By Humberto Fontova ——Bio and Archives--January 7, 2012
World News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
"The U.S. is a vulture preying on humanity!" he raved just a week after Smith's sacking. "Let the Marines invade! Then we'll pile up 200,000 dead gringos!"As mentioned, the only "U.S. invasion" then envisaged was one of smiling, groveling Yankee diplomats and Yankee taxpayer subsidies. Alert Cubans started plotting against Castro almost from day one, but --alert to who helped him into power--they kept well clear of U.S. officials, turning instead to Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic for some logistical assistance. Nonetheless, in August 1959, Phil Bonsal got wind of this plot and promptly alerted Castro to a conspiracy against his regime manned solely by Cubans. Thanks in part to Bonsal's solicitude for the regime insulting his nation as "a vulture preying on humanity" and poised to steal $2 billion from U.S. stockholders, the anti-Castro plot was foiled. Hundreds of the Cuban plotters were imprisoned. Some were executed. And the regime that three years later came close to vaporizing many of America's largest cities with nuclear missiles (including Bonsal's home) survived. Then, as now, the word gringo was very rarely used by Cubans. So in his "vulture" tirade, Castro was already mugging to the Latin American gallery. Castro's very first trip abroad as head of state was to Caracas, where on January 25, 1959 he, implored Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt to "join" his "master plan against the gringos." The newly elected Venezuelan president soon learned that his "joining" would consist of massive loans, financial aid, and shipments of free oil to Castro from Venezuela. So Betancourt decided to "think it over." It took Hugo Chavez for Venezuela to finally "join" Castro's master plan. In mid-2005, 160,000 barrels of essentially free oil were flowing from Venezuela to Cuba daily, a flow that continues unabated despite Venezuela's pathetic economy. Chavez's honorarium comes in the form of the thousands of Cuban specialists who essentially run his regime's security and intelligence sectors. Not a bad bargain, actually. Trained and mentored for decades by the KGB and East German STASI, Castro's secret police is considered among the most "proficient" on Earth, as befits a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin's and executed (murdered, actually; the former term implies some form of judicial process) more people in its first three years in power than Hitler's did in its first six. Within weeks of his "dead gringos!" tirade and his Venezuelan visit, Castro's regime had stolen the Cuban Telephone Company (an ITT subsidiary), commencing a mass larceny of U.S. property at Soviet gunpoint that would reach almost $2 billion in little over a year -- and included the torture and firing squad murder of several U.S. citizens who resisted. The Castro regime has never settled a penny of this mass burglary with its U.S. victims. Search for any mention of the above in an MSM article on the so-called U.S. embargo of Cuba (in fact, we've been Cuba's main food supplier and fifth largest trading partner for close to a decade now) and you will draw a complete blank. "But that's hoary Cold War stuff, Humberto," some will counter. But the same people run Cuba today as ran it in 1959.
View Comments
Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including “Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.” Visit hfontova.com.