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Thursday, December 03, 2009

Castro's Berlin Wall

Castro's Berlin Wall
By Humberto Fontova *
The American Thinker
.US.
Infosearch:
José Cadenas
Analyst
Bureau Chief
USA
Dept. de Investigaciones
La Nueva Cuba
December 2, 2009

OK, a decent interval has passed since Freedom-Week, so I'm no
party-pooper. The fall of the Berlin Wall certainly merited all the
festivities. Its construction eventually whacked many of the
"enlightened" on the head, grabbed them by the ears, and shoved their
faces in for a close-up of an enclosure that had gone up fourteen years
earlier: the Iron Curtain.


After September 1961, there was no denying it: the term "captive
nations" was not a "McCarthyite" confection. All that barbed wire, those
minefields, and those machine guns were not ornamental. Those big,
steely-eyed dogs were not trained to beg and roll over, but to rip apart
anyone seeking freedom. The Berlin Wall (FINALLY!) bellowed high-decibel
proof, even to the deafest leftist, that Communism was pure slavery (but
obviously not for the slavemasters).


Now for some "party-poopery." Between two and three hundred people died
trying to breach the Berlin Wall (i.e., the "anti-fascist protection
barrier," as dubbed by the Reds and as probably thought of by the type
of people who believe Cuba has free and exquisite health care and who
pay to see Michael Moore movies). Between sixty-five and eighty thousand
people (men, women, and children, entire families at a time) have died
trying to escape Castro's Cuba. The former is now happily torn asunder.
The latter is alive and kicking and glorified by everyone from the
Congressional Black Caucus to Michael Moore and lavished with economic
succor by many of the same governments who celebrated the collapse of
East German Communism two weeks ago.


More tragically, I daresay that many of the Cuban freedom-seekers died
more horrifically than the German freedom-seekers. He'd be loath to
admit it, being a Che-T-shirt-wearer and all, but Eric Burdon of the
Animals wrote a song that resounds with many Cubans: "We gotta get outta
this place -- if it's the LAST thing we EVER do!"


The last thing, indeed, for an estimated one in three of the desperate
Cuban escapes during the '60s, '70s and '80s. This is according to a
study by the late to Cuban-American scholar Dr. Armando Lago. This
hideous arithmetic translates into those tens of thousands of estimated
deaths at sea over the past half-century. And from people desperately
fleeing a nation -- this cannot be repeated often enough -- that
previously enjoyed net immigration, that pre-Castro/Che took in more
immigrants per capita than the U.S., including during the Ellis Island
years.


Many Cuban escapee-rafters perished like captives of the Apaches, staked
in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Then there are
others, gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally give out
and they gulp that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The
Perfect Storm. Still others are eaten alive -- drawn and quartered by
the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks, much like Captain
Quint in Jaws. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we've
all seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.


"In space no one can hear you scream," says the ad for the original
Alien. Same for the middle of the Florida straits -- except ,of course,
for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while
watching the fins rushing in and water frothing in white -- then red --
they hear the screams all too clearly. Elian Gonzalez might know.


Every year in South Florida, the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such
stories. Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct --
say, if they could somehow pin it on George Bush, Glenn Beck, or Sarah
Palin -- we'd have no end of books, movies and documentaries. We'd never
hear the end of it.


Alas, the agents of this tropical holocaust consist of the Left's
premier pin-up boys. 'Nuff said.


"Pin-up" along with "tattoo idol" boys, I should have clarified, as
exemplified by many including Angelina Jolie. According to Trisha Ziff,
curator of a world-traveling Che-glorification museum show, Ms. Jolie
sports a Che Guevara tattoo somewhere on her epidermis. More
interestingly, a few years back, Ms. Jolie won the U.N.'s "Global
Humanitarian Award" for her "work with refugees."


Will someone please inform Angelina Jolie that her tattoo idol, with his
firing squads and prison camps, provoked the most macabre refugee crisis
in the history of this hemisphere?


A consistently hot item on Cuba's black market is used motor oil: poor
man's shark-repellent, they call it. Perhaps for a few minutes. I
suppose we all cling to false hopes when desperate. And people get no
more desperate than when they have a chance to flee the handiwork of
Norman Mailer's, Oliver Stone's, and Charlie Rangel's hero.


"I Hate The Sea" is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by
Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It's about some young men Rafael met
on the beach near Havana. They stared out to sea, cursed it and spit
into it. "It incarcerates us," they fumed, "worse than jail bars."


Yet mankind has always been drawn to the sea: it soothes, attracts,
infatuates. The most expensive real estate faces the sea. "Water is
everywhere a protection" writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, trying to
explain the lure, "like a moat. As a species we love it."


Yet Cubans now hate it. Che was right: the Cuban Revolution indeed
created a "New Man," but one more psychologically perverse than what
even Che's fevered brain could conjure. In Cuba, Castro's and Che's
totalitarian dream gave rise to a psychic cripple beyond the imagination
of even Orwell or Huxley: the first specimens in the history of the
species to actually hate the sea, the first to regard it not as
protection, but as equivalent to the barbed wire and machine guns of the
late Berlin Wall.


Yet all we hear about Cuba is the horrors at Gitmo, where the criminals
and terrorists are behind bars. On the rest of the island, this sort
runs the country.


A seventeen-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a
homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His
crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was
fifteen when he was machine-gunned to death for the same crime. Owen
Delgado was fifteen when Castro's police dragged him out of the
Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with
rifle butts.


After so many machine-gun blasts kept disturbing their coastal subjects,
the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having their Soviet
helicopters hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, and rather than
machine gun them to death, simply drop sandbags onto their rafts and
rickety boats to demolish and sink them. Then the tiger sharks and
hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work.


Four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Moore's, Jesse
Jackson's and Charles Rangel's gracious hosts were machine-gunning
desperate Cubans who tried to swim into our Guantanamo Base, then
retrieving their corpses with gaffing hooks. "This is the most savage
kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy
assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton
administration (no less!). "This is even worse than what happened at the
Berlin Wall!"


So what's the alternative if you can't flee Cuba? Well, in 1986, Cuba's
suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand -- making it double Latin
America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban
women the most suicidal in the world, and making suicide the primary
cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point, the Cuban
government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The
figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the
Castroites.


But apparently not the MSM's gynocracy. Take Barbara Walters: "Castro's
personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding.
Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to
his country."

Here's NBC's Andrea Mitchell: "Castro is old-fashioned, courtly -- even
paternal...a thoroughly fascinating figure."


* Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Fidel:
Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara. Visit
hfontova.com

LA NUEVA CUBA (2 December 2009)
http://www.lanuevacuba.com/archivo2009/Dec/humberto-fontova-37.htm

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