Used by permission of Regnery Books:

EXCERPTS FROM
FIDEL: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

The Terrorist Next Door
Atomic bombs might have been a tad ambitious, but Fidel's 1962 bomb plot was serious enough. The March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all ten of them, killed and maimed almost two thousand people. The al Qaeda-linked terrorists used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT, roughly ten kilos per blast. Rafael del Pino, who once headed Castro's air force and defected in 1987, has confirmed that Castro's 1962 bomb plot involved five hundred kilos of TNT, among other explosives and incendiaries. (p. 3).

Biased Reporting
Pedro Porro... who worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in 2000. He was the translator for Juan Miguel during the famous interview with Dan Rather..."Well, when I saw the interview as it appeared on the 60 Minutes show I didn't know whether to throw up or start crying," he says. Even during the interview it was obvious that Gregory Craig [former Clinton lawyer and friend then acting as Juan Miguel's (read: Fidel Castro's) lawyer] was stage-managing the entire thing. The questions for Juan Miguel were actually fed to Dan Rather by Gregory Craig... It was obvious that Dan Rather and Gregory Craig were on very friendly terms... Craig was acting like a movie director, too. He didn't like the way Juan Miguel's voice was coming across in the English translation...So they went out and got a bona fide dramatic actor to translate and mouth his responses. (p. 171).

"Cuban Specialist"
In 1999, heavily influenced by these Clintonista generals, the Pentagon issued an official intelligence assessment that declared, "Cuba is no longer a threat to the U.S." "This is an objective report by serious people," proclaimed Fidel Castro from Havana. "Cuba can no longer project itself beyond the boundaries of Cuba," said General Wilhelm in praise of the Defense Department report. "No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere"... But the big shoe fell on these Clintonista generals two years later—two days after September 11, 2001, in fact—when the Defense Department's top Latin American expert, the agency's "Cuban specialist," Ana Belen Montes, was arrested by the FBI as a Castro spy. She had authored the "Cuba is no threat" intelligence report that the shrewd generals had so recently and officially blessed. Worse, "Montes passed some of the United States' most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana," said John Bolton, undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department." (p. 9).

Suicide: A State Secret
When Cuba's overall suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand in 1986, it was double Latin America's average and triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate. Cuban women are now the most suicidal in the world, making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cuban aged fifteen to forty-eight. The statistics got so embarrassing that the Cuban government ceased publishing them; they are now state secrets. But we also know that Cuba had the highest (or third highest; the sources differ) abortion rates in the world. The suicide and abortion rates smack of hopelessness and despair. (p. 60). Castro's Cuba

Shortcomings
Batista's Cuba had the second highest per capita income in Latin America... as well as net immigration... Castro's Cuba on the other hand, has the highest political incarceration rate on earth... Given Cuba's population, Castro incarcerated at a higher rate than Stalin and is shunned even by Haitian refugees. But the only shortcoming of Castro's Cuba, according to the Globe and Mail, is that "All car-rental companies are state owned and rates are exorbitant." And of course, the Globe and Mail criticizes the American trade "embargo." (p. 81).

Running from Castro
Before Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the United States. Cuba went from being the Western Hemispheric with the highest per capita immigration rate... to one where 20 percent of the population fled, and where probably 80 percent sought to flee. They fled in planes and ships, they crammed into the steaming holds of merchant vessels, they leaped into the sea on rafts and inner tubes, knowing that their chances were about one in three of making landfall. Thus they vote with their feet against a place Jack Nicholson declared "a paradise." Thus they flee the handiwork of the man Colin Powell assures us "had done good things for Cuba." Thus is their desperation to escape from Bonnie Raitt's "happy little island." (pp. 56-57).

The UN's Love of Castro
But liberals love the Cuban tyrant. In November 1995, Castro made a triumphant visit to New York. He was the star speaker and main attraction at the United Nation's fiftieth anniversary bash—the guest of honor. "The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!" read a Newsweek story that week... "Fidel Castro got, by far, the loudest and warmest reception in the [United Nations] General Assembly" wrote Time magazine. (The United Nations had been sweet on Castro for a long time, and still is). During an April 2000 summit in Havana, Secretary-General Kofi Annan proclaimed, "Castro's regime has set an example we can all learn from.) (p.12).

Castro Holds Court
Castro plunged into Manhattan's social swirl... David Rockefeller invited him to a celebrity-studded dinner at his Westchester Country estate... After holding court for a rapt Rockefeller...Castro flashed over to media mogul Mort Zuckerman's Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of talking heads, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, and Barbara Walters all jostled to hear the Comandante's every comment, clamoring for autographs and photo-ops... According to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, on that visit, Castro received 250 dinner invitations from celebrities, power brokers, millionaires, pundits, and socialites. (p. 12).

Blissful ignorance
Carole [King] went in February 2002 and serenaded the Maximum Leader with a heartfelt "You've Got a Friend." Bonnie Raitt visited in March 1999 and stopped hyper ventilating just long enough to compose a song in Castro's honor, "Cuba is Way Too Cool!"... A beaming Jimmy Buffett came on after Bonnie... Most of the five thousand clapping Cubans in the audience were Cuban Communist Party members...Many... had a hand in 110,000 political murders of their own. Maybe these musical hipsters didn't know that, or know that Castro's Cuba had the highest emigration, incarceration, and suicides rates for young people on the face of the globe... I wonder if they know that owning a Beatles or Rolling Stones record in Cuba was a criminal offense or that effeminate behavior, or wearing blue jeans, or being a man with long hair meant the secret police could dump you in a concentration camp with WORK WILL MAKE MEN OUT OF YOU posted in bold letters above the gate and machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. (pp. 59-60).

Castro and Hitler
The plain fact about Castro is that Castro was a terrorist before terrorism was cool. He started way back in April 1948, when he was part of the Communist-led riots that rocked Bogota, Columbia...And Castro... earning his revolutionary credentials. Those credentials include an admiration of Hitler... Mein Kampf was among Castro's favorite books... The very title of Castro's manifesto, History Will Absolve Me, comes almost word for word from Hitler's famous courtroom defense for his Rathaus Putsch in 1924... ."Condemn me. It doesn't matter," declared Castro to the packed courtroom in 1953 during his own trial... "History will absolve me!" Heck, even Castro's official title, Lider Maximo, copies Hitler's Fuhrer (leader). Except, typical for Castro, he had to one-up even Hitler. He had to thrown in that "Maximum" bit... Castro had to distinguish himself from chump "leaders" like Hitler too. (pp. 20-21).

Castro's Obsession
Khrushchev wanted peace; Castro didn't. True, in 1957 the redoubtable New York Times had passed along his heartfelt message, "You can be sure that we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people." But here's the same Fidel Castro confiding in a letter to a friend a month later: "War against the United States is my true destiny. When this war's over I'll start that much bigger and wider war"... Castro said this while the U.S. State Department and CIA were backing Castro's movement, and even helping finance it. After defecting in 1964, Castro's own sister brought an unmistakable message to Congress: "Fidel's feeling of hatred for this country cannot even be imagined by Americans"... "His intention-his OBSESSION-is to destroy the U.S.!" (pp. 2-3).

Cheers for Castro
By the time Castro was cheered at Harvard Law School in April 1959, Mr. Castro's firing squads had slaughtered 568 men and boys... By the time Norman Mailer (an opponent of capital punishment), was calling Castro "the greatest hero to appear in the Americas," Fidel's firing squads had piled up four thousand corpses. By 1975, when George McGovern (another opponent of capital punishment), was saying, "[Castro] is very shy and sensitive, I frankly liked him," the bullet-riddled bodies of fourteen thousand Cuban lay in unmarked graves. Combine this bloodbath with the jailing of more political prisoners... add the ghastly deaths of seventy-seven thousand desperate Cubans in the Florida straits, add forty-five years of totalitarian oppression, and what do you get? You get the December 2003 edition of The Nation, where Arthur Miller (a longtime foe of capital punishment), describes Castro as "exciting, a person who could probably have had a career on the screen, and
one who'd undoubtedly win an election in his country." (p. 117).

Protecting the Enemy
Fidel Castro, that "brave and plucky underdog" who, according to his liberal groupies, practices "Machismo-Leninismo," in fact has survived all these years by hiding behind the skirts of the three most powerful nations on earth: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. So after October 28, 1962, Castro enjoyed a new status of Mutually Assured Protection. And Cuban exiles willing to fight for freedom were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. neutrality laws"... The Florida Coast Guard got twelve new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remain unmolested. (p. 27).

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