Fidel Castro's Friend, Harry Belafonte

Castro's treatment of Blacks in Cuba
Harry Belafonte Insults Herman Cain—but Hails Fidel Castro

- Humberto Fontova Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Harry Belafonte recently denounced Herman Cain as a “bad apple” as a “false Negro” and as someone “denied intelligence” and “denied a view of history” (whatever that means.) His host Joy Behar snickered her approval of Belafonte’s every vocalization, often before they were decipherable.



“If you believe in justice,” vocalized Mr Belafonte in an interview with Cuba’s propaganda ministry years earlier, “if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people’s rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind—then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!”

If only Herman Cain were a lily-white Stalinist whose regime murdered more people in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six, jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s—including the longest suffering black political prisoners in modern history. If only Herman Cain proposed policies to plunge a nation more prosperous than half of Europe’s into one that repels Haitians. If only he’d driven into exile—even with machine-gunners and Tiger Sharks as dutiful border guards—20 per cent of the population from a nation formerly flooded with immigrants.



Instead Herman Cain spent most of his life creating wealth and promoting freedom. He personifies the antithesis to the disaster and horror known as Castroism. This grates on Harry Belafonte.

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote AWS hero Che Guevara in his diaries. Shortly after entering Havana, Che took a break from signing death warrants and blasting apart the skulls of defenseless men and boys, exhaled, wiped his brow and gave a radio conference. A black listener asked him what the revolution planned to do for Cuba’s blacks. “We’re going to do for Cuba’s blacks exactly what they did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean nothing!”

“VIVA CHE!—VIVA FIDEL!” roared Harry Belfonte’s friend Jesse Jackson , arm in arm with Castro at the University of Havana in 1994.

Actually, Che was much too modest. “Nothing” is not an accurate description of Castroite treatment of Cuba’s blacks. Fidel and Raul Castro are sons of a European Imperial soldier (Angel Castro) who butchered Cuban patriots for pay by the King of Spain. Then came the son’s turn. First off, by media manipulation, terrorism and guile (NOT guerrilla war) they overthrew a Cuban government where Cuban blacks had served as President of the Senate, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista a grandson of slaves who was born in a palm-roofed shack in the Cuban countryside.) These blacks had all served elective and appointed office in a nation 72 per cent white, by the way.

Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie, which is probably still an improvement over what the Ivy League teaches. Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90% black while only 9% of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Many of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents today are black, many female. Were they opposing anyone but the Left’s favorite poster boys, the MSM would have made them household names long ago. Think Rigoberta Menchu and Winnie Mandela.

In 1980 Harry Belafonte visited Cuba to collude with Castro’s KGB founded and mentored propaganda ministry for a documentary in his honor titled, “I Look at My Life.” Within walking distance of where Belafonte posed for Castro’s cameras detailing the horrors of life for black Americans, the world’s longest-suffering black political prisoner languished in a torture-chamber.

“N*gger!” taunted his Castroite jailers between tortures. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” Shortly before his death in 2006, this prisoner, Eusebio Penalver, granted this writer an interview. “For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell,” Eusebio recalled. “That’s 4 feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.” Eusebio Penalver suffered longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa’s.

On another of Belafonte’s almost annual visits to Cuba he again posed for Castro’s propaganda ministry complaining about the stifling censorship in the U.S. “In the U.S. people don’t know the truth,” he vocalized for Castro’s press in 2002. Within walking distance of his fulminations against U.S. racism and censorship, Black human-rights activist, Dr. Oscar Biscet was being kicked, spat upon, and burned with cigarettes in a Castroite torture chamber. Cuban doctor, Oscar Elias Biscet had been sentenced to 25 years in Castro’s gulag for public readings of the Works of Martin Luther King and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

Shortly after Belafonte’s Cuba visit in Dec. 2009 the Black human-rights activist Orlando Zapata-Tamayo, was beaten comatose by his Castroite jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull and Subdural Hematoma. A year later Zapata-Tamayo was dead after a lengthy hunger-strike. Samizdats smuggled out of Cuba by eye-witnesses’ report that while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning Tamayo, his Castroite jailers yelled: “Worthless N*gger!—Worthless Peasant!”

Apparently Castro’s KGB-founded and trained police regarded all of the above blacks as “bad-apples.” And surely the MSM kept you as informed about this half century of racist horrors 90 miles from U.S. shores as they did about Nelson Mandela’s travails, 8000 miles from U.S. shores.

Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including “Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.” Visit hfontova.com. Humberto can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

CHE GUEVARA

Che Remembered 40 Years After Death
Published: 10/5/07, 6:05 PM EDT
By ALVARO ZUAZO
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia (AP) - Fidel Castro insists Ernesto "Che" Guevara could never have been taken prisoner 40 years ago if his gun hadn't malfunctioned. But the retired Bolivian general who led the mission to capture him says the Argentine revolutionary was hardly a heroic figure in his final moments.

The man that Gen. Gary Prado remembers - sad, sick, hungry, dressed in rags and alone in the jungle - simply dropped his gun and surrendered, saying, "Don't shoot, I'm Che."

"He wasn't the figure of the heroic guerrilla," Prado recalled in an interview with The Associated Press Thursday night.

Decades after he gave up a comfortable middle class life in Argentina to foment armed rebellion, Guevara still inspires and infuriates people around the world.

He is an icon for fans who have made his death scene a tourist trap. His face is instantly recognizable, a one-dimensional image on posters and T-shirts that either celebrate or mock his revolutionary ideals.

Prado is bitter that Guevara still gets so much global attention four decades later. He's angry that Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales plans to honor Guevara but not the 55 soldiers who died putting down his attempted revolution in Bolivia.

Che "wasn't someone to inspire terror or anything, but simply to be pitied," he said.

Castro has put a noble spin on the death of his fellow revolutionary and close friend, calling Guevara "not a man who could have been taken prisoner" with a working gun.

"Wounded and without a weapon they were able to hold him and take him to a small town nearby, La Higuera," Castro told Spanish writer Ignacio Ramonet for the book "100 Hours with Fidel."

"The following day, October 9, 1967, at noon, they executed him in cold blood," Castro said.

Prado said the order to kill Guevara, then 39, came not from the CIA operatives who joined his soldiers, but from Bolivia's president, who wanted to avoid a trial that would give Guevara a global platform to spread his views. Prado said he wasn't present when Guevara was shot.

"Why did they think that by killing him, he would cease to exist as a fighter?" Castro asked in 1997, when Guevara's remains were finally laid to rest in Cuba amid thundering cannons. "Today he is in every place, wherever there is a just cause to defend."

Those who knew him personally remember a complex character - sardonic and demanding of himself as well as others.

"He always did what he said he was going to do," said Alberto Granados, who traveled with Che across South America on a broken-down motorcycle in 1952, a trip portrayed in the hit 2004 movie "The Motorcycle Diaries."

"That's why he is still timely," added Granados, who is now in his 80s and lives in Havana.

Guevara's Cuban enemies, now living in exile, remember a man who did not flinch after Castro and his rebels came to power. It was Guevara who oversaw the military tribunals and subsequent firing squad executions of hundreds of people - military, police and other officials of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Cuba will honor him Monday with a ceremony at the tomb where his remains are kept, beneath a gigantic bronze statue built in his image in Santa Clara, where Guevara oversaw a decisive victory for the Cuban rebels. Cuba also planned a gathering of 1,500 people playing chess - Guevara's favorite game.

In Bolivia, Che fans were gathering in the jungle where he was captured and in La Higuera, where he was killed. A new Che statue is being built in his native Argentina, Venezuela is holding an art and music festival in his honor, and students were painting huge Che portraits in Mexico City's subway.

Guevara's image is ubiquitous in Cuba, where a giant stylized rendering of his face oversees Havana's Plaza of the Revolution. Cuban schoolchildren start their daily classes by pledging: "Pioneers for communism. We will be like Che!"

Those who knew him personally would consider that difficult. They recall him being a taskmaster insistent on austerity.

"He was demanding of everyone and practiced being a personal example," wrote Tirso Saenz, an adviser when Guevara served as Cuba's Industry Minister. Once, Guevara and other ministry officials were served fat, juicy steaks during a severe food shortage. Steaks are a treasured meal for Argentines, but Guevara became incensed and ordered it all removed.

"What is this?" Saenz quoted Guevara as saying in his biography. "No one is touching this meat. Take it away."

Leftists still cherish the image of the dogmatic Marxist wearing a beret, a determined gaze and an unkempt beard. But anti-communists hate what he stood for.

One such man is Cuban exile and former CIA operative Gustavo Villoldo, now living in Florida, who hopes to profit from a lock of hair snipped from the slain rebel's head in Bolivia. Now 71, Villoldo said he kept the hair and other items in a scrapbook since participating in that mission. Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas is auctioning them off on Oct. 25-26.

The auction has generated much discussion among Cuban exiles. Some fear a Che fan will buy them and put them on reverent display.

Prado said that after Guevara surrendered in the jungle to his squad of 70 Bolivian soldiers, he asked what they planned to do with him, and that they initially told him he would be put on trial.

"I'm worth more to you alive than dead," Prado remembers him responding.

Guevara was shot the next day. He would have been 79 this year.