Turns out, however, that the “real story” as “revealed” by Sorensen is identical to the one filtered through the MSM for the past fifty years:  Kennedy, we’re given to understand, trounced Nixon—and not just in style—mainly in substance. Sorensen also laments what “now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-biteTwitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims.”

Nothing of the sort, we’re given to understand, marred those heady and substantive debates of yore. Take Kennedy’s claim that President Eisenhower had fallen asleep (or gone golfing) during his command and allowed a perilous “missile gap” to grow between the U.S. and the Soviets. In fact a huge gap had grown (roughly six thousand for us, three hundred for the Soviets.)

Might this qualify as an “outrageous claim” by Kennedy?  Not if your source is Ted Sorensen and the New York Times. In fact, prior to the debates, CIA director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the genuine missile numbers. But rather than respond to this genuinely outrageous claim, Nixon bit his tongue. Disclosing the real number (that JFK knew perfectly well) in public would alert the Soviets to how we got their number, and jeopardize U.S. national security.  Which is to say, to blindside his Republican opponent Kennedy relied on that opponent’s patriotism. Let’s face it, Republicans are at a woeful disadvantage here.

“The Republicans have allowed a communist dictatorship to flourish eight jet minutes from our borders,” Kennedy charged during the second debate. “We must support anti-Castro fighters. So far these freedom fighters have received no help from our government.” Here again JFK’s “extremist rhetoric” was a pre-meditated lie. Unlike the John Lovitz character on “Saturday Night Live,” JFK lied expertly and with a straight face.

Short weeks before the debates Allen Dulles (on Ike’s orders) had also briefed Kennedy about Cuban invasion plans (what became the Bay of Pigs invasion). So the “Real Story” (as you well know, Mr. Ted Sorensen) is that Kennedy was again lying through his teeth. He knew damn well the Republican administration was training Cuban freedom fighters. And since the plans were secret, he knew damn well Nixon couldn’t rebut. So Nixon bit his tongue again. He could easily have stomped Kennedy on it. But to some candidates, national security trumps debating points.

Four months later, 1,500 of those very Cuban freedom-fighters that “we must support” were slugging it out with 51,000 Castro troops, squadrons of Stalin tanks, and his entire Air Force at a beachhead now known as the Bay of Pigs.

JFK was no longer a candidate. He was now commander in chief. It was time to put up or shut up. He’d already done plenty of putting up by forcing the CIA and military planners to change the landing site. Then by holding up his approval of an invasion a year in the making till 24 hours before the planned D-day. Then by canceling 80 percent of the pre-invasion air strikes. This last was a vital element of the invasion as planned under Eisenhower.

The Cuban invasion was born under a Republican administration, with Vice President Nixon its main booster. The man who saw through Alger Hiss was also the first to see through Fidel Castro. Then it landed in Camelot’s lap.

“Where are the PLANES?” kept crackling over the invasion ships’ radios. That was their commander, Pepe San Roman, roaring into his radio from the beachhead between hundreds of artillery concussions from huge 122 mm Soviet Howitzers. “Send planes or we can’t last!” San Roman yelled while watching the Soviet tanks close in and his casualties pile up.

The pleas made it to Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke in Washington, D.C., who conveyed them in person to his commander in chief.

“Two planes, Mr. President!” Admiral Burke sputtered into his commander in chief’s face. The fighting admiral was livid, pleading for permission to allow just two of his jets to blaze off the carrier deck and support the desperately embattled freedom-fighters on that heroic beachhead.

“Burke, we can’t get involved in this,” replied JFK.

“WE put those Cuban boys there, Mr. President!” the fighting admiral exploded. “By God, we ARE involved!”‘

Interesting match here. In one corner, the man who blasted almost half the Imperial Japanese fleet to fiery rubble and sent it to the bottom of the Pacific at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

In the other, the man who managed to get his PT boat Karate-chopped in half by a Japanese destroyer, a feat of nautical ingenuity that still has naval men scratching their heads – and one that almost got him court-martialed. Only some heavy political pressure saved John F. Kennedy in 1944.

Alas, politics prevailed again that night in April ‘61. JFK refused to help the freedom fighters. The election was over, you see.

“Can’t continue,” crackled the final message from San Roman a day later. For three days his force of mostly volunteer civilians had battled savagely against a Soviet-trained and led force 10 times their size, inflicting casualties of 20 to 1. To this day their feat of arms amazes professional military men. Morale will do that to a fighting force. And there’s no morale booster like watching Fidel Castro and Che Guevara ravage your homeland and families, believe me.

Ammo finally ran out. “Russian tanks overrunning my position,” San Roman on his radio again, “destroying my equipment… How can you people do this to us?” Finally the radio went dead.

“Tears filled my eyes,” writes CIA man Grayston Lynch, a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who took that final message. “I broke down completely.  For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”

“Let me address the FOX News Network…. two words. It’s all I need:  “You lie”… Fox News is “essentially the voice of the Republican Party.”  – Rick Sanchez, September 18, 2009

Americans of Cuban heritage are, in fact, the most overwhelmingly Republican ethnic group in the U.S. Even with the third generation registering to vote, a measly 13 per cent of these incurably obtuse and unenlightened Hispanics 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.

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—simply will not politically assimilate. Not all the Kings Horses or all the King’s Men can bring them around to follow the lead of the majority in their adopted country and register Democratic.

During candidate Obama’s campaign visit to Miami summer of 2008, a huge crowd clapped deliriously at the Democratic Messiah—while outside the convention Hall, Cuban-Americans marched and waved picket signs denouncing him. This was the first instance of such irreverence towards the One during this campaign.

To add insult to injury, a formal letter drafted by five major Cuban-American organizations at the time, including the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association and Cuban Political Prisoners Association called Obama’s candidacy “an affront” to their very sensibilities! Nothing remotely of this sort had been mounted by properly-assimilated Americans on any campaign stop by the Democratic candidate.

Even more infuriating for the Democrat-Media Complex, the 2000 census showed that second-generation Cuban-Americans have educational and income levels higher–not only than mot ethnic groups who dutifully punch the clock at the Democratic sweat shop every morning–but also higher than the U.S. population in general.

This political and cultural recalcitrance has often goaded the Democratic/Media axis to enraged sputterings against Cuban-Americans.

During their Convention in 2004, America’s majority political party feted Michael Moore as their honored guest, seating him in a place of honor right next to Jimmy Carter. “Cuban-Americans,” wrote this honored guest for America’s majority party in his book “Downsize This,” “are responsible for sleaze and influence-peddling in American politics. In every incident of national torment that has deflated our country for the past three decades, Cuban exiles are always present and involved.”

Interestingly, the gripes against Cubans-Americans by liberals closely resemble the ones against Jewish-Americans by Rick Sanchez (among others.)

• “Cuba Policy isn’t made in Washington,” griped Bill Press in a CNN column. “It’s made in Miami by former Batista supporters who think they can reverse history!”
• “Bush’s defense of the (Cuban) embargo serves a family voting bloc and little else!” griped alleged “conservative” Kathleen Parker in a column.
• “A small number of powerful exiles in South Florida cow our politicians into keeping the crazy Cuban policy!” griped media baron Al Neuharth in USA Today.

All this takes talent, my friends. Around our domino tables we snicker derisively at those bumbling Trilateralists. Between sips of our mojitos, we guffaw and slap our thighs at the incompetence of the Bilderbergers and Rothschilds.  We Cuban-Americans are the Illuminati to beat all Illuminati, the slickest of the slick. We watch “Godfather II” and snort scornfully. That was a chump operation Mikey Corleone pulled on Nevada Senator Geary with that dead prostitute. We woulda had him in our pocket for half the trouble.

We watch “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and direct our boos and hisses at Jimmy Stewart. What a fuddy-duddy.

We managed to get Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal, Chris Dodd and Larry Craig, The Brookings Institution and the Cato Institute, the Wall Street Journal and The Nation, the U.S. Communist Party and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce all on the same side of an issue. All of the above have come out publicly against the so-called Cuban embargo. All blame it on the “politically powerful” and “well-heeled” Cuban-American lobby.

Imagine the MSM/Democratic uproar upon sighting a Tea-Party placard that celebrates the mass-expulsion of Hispanic U.S. citizens from U.S. shores. (Heck, one that celebrated the expulsion of illegals would detonate their hair-trigger charge of RACISM!!!”) Well, a mass-expulsion of U.S. citizens of Hispanic heritage was in fact celebrated with a cartoon by the MSM/Democrat’s very flagship, the Washington Post.

Study the cartoon and imagine the uproar if instead of fedoras (which are rarely worn by Cuban-Americans, BTW) the group had worn keffiyehs, burkhas and chadors. What if the boat’s passengers were headed for Africa? Imagine the rallies and raised fists in Los Angeles and Phoenix if they’d worn sombreros!

The head explodes imagining the MSM hysteria over any such depictions of any reliably Democratic ethnic group.

Last month Fidel Castro granted Goldberg an extensive “interview.” This week a seemingly conscience-pricked Goldberg cops a plea for the arrant apple-polishing that resulted. Regarding his portrayal of a “benign” and grandfatherly Fidel Castro whom he also called a “great man,” Goldberg rationalizes thusly:

A close reading of the human rights literature suggests to me that the leadership of Cuba is not morally comparable to the leadership of Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela.

Well, Mr. Goldberg, perhaps a closer reading might help. To wit:  In his book Against All Hope, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 years in Castro’s dungeons, forced-labor camps, and torture chambers, then served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, reveals how at one point in 1961, Castro’s Gulag held 350,000 political prisoners. Freedom House estimates that half a million Cubans have passed through Castro’s Gulag. That’s out of a Cuban population at the time of 6.4 million.

In her book Gulag, Anne Applebaum estimates that at any one time, two million people were incarcerated in Stalin’s Gulag. That was out of a Soviet population of 220 million.

Now punch your calculator…see, Mr. Goldberg? Turns out that calling Castro a “Stalinist” actually lowballs his repression. Castro and Che Guevara jailed and tortured Cubans at a higher rate than (Che Guevara’s idol) Stalin jailed and tortured Russians.

“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 that Castro’s regime murdered from 14,000 Cubans by firing squad mostly during the 60s. Again, Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in those years. Given the U.S. population, a proportionate bloodbath would reach 3 million firing squad murders.

According to the Cuba Archive Project, headed by scholars Maria Werlau and Dr. Armando Lago, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. According to the Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation.

France was nation of 42 million in 1940. – and as mentioned, 172,260 of these died from Nazi policies. My calculator reveals that “The Great Man” Fidel Castro caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among the people he “liberated” and lavished with free and exquisite health care than the Nazis caused among the French they enslaved and tortured with the SS and Gestapo.

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 “The Great Man’s” Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.  An association of these heroes, representing 3,551 years in Castro’s prisons, and torture chambers reside in the U.S. today and would be as happy to indulge Mr. Goldberg with an interview as was Fidel Castro. But unlike the “The Great Man” they’ll tell the truth.

“I judge his (Castro’s) revolution against what it replaced, namely, the thugocracy of Batista, who was a friend only to a handful of oligarchs and American mafia leaders,” further rationalizes Goldberg.

Granted, The Godfather II is a superb film. But better educational sources on pre-Castro Cuba do exist. This “friend of oligarchs” was a mulatto grandson of slaves born on the dirt floor of a palm roofed shack in the Cuban countryside. Cuba’s oligarchy in fact denied Fulgencio Batista admittance into their Havana Yacht Club and largely bankrolled his violent overthrow. From Cuba’s richest man, sugar magnate Julio Lobo, to Pepin Bosch of the Bacardi dynasty, and hundreds of oligarchs in-between, Castro’s July 26 Movement was funded by the very people the learned Mr Goldberg claims were Batista’s “friends.”

“Many of the poorest Cubans under Batista, which is to say, most Cubans, appreciated (Castro’s health-care and educational) innovations,” Goldberg further elucidates.

In fact, Cuba’s per-capita income in 1958 was higher than half of Europe’s. “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” begins a UNESCO study of Cuba from 1957. “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 a Cuban agricultural worker was also among the highest in the world. Cuban labor received 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent.”

These citizens of this “Oligarchic Thugocracy” had owned more TVs per capita than any European country, had enjoyed the services (some free, most extremely cheap) of more doctors and dentists per capita than citizens in the U.S. or Britain and had never emigrated from their homeland.  Instead, in the 40’s and 50’s when Cubans could get U.S. visas for the asking and Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and family, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans in Cuba, and Cuba was deluged with immigrants. At the time Cuban laborers earned the 8th highest wages – not in Latin America– but in the world.

“Cuba’s laborer’s always maintained a stony indifference to Fidel Castro’s movement,” admitted Fidel Castro’s bankroller Julio Lobo, who knew because he employed thousands of them.

Granted this information is not yet available on Blu-Ray, Mr. Goldberg, much less from an “interview” with Fidel Castro.  I’m afraid the fully documented historical record above would require actual reading by The Atlantic’s newly-minted “Cuba Expert.”

The MSM is absolutely agog with the catalogue of insights, woes and regrets bequeathed by the Cuban mass-murderer to Goldberg. “I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting” writes Goldberg.

“‘The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro replied.  And as mentioned the MSM and assorted “Cuba Analysts” are all aflutter over Castro’s “epiphany,”  “honesty,” “regret,” –take your pick—“that Communism “doesn’t work.”

Some actual study of recent Cuban history might enlighten these learned parties. To wit:

“This doesn’t work, I’m resigning!” (Fidel Castro, July 1959 during political crisis with his puppet “President” Manuel Urrutia)

“This doesn’t work! Terrible mistakes were made (especially in adopting Che Guevara’s moral incentives)–we need material capitalistic incentives. So I’m resigning!” (Fidel Castro, July 1970, after the much-ballyhooed “10 million ton” sugar harvest proved way short and utterly disastrous.)

“The capitalists organize production better than we do. There’s much we can learn from them.” (Fidel Castro, 1986 during “Rectification Process” i.e. another “re-evaluation” after another economic crisis.)

“We are not afraid of the market. We are not afraid of economic reform. The people understand the reasons behind them and support them.” (Fidel Castro. Nov. 1991 announcing Cuba’s “Special Period” i.e. loss of Soviet Sugar Daddy–another re-evaluation after another economic crisis.)

Has any “Cuba Analyst” noticed a marked change in the rights, prosperity and welfare of the Cuban people after any of these “epiphanies,” “regrets,” “re-evaluations”, etc.?

And has any “Cuba Analyst” mentioned that Hugo Chavez (current Cuban Sugar-Daddy) looks to lose the Sept. 26 parliamentary elections in Venezuela 52 to 42 percent? (granted, there’s much room for altering the results.)

And has any “Cuba Analyst” mentioned that this will present Castro with an economic crisis as bad as the “Special Period” in the early 90’s after the Soviets collapsed? And will thus require another “re-evaluation,” that will buttress the regime but have the same effect on the Cuban people’s rights, prosperity and welfare as all the other “re-evaluations?”

And has any Cuba Expert mentioned that–given Castro’s history of pronouncements during his various economic crises (to say nothing of this one) –his pronouncements to Jeffrey Goldberg just might be insincere?.. Just might have an ulterior motive? … Just might mean absolutely nothing regarding the rights and welfare of the Cuban people?

If so, I haven’t seen or heard it.

Employing Jeffrey Goldberg as a conduit, during his exclusive interview, Castro also admonished Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his anti-Semitism and implored the Iranian leader to kindly desist from such error. And “try to understand why Israelis fear for their existence,” as Goldberg put it. “For over 2,000 years they (Jews) were subjected to terrible persecution,” explained Castro. “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours.”

However impolitic for Goldberg, the Atlantic’s investigatory gumshoe/sleuth might have asked Castro why a scant two months ago he declared that, “the Fuhrer’s swastika is today Israel’s banner.”

Or why Cuba co-sponsored the U.N.’s infamous “Zionism= Racism” resolution in 1975. Or why Castro sent Cuban “volunteers” to fight (and get creamed) against Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Or why he provided training basis for the PLO, Al Fatah and Carlos the Jackal, the most notorious terrorist of the 70’s.

Or why Castro personally decorated Yasir Arafat with Cuba’s highest honor, the Bay of Pigs Medal, whereupon Arafat exulted that:  “Comrade Fidel said that the Palestinian Revolution can count on the full support and aid of the Cuban Revolution! We are not alone!”

Or why Cuba’s current Foreign minister declared that, “Zionists are the same as Hitler’s hordes who massacred millions of Jews!”

Or why at the September 2001 United Nations “World Conference against Racism” conference in Durban, South Africa Castro denounced, “Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people!”

Or why for decades the Cuban press ran cartoons worthy of Julius Streicher, such as these.

Or why the PLO’s very first Latin American embassy was opened in Havana, Cuba in 1974—and with a cheeky little twist. The site for this embassy was a Jewish  Community center that flourished during the reign of the unspeakable “dictator”( as known throughout  the MSM) Batista, who  never saw fit to a lay on finger on anyone’s property.  But “President” (as known throughout the MSM) Castro snatched it from its Jewish owners at Soviet gunpoint. The title transfer whisked through in typical Castroite manner (resist and we shoot you.)

During the mid ’60s Castro’s police and military herded tens of thousands of Cuban youths (long-hairs, rock &rollers, the religious—and especially–gays) into forced labor camps at Soviet bayonet point.  No pesky trials determined this, but their collective “crime” was “delinquency.” Che Guevara, “the Brains of The Cuban Revolution” (as Time magazine crowned him in a 1960 cover story) decreed this system of forced labor in 1960 for any and all who proved insufficiently reverential to his revolution’s mandates. “We send to Guanahacabibes people who have committed crimes against revolutionary norms,” explained Guevara. “It is hard labor. The working conditions are harsh.”

Alas, Che Guevara’s definition of “revolutionary norms” proved pretty sweeping. And the regime co-founded by this icon of freedom-mongers commenced to jail political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murder them at a higher rate pre-war Hitler’s.  Above the barbed wire and just below the machine guns on the watchtowers, these prisoners saw a huge sign as they entered. “Work Will Make Men of You,” It read.

The greeting at Auschwitz’ entrance read, “Work Will Make You Free.”

“What?!”  snort the “enlightened.” You rubes got the news exactly bass-ackwards!  In fact, last week Fidel Castro apologized graciously for his regime’s past mistreatment of gays. His graciousness has been accepted graciously by all enlightened parties.  The AP, Reuters and CNN picked up the story and it went media-viral. Any Google search finds it in spades.

The “news” agencies to which Fidel Castro bestowed Havana “press” bureaus indeed ran with his “apology” regarding his historic jailing, torture and murder of gays.  But true to their Cuba-“reporting” the MSM has completely “overlooked” the World Court complaint by Brazil’s Grupo Gay da Bahía, which is to say, what prompted the apology in the first place.

Again, true to form, the MSM pack—yipping, yapping, tails wagging, tongues hanging — followed the snickering Castro’s every cue as he led them off the trail of this damaging accusation in the World Court. Again, dutiful to their mission as outlined by Castro upon granting their Havana bureaus, they rushed to bark up every wrong tree and report bald misinformation.

“Castro, 84, said he was busy in those days (of repression gays, documented here) fending off threats from the United States, including attempts on his life, and trying to maintain the revolution that put him in power in 1959,” dutifully reports (i.e. transcribes from Castro’s hand-outs) Reuters.

“What threats, Mr. Castro?”  a genuine reporting agency might ask him. “The forced-labor camps and torture-chambers, for Cuban gays went up in 1965. Yet on Oct. 1962 the U.S. vowed to –not only refrain from molesting you—but to protect you. “We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs regarding the Missile “Crisis”  resolution: “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.”

Evading the massive U.S. dragnet ordered by JFK, intrepid Cuban exile freedom fighters moved their operations to the Bahamas. But JFK was quickly on the phone to Harold Macmillan, alerting the British Prime Minister to the presence of these pesky Cubans and requesting the solidarity of Her Majesty’s Navy in nabbing them. Macmillan was quick to comply.

So let’s step back and consider a key article of the MSM mantra on Castro, how this “valiant” and “plucky underdog defied ten U.S. presidents!”

In fact, as well known by the historically literate, far from “defying” anyone, Castro survived by hiding behind the skirts of the three most powerful nations in modern history: the U.S., the Soviet Union and the British Empire. The genuine “plucky underdogs” were the Cuban exile freedom-fighters  defying these super-powers while trying to free their homeland with small arms and while persecuted by powerful “freedom-loving” nations allied (again) with the Soviet Union.

“Castro is responsible for the “persecution, imprisonment in forced labor concentration camps, torture, banishment, and death of thousands of gays, transvestites and lesbians,” reads the recent Grupo Gay da Bahía’s accusation.

But Reuter’s transcription of their Cuban propaganda ministry hand-out “reports” that the Castro regime decriminalized homosexual activity in 1979.

A better judge might be the Spanish Gay organization Fundación LGBT Reinaldo Arenas that reports tens of thousands of Cuba gays recently fined, imprisoned or forcibly deported from Havana to the countryside along with 600 HIV positive men in Cuban prisons for the crime of being HIV positive.  (Castro’s regime is widely lauded in Hollywood , by the way, the Red-Ribbon capitol of the world.)

Might the last half century have given news agencies cause to doubt a Castro pronouncement?  After watching this short You Tube, of Fidel Castro addressing the National press club in Washington D.C. (in English, a rare honor) you be the judge.

Question 1. What embargo? Webster’s defines “embargo” as “a government order imposing a trade barrier.” As a verb it’s defined as “to prevent commerce.”

And yet:  according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce (that you’d hope Time could dig up) the U.S. transacted $710 million worth of business with Castro’s Cuba in 2008, and has transacted more than $2 billion worth of business with Castro’s Cuba in the last decade. Currently the U.S. serves as Castro’s Cuba’s biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. Furthermore, the U.S. has been Castro’s Cuba’s biggest donor of humanitarian aid including medicine and medical supplies for decades. All this together with the almost $2 billion a year in remittances sent from the U.S. ranks our nation right between Red China and Hugo’s Venezuela as a Castro business partner.

Question 2. What Travel Ban? The term seems pretty self-explanatory, right?

Well, last year Castro’s Cuba received 200,000 visitors from the U.S.–.legally. Global Travel Industry News (a source probably delighted to indulge any Time magazine query) reports that another 200,000 Americans visited Castro’s fiefdom illegally.

And remember during the 1950’s Cuba was a “playground” for American tourists who inundated the island, right? Of course. We learned this from that famous documentary on Cuba, The Godfather.  (No doubt a major source for Time magazine.)

Well, according to figures from Cuba’s Banco Nacional, during the 1950’s an average of 185, 000 Americans visited Cuba annually.

Let’s step back for a second and consult our calculators:

• Cuba while enjoying status as “tourist playground,” especially for Americans—185,000 U.S. tourists, another 20 to 30 thousand from Canada and Europe.
• Cuba  while suffering a crushing “U.S. blockade/embargo”–  400,000 U.S. tourists along with 2.2 million Canadian and European tourists annually., while the U.S. serves as her second biggest  trading partner, including remittances.

Time chants that the “embargo has  utterly failed to dislodge the Castro regime.”

Question 3. Who said that was the “embargo’s” purpose?

Here’s an excerpt from the speech Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave to the Organization of American States at Punta del Este Uruguay on January, 21, 1962 initiating the sanctions against Cuba. “The United States objects to Cuba’s activities and policies in the international arena not its internal system or arrangements.”  Note that here is not a single word-or even an inference-that the “embargo’s” goal was to “dislodge Castro.  Indeed, Secretary Rusk went out of his way to stress that this was not the embargo’s purpose. Time’s crackerjack “crusaders for the truth!” (the Columbia School of Journalism’s term for its students) should be able to dig up this speech. No painstaking Freedom of Information application is required, I assure you, Time magazine.

In fact, few U.S. foreign policy measures have been as phenomenally successful as our limited sanctions against the Stalinist robber-barons who run Castro’s regime. First off, for the course of three decades the Soviet Union was forced to pump the equivalent of almost ten Marshall Plans into Cuba. This cannot have helped the Soviet Union’s precarious solvency or lengthened her life span.

Secondly, the U.S. taxpayer has been spared the fleecing visited upon many others who reside in nations who eschew “embargoing” Cuba. To wit:

Nowadays the so-called U.S. embargo merely stipulates that the Castro regime pay cash up front through a third–party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; no Ex-Im (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales. Enacted by the Bush team in 2001 this cash-up-front policy has kept the U.S. taxpayer among the few in the world not screwed and tattooed by Fidel Castro.

Here’s a few items regarding the so-called embargo studiously side-stepped by much of the MSM:

Per-capita-wise, Cuba qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation with a foreign debt of close to $50 billion, a credit –rating nudging Somalia’s, and an uninterrupted record of defaults. In 2007 one of the world’s most respected economic forecasting firms, the London- based Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked Cuba as virtually the world’s worst country business-wise. Only Iran and Angola ranked lower. This firm predicted that Cuba’s abysmal business climate would remain that way for the next five years, at the very least.

Standard & Poors refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by the regime as utterly bogus.

In 1986 Cuba defaulted on most of its foreign debt to Europe. Three years ago France’s version of the U.S. government’s Export- Import Bank (named COFACE) cut off Cuba’s credit line.  Mexico’s Bancomex quickly followed suit. This came about because the Castro regime stuck it to French taxpayers for $175 million and to Mexican taxpayers for $365 million. Bancomex was forced to impound Cuban assets in three different countries in an attempt to recoup its losses.

The anti-“embargo” mantra  also stresses that a flood of rich Western tourists will magically smother Cuban Stalinism, whereupon the island nation will quickly mutate into a bigger (and more historic and picturesque) Cozumel. This reasoning seems to go something like this: Rewarding and enriching the KGB-trained and heavily armed guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist status-quo will magically convert them into instant opponents of that Stalinist status quo.

As two decades of such tourism have amply proven, any trickle of foreign currency that reaches the Stalinist regime’s subjects (primarily from prostitution) is offset a thousand-fold by the millions ($2.4 billion last year, for instance) crammed into the regime’s military and secret-police coffers.

The Obama administration is planning to expand opportunities for Americans to travel to Cuba. The policy… is meant to loosen restrictions on academic, religious and cultural groups that were adopted under President George Bush and return to the “people to people” policies followed under President Bill Clinton… Those policies, officials said, fostered robust exchanges between the United States and Cuba, allowing groups … to share expertise as well as life experiences.

In fact, these groups shared much more than “life experiences.” The Times is much; too bashful in detailing just how “robust” these exchanges with Cuba had gotten during the Clinton administration.

Mr. and Mrs. Kendall Myers, Cuban spies in the State Dept.

No mention by the Times, for instance, that the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department by an enemy agent resulted precisely from all that “sharing” by the Clinton administration with Stalinist Cuba, a regime Obama’s very State Department lists as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Schizophrenia by any other name

“Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of his hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere,” asserted the Clinton Defense Department’s “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba.”

From Havana Castro immediately hailed the report as “an objective report by serious people.”

This report was authored by the Clinton Defense Department’s Ana Belen Montes, a champion of cultural and educational exchanges with Cuba, in which she partook abundantly. During the Clinton administration Ana Montes was awarded the “Certificate of Distinction,” the third-highest honor awarded by any U.S. Intelligence agency. Her diligence, brilliance and sagacity led the Clinton team to promote Ana Montes to head the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Cuba division, an ideal post to better champion her enlightened policy of “openness” and “sharing” with Castro’s Cuba.

Ana Belen Montes, Cuban spy in the Defense Dept.

Ana Montes had access to all U.S. intelligence on Cuba and led briefings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and the Pentagon regarding her enlightened Cuban policy. “On Cuba,” one government official said. “Montes was who you went to.”

Thus pampered, promoted and honored under Clinton, Montes today serves a 25-year prison sentence for “Conspiracy to Commit Espionage.” On September 20 2001, (under Bush) Ms. Montes was arrested by the FBI as a Castro spy and accused of the same crime as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. After conviction, only a plea bargain allowed the Clinton Administration’s top “Cuba Expert” to escape their fate.

• “Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” said then Undersecretary for International Security, John Bolton.
• “Ana Montes compromised our entire program against Cuba, electronic as well as human,” admitted Joel F. Brenner, National Counterintelligence Executive.

The Montes case is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the “end” of the Cold War.

In May 2003 14 more Cuban spies were uncovered and booted from the U.S. Most had worked under diplomatic cover while “robustly exchanging” all those “life experiences” with their American hosts.

“It’s a way (Obama’s forthcoming Cuba policy) over the long term to allow Americans and Cubans to have contact, even as their governments continue to hash out a lot of seriously thorny issues,” The Times thus quotes Ms Julia Sweig, resident Cuba Expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Such contact was particularly useful to Ms Sweig, whom the Times habitually consults and quotes on all matters Cuban. “In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island… Elsa Montero and  Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.” That’s Julia Sweig in the acknowledgements to her book, Inside the Cuban Revolution.

By looking in their very archives, the Times can discover that the Cubans who provided such “friendship and warmth” to Ms Sweig, who “opened so many doors” and who “championed” her project are Castro agents of considerable notoriety. Had J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI not nabbed them in time, 9/11 might be remembered as the second-worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Big Journalism already reported the details of the explosions Ms Sweig’s “champions” plotted for Macy’s, Gimbel’s and Bloomingdale’s on Black Friday 1962.

Interestingly, the very Defense Intelligence officer (retired Lt. Col. Christopher Simmons) who helped nab Ana Montes and the 14 other Castro spies alleges that Times favorite, Ms. Julia Sweig, serves as an Agent of Influence for the Castro regime. “For Cuba, being able to influence policy and elite opinion-makers is equally important–possibly even more important– than recruiting spies with access to intelligence information,” explained Norman Bailey, a high official in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Times article also mentions that this “opening” might be a doggie treat to reward Castro for good behavior: “Others described it (the forthcoming Obama Policy) as a nod to President Castro’s stunning decision last month to begin releasing dozens of political prisoners.”

Indeed, the Times has a long and illustrious history of being “stunned” by Fidel Castro.  That the newspaper swallowed Castro’s latest about “releasing” political prisoners is no surprise. In fact, this very month, Castro unleashed a fresh wave of repression against his subjects.

If only the Times would consult more reliable “Cuba Experts,” its editors might learn of such developments. Some brave black Cubans just smuggled out some tapes and videos of what the Stalinist/Apartheid Castro regime has been up to lately. The Times, needless to say, cannot be bothered. They’re much too busy interviewing Manhattan-based “Cuba Experts.”

Fidel Castro marks his 84th birthday on Friday after a spate of public appearances and apocalyptic warnings of nuclear war and environmental disaster that have catapulted him back onto center stage in Cuba and garnered him headlines outside the Communist-run Caribbean island.

The Cuban public, by and large, has welcomed their Commandante back after four years of seclusion with the warmth and sympathy one might bestow on an ailing, but wise grandfather home after a prolonged hospital stay, but in no position any longer to play head of the household.

– Big Journalism will report on some of the tens of thousands of his countrymen who cannot celebrate birthdays. Seems only fitting.

Upon arriving in Havana Jan of 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war, (The New York Times had breathlessly reported of “thousands dead in single battles!” The official tally compiled by the U.S embassy after two years of “ferocious civil war!” was 184 dead on both sides, half New Orleans’ annual murder tally)–at any rate, upon entering the Cuban capitol, the gallant Che Guevara (beaming and strutting over his appointment as Castro’s chief hangman!) immediately recognized the moat around Havana’s La Cabana fortress as a handy execution pit. At Babi-Yar Hitler’s SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had one ready-made and so they put their firing squads to work in triple-shifts.

“Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!” Before the bullets ripped their bodies apart “the defiant yells of the bound and staked martyrs would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble,” wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares.

So by mid 1961 the mere binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che’s enemies wasn’t enough. The Left’s premier poster-boys began ordering their gagging too. The shaken firing squads demanded it. The defiant yells by the hundreds of men and boys they were murdering had badly spooked the trigger-pullers, you see.

So now, as the Castroite henchmen yanked the martyrs and heroes from the cells, bent their arms back, and bound their hands, two more Communist guards came into play. One grabbed the struggling victim’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut.

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che Guevara’s henchmen dragged him from his cell in Havana’s La Cabana prison and execution-pit, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

“FUEGO!” and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. Remember the gallant Che Guevara’s instructions to his revolutionary courts: “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” And remember Harvard Law School’s invitation and rollicking ovation to Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath.

Alas, in the Cuban countryside Castro and Che’s directives regarding their murder-preparations arrived rather haphazardly. So some freedom-fighters often faced the Communist firing-squads un-bound and un-gagged, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. “Aim right HERE!” was a favorite among some of these as they reached below the belt. This was a favorite, they say, of the rednecks Castro and Che’s firing squads murdered during the Escambray rebellion. “‘Cause y’all ain’t got any!” yelled these courageous Cuban rednecks right before the Soviet bullets 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. All refused blindfolds and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen

Not that the victims of this Stalinist bloodbath were exclusively men and boys. In fact, the Castroites were well ahead of the Taliban. On Christmas Eve 1961 a young Cuban woman named 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” (Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight his theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant.

In Aug. 7, 1961, Lydia Perez was eight months pregnant and a Cuban political prisoner. She somehow annoyed a guard who bashed her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach, and walked off. Both Lydia and her baby were left to bleed to death

The Cuban Archive project headed Mrs Maria Werlau and Dr. Amando Lago has fully documented the murder 219 women from various brutalities and tortures while in Castro and Che’s prisons. Indeed, the Taliban has nothing on the regime co-founded by Che Guevara. Ten years into Stalinism’s imposition on Cuba, Cuban women had tripled their suicide rate. They became the most suicidal women on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.

During the 1960’s, Castro’s Stalinist regime jailed 35,150 Cuban women, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba—but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime whose de-facto first lady was hailed by the New York Times in 2006 as, “a prominent advocate of women’s rights.”

The Washington Post quickly seconded by hailing Raul Castro’s wife as “a champion of women’s rights.”

According to the Cuba Archive Project, headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Dr. Armando Lago, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1960.  Put your calculator to it and you’ll see that—per-capita wise–Castro and Che were close on the heels of their heroes and mentors Stain and Mao.

Celebrate that if you can, Mainstream Media.

That’s not a typo above. Castro, who co-sponsored the famous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism, says the Israeli tail wags the Yankee dog. Those Yankees are certainly powerful, Castro explained, but also a bit naïve and docile.  The main instigators, the ones carefully setting the trap to ignite nuclear war are those crafty Israelis. “The control that Israel has over the United States is enormous,” he revealed last week.

Fidel Castro, that sentimental old fool, has excellent reason to bask in the fond memory of imminent nuclear war. “Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them.  And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”

If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.

– Che Guevara, November 1962.

“My dream is to drop three atomic bombs on New York City

– Raul –not Fidel—Castro, Nov. 1960.

But “Hay Caramba!” the Stalinist trio fumed and raged for years afterwards. “Nikita Khrushchev, that sniveling maricon, snatched that magic button-pushing moment from our eager fingers!”

“We should deliver a nuclear first strike,” read the telegram from Castro to Khrushchev on Oct. 28 1962.

“What!” Khrushchev gasped, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?”

“Apparently.”

“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission. Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack.”

“But that is insane!…Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” instructed the Soviet premier.

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot “standing up to the Russians. And forcing their retreat during the Cuban missile crisis!” In fact, it was the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lusts that prompted the Butcher of Budapest to get those missiles out of their reach.

“We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” later snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro (italics mine.) After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.”

“Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” Nixon wrote about the Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis. “then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard.”

“We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” observed Barry Goldwater in 1964. “I would help Cuban exiles openly. I’d give them the guns and ammunition to blast Castro out of his island stronghold now defended with Soviet arms.”

In his memoirs the Butcher of Budapest further twisted the knife and snickered yet again: “it would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba–for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. “

So the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and cinematographers, were pure hooey.  The threat came, not from the Soviets, but from the Stalinist regime hailed to the high heavens and befriended  by Democratic Presidential candidates (“Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, a man I regard as a friend,” George McGovern)  and preparing for a windfall of U.S. dollars, courtesy of the U.S. Congress. (More on that shortly)

Considering the U.S. Nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it’s hard to imagine a president Nixon—much less Reagan—quaking in front of Khrushchev’s transparent ruse a la JFK.

The Crisis “resolution” bestowed upon Castro a new status. Let’s call it MAP, or “mutually-assured-protection,” assured by the two most powerful countries on earth, including the one whose president had recently declared freedom “indivisible,” and more: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

JFK’s Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba’s in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different “bands of bandits” as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba’s countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy’s deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. The Cuban freedom-fighters working from South Florida were suddenly rounded up for “violating U.S. Neutrality laws.” The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro and his Soviet patrons remained utterly unmolested as they consolidated Stalinism 90 miles from U.S. shores. Think about it: here’s the U.S. Coast Guard and Border patrol working ’round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country.

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 betrayed rural rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of “Scarface.”

Most of these thousands of fighters died as Tony Montana died. Surrender wasn’t an option. When their bullets ran out, their lives ran out.

The new British government informed Mr. Savage his exclusion stands because of “the absence of clear, convincing and public evidence that he has repudiated his previous statements.”

Instead of the false contrition, groveling and confessions that Stalin, Mao and Che Guevara demanded from the subjects they accused of “thought crimes,” (before murdering them) Michael Savage sought to repudiate his listing alongside terrorists and Nazis by resorting to the tenets of Western jurisprudence and presenting evidence to the contrary.

“His bad” some might quip regarding the strategy. In today’s Britain what’s left of the Magna Carta only work s in favor of actual Islamic terrorists.

One month after insulting and banning Michael Savage last summer, Britain opened her arms to Che Guevara’s daughter, Aleida. The occasion was a celebration in London titled Cuba50, billed as “the biggest European celebration in the 50th anniversary year of the Cuban Revolution.  “In London’s expansive Barbican Centre, Britain threw the continent’s biggest party commemorating fifty years of Castro’s Stalinist regime, which jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered political prisoners at a higher rate than pre-war Hitler’s, and came closest of anyone to plunging the world into nuclear war.

Che’s daughter was there to promote, in her own words: “my father’s ideals, his concerns, and his ambitions. I believe that my father is a banner to the world. If we could only follow his example, the world would be a much more beautiful place.”

Fine. Let’s have a look at Aleida’s father’s “ambitions,” keeping in mind that what got Michael Savage banned was his purported “fostering of extremist views” and his “hate speech.”

“Hatred as the central element of our struggle!” raved Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in his 1966 Message to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. “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…We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow… The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! These hyenas (Americans) are fit only for extermination. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm! The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

No rational person would require much elasticity of definition to classify Aleida’s father’s—this “banner to the world!”—speech. And Aleida Guevara, in an interview with the Guardian during the visit, boasted of her fervent “fostering” of her father’s views.  “I want to be like Che and fight until final victory, then you feel elated! It is preferable to sink in the sea than to betray the glory that once lived!”

“Gay-bashing” seems to figure big in Britain’s definition of hate speech. But apparently when this bashing comes in the literal form, involving Soviet gun-butts and bayonets bashing a gay’s head until he dies from massive cerebral trauma, it fails to fall under her definition of “Hate Speech.”

The British government gives no indication that in the process of “promoting her fathers’ ideals” Aleida Guevara presented the slightest offense to Britain’s “standards and values.”