owner with a firing squad to get out.
He was a contractor, a building contractor in Cuba, who was very successful, and he had this house.
So the point is, everything is wrong.
I mean, what you're hearing about Fidel and Che, everything about the revolution, it's not just wrong, it's upside down.
And it's because Che Guevara said it himself in 1958 in his diaries, he wrote, Much more important than recruiting guerrilla recruits for our guerrilla army, we're recruiting American reporters to report our propaganda.
And it's still going on 60 years later, folks!
Well, okay, so let's talk a little bit about the media.
I don't even want to say, and correct me where I go astray, of course, but I don't even want to say that the media supported it.
I think that without the media, none of this would have been possible.
Without the media, without repeating this propaganda, without cutting off criticism, without attacking critics, which seem to be the role of the media, particularly as you point out, what was it Hemingway said to a writer who wanted to criticize the communists?
And he said, hey man, you criticize the communists, your career is done.
You'll be bad reviewed into obscurity.
So the American media, and in particular, the New York Times, which I feel like I just want to do one of these superstitious spits to the side.
The New York Times, you know.
The New York Times in particular, but the American media as a whole, were bootlickers to these vile, murderous monsters.
And it was the paving of language that opened the gates to this blood fest.
It was more than just fake news.
You know, I mean, everybody knows what that is.
Fidel Castro visited the United States in April of 1959.
Oh, a big hero.
He talks about Harper. But he made it a point.
To visit the offices of the New York Times, where he decorated New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews with a medal, especially printed, minted medal from, and he said it, there's a ceremony, and you can Google this up, folks, without the New York Times The Cuban Revolution would have never been.
He awarded a medal to a literal propagandist from the New York Times for his communist movement.
At the time, in April 59, a lot of people were saying, well, he's not really communist.
Let's wait and see what happens.
As a matter of fact, the US government was still saying that.
But there were Cubans coming here saying, people, wake up!
Knocking on doors in the State Department.
That's those rich Cubans who own the plantations and they want it back.
You can't believe them.
Oh, horrendous. And the comparison, or I guess you could say the juxtaposition between the Jesus-like figure who's portrayed in movies like The Motorcycle Diaries and what he actually said, and this is always an amazing thing to me, Umberto, about history, is that people very often kind of say what they're about.
And they say what their intentions are, they say what their goals are, they openly state what they want to achieve.
And nobody seems to listen, right?
So, as you point out in the book, J. Guevara says that, and I quote, a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.
He executed from revolutionary conviction rather than from any archaic bourgeois details like judicial evidence.
He urged atomic extermination.
For Americans and you know he had of course with with Castro tried to figure out how to get nuclear weapons to strike against New York the New York Times Openly advocating for a man who wants to kill Americans with nuclear war and who planned terrorist attacks, which we can get into. I mean, he was not hiding anything.
That's the most astounding thing.
It's like you see a guy killing someone in cold blood, on camera, eyewitnesses, everything.
GPS coordinates match.
It's perfect. He's got the smoking gun in his hand.
People say, well, he's just a gentle hero who wants to cure his lepers with a touch.
That's what it is. A lot of it has to do with the timing, as we know.
Timing is everything in history.
And listen, when they took over in 59, man, they were the first beatniks.
Think about it. They were in their early 30s at the time.
And Raul had a blonde ponytail, baby.
He looked like Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.
And Fidel himself kind of looked like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, didn't he?
Che Guevara, except for the beard, looked like Jim Morrison of the Doors, which they weren't out at the time.
But the point is, at the time, they were really the first beatniks.
In April of 59, on that same trip I told you about that Castro came to the U.S., he spoke at Harvard on the same bill.
As the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, because it seemed perfectly congruous.
Hey, both of these guys are beatniks.
Cool. And in the U.S., you had this bald golfer, you know, Ike, as the president.
And in Cuba, you supposedly had Batista.
It was 56 years when they overthrew him.
In other words, he's 10 years younger than Tom Petty was when he passed away, yet he's considered the old regime.
But it's this whole aura of the cool beatniks taken over from the evil old guys that really, no matter—look, The very things that millennials and young people, for instance, in 1967, the Rolling Stones were playing a concert in Poland.
Poland allowed the Rolling Stones to play there.
That's why I tell people, Cuba's regime was worse than our...
Rolling Stones were playing in Poland at the same time that in Cuba, Forced labor camps were set up for kids caught listening to the Rolling Stones, and yet Che Guevara is a Rolling Stone rockin' idol!
You can't make it up. Well, and as you point out in the book, they had a great deal of hostility to what we would call hippie culture, either affectionately or contemptuously.
They had a hatred for laxity, for what they called laziness, for hedonism, like all of the things that characterized the 60s of whom this guy seems to be quite a hero.
Man, if those hippies had found themselves in downtown Havana under Jay, they'd have lasted about eight minutes.
That's the thing.
It's the very things, you know, it's the same.
Do your own thing, folks.
Che Guevara founded a regime where he told you what you had to eat, read, sleep, where you had to work, where you had to travel, that you couldn't listen to rock music, folks.
For heaven's sakes, look at it.
It doesn't take a whole lot of reading.
He mentioned this in his own writings.
It is a cult, I'm telling you.
I've tried to argue with people about this.
Are you defending Bautista?
As a matter of fact, I am defending Batista, not him as a person because he was corrupt, but the system.
See what happens with these so-called right-wing dictators and why capitalism often flourishes under them?
Here's the thing. The bribes that you've got to pay, the businessmen have to pay.
To people like Batista and Marcos and so forth.
That's a tax of sorts.
It's a tax. But it's a tax smaller than the tax that a, say, social democratic government would impose on a businessman.
So Batista comes up and he says, okay, you want to build five?
Okay, I need 7% of the action.
Boom. He gets out of the way.
I'm fine. I'm going to the Riviera with my wife.
Whereas a social democrat busybody company will come in, oh, you want to do this?
Okay, well, we've got these regulations for environmental.
We've got these other regulations.
We've got these taxes for this.
We've got this fair labor law.
And so they actually encumber businessmen more than do these so-called tin pot dictators.
And that's what was going on in Cuba in the late 50s.
Oh, yeah. No, I'll take someone's greed over someone's ideology every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
These 10-part right-winged aren't ideological, typically.
Give me a piece of the action, baby.
I'm out of your way.
Right. So, by the end of the 60s, 14,000 Cubans were gunned down, murdered, executed.
And that is, of course, in a relatively small population.
Just no due process at all.
Now, Slobodan Milosevic, Right, went on trial, as you point out, because he ordered 8,000 executions, which of course is much lower than 14,000 executions.
And the charge against Milošević, It was genocide.
And the charge was leveled against him by the same United Nations that stood there and cheered and applauded and threw hats in the air at Che Guevara's speech.
And this just shows you how relativistic, how subjective all of this is.
You know, whether it was because Slobodan was white, and I have no idea, but this bringing genocide charges against a guy who orders the deaths of 8,000 people, whereas Cheering a guy who's responsible or at least in part responsible for the murder of 14,000 people just shows you how subjective so-called universal morality is around the world.
Literally cheering because in December 9th of 1964 Che Guevara visited the General Assembly where he boasted A delegate from Panama, I said, well, what about you?
And he screamed out, executions?
Certainly we execute.
And we will continue executing.
Fusilando is a word he used.
Whoa, this is the United Nations folks.
And now he called them executions, but no, an execution implies some kind of legal process.
So they really don't even qualify as executions.
You know, he himself said it.
We execute from revolutionary conviction.
Oh, he says, I don't kill a man based on evidence.
I kill him because he's necessary to be killed.
And this is the guy. What is it?
The first time he blows away someone at gunpoint.
And it's always helpless. He never liked anybody who had...
He's a great argument for loosening gun control restrictions because the only time Shea was polite to people he met in the middle of nowhere was when they were very well armed, in which case he was very...
Very polite. But if they weren't armed or he could disarm them, he'd just line them up and gun them down.
And was it after the first time he shot someone that he wrote to his father and said, you know, I actually really, really like this killing thing.
Appalling. Appalling.
And he goes into detail.
I spoke with people again who interacted with Che Guevara in person.
I mean, at the Bay of Pigs, after the Bay of Pigs, after the battle was over, our guys, the good guys, The freedom fighters got sold down the river by the Kennedy administration.
They were all captured. And I had relatives who were part of that group and a lot of friends, family friends, and said they were sitting there corralled.
I mean, you know, wounded, ran in no arms or nothing.
Finally Che Guevara shows up in the battle site.
You know, they were And a friend of mine, Menendez, looked up at him and he says, well, Che, I guess this is it.
We're going to the firing squad now.
Because you can imagine, a lot of people were going to the firing squad here before, a lot less than what these soldiers had done.
And Che said, looked around, he says, no, we're not going to send you the firing squad.
We're going to hang all of you, and very slowly.
And Menendez and other people who had medical problems I started behind him.
They looked at him and said, there is something wrong with this guy.
You know, the battle is over.
The battle is over. These are prisoners unarmed.
Now, you can go back to George Patton or Monty Montgomery and you can find bloodthirsty speeches, but that's to fire up the troops for the battle against arms.
This was after combat was over.
And here's Che. And he says, when you looked at his face when he said that, we're going to hang you, all of you.
They said it was obvious that there was something very, very wrong with this guy, Che Guevara.
Let's talk about what he was planning to do in New York.
Because that's something that was really quite shocking.
And I don't think a lot of people know how Che Guevara almost brought 9-11 to New York decades before the final occurrence.
Think about it. 500 kilos of TNT was supposed to go off in these sites.
Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's, And Grand Central Station, terminal as it was called at the time.
This was November of 1962, 500.
Macy's gets 50,000 shoppers that one day.
Not at one time, obviously, but 50,000.
Macy's gimbals, they would go off.
The FBI, hey, at the time, Stephan, we had an FBI that did their job.
You can imagine such a thing, huh?
They did their job. They infiltrated the plot, and it was members of Castro's UN. Diplomatic Corps, working in cahoots with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which became very famous a year later, Oswald.
And they were going to plant these bombs there, and it was going to go off the day after Thanksgiving.
But they were rounded up in time.
Now, if you think about it, what the toll would have been in that, and that was November of 62.
And a lot of people were telling me, But Humberto, that makes no sense.
Why would they have done that?
First of all, you can document this, and what I do when I wrote about this, it's in the New York Times.
Folks, pictures of the terrorists captured.
It's in the New York Times.
This happened. But I tell them, just a month earlier had been the Resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you see, where Kennedy promised to Khrushchev, you get the missiles out of Cuba, and we promised not only not to molest Castro, but to prevent anyone else in this hemisphere from molesting Castro.
And so a lot of people were thinking, I mean, who can say that Castro was trying to crank up The missile crisis again, because he got enraged.
Even though he came out smelling like a rose, he got the US and Russia to protect him.
He was enraged, and he was trying to crank up the missile crisis because he sent a telegram to Khrushchev on the last day of it saying, launch a preemptive strike against the US. That's what got the missiles out.
And Khrushchev said- Is this guy nuts?
Please check that. And his people were there, and he says, yeah, he sent him to launch it.
And Khrushchev freaked.
He says, okay, tell Castro I can't do it right now, but if the Yankees invade, then I'll go ahead and send him.
And Khrushchev said, I had no intention of doing that.
Khrushchev admitted it would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba.
Like the US didn't go to war over Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
We're not going to go to war over Cuba.
So Castro sends another telegram saying, hey, they're loading the landing barges.
They're coming. I can tell. Let's not let them have the first shot.
Send them, Khrushchev. And that's when Khrushchev said, this guy is nuts.
Because he had spies here.
He knew they weren't.
An invasion wasn't imminent.
So he said, get the missiles out of Cuba before something terrible happens.
That something terrible would have been Fidel or Che getting too close to the buttons.
That's what got the missiles out of there.
So Castro got mad.
And there's reason to believe that this terror plot was him trying to crank up, you know, The missile crisis again.
So let's talk about the Bay of Pigs, one of the great obfuscated events in history.
So April 1961, the narrative from the left is, well, you know, there was this wonderfully successful socialist revolution in Cuba, but the evil arch imperialistic capitalists didn't like it and invaded and try and destroyed it.
But the heroic socialists fought back and emerged victorious.
First of all, the US made a total of 16 back-channel attempts after Castro took power to come to terms with them.
There were a lot of them were through Arturo Frondizi.
He was Argentine president at the time, and he documents him in his memoirs.
The U.S. was flabbergasted to say, how can we come to terms with this raving lunatic?
We're trying to find out what his grievances are, and we're going to try to work with him.
But every time they saw one grievance, he'd come up with it.
He needed the U.S. as an enemy.
He was going to have them as an enemy, regardless of what the U.S. So the U.S. tried desperately to come to terms with Castro, and they didn't.
So finally, finally, after Castro confiscated, I say confiscated, stole, burglarized, almost worth $7 billion today.
It was $2 billion at the time.
He stole every penny of U.S. property and businesses in Cuba, tortured and murdered a couple of U.S. businessmen who resisted.
People said, well, why do y'all have this embargo on it?
Folks, that was the reason.
He stole $7 million.
The CIA finally approved contingency plans for an invasion in Cuba.
And by the time that those contingency plans were approved, Castro had already sent his own Bay of Pigs invasions to try to disrupt Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Panama.
So, poor little innocent Castro.
He had already tried to invade with guerrillas and terrorists five neighboring Latin American countries before the U.S. even started contingency planning about getting rid of him.
So, unfortunately, the plans that started under Eisenhower, with Richard Nixon, the main booster, by the way, Richard Nixon met Castro on that April 59 trip where he came to the US. And when he finished that trip, he told Ike and he told the guys, look, let's just start thinking about something with this guy, because this guy scares me.
I think he's something. Isn't it interesting that the first guy who saw through Alger Hiss, famous commerce buyer, was the first guy to see through Fidel Castro in the US. Oh, it took the press a long time to get their revenge on Nixon, but eventually they did.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But think about it. I mean, it's interesting that he got both his, he had Alger Hiss's number and Fidel Castro's.
So they start the plans.
Unfortunately, Kennedy wins and the plans land in Kennedy's lap.
And, you know, people say, what happened to Bay of Pig?
Bottom line, Kennedy canceled the air support, the airstrikes at the last minute, and then he forbade the US fleet, which was right offshore, from offering air support.
And people said, well, bottom line, the Kennedy's people that were liberal, Beltway, Ivy League liberals, their heart wasn't in it from the beginning.
If Ike had won, if Nixon had won, In 1960, some guys named Che Guevara and Fidel Castro would have less Wikipedia space than Pancho Villa.
I'm telling you, if Nixon had won.
But he canceled it and the guys were, they were sitting there pleading on the phones, what happened to the air support?
What happened to the planes? We've got all these ships.
And Kennedy from Washington came saying, no, we can't get involved in this.
We can't get involved in this.
Who put the guys there?
Oh, it was a horrifying betrayal.
And the idea, of course, that it was some, I don't know, Anglo plot or some white person's plot.
As you point out, everyone involved in the invasion in the Bay of Pigs, including the commanders, were all Cuban.
They all wanted to go back and liberate their families, their friends, and get back their property and try to find a way to live on the island that they had formerly loved.
Yeah, the second in command in Nido Oliva was a black Cuban.
In fact, it was almost a precise, if you looked at it, and I looked at it in my book, I have a chapter on it, a precise cross-section of Cuban society at the time.
You had the sugarcane planters, and you had sugarcane cunners.
You had, you know, elite, urban elite, and you had their show first.
Everybody wanted to get rid of Castroism, and this was fairly early in the game.
These guys were all being recruited in the late 1960s, but Castroism had already shown its fangs and is saying, whatever problems we have right now, Castroism ain't gonna solve them.
Well, and this is something that, for many years, Umberto, I have just been astounded and frustrated by, probably even less so than you.
Here's a sentence from your book that I hope puts some of this in context.
So when you go and you see people with their little Che pins, or you see rock stars up there snarling away into a microphone, dressed up as Che Guevara, or you see people with those posters up on their dorm room walls and so on.
Okay, this is a sentence.
Che performed the same role for Fidel Castro that Dzerzhinsky performed for Lenin.
Himmler for Hitler and Beria for Stalin.
He was the snarling enforcer, the regime's chief executioner.
Now, you cannot, and rightly so, you cannot roam around with a picture of Heimlich Himmler on your wall or on your shirt...
This guy, as you say, this Cuban journalist, Louis Ortega, Says that Guevara sent 1,892 men to the firing squad.
And men there is kind of loose, because as we'll talk about in a sec, some of them were boys.
I mean, they were definitely boys, mid-teens.
So that to me is the astounding thing, that this man who ordered the deaths of thousands of innocents, who tortured, who set up torture camps and rape camps and murder factories, that you can just roam around and With a picture of him.
And people are like, hey man, that's cool.
That's chic. It's primarily because people don't know.
You know, even me, obviously an enemy of the useful leaders of Forth.
When people ask me, I say, 90% of it is ignorance.
And that's why I wrote the last book about Castro, the longest one, because the media doesn't let the truth get out about Cuba.
If you get a bureau to report from Havana A foreign news word.
CNN got the first one.
You're going to play the regime's game.
If you start writing things that slight Cuba's revolution in the Castro regime, you're going to lose your bureau in Cuba, folks.
It's not rocket science.
I have to keep reminding myself that Bolshevism or Communism collapsed, what, 30, 40 years ago.
And a lot of people don't know that it's a totalitarian regime.
If you see a report from Cuba and it says Dateline, you know, Havana AP, Havana Order, folks, that is being monitored.
This is a totalitarian regime.
They look at everything reported and ongoing for 60 years this has been going on.
So really, nobody really knows what happened during the Cuban Revolution.
All these things that we've been talking about, Or front page news to a lot of people.
And that's why I appreciate this so much.
And there's a chilling scene in the book about the boy.
And it's important to focus on, I think, individual murderers because, you know, as the old saying goes, a million deaths, one death is a tragedy, a million death is a statistic.
Stalin, I think, said that.
And the boy, this is the quote, this is a boy, I think he was about 15 years old, who had been captured.
It says, the boy stared Che resolutely in the face.
If you're going to kill me, he yelled, you'll have to do it while I'm standing.
Men die standing. And there are men who are in their cells watching this, who are crying out, murderous.
And one of them says, then we saw Che unholstering his pistol.
He put the barrel to the back of the boy's neck and blasted.
The shot almost decapitated the young boy.
And it is astonishing to me, Umberto, that a child murderer, who murdered, I mean, all the deaths are horrifying, but I think we can understand that blasting the head off a young boy, that this man has become a hero to so many.
It's testament to just the power of propaganda.
I'm sort of speechless at how someone like this gets elevated to such a position of reverence.
It is. It is.
Propaganda is the heart of our struggle.
We can never abandon.
That was Fidel Castro writing in 1956.
And in fact, he got the media.
That was the whole point of my last book.
He got the media and he was smoothing them and he was bringing them in and he's been cultivating them for six years.
And that's why so little is not like, again, it's not just wrong, folks.
It's upside down.
They're saying, well, Umberto, whatever else you've got to say about Castro and Che, you've got to hand it to them because they stood up to the big bully Uncle Sam.
See, that's part of his appeal, especially in the third world in Latin America.
They stood up. And that is the biggest farce of all.
The United States put Castro, especially the State Department, there's a quote from the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, without U.S. help, Castro would have never gotten into power.
Everyone in the State Department and everyone in the CIA were He was pro Casserole.
That quote is documented in my books.
So they helped put him in power.
They thought they bought his line that he was part of the Democratic left.
And that was the CIA's pet project in the 50s in Europe, the Christian Democrats, and they thought that Casserole belonged to him.
So they helped him get into power and they pulled the rug out from under Batista, kicked him out.
They wouldn't let him come to seek asylum in the U.S. He had to go to Portugal.
They helped put him in power, and then after the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact, the US pledged itself to not only not to invade Cuba with US forces, I know people who were involved in launching commando raids against the Castro regime from Miami,
and after the missile crisis, they were rounded up and detained for violating U.S. neutrality laws.
We all know what mutually assured destruction is.
Castro had mutually assured protection, protected by both the Soviet Union And the United States.
So then some very intrepid commandos move their operations to the Bahamas to launch and raise.
Well, don't you know that Kennedy got on the phone to his friend Harold McMillan in the UK, PM at the time, and said, hey, we got these crazy Cubans over there.
They're launching raids. And in making Castro mad, can you please round him up?
So think about it. In 1962, Fidel Castro, this plucky underdog, had the protection of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the British Empire.
You can't make it up.
You can't make it up. Now, let's call that shrewd diplomacy, but let's do away with the David Goliath thing.
Another thing that I found astounding in the book, Umberto, was the vampiric element of the revolution, which is a relatively small detail, but I think quite telling about how when they were going to shoot someone, they would drain the blood out of him first and but I think quite telling about how when they were going to shoot someone, they would drain the blood out of him first and
But the idea that they're hauling blood, sucking blood in a truly vampiric fashion, sucking blood out of people they're about to murder, shipping it off to help other regimes gain power to continue the murder to the point where the people have to sometimes be dragged out.
They've been drained of so much blood in order to be shot.
It was a thing.
I mean, so much blood was draining in the early 60s.
All this blood was just pulling to the ground.
And so they got the bright idea, hey, that's worth money.
That's plasma. You know, that's blood.
And so they actually would start draining just enough Leaving just enough to where they could be tied up to the stake.
And this happened to some US citizens, by the way.
Howard Anderson was one of them.
He's one of these American business owners.
He owned a Jeep dealership and a couple of filling stations in Cuba.
And I told you, the U.S. Castro's people stole him.
He resisted the theft.
And that's what they did to him.
They drained the blood from him before sending him to the firing squad in April of 61.
And this happened, and this kept going in the early 60s.
Obviously, the Vietnam War wasn't going on.
But the executions were going—murderers were going through all through the 60s.
And so by mid-60s, 65, 66, they were sending this blood— To North Vietnam.
In 67 and 68, Castro sent some of his top KGB-trained torturers to North Vietnam to torture USPOWs, and a couple of them were tortured to death.
There's a book called Honor Bound, and it says that the torturers of USPWs in North Vietnam, the worst torturers, were carried out by Cuban, Castro Cubans.
Please don't confuse them with me, folks.
Again, this is not reported anywhere, anywhere.
Now, there was, of course, a desperate rebellion against the Castro regime, which is, what, less than 100 miles from the U.S. coastline.
And this went on for six years or so, this desperate fight against this totalitarian, violent, murderous...
Now, if there is supposed to be sympathy for the underdog, you'd think that there would be a few movies or books or, you know, publicly available stories of this desperate and eventually and very courageous, right?
Because they had very little support and constantly running out of ammo.
And they also knew that the price had been taken alive.
Would be a death we could scarcely wish on our worst enemy.
Well, maybe our worst enemy.
But there's very little in popular culture about this.
You hear about the French rebels against the Nazi occupation.
But you don't hear about this desperate revolution or counter-revolutionary war that went on for over half a decade.
Again, like I tell people, it's upside down.
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were not guerrilla fighters.
They were fighters against guerrillas.
The only genuine popular rebellion in Cuba in the 20th century was fought against Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and he brought in Soviet advisors.
Remember, the rebellion started in about 60 and petered out about 66, 65, 66.
So he brought in Soviet advisors.
Some of these Soviet advisors, you know, had been very, very active and were very good advisors against their own rebellions, especially in the Ukraine, which had only been 25, 30 years prior to that.
So he crushes literally a campesino, a rural revolt with Russian tanks and Russian flame floors, among other things.
And then they still have the reputation of being guerrilla fighters.
Again, this is documented.
These survivors of this rebellion, many of them live in Miami today.
I interviewed some of them for the book.
And as a matter of fact, unfortunately, it only came out in Spanish.
People can try to look it up.
Leyendas del Exilio translates into Legends of the Exile.
And there was just a special program last month Interviewing these rural guerrillas.
Unfortunately, it didn't get outside of the Miami Spanish language bubble.
But boy, that would have been very important for the general public to learn these guys talking about how they fought desperately against Fidel and Che as guerrillas, helped by no one, whereas Russians were coming in to crush them.
Well, and there's this horrible paradox, I mean, to the point now where I just think leftism is just one big paradox as a whole, where the left says, well, we really care about women, we care about minorities, we care about blacks, and so on.
Let's get a snapshot, Umberto, of what life was like for women and blacks and other minorities before the revolution versus after.
Well, how many of our viewers realize that Cuba, that Castronche ousted A black Cuban president, Batista was—well, in Cuba he would be called a mulatto, but as we know in the U.S., you know, he would pass as a black in the U.S. in the same way they'd say Soledad O'Brien does.
Holly Berry does, Charles Rangel does, and so forth.
So the Castro, and he had a lot of blacks in his government.
As I mentioned, the Bay of Pigs invasion included the second command was a black Cuban and a lot of black Cubans.
After that, when Castro and Sheik him in, somebody asked Che Guevara a couple of weeks after he entered Havana, a black Cuban, his name was Pons.
In fact, he belonged to the Cuban American National Foundation.
He says, Che, what are you going to do for blacks in Cuba?
And he said, We're going to do for blacks in Cuba exactly what blacks did for the revolution.
Nothing. He was admitting that Cuban blacks, which were only...
Cuba was 71% white, by the way, in the 50s.
This was the U.S. state, so it wasn't a predominantly black country.
But yet, blacks have played almost no rule In Castro and Chez's movement whatsoever, they played a much bigger role in the resistance to these guys.
And women, the longest suffering female political prisoners in modern history, the longest suffering black.
Eusebio Peña Auer suffered 29 years And Castro's Dungeons, and there are several others like that, longer than Nelson Mandela suffered.
Nelson Mandela was 27 and a half years in a relative country club prison.
Yet, I'm here to tell you, and I'm here to guess, that most of our viewers have all heard of Nelson Mandela, and none of them have heard of Eusebio Peñaver or the other Cubans who suffered longer, 90 miles from U.S. shores, and much more horrible incarceration.
Well, and given that Mandela, as I've talked about elsewhere, was a communist who was devoted to terrorism, well, it's not quite the same in terms of how people could be treated.
You also point out here, 1958, Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the United States.
And now... The female suicide rate in Cuba is very high.
And so from a chance, I mean, they had a chance to be educated.
They had a chance for egalitarianism.
You had, I mean, these aren't social programs I agree with, but the left would generally consider them good.
You know, you've got forced unemployment insurance.
You've got three months maternity leave in the 1930s.
So a lot of social, socialist-y kind of mixed economy type of programs for women.
And then they go to the highest suicide rate in the region.
Yeah, those things that we mentioned that were there...
By my opinion, my opinion, they retarded Cuba's progress a little bit.
That was a problem. The unions, this just happened.
The organized labor stranglehold in Cuba led to fairly high unemployment in these things, as they do every place.
But they go against all of the propaganda that you hear, that Cuba had no social policies and people were dying in the streets and so forth, which is complete bull.
Females in Cuba...
You know, they served in government positions.
My mom was a college professor in Cuba.
You know, she graduated in the 40s and all this thing.
But people think, you know, well, Cuba is one of these tin pot Latin American macho places where women, you know, were kept, were lashed.
And blacks were slaves and nannies and so forth.
Folks, this was not the case.
Well, let's talk about this as well, because when society progresses, and Cuba was an example, I think, just like Argentina back in the 1930s, which had the same GDP per capita as America, when society begins to do well...
The problem is the rising tide does not lift all boats because it's not an automatic process.
So when you get freedoms, when you get opportunities, smart, hardworking people end up doing very well.
And left behind are these baleful, Gollum-like, resentful people.
As you point out, Che, a failed doctor.
Castro, a failed lawyer.
And people who just...
Can't get it together, can't get ahead and feel left behind and this, what Nietzsche would call the resentment, the resentment, like the resentful people, the people who say, well, everyone else is getting ahead, everyone else is doing better, everyone else is getting the nice houses and the nice girls and rather than say, well, what can I do to improve my opportunities for success in the free market?
I just want the whole world to burn.
I want to kill everyone who's more successful than me.
I want to grab things that I have not earned.
I want to have power over people who are doing better than me.
This what Rand would call hatred of the good for being the good.
This is one of the great dangers, which I think we can see playing out in the West is one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you about this as we obviously can't go back in time and fix Cuba.
Understanding that when society gets wealthier, it has this great destabilizing element of all the resentful, rageful people who feel they can't get ahead and just want to destroy.
As we always say to Cubans, you know that Cubans in the early years of the revolution, while we were still there and so forth, nobody called Castro and Chase, they call them comunistas, but mostly they call them los resentidos.
The resentful ones.
I hear my parents talk, and I remember this conversation when I was looking, no, ese es un resentido.
They wouldn't say un comunita, un resentido.
I'm here to tell you probably 80% of the people, the Cubans, who joined Castro and Che's movement in early years had never heard of Marx or Lenin.
They were exactly the type of people you just mentioned.
Resentful. Resentidos.
You put those people in positions of power, Katie, bar the door.
Leave. The society is destroyed.
And that's what happened in Cuba.
It rose. The expectations, you know, the rising expectations and people weren't getting ahead.
Los resentidos.
The resentful ones.
Is there any sense, Umberto, in the expat or in the Cuban community...
When they look across the sort of cultural and particularly educational and entertainment vista of the United States, when you start to see these class divisions, these racial divisions, these gender divisions being constantly poked at and inflamed, and you see people who are now resentful of what's called white privilege, which if it really existed, you probably couldn't even criticize it.
But they look at sort of white privilege or the patriarchy or whatever it is.
It seems to me that the seeds of this resentment are continually being sowed into the American soil.
And given what Cubans have seen, how that tends to flower into these demon seeds, is there a concern that it's sort of a little bit out of the frying pan into the fire?
Yeah, and that is why Cuban Americans are despised, detested, loathed by the left.
And that is why they gave...
Cuban Americans voted for President Trump, candidate Trump, at a higher rate than so-called white Americans, even though most Cuban Americans, like I say, was white, at a higher rate.
Why? Why? Been there, seen that?
Because they can see it.
You know, we see that, the kind of stuff that the Democrats are coming out with and say, oh, where have we seen this before?
You know, it's the kind of thing.
And that's why Cubans are detested so much by then.
And that's why we're accused of being fanatic, because we look around us and we see these things going on and we say, we saw it happen, folks.
It destroyed a prosperous society.
We saw it.
And so what would you think are the major lessons you'd like to get out to the people who are going to watch and who are going to listen to this, Umberto, the takeaways that hopefully will give people strength in the cultural battle?
Because if you lose the cultural battle, man, it's all over.
And you end up being in a situation like one detail that struck me from your book was that One of the most wanted items in Cuba's black market is used motor oil because it's the poor man's shark repellent in case you need to get out.
What is it that you would like to say to people to extract from the experiences of people under the Cuban regime and how to energize them and to fight the same trends that are happening throughout the West, but in America in particular?
When you hear those buzzwords, exploitation, racism, exploitation...
Equal opportunity, that kind of stuff.
When you hear that? Social justice.
Social justice.
Look at it very, very closely, folks.
I'm not saying every single time you see it, it's going to be a comment, but start studying and start seeing who is behind that.
Who is funding those movements for social justice?
Who is funding for racial equality?
Who is funding these things?
Look behind it.
Because that's what we're accused of being fascists.
We're not a fascist, just we saw this thing happen.
We saw this whole movement of this and that, and people not thinking, people not analyzing things.
And well, here we are.
I mean, not that I'm complaining.
Like I say, I'm going fishing with my dad and my kids tomorrow.
So ours had a happy ending.
Well, it's funny because, I mean, the lessons out of Nazi Germany sometimes seems to be to see a whole bunch of Nazis where there really aren't any.
But we seem to be overlooking the larger large tsunami of communism that is threatening to swamp the West.
So I really want to thank you for your time, Umberto.
I just want to remind people these.
We'll put links to these books below.
They're really, really well worth reading.
And I hope we can get together and talk more about Fidel.
So here's a couple of books.
The Fidel, Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, The Longest Romance, The Rainstream Media, and Fidel Castro, and Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolized Him.
The website is hfontova.com and twitter.com forward slash hfontova.
Really, really appreciate your time today, my friend.
