Helping Barack Remember History

WASHINGTON -- Does anyone remember what it was that turned America hostile toward the tropical paradise of Cuba? Our president tells us "we're caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy, and 'Yanquis' and the Cold War." Yes, really, "gunboat diplomacy." That is how University of Chicago adjunct law professors talk about American foreign policy. And he adds, "Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born." So, what got America so riled up over the Castro brothers and Cuban communists even before Barack Obama was born?

As I recall, it was a bipartisan hostility. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican if memory serves, began it. His successor, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, continued it, and he and his brother Bob actually dragged the nation through the Cuban missile crisis. Then Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican, and literally every president thereafter continued to harass and afflict the Castros until President Obama had the brilliant idea of simply using his executive powers to relax various commercial and travel restrictions against Cuba. Yet why did America's hostility toward Cuba start in in the first place?

Truth be known, not all Americans hated Castro. There were the members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, among whom were the writers James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Allen Ginsberg. Also the political activist Lee Harvey Oswald who, as you might recall, actually assassinated John F. Kennedy. Then there were Castro's friends among the Hollywoodians, Fidel being rather arty. There was the actor Jack Nicholson who immediately identified Castro as "a genius." Oliver Stone, the director, appraised him as "selfless and moral, one of the world's wisest men." And another director, Steven Spielberg, adjudged a dinner spent with Castro "the eight most important hours of my life." There were members of the media, Ted Turner, Barbara Walters and Andrea Mitchell, who said of the Cuban leader, "Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly -- even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure."

Still the rest of America favored hostility for years. America seems to have taken offense when Fidel Castro said some rude things about us. He took the side of the USSR against us in the Cold War and sent troops abroad to foment revolution. He also sent spies. Institutions that America has cherished, such as democracy and the rule of law, were not always respected in Castro's Cuba, where there existed political prisoners who were treated badly and often killed.

A very persuasive case was made against the Castro brothers by Armando Valladares in the early 1980s when he published his prison memoirs, "Against All Hope." In that book he chronicled almost unbelievable cruelty during 22 years of imprisonment for philosophically opposing communism. He was arrested at 23 and suffered through torture, solitary confinement and witnessing friends dragged before firing squads. He ate putrid food, suffered squalid conditions, illness and forced labor until the protests of world leaders such as Francois Mitterrand led to his release. Through it all I can find no hint of our Hollywoodians or of the members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee speaking up on behalf of Valladares or any other imprisoned Cuban.

The brutality of "Against All Hope" is astonishing. It puts me in mind of stories John McCain has told me and doubtless others regarding Cuban communists. He says that when he was in communist prisons in North Vietnam things were bad. Nonetheless when the Cubans arrived to assist the North Vietnamese they became worse. I wonder if any Cuban prison guards from the good old days graduated to become members of Raul Castro's security detail. Were they with him in Panama City when he and President Obama sat down to talk last weekend and to engage in shared amnesia about why the vast majority of Americans approved of our long years of hostility toward the Castros?

President Obama's insouciance toward American sacrifice during the Cold War marks him out as the only American president that does not understand the Cold War. It also marks him as the only president that does not like American history and in truth does not like America. While he was visiting with Raul Castro and scratching his head about the inscrutability of America's long history of opposing the Castro brothers, my guess is that their prisons still hold latter day Armando Valladareses. Obama might have asked Castro about freeing them.

Cuba’s Vietnam War Involvement

Research by John Lowery

Whatever one thinks of President Barack Obama’s overtures to Cuba
and the accompanying prisoner exchange, an important consideration in
need of immediate attention is an accounting of our servicemen captured
in the Vietnam War and imprisoned in Cuban-operated POW camps. Of
utmost importance is an accounting of the 17 American airmen captured
in North Vietnam and then taken to Cuba for medical experiments in
torture techniques.

Most
Americans are unaware that Cuba was deeply involved in the Vietnam War.
In fact they had an engineering battalion called the “Girón Brigade,”
that was maintaining Route Nine, a major enemy supply line into South
Vietnam. Their facilities included a POW camp and field hospital very
near the DMZ, just inside North Vietnam. Meanwhile Cuban interrogators
worked in Hanoi at a prison known as the Zoo. We know of these
operations and some of what happened to our servicemen after so managed
to survive and be repatriated in the winter of 1973, during Operation
Homecoming.

Following
his release Major Jack Bomar, a Zoo survivor, described the brutal
beating of Captain Earl G. Cobeil, an F-105F electronics warfare
officer, by Cuban Major Fernando Vecino Alegret, known by the POWs as
“Fidel.” Regarding Captain Cobeil, Bomar related, “he was completely
catatonic. … His body was ripped and torn everywhere…Hell cuffs
appeared almost to have severed his wrists…Slivers of bamboo were
imbedded in his bloodied shins, he was bleeding from everywhere,
terribly swollen, a dirty yellowish black and purple [countenance] from
head to toe.”

In an effort
to force Cobeil to talk “Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face,
driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the
room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took
a length of rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could
into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or
even blink an eye. Again and again, a dozen times, [Fidel] smashed the
man’s face with the hose.”

Because of
his grotesque physical condition Captain Cobeil was not repatriated but
instead was listed as “died in captivity,” with his remains returned in
1974. (Miami Herald, August, 22 1999, and Benge, Michael D. “The Cuban
Torture Program, Testimony before the House International Relations
Committee, Chaired by the Honorable Benjamin A. Gilman, November 4,
1999.) Incredibly, Fidel’s torture of Major James Kasler is well known
as he somehow managed to survive the Cuban’s torture.

Much less is
known about our 17 captured airmen taken to Cuba for “experimentation
in torture techniques.” They were held in Havana’s Los Maristas, a
secret Cuban prison run by Castro’s G-2 Intelligence service. A few
were held in the Mazorra (Psychiatric) Hospital and served as human
guinea pigs used to develop improved methods of extracting information
through “torture and drugs to induce [American] prisoners to
cooperate.”

After being
shot down in April of 1972, U.S. Navy F-4 pilot, Lt. Clemmie McKinney,
an African-American, was imprisoned near the Cuban compound called Work
Site Five. His capture occurred while then-Cuban president Fidel Castro
was visiting the nearby Cuban field hospital. Although listed as killed
in the crash by DOD, his photograph standing with Castro, was later
published in a classified CIA document.

More than 13
years later, on August 14, 1985, the North Vietnamese returned Lt.
McKinney’s remains, reporting that he died in November 1972. However, a
U.S, Army forensic anthropologist established the “time of death as not
earlier than 1975 and probably several years later.” The report
speculated that he had been a guest at Havana’s Los Maristas prison,
with his remains returned to Vietnam for repatriation. (We also paid
big money for the remains—delivered in stacks of green dollars to Hanoi
aboard an AF C-141 from Travis AFB, California.) Unfortunately, our
servicemen held in the Cuban POW camp near Work Site Five (Cong Truong
Five), along with those in two other Cuban run camps were never
acknowledged nor accounted for and the prisoners simply disappeared.

If our honor
code of “Duty, Honor, Country,” and our national policy of “No man left
behind,” are more than meaningless slogans, then before our relations
with Cuba can be normalized, their murderous leadership must account
for our POWs—especially the 17 airmen taken to Cuba. The civilized
world and American veterans demand it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.