The Longest Romance

Among historical figures Fidel Castro wins, hands down, as the most persistently effective liar of modern times. Consider: He jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six and came closest of anyone in history to starting a worldwide Nuclear war. In the above process he converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians and boasts the highest suicide rate in the Hemisphere. Who would guess any of this from reading the mainstream media? Instead we read almost exclusively about how he freed Cuba from the greedy clutches of U.S. robber barons and Mafiosi, and bestowed his formerly downtrodden countrymen with free healthcare and education. A scornful Uncle Sam then retaliated with a vindictive "embargo," still in place. Topping it all, last year Newsweekhailed Cuba as among "the best countries in the world to live." "Propaganda is vital--the heart of our struggle," (Fidel Castro wrote in a letter to revolutionary colleague Melba Hernandez in 1955.) "Much more valuable to us than military recruits were recruiting American reporters to export our propaganda."(Che Guevara in his diaries.) And today the concept is as valid as ever. History records few recruitment drives and propaganda campaigns as phenomenally successful or as enduring as Castro and Che's. It's high time to expose the scam. "Castro's use of propaganda assets--interviews with journalists, radio broadcasts--during his guerrilla war against Batista contributed in a major way to his victory and was a preview of the methods he would use so successfully after coming to power," states a declassified CIA document from 1984 titled "Castro's Propaganda Apparatus." "Immediately after assuming power," it continues, "Fidel Castro set out creating a propaganda empire that today is perhaps the most effective in the Western Hemisphere" Sadly, the CIA itself is testimony to its effectiveness. In 1987 Cuban Intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga defected in Prague and revealed that every Cuban agent (4 dozen of them) the CIA had recruited to spy on the Castro regime since 1962 was in a fact double agent controlled personally by Fidel Castro. This book documents how a fawning U.S. media abets Castro's propaganda campaign and its astounding worldwide success. Castro's colorful cachet as worldwide icon of anti-Americanism and as pioneering beatnik allows his record as a warmonger, racist/Stalinist and the godfather of modern terrorism to be forgiven, ignored and/or falsified. This book highlights the record, the abettors and the falsifiers. It's high time to expose the magnitude of Castro's lies and to identify his propaganda auxiliaries in the mainstream media. Nothing like this has been published to date. For close to a decade, roughly 70 per cent of what Americans have read about Cuba in the mainstream media has been doctored by Castro-regime "agents-of-influence" working in concert with the Castro regime's Intelligence service. Let's hope the CIA finally caught on. "Useful-idiocy" is one thing; deliberate collaboration quite another. This book outs many big-names in both camps. Most Cuba "scholarship" and "reporting," relies on the totalitarian regime's officials as sources. This author prefers eye-witnesses to Castroism free from fear of Castro's firing squads and torture chambers for the crime of telling the truth.