Posted on 12/17/2002 2:55:17 AM PST by kattracks
CNSNews.com) - Despite decades of criticism by exiled Cubans and human rights activists, Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro, has been labeled a "genius" and a "source of inspiration to the world" by Hollywood celebrities.
Media critic Michael Medved labels the movie-star attention to Castro, "sickening." Dennis Hayes, head of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, says Castro maintains a "cult"-like following, similar to the devotion for past figures like "Jim Jones or David Koresh."
But Saul Landau, an Emmy award-winning filmmaker who produced documentaries on Castro's Cuba, says Hollywood celebrities are realizing that a lot of the negative portrayals of Castro are inaccurate. Landau praised many of the dictator's policies, noting that Castro "has brought a greater equality in terms of wealth distribution than I guess any country in the world today."
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg visited Cuba and met with Castro in November and dined with the dictator until the early morning hours. Spielberg announced that his dinner with Castro "was the eight most important hours of my life."
Actor Jack Nicholson told Daily Variety, following his three-hour 1998 meeting in Cuba that, "He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything."
Model Naomi Campbell declared that Castro was "a source of inspiration to the world."
"I'm so nervous and flustered because I can't believe I have met him. He said that seeing us in person was very spiritual," Campbell recounted of her 1999 visit to Cuba with fellow model Kate Moss, according to the Toronto Star.
The stars have also praised Castro's economic system. Comedian Chevy Chase, at Earth Day 2000 in Washington D.C., said he believes "socialism works" and explained that "Cuba might prove that." Chase added, "I think it's conclusive that there have been areas where socialism has helped to keep people at least stabilized at a certain level."
American media moguls, including the president of CBS TV, the head of MTV and the editor of Vanity Fair, visited Cuba in 2001 and had nothing but praise for the Caribbean Island. One member of the entourage described Cuba as "the most romantic, soulful and sexy country I've ever been to in my life," according to the New York Post.
'Experience of a Lifetime'
Other Hollywood celebrities who have visited Cuba and Castro include Robert Redford, Spike Lee, Sidney Pollack, Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Shirley MacLaine, Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kevin Costner.
Costner visited Cuba in 2001 for the premiere of his film on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days, and attended a private screening with Castro. The film depicts the Kennedy administration behind the scenes during the October 1962 crisis.
Costner was clearly impressed with Castro, stating at a Havana press conference, "It was an experience of a lifetime to sit only a few feet away from him and watch him relive an experience he lived as a very young man."
Movie portrayals have also reflected Hollywood's enthusiasm for Castro's Cuba, even while infuriating cultural critics like David Horowitz, who called the 1990 film Havana, starring Robert Redford and directed by Sydney Pollack, "grotesque," for its pro-Castro sentiment.
Another film currently showing in the U.S. is called Fidel. The 2002 movie is being billed as a biographical documentary of Castro, featuring the Cuban dictator as well as Harry Belafonte and Ted Turner.
The movie presents such a favorable view of Castro that New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott said of the film: "This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship."
Last week, one of the stars of Fidel, Belafonte, was back in Cuba for a film festival and told reporters that "every day, more and more Americans are opposed to the war machine being driven by George W. Bush," according to a report from Cuba's state-run Radio Havana.
Belafonte accused Bush of using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to further his desire "to control the world militarily, politically, economically and culturally."
Among their key political causes, Hollywood activists are calling for the U.S. government to end the trade embargo imposed on Cuba in 1961. However, Bush has said he will not lift the embargo until Castro's government honors human rights, releases political prisoners and holds free and fair elections.
'Lovesick Rock Groupies'
Hayes, executive vice president of the Cuban American National Foundation, an organization dedicated to fighting for democracy and human rights in Cuba, believes Castro's personal mystique may be blinding the celebrities to the harsh realities of life in Cuba.
"You have to remember that Fidel Castro is a cult leader, much along the same lines as Jim Jones or David Koresh. He's a megalomaniac with a messiah complex and people go and fall into his orbit," Hayes told CNSNews.com.
He believes otherwise rational individuals can "lose all context of reality" in Castro's presence.
"People turn into lovesick rock groupies when they get into his presence. This is the impact that cult leaders have on people," Hayes added.
Furthermore, he insisted, celebrities should not be praising Castro when they don't understand the situation in Cuba.
"It's very sad, and I wish Steven Spielberg and Danny Glover or any of these other guys would spend a little time with some of the political prisoners in jail before they make broad stroke comments about Cuba and Cuban society," Hayes said.
He said he hopes celebrities will "open their eyes" before they promote Castro's Cuba.
"Remember, this is a man who has killed tens of thousands of his own citizens. He's killed over 30 Americans, he harbors fugitives from U.S. justice, he has supported terrorism and narco-terrorism throughout the hemisphere, causing untold thousands of other citizens' deaths," Hayes said.
He described Castro's rule as a "ruthless dictatorship that denies people the freedom of speech, the freedom of press, the freedom of association," and said he cannot understand how celebrities miss these points.
"What is the problem here? Short of Saddam Hussein, it's hard to find a figure in the world that has caused more human misery than Fidel Castro," Hayes added.
He said he finds it ironic that Spielberg produced the film Schindler's List, about the German slaughter of Jews during World War II, yet cannot comprehend the reality of Cuba.
"[Spielberg is] totally blind to gulags in Cuba. [During his recent visit to Cuba] he made no mention of the thousands of people who are harassed and imprisoned on a daily basis," Hayes added.
'Sickening'
Michael Medved, entertainment critic and author of the book Hollywood vs. America, describes the celebrities' support of Castro as "sickening." He believes they are naturally drawn to Castro because "part of the Hollywood mindset is an almost childlike fantasy to escape to fantasy worlds."
"The one characteristic we connect most to really successful people in Hollywood is immaturity and that fits very well into utopian paradises of various kinds, like Cuba," Medved explained in an interview with CNSNews.com.
He maintains that most celebrities can't handle their wealth and become "animated by guilt," causing their political views to become skewed.
"One of the ways people deal with that guilt is they become revolutionaries, and Castro is perfect for them because he is an intellectual," Medved said.
"[Castro] is a rich guy, he's always been a rich guy, he's from the elite like most of Hollywood," he added.
Medved expressed surprise over Spielberg's comments, that his visit to Cuba had been the "eight most important hours" of his life.
"Not the hours when he met his wife, not the birth of his children, it was the eight hours he spent with Fidel," Medved said.
David Horowitz, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of the Popular Culture and a former 1960s radical, said Spielberg's comments about Castro were revealing.
"It just shows that Spielberg may be a talented filmmaker, but he hasn't got any moral brains," Horowitz said.
Medved believes the left-leaning Hollywood celebrities are drawn to the meager existence of the Cuban people.
"They say, 'isn't it wonderful, [Cubans] are all driving these vintage cars and they keep them running. Well, it is not so wonderful because they are too poor to get anything else," he said.
Another key factor in Castro's appeal to Hollywood is his "machismo" or sex appeal, according to Medved.
"[Castro] has acknowledged that he personally slept with over 1,000 women...it would be fairly common for Castro to go through four or five women a day," he said.
"For people who have invested a great deal of life proudly trying to see how many beautiful women you can conquer, there is a natural tendency to identify with Bill Clinton or Fidel Castro," Medved added.
'Useless Idiots'
Horowitz called Hollywood's close relationship with Castro a "national disgrace," which he alleged has "been going on for years and years."
Castro is a "sadistic monster," Horowitz said and "the longest surviving dictator in the world." Celebrities gloss over these realities, he contended.
"[Hollywood] can't tell a dictator from a Democrat or a country deliberately and systemically impoverished by its leader. These people don't know anything," Horowitz said.
"It's just depressing to even talk about it. They are useless idiots, if I may turn [Vladimir] Lenin's comment around," he said, referring to the Russian leader's description of naive Western journalists as "useful idiots."
Robin Bronk, executive director of the Creative Coalition, a liberal celebrity-based activist group whose founders include Ron Silver, Christopher Reeve, and Susan Sarandon, believes many Hollywood celebrities are getting a bum rap when it comes to political activism.
"Celebrity activism is as old as [silent film actress] Gloria Swanson," she said.
"We live in a society here in the U.S. where celebrities are put out there as opinion leaders," Bronk explained. "Just as they have their agent and their manager and their publicists, they are expected to have their issue," she added.
Noting that the activism can be effective "if utilized the right way," Bronk conceded that "there are a lot of spokespeople who are speaking on behalf of issues that are not necessarily the best spokespeople."
She also said Hollywood is dominated by liberals because, "typically people in the arts tend to be more liberal and less conservative. I think it's the nature of that constituency."
'Cuba is King'
Filmmaker Saul Landau, an Emmy award-winning filmmaker who produced four separate documentaries on Castro's Cuba for PBS and CBS, including a 1974 CBS documentary with Dan Rather, thinks Hollywood's assessment of Cuba reflects reality.
Landau rejects the idea that Castro is duping celebrities.
"How the hell is he duping them? They've got two eyes, they've got two ears," he told CNSNews.com.
"Cuba is the king of all of Latin American countries," Landau said.
He believes Hollywood stars have seen the truth in Cuba.
"You don't have millions of homeless people in Cuba, you don't have 42 million people who don't have access to medical care," Landau said, comparing Cuba to the United States.
Cuba outperforms the United States "when you talk about the right to food, the right to shelter, the right to a job, the right to a retirement," according to Landau. These issues are "less than rigorously enforced in the U.S." he added.
Landau also believes Castro's detractors have exaggerated his human rights abuses.
"I have not seen any evidence that he is a sadistic monster or a brutal dictator," he explained, adding that he has little regard for Cuban American refugees.
"People in Miami who are running their anti-Castro lobby, are, in my opinion, not representative of the Cubans in the country," Landau said.
"Cuban human rights violations take the form of procedural violations. They involve legal and political rights rather than economic and social rights," he added.
Landau did not deny that Castro's rule has included suppression of a free press and multi-party electoral process, but said like in any revolution, "they broke a lot of eggs" to achieve their goals.
He also made it clear that he is no fan of President George W. Bush.
"It's very difficult coming from the U.S., to imagine a political leader with whom you could have an intelligent conversation. Well, I guess you could with Bill Clinton, but you certainly can't with the moron that is in there today," Landau said.
Castro has a "religious aura" about him, according to Landau.
"When he comes into room, a wind follows him. He intimidates people by his very presence, he emanates, he vibrates power," he explained.
'Truth Needs to Come Out'
There are a few celebrities who make no attempt to hide their disdain for Castro. Actor Andy Garcia, a Cuban refugee, recently expressed his frustration over what he sees as the ignorance on the part of many in Hollywood and in America to Castro's Cuba.
"Sometimes, you feel like what's really going down in Cuba is protected in a way by the American media, and it's a shame, because the truth needs to come out. People need to be aware of what's really going on down there," he told Fort Lauderdale's City Link newspaper in October.
Garcia said he was proud of his 2000 HBO movie, "For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story." The film profiles a jazz musician who fled Cuba for America.
Garcia was blunt in his assessment of his native country. "For me, there's no substitute for liberty and freedom. People die for that," he said.
Singer Gloria Estefan is another Cuban refugee who feels frustrated that people don't understand the Castro government. Estefan fled the communist nation when she was two years old.
"People don't have a lot of information, and when they ask me about it, I tell them about the drama of exiles, the repression, the firing squads, the horror of communism," she told Exito Online in 1997.
"My whole family paid a heavy price for freedom. My father not only fought in the Bay of Pigs, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He fought for these same freedoms," Estefan said.
"How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?" she asked.
E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.
Many only had to sleep their way to the top but that explains why they're such whores.
When reading this article a scene from a movie immediately jumped out. It was nothing that any of these "Entertainers" ever had done, but it was the scene from Braveheart where Mel Gibson cries "Freedom".
As for redistribution of the wealth, there is none to resdestribute because the economy have been dead for four decades and any one that would know about ginning up the economy are dead or have been run off the island.
It hard to understand why these rich Americans treck down to Cuba, see ther deplorable conditions and say how quaint and happy the (handpicked) people are, but the are not willing to relocate to that utopia. Castro is a genius only in that he has been able to survive all the these years. Even if someone wants to call him a genius, that dose not absolve him of murder.
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. For real!
Makes perfect sense.
Exactly.
In Cuba they see nothing but what Castro wants them to see and they are, as Cubans say, such comemierdas that they cannot or will not see beyond that.
Pasted below are two postings from a few years ago on soc.culture.cuba. The poster was a New York Liberal now living in Seattle. We e-mailed and he and his friend Lois had Cuban Christmas Eve “Noche Buena” with us at our home one year. The story they told us that night of Lois in the Cuban Police station with her New York Liberal attitude and her friend telling her to shut the h*ll up in Pig Latin was hilarious.
They went to Cuba believing the Liberal propaganda. After three trips, they came to the conclusion that Castro was "a Fascist". They saw for themselves how the Cuban people are treated, in their own country, as blacks were treated in South Africa in the days of apartheid.
Cuba is essentially a feudal state with the Communist nobility living in one world and the peasantry living in another. Liberals like Steve and Lois travel amongst the peasants and learn. The Hollywood elite stay in the manor house feasting with the Communist nobility and learn nothing. ****************************************
It was the best vacation of my life. The people are wonderful; it is one of the best places in the world to visit....but the repression is getting really bad. I have so much to write that I barely know where to start.
Let me just sum up some of what happened to us briefly. When I recover from jetlag I will post in more detail.
We took a road trip to Guernevaca Beach. We were 5, 2 American guys, 1 American woman, 2 Cuban women. The Cubanas were immediately accosted by the police and told they couldn't accompany us to the beach. Everyplace we attempted to eat we were sent away. It is obvious the government wants to keep the tourist beaches sterile with no interaction.
Lois went to Baracoa with a German and a Cuban man. She made the mistake of taking lots of pictures and befriending a homosexual. She was detained, maybe arrested for a brieftime. Her male friend was thrown in jail.
After we moved out of our hotel where the hot water was sporadic and the food was terrible and we weren't allowed Cuban guests, 2 Ministerio de Interior Officials visited our private house and told us to report to the Immigration Office the next morning. There we were told our Visas said we had to stay in hotels (not true). They later checked to make sure we had moved out.
Police came to the casa particulare looking for Lois the next day, scaring the daylights out of our friends. At their request we completely erased all of our videotape to keep them from being compromised.
The place is becoming a Fascist state. It appears to me that Castro is getting scared and tightening the screws.
Even back here I am afraid to tell everything for fear of retribution against my friends.
****************************************************
Five of us set out for our trip, 3 Americans (2 male, 1 female), and 2 Cubanas. The road from Santiago is wide, at least the first few miles, but pretty much unmarked with absolutely no lights. Of course, there are no streetlights in Santiago to speak of either.
You need to stop every time there is an intersection because there are no signs.
My novia's brother lives in Bayamos so that was our first stop. Even though it is only an hour from Santiago she hadn't seen him for 5 years. Very few Cubans ever get to travel that far. Most of them have never left their own town.
Auspiciously, amazingly, perhaps miraculously, we arrived about half an hour after her brother had been in a motorcycle accident. Details were lacking; all we could find out was that he was in the local clinic. As it turned out, the details weren't lacking because of the severity of his injury (a broken collarbone), but because he was riding with his girlfriend and not his wife.
The clinic was breathtakingly bad. Forget about looking for a receptionist. You find someone milling in the crowd and ask for directions. The place was dingy, dark, and not very clean, although there were people constantly mopping and trying to make the best of the situation. Different rooms had handlettered signs on the door for orthopedics, etc. I went to the bathroom, and there was no soap or toilet paper, normal in Cuba, but in a hospital, too? There were bloodsoaked bandages in the trash.
The brother was on a bed in orthopedics, groaning from the pain. Fortunately my friend Jorge had a large bottle of ibuprofin which we immediately donated to the cause.
Lois was shooting pictures incessantly, which I thought was a little tasteless, but she insisted that she was an "artiste" and "journalist." I don't know what the people thought, but nobody said anything to her.
After determining that he would be okay for now, and probably operated on tomorrow, we paid $6 to the doctor (for God knows what?) and continued on our trip, promising to return on the way back the next day.
Our next stop was Holguin, where my first observation as a driver was that the place was teeming with bicycles. Holguin is much flatter than Santiago and presumably easier on cyclists. As a result we just inched along, feeling rather like we were driving in China!
We stopped in a hotel, where we dropped off Loisa, and were informed not surprisingly that the Cubans could not stay there. So we set out to find private houses to stay in. Almost immediately a guy on a bicycle volunteered to find us one, so we drove through the streets following him. One after another was already full (a sign of something I guess). Eventually we found nice accomodations run by a young guy in his 20's. We called him Calvin, because he wore a CK t-shirt. He looked kind of American or Canadian really, in his t-shirt, BlueJays cap, shorts and sneakers.
This was his job, renting out his house. He informed us he made much more money doing this than he ever could working a job. We invited him out to dinner with us.
Dinner was at a Paladar nearby, on a rooftop. We also managed to score some gasoline there for 50 cents a gallon, half the official rate. We bought 30 liters, literally, because he arrived with 10 liter bottles which he filled 3 times. Our guide, who had originally found us the house to live in, almost got us killed when he insisted on lighting a cigarette while this was going on. We decided from thereon that he was crazy and kept our distance. He had apparently made enough commission to also eat at the Paladar, so he was still around.
Food was pretty good although the selection was limited to ham or chicken. Not uncommon. Jamon seems to be the national meat of Cuba! Dinner was about $3 to $4 plus $1 for beers.
The house was comfortable enough, and even had hot water. One of those electrical-wired jobbies that they use in Cuba; I don't think they have even heard of hot water tanks there. (I have written about plumbing in Cuba before and will probably again, it's one of my favorite subjects about Cuba. They have all these beautiful fixtures from which a dribble comes out if you are lucky. Everybody has non-functioning bidets, harking back to a more golden age).
Cuba is a nation of noise, whether it is the street noise of central Havana with mothers yelling out for their children and people tuning up their mufflerless cars, or the noise of animals such as roosters, sheep, goats, and dogs in Santiago. In Holguin we were woken up to the sounds of schoolkids reciting their vowels over and over.....a,e,i,o,u. My Spanish is bad enough that I even joined in after giving up the idea of sleeping.. We discovered we were only a few blocks from the town center, where people had set up tables selling all kind of goods, from shoes to hardware. There was one very long line at the money-changing center. In front of many of the "stores" people were holding up little things that they were themselves selling, panties, pencils, whatever. And always shoes.
Jorge finally figured out why everybody in Cuba always wants shoes. It's because they have to walk so much.
We found a little place where we could buy breakfast, and then set out on the rest of our trip. About halfway to Guernavaca we ran into a procession of hundreds of Italian cyclists, who had a police escort and a bus following behind them with their supplies. Obviously the cyclists were not too popular with us, and we all exchanged anti-Italian stories, as we had to lag behind them for miles until we got to the beach.
There are 3 resorts on Guernavaca Beach, catering to tourists obviously, one of them being the Canadian-run Delta. We chose the so-called public beach, but the 2 Cuban women were immediately spotted by the cops who told them they could not go to the beach with us. This whole thing was infuriating, because Cubans were on the beach, they just couldn't go because they were with us. I took a quick swim on the beach, which by the way is a beautiful place; one of the few white sand beaches I have been to in Cuba. Then we set out to find something to eat and met the same problem. Cubans could not eat at the restaurants either. Loisa had a little bit of a shouting match over this and ended up eating by herself at one of the restaurants. She later told us the food was terrible and espensive anyway. We stopped at a store and purchased bread, cheese, and sardines from Spain. So much for our trip to the beach.
I stopped at the Delta to visit my friend Ana Maria who is the Canadian Holidays Representative. I knew her from when she had that job at the Balnearol del Sol outside Santiago. She was very surprised to see us and delighted. We shared our tales of woe with her and she had one for us herself. Even her Cuban husband was not allowed to stay at the hotel with her. He lived in the tenements across the street, so we went to visit him for awhile. He shared a small apartment with some toothless men whom he introduced as his "drinking club." It was a fun time and made our problems less bothersome.
This was the first time I was exposed to the art of rice-cleaning. All Cubans spend a great deal of time cleaning their rice. They lay it out flat on a tray and pick these little black things out of it. I don't know what they are: bugs, dirt, whatever, rice doesn't come all sanitized like it does here. We smoked some cigars drank beer, and then hit the road again.
On the way back we stopped in Bayamos; the brother was still in the hospital having had surgery; his wife wasn't going to leave him, but she would definitely take care of business. We went to a little Paladar for dinner. The food was great and cheap of course. We had chicken and ham and beer! What else is there?
Then we drove home, discovering that driving in the dark is even more of a challenge. At one point on the small 2-lane road I thought about passing, but saw a glimmer of lights ahead so thought better of it. When we reached the glimmer it turned out to be a truck parked on the highway with his parking lights on. So I was a hero.
We had to stop several times to make sure we were still on the road to Santiago. You don't know dark until you have driven in Cuba. By the time I got back to Santiago I was a wreck, my hands stuck to the wheel, but still I was happy that at least I was the one driving.
Considering that hundreds of thousands of Cubans left Cuba for Miami, that would have made 1958 Cuba the richest country that ever existed on the Planet Earth.
My uncle fought with Castro against Batista in the Sierra Maestra because Castro had promised to restore the democratic Constitution of 1940 that Batista had killed. After he discovered that Castro was a Communist fraud, he came to the U.S. and then fought against Castro at the Bay of Pigs. After his release as a Bay of Pigs POW, he returned to the U.S., joined the U.S. Army and then served two combat tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret. After he retired from the Army, he stayed active in anti-Castro and anti-Communist activities.
You do not get that kind of fire in your belly simply because you are "an ex-millionaire who lost a plantation".
Such fire in the belly is usually produced by ideas that go by names such as Liberty and Freedom.
For the same reason that such a small group as the Jews makes such a vocal and influential impact on the federal psyche.
Cubans are financially successful, they contribute financially to politicians that support their cause, they take their politics very seriously and they get out the vote.
If the Cubans in Florida had not had not given Bush 80% of their vote, Al Gore would be President of the United States right now.
Stick that in your impact pipe and smoke it.
Tell ya what, Jake, you start making that kind of a difference and politicians will start paying attention to you too. Until then, you'll just have to settle for boiler-plate form letters thanking you for your opinion whenever you write your Congressman.
That might not be fair but that is the way the American political system has worked since way before you were ever born.
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.