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Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Cuban-born Humberto Fontova, who came to the United States when he was six years old and grew up in New Orleans. He is the author of the new book Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.

FP: Humberto Fontova, thank you kindly for joining us today.

Fontova: My pleasure entirely.  It's going to sound like I'm sucking up here, but I've been a Frontpage fan for years.

FP: We believe you my friend. We are big fans of yours as well. So let’s start at the beginning, what inspired you to write this book?

Fontova: I was motivated by the avalanche of idiocies you hear in the mainstream media, academia and celebrity circles about Cuba and Castro. You know the ones:  "Castro the benefactor of the poor, the oppressed, etc. Cuba, formerly a pesthole of poverty and oppression, now a Shangri-La of free healthcare, universal literacy and overall bliss for it's perpetually-smiling, rally-attending, flag- waving citizens. 

Look, it's one thing to hear this bilge from a Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Dan Rather, etc. You expect that. It's quite another to hear it from my old college professor Stephen Ambrose (yes, THE Stephen Ambrose.) Back in the late seventies, I'd have to sit there in class and listen to Professor Ambrose sing the praises of Fidel and Che -- actually, I didn't just sit there. I'd try to correct him. My desk usually ended up covered in spittle as a result. Also, there's Colin Powell. At the SAME time he was making the case against Saddam Hussein at the UN he said, "Castro has done good things for Cuba." It's hard to know where to begin when you hear this stuff. I thought I'd begin with a book. In brief, I took a page from boxer Roberto Duran's script and finally said "NO-MAS!" to that blizzard of bilge.

FP: Tell us some of the horrifying ingredients of Castro’s Gulag. 

Fontova: Let's start with its dimensions: Castro's gulag held more political prisoners, as a percentage of population, than pre-war Hitler's and --yes--even Stalin's. Also, the longest serving political prisoners OF THE CENTURY spent their hell in Castro's Gulag. Senores  Mario Chanes de Armas, Angel de Fana and Eusebio Penalver all served thirty years in Castro's dungeons.  To put this in proper perspective, Alexander Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in Stalin's Gulag.  So here's men who served over THREE times as long-- and who's heard of them? They all live in Miami today. So where's the PBS documentary on them? Where's the 60 Minutes interview with them? Where were the rallies (outside of Miami's little Havana) for their release? Where were the U.N declarations for their release? (Instead their jailer's regime is appointed to the UN's Human Rights Commission!)

Where was the caterwauling by Democrats and Hollywood types? Well, these men, and many others like them, are showcased in my book as the heroes they are. Penalver is the longest serving black political prisoner OF THE CENTURY, by the way. He served longer in prison than Nelson Mandela. So where's the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, etc? I'll tell you where: they were hugging and hoisting the arm of Penalver's jailer, Fidel Castro!

You can't MAKE this stuff up, Jamie! Also, for months many of Castro's political prisoners are shoved naked into cells called gavetas (drawers), these measure six by four feet--and that's four feet high so they can't stand. This stuff is going on 90 miles away from our shores while celebrities and farm-state ward-healers chum it up with the mass jailer!

Also, for the first time in Cuba's (perhaps the hemisphere's) history, thousands of women were sent to prison and forced labor camps by Castro. Cuban women today are the most suicidal in the world. This doesn't stop Diane Saywer, Barbara Walters and Andrea Mitchell from fawning all over Fidel when in his glorious presence however.

FP: The suffering of these poor and courageous people just breaks your heart. Can you tell me a few of your thoughts about Armando Valladares and his book Against All Hope?

Fontova: Mr. Valladares' book is cited often in mine. The great thing about his book was how he FINALLY got a few "intellectuals" to utter a precious few peeps off protest against Castroism. Just as amazing, he got the New York Times and The Washington Post to do the same while reviewing his book! Best part came when president Ronald Reagan got a hold of Against All Hope and promptly appointed Valladares U.S. a delegate to the UN's Human rights commission. "Who better?" Reagan reasoned. Who better indeed.

FP: What was some of the research that went into this book? Tell us about your sources.

Fontova: Got plenty of those, knowing how the left would come after this book.  Heck, fully a quarter of the pages in this book are footnotes. First off, my Masters Thesis at Tulane University was on this topic. As you might imagine, heavy, heavy research and documentation went in to that. Many sources are Spanish language books, published in places like Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires.

You see, for years, no major U.S. publisher would TOUCH any manuscript critical of Castro.  But more important were my interviews with people with first-hand, eye-witness roles in this drama. You'd never know it from the mainstream media, but the U.S. swarms with these sources. My own father was briefly a political prisoner. I had two cousins and many other relatives who fought to the last bullet at the Bay of Pigs, then served two years under a daily death sentence in Castro's dungeons. But this isn't special. Actually, it's almost impossible to run across a Cuban-American family WITHOUT someone in it that has multitudes of hair-raising accounts. The Beltway media and academia naturally ignores them. Well, they get their say in my book for sure. 

FP: Who was the real Che Guevara?

Fontova: A bumbler, a fool, a coward and a mass--killer. He excelled in only one thing: the mass-murder of bound and blindfolded men. In "battle" such as these were (puerile skirmishes that would bore the Cripps and Bloods on any week-end night) his imbecilities defy belief. Che was Castro's chief executioner, a combination of Beria-Himmler. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," is a famous Guevara quote, "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans–to scale, that is.  So what happens today? Well, you see Che's face on t-shirts worn by people who oppose capital punishment! I devote an entire chapter to the gallant Che so please indulge me here, Jamie. I can't resist a few more quips. Because Che's lessons and history are fascinating and valuable, but only in light of Sigmund Freud or P.T. Barnum. "One born every minute," Mr. Barnum? If only you'd lived to see the Che phenomenon. Actually, 10 are born every second.

Here's a "guerrilla hero" who in real life never fought in a guerrilla war. When he finally brushed up against one, he was routed.

Here's a cold-blooded murderer who executed thousands without trial,  who stayed up till dawn for months at a time signing death warrants for innocent and honorable men, whose office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions – and today his T-shirts adorn people who oppose capital punishment!

Here's communist Cuba's first "Minister of Industries," whose main slogan in 1960 was "Accelerated Industrialization!" Whose dream was converting Cuba (the hemisphere, actually) into a huge bureaucratic-industrial ant farm – and he's the poster boy for greens and anarchists who scream and rant against industrialization!

Here's a snivelling little suck-up, teacher's pet and momma's boy who was the constant pride of joy of his teacher (Alberto Bayo) and parents (the most obnoxious sort of Limousine Bolsheviks) – and he's idolized by millionaire delinquents such as Rage Against the Machine!

Here's a humorless teetotaler, a plodding paper-pusher, a notorious killjoy and all-around fuddy-duddy – and you see his T-shirt on MTV's Spring Break revelers!

Perhaps competent psychologists (if any exist) will explain this some day.

Che excelled in one thing: mass murder of defenseless men. He was a Stalinist to the core, a plodding bureaucrat and a calm, cold-blooded – but again, never in actual battle – killer.

FP: Why do you think the Left loves the Cuban dictator and his vicious regime so much?

Fontova: Let's face it, anti-Americanism is "cool" in leftist circles. Well, here's the man who has PERSONIFIED anti-Americanism for going on half a century now. So how "cool" can you get! Castro has been jerking Uncle Sam's chain from 90 miles away for 46 years now. The Left eats this kind of stuff up. Plus you have to remember: Fidel, Raul, Che and their cronies where the first Hippies--beatniks actually, given the time. They took over in 1959, with long hair, beards, etc. You look at pictures of them at the time --they were all in their early thirties--and they look like the Grateful Dead! So again, how cool can you get?  And here's these cool beatniks flipping their finger  at the biggest fuddy-duddy country on earth at the time--- Ike's America, with Ozzie & Harriet on TV, with a bald golfer as President, with people living in Levittown. So that coolness cachet still surrounds Fidel, despite his massacres, his mass jailing, his lust to set off nuclear war in 1962, his use of Sarin gas against Angolans.

FP:  Let’s look a little deeper into the morbid psychology of the Left and its veneration of mass murderers like Castro and Ché.

It is definitely nothing new that leftists love totalitarian and terrorist figures who engage in mass murder and genocide. The history of the 20^th Century is a dark testament to the Left’s long record of venerating totalitarianism. Now, with communism gone, except for a few tyrants like Castro, the Left has turned its adulation toward the bin Ladens, al Zarqawis and the suicide bombers. Individuals such as Michael Moore can’t even contain their gleeful cheer when terrorists kill Americans and innocent civilians in Iraq.

I see the Left’s main impulse as the instinct to worship at the altar of death-cult ideologies. Seeking an earthly utopia, it seeks to destroy this world in order to wipe the slate clean. It therefore only makes sense that the Left, obsessed with destruction, would idolize someone like Castro, a mass murderer engaged in mass killing. It only makes sense that it champions the nihilistic Islamist suicide bombers who, like Stalin and Hitler, worship death and suicide for no rational reason whatsoever. What are your thoughts on the Left’s psyche?

Fontova: I used to ponder it often. I've read Paul Hollander, Malcolm Muggeridge, James Burnham, Arthur Koestler, David Horowitz, Robert Conquest, Paul Johnson, Jean Francois Revel, etc-- I've read an entire library on the Leftist mind-set.  But I finally resolved that life's too short to concern yourself with what motivates lunatics. Now I leave this strange study to competent psychiatrists (if any exist.) You finally get to a point where you regard it as a form of mental illness -- at least I do.

What gets me about these people is that the MORE murderous and repressive a regime the MORE popular it becomes with them. Think about it. The Soviet Union was never as popular with leftist intellectuals as during Stalin's blood-drenched reign. China was the Leftists' showcase Shangri-La precisely during Mao's mass butcheries during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1960's and 70's Cuba had the highest political incarceration rate on earth, (higher than the Soviet Union's) Castro and Che's firing squads were piling up thousands of corpses a year--well, it was at that very time that Western college kids like Christopher Hitchens and the Venceremos Brigadistas made a fetish of flocking to Castroland to help with sugar cane harvests and worship at the altar of the Maximum Leader. It was at that very time that Norman Mailer hailed Castro as "The Greatest hero to appear in our Hemisphere!" You finally give up on expecting sense from such people -- at least I do. So you grab a brewskie, pop it open and laugh at them as you would at a Chimpanzee in a zoo cage, or the characters in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

FP: Well I guess one could laugh, except that it is difficult to see anything much funny in this morbid and tragic phenomenon. The Left has done an incredible amount of damage and has a massive amount of human blood on its hands, from Walter Duranty and his lies about Stalin, to how the anti-war Left facilitated a bloodbath in Southeast Asia, and to today’s malicious behavior of individuals like Michael Moore, who gives morale to our Islamist enemy and gets innocent civilians and our own troops killed in Iraq.

I always hoped that there would be some form of justice in terms of Cuba and that Castro would be tried in a world court for crimes against humanity. But I guess that will never happen. Why do you think it is accepted that someone like Augusto Pinochet is put on trial, but not Castro, when Pinochet’s “crimes” represent a Sunday school class in comparison to Castro’s crimes?

What do you think would be suitable justice when it comes to Fidel if he was put on trial? What would he be tried for and what sentence do you think would be fitting?

Fontova: First off, let’s consider Dave Barry's definition of laughter. It helps explain why I laugh at these leftist waterheads. "A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge." And let me add one more example: Carlos Santana at the Academy Awards, proudly showing off his Che Guevara T-shirt. As he entered the ceremony, Carlos stopped for the photographers, smiled deliriously and swung his jacket open. TA-DA! There it was: Carlos' elegantly embroidered Che Guevara t-shirt. Carlos' face as the flashbulbs popped said it all. "I'm so COOL!" he beamed. "I'm so HIP! I'm so CHEEKY! So SHARP! So TUNED IN!"

Tune into this, Carlos: in the mid 1960's, Fidel and your charming t-shirt icon set up concentration camps in Cuba for, among many others, "anti-social elements" and "delinquents." Besides Bohemians and homosexuals, these camps were crammed with "roqueros," who qualified in Che and Fidel's eyes as useless "delinquents." A "roquero" was a hapless youth who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music in Cuba. So here's Santana, grinning widely – and OH-SO-hiply! – while proudly displaying the symbol of a regime that MADE IT A CRIMINAL OFFENSE TO LISTEN TO CARLOS SANTANA MUSIC.

Now regarding Castro and Pinochet in a world court, I'm afraid you're absolutely right, Jamie, Castro's thousands of victims will never see justice done. It just ain't gonna happen. To explain this infuriating hypocrisy I'll quote James Burnham from his classic Suicide of The West: "the liberal cannot strike wholeheartedly at the Communist for fear of wounding himself in the process." That's from Burnham's chapter titled "No Enemy on the Left," which says it all.

Armando Valladares saw this swinish hypocrisy first hand while working at the U.N. "What shocked me the most about United Nations politics during my time there," he writes in the prologue to Against All Hope, " was the double standard of  many governments, especially the attitude the Spanish government  under the leadership of   Socialist President Felipe Gonzalez. While I was in Geneva, friends in Spain sent me a copy of a confidential report on the violation of human rights in Cuba, prepared in secret by the Spanish Chancery itself. This report documented systematic torture, crimes, and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of Cuban political prisoners. But the Spanish foreign ministry's official document concluded by stating: "But even so, we cannot condemn Castro because that would be proving the Americans right."

So there you have it. It's that anti-Americanism that I mentioned earlier. Castro gets away with his wholesale butcheries because he's still seen as the symbol and standard-bearer of anti-Americanism, as such he can do no wrong. According to Cuban-American scholar and researcher Armando Lago, who I cite often in my book, the death toll from Castro's Revolution stands at around 110,000. This includes children as young as 14 executed by firing squad and many women political prisoners who perished from maltreatment in prison. What would justice mean for this butcher? We saw an example at Nuremberg and Tokyo after WWII, didn't we?  Now wouldn't it be wonderful if Communist butchers got the same dose of justice. But no, instead we saw Stalinist butchers themselves standing in judgment of their Nazi butcher (onetime) brothers at Nuremberg! Like they had room to talk!. And speaking of  the incomparable Michael Moore, Castro hails him as "an outstanding American!" And shows his movies for free in every movie theatre in Cuba. And why not? Heck, Castro and his propaganda ministry themselves couldn't come up with more virulent and hateful anti-Yankee propaganda.
 
FP: What is the future of a post-Castro Cuba? How do you envision it?

Fontova: I'd love to be optimistic here, instead I'll be honest.  Now, I could indeed be optimistic about a post-Castro Cuba. But I suspect you mean a post-Fidel Castro Cuba. You see, Raul Castro (Fidel's brother) is the sure-fire successor to Fidel. Raul will simply become de jure ruler of Cuba, instead of just de-facto as he is today. Raul runs Cuba's military, who own and run Cuba's tourist and export industries. Very shrewd of Fidel to award them these enterprises--no incentive for a coup this way. In Castro's Cuba, the Military--the only outfit with guns-- is fat, happy and content. Some say Raul has actually been running Cuba for the past ten years (the day to day nuts and bolts of the thing) with Fidel as figurehead loudmouth. When he takes over, Raul will probably open the economy a bit, like China in the early 80's, and keep the clamps on politically. For things to really change in Cuba Fidel, Raul and a couple of other high Military figures would have to be taken out. There's no Deng or Gorbachev in sight anywhere in Cuba. Indeed Raul himself was quoted a few years ago. "If any Cuban Gorbachev shows his head around here, we'll promptly chop it off!" 

FP: Mr. Fontova, it was an honor to speak with you today. Thank you for telling the truth about some of the most vicious and sadistic butchers and killers of our time. We hope to see you again soon.

Fontova: My pleasure entirely. Call anytime. Heaven knows we have precious few outlets to tell the truth about Cuba.  It's great to have one in Frontpage. 

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