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“One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting!” read a New York Times headline on Jan 4, 1959. The fake news headline dealt with the (utterly bogus) “battle” of Santa Clara in central Cuba where Ernesto “Che” Guevara earned much of his enduring (and totally bogus) martial fame. “Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties,” continues the breathless The New York Times article. “Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men!”A year later, Che’s own diaries revealed that his forces (which actually numbered...

We all saw it in the Fake News Media’s top educational source on the Cuban revolution, right? It’s New Year's Eve 1958 in Havana and the “U.S.-backed dictator” Batista says goodbye to his crooked cronies (American and Cuban) at a lavish ball, then hightails it out of the country as the brave, noble and chivalrous Fidel Castro and Che Guevara close in on Havana.So far so good—as far as the surface details go. But Hollywood’s implications in those scenes actually trash the truth.….…..Oh? Does my phrase “Fake News Media’s top educational source” strikes some of my amigos as unnecessarily hyperbolic?” I...

WASHINGTON -- The National Enquirer has published what it says is conclusive evidence that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, is the man photographed next to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald distributing pro-Castro leaflets in 1963 in New Orleans. The Cruz presidential campaign fired back unequivocally. “This is another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage,” communications director Alice Stewart told McClatchy. “The story is false; that is not Rafael in the picture.” The explosive suggestion that Cruz’s father would have had any affiliation with Oswald is not corroborated in any other way. Cuban-born Rafael Cruz is now a...

This Rubio hypocrisy and deceit squares not only with the senator’s do-nothing blowhard talk, but also the hard fact that he has misrepresented at the outset of his presidential campaign that his father had fled Castro’s Cuba. In fact, his dad had freely left the island during the reign of rightest President Raul Batista, the Castros’ predecessor, who his father supported. So Marco’s father did not escape communism to become a simple bartender, as he touts so often. Similarly, Rubio has been caught lying on other occasions during his political career. Then there is Rubio’s similar boasting about how he...

From his dad’s torture in Cuba to his experience watching hard-core porn with Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor, it seems nothing is off-limits in the senator’s forthcoming memoir. Ted Cruz first heard about his father’s torture as a teenager, after the two of them spent the afternoon watching a Rambo movie.Torture is a tragically familiar concept in the Cruz family: Cruz’s father, Rafael, had been jailed as a Cuban revolutionary in the days of Fulgencio Batista; his aunt later opposed the Castro regime, and too was physically abused. Just hours after watching Rambo endure agonizing electrical torture by Vietnamese captors, Rafael...

THERE is no guerilla fighter in the world as famous as Che Guevara. The revolutionary’s face adorns the T-shirts of wannabe radicals everywhere and 41 years after his death he is still idolised by the Left. Now Ernesto Guevara, to give him his real name, is getting the big Hollywood movie treatment. Oscar-winning actor Benicio del Toro plays the Argentinian revolutionary in two films directed by Steven Soderbergh, the man behind Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen. But while Soderbergh’s films — Che: Part 1 and Che: Part 2 — largely follow the predictable path of lauding him as...

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous beret is gone. His iconic beard is filthy and matted against skeletal cheekbones. One bushy eyebrow arches over his half-open eyes. As a Bolivian country surgeon methodically saws off his lifeless hands, Che appears vaguely amused. Gustavo Villoldo, a stocky figure in green army fatigues, stands just inside the tiny laundry room where the Cuban revolutionary's corpse rests atop a sink. For five months, the CIA operative has led soldiers hunting Guevara through the rough crags and valleys of southern Bolivia. Less than 24 hours ago, his team had captured and executed him in a village...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexican gunmen have kidnapped a U.S. security consultant who negotiated the release of dozens of kidnap victims in Latin America. Gunmen abducted Felix Batista outside a restaurant last Wednesday in the relatively safe northern industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state, Mexican authorities and his employer, security consultancy ASI Global, said on Monday. Batista, a Miami-based Cuban American credited with negotiating the release of victims abducted by Colombian rebels, was snatched after he stepped outside the restaurant, answering a call on his cellular phone, Mexican media said. The U.S. embassy in Mexico City said it was...

What will become of Cuba once Fidel Castro dies ? I suspect Cuba will be absorbed into the new,steadily growing "Bolivarian Republic" of Hugo Chavez,and that nobody but Hugo is going to like the idea.

A must see movie. In Houston on Friday June 23 at the River Oaks Theater, 2009 West Gray. Ph: 713-866-8881 www.landmarktheaters.com Movie critics aghast at Andy Garcia’s The Lost City Humberto Fontova* BrookesNews.Com Monday 8 May 2006 Andy Garcia blew it big-time with his movie The Lost City. He blew it with the mainstream critics, that is. Almost unanimously, they’re ripping a movie 16 years in the making. In this engaging drama of a middle-class Cuban family crumbling during free Havana’s last days, which he both directs and stars in, Garcia insisted on depicting some historical truth about Cuba —...

HAVANA (Reuters) - How did a well-to-do country boy with a conservative education called Fidel Castro turn into a fearless rebel and enduring leader of one of the world's last Marxist states? For Finnish documentary-maker Folke West, granted rare access to early Cuban state archives, the answer lies in Castro's formative years, long before he became a Communist. His 2-hour, 50-minute "Young Fidel" traces the Cuban president's life from his father's ranch through Jesuit schools and volatile university politics to a nearly suicidal raid on Cuba's second largest military garrison, prison and finally exile in 1955. "Most biographies jump most...

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

p193 Miami -- It is there that a nutty bunch of Cuban exiles have controlled U.S. foreign policy regarding this insignificant island nation. These Cubans, many of whom were Batista supporters and lived high on the hog while that crook ran the country, seem not to have slept a wink since they grabbed their assets and headed to Florida. And, since 1960, they have insisted on pulling us into their madness. Why is it that in every incident of national torment that has deflated our country for the past three decades-the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, IranContra, our drug abuse epidemic-the list...

Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro met with Colonel General Xu Caihou, Head of the General Political Department of China’s People’s Liberation Army. During the meeting both Fidel and Xu agreed that the visit by the Chinese delegation to the island strengthens bilateral relations between both nations, governments and armed forces. Xu Caihou also met with Cuban Armed Forces Minister, Army General Raul Castro and gave him a friendly message of greetings from Chinese top authorities. In his meeting with Raul Castro, the Chinese visitor stressed the experience of the Cuba armed institution and the population in their preparation for defense and their...

The Rev. Pedro Cartaya remembers July 26, 1953, as the day that changed his life. He was 16, a student at Colegio de Belen in Havana — the alma mater of Fidel Castro. It was a Sunday and he had just gotten home from the movies when he heard that Castro and a band of followers had attacked the second largest military stronghold of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The raid was daring and bold — and unsuccessful. Castro didn't even go inside the barracks, running away instead after realizing his plan failed miserably. Most of his loyalists, though, were captured, then...