And it’s not an inconsiderable threat. To wit: Castro’s Stalinist regime jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s own, murdered more political prisoners its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six, and voraciously “devoured its own children,” complete with show trials. The cheeky Che Guevara often signed his correspondence “Stalin II.” (Tee-hee!)

Needless to add, his thoroughly novel approach to revealing what actually happened in Cuba has caused Agustin Blazquez major problems in the film industry. When back in 2001, he  asked the American Film institute to screen his documentary “Covering Cuba,”  the AFI’s President balked that such a documentary was “too controversial” for them to air.

The following week, the AFI cranked out the press releases and snapped on the spotlights to screen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11. Controversy? What Controversy?

“The AFI later denied giving “controversial” as the reason for declining my film,” Blazquez says. “But it’s’ the absolute truth. I remember it like it was yesterday. And I’ll submit to a lie detector test while repeating it.”

In fact when the AFI proudly screened Stephen Soderbegh’s “Che” at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 2008, the film’s “controversy” was cheekily flaunted by both the AFI and the stars as the film’s main cheeky charm. “Che Guevara is a hugely controversial figure,” snickered a dapper Lou Diamond Phillips in front of the theater. (Tee-hee!)

“Che” himself, Benicio del Toro, and co-star Joaquim de Almeida then snickered for the mics and cameras.  Most snickering by these cheeky cut-ups (none would last a day as a Castro subject rather than a pampered Castro guest) came when referring to the film’s probable reception in Miami. This city, as you might guess, is home to most of the wives, mothers, daughters, sons and brothers of the defenseless men (and boys) who Che Guevara gleefully murdered in cold-blood. (Tee-hee!) See the snickering for yourself.

For his documentary “Che” The other side of an Icon”, (a sort of antidote to Soderbergh’s hagiography) a few years later Blazquez approached PBS—which refused to either fund or later to even broadcast the work. PBS seemed so outraged by a film that relies on eye-witnesses to Che’s handiwork—on men who worked alongside him in Cuba, on daughters and wives of his victims, on the very man who helped capture Che in Bolivia—that they rejected his 104 page proposal via a brusque phone call, rather than the customary mail. “We would never take on a project like this” PBS’ John Prizer told Blazquez. Then when Blazquez privately funded the film, PBS refused to even show it.

On the other hand, PBS hails Estela Bravo’s documentary Miami-Havana, as among the “10 best documentaries” of its POV (Point of View series.)  Estela Bravo worked as an executive in Castro’s Oficina de Publicaciones Consejo de Estado (Publication Office of Cuba’s Council of State.) Cuban Dissidents refer to her a “Fidel’s Personal Documentarian,” and PBS refers to her as among their top ten filmmakers of 1992.

“As Fidel spoke I could feel a peculiar sensation in his presence!” gasped filmmaker and former Fair Play for Cuba Committee activist Saul Landau. “It’s as if I am meeting with a new force of nature! Here is a man so filled with energy he is almost a different species! Power radiates from him!” continued Landau. No trifling “tingle up his leg” for Saul Landau. Fidel Castro really Rocked-His-World! 

Saul Landau’s 1988 film “The Uncompromising Revolution,” which fully delivers on the director’s above-mentioned hyperventilations was run nationwide by PBS in 1990.

The screenplay for the Soderbergh/del Toro Che biopic was based on Che Guevara’s diaries which were published by Cuba’s propaganda ministry with the forward written by Fidel Castro himself. The film includes several Communist Cuban actors and the other Latin American actors spent months in Cuba being prepped for their roles by members of Cuba’s “Che Guevara Institute.”

Castro’s own propaganda ministry boasted of their role in the film’s production: “Actor Benicio del Toro presented the film (at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater) as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) for its assistance during the shooting of the film, which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba,”  read their press release. The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) is an arm of Stalinist Cuba’s propaganda ministry.

For their screenplays, Stephen Soderbergh and Saul Landau both relied on Castro-regime founders and apparatchiks. Estela Bravo is one herself.

 Seems that if Agustin Blazquez wants assistance from PBS or the American Film Institute, he’ll first need a glowing reference letter from Fidel Castro, who jailed and exiled the most filmmakers in the Western hemisphere.

Enter Mr. Wikileaks, Julian Assange.

Any enemy of America has a friend in Michael Moore and what better way to get a little ink and feel the warm glow of those MSNBC studio lights than to post part of Julian Assange’s bail and offer up his own website as an outlet for any and all of this brave truth-tellers leaks. But because there’s a God and because He is a good and noble God with a delicious sense of humor, the best laid plans of rat and liar have just completely blown up in Michael Moore’s face — twice in a single week.

For starters,  in his knee-jerk zeal to defend America’s enemies, Moore brought a public relations nightmare down on his and host Keith Olbermann’s head late last week, earning the label “rape apologist” even from many of his own fans after dismissing some pretty serious rape charges against Assange as nothing more than ”hooey.” 

Then — just when you thought it couldn’t get any better — Moore’s own hero dropped this bomb on the anti-American director regarding his 2007 documentary “Sicko.”

 All hail Wikileaks:

Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.

Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”

Whether or not this is true, we don’t know — at least for now. (Rumors about “Sicko” being banned in Cuba aren’t anything new. Lacking the sex appeal of Wikileaks, they just weren’t given much attention until now.)

But the result is that for the second day in a row, Micheal Moore is over at the HuffPo playing Wikileaks’ defense, claiming the leaked “Sicko” cable was nothing more than Cuba telling the world what it wanted to hear and that “Sicko” was in fact broadcast on Cuban television. But Moore’s mouth is moving, so who knows. When it comes to truthfulness, asking us to choose between Michael Moore and a murderous Communist government is asking too much.

While the irony here is is so obvious one need not point it out, I’m still going to. Moore bailed this scumbag out of jail, hailed him as some sort of brave truth teller and now Moore’s the one whose reputation is taking a harsher beating than anyone in the American government he so despises. It’s Michael Moore who’s having to explain himself, not the NSA or CIA. 

And this just one day after Moore was forced to again hit the HuffPo in a desperate attempt to talk his way out of that hearty helping of rape apologia he cooked up for his hero Assange in what was such a disastrous appearance on “Countdown” for both Moore and his host that Keith Olbermann’s been forced to suspend his Twitter account to avoid the only kind of outrage the former sportscaster can’t deal with — outrage from his own supporters.

Michael Moore: Rape Apologist.

Michael Moore: A socialist liar whose propaganda is so out there even murderous Communist dictators don’t believe it.

It must be true, Wikileaks told me so.

There just isn’t enough popcorn in the world.

Case in point: Fidel Castro’s recent analysis of the midterm elections. In an essay published by the state-run paper Granma (which I always thought carried stories about ribbon candy, shawls, and Triscuits), he announced that the Democrats’ debacle was the consequences of racism. He spouts: “The most reactionary sectors in the United States are sharpening their teeth,” and then warns that “all power (will fall) to the extreme right in the United States.”

Mind you, this is the exact same opinion held by everyone at MSNBC, the batwing-haired boob Graydon Carter, and anyone else who thought “Fair Game” was an accurate portrayal of two self-promoting tossbags. Anyway, for all you folks who still think tea partiers are racist (despite electing two black men to Congress), please reconsider this view, now that a third-rate commie dictator agrees with you.

I mean, this tool has been wrong on everything, while desperately clinging to power and atrocious facial hair. It should make you think that racial politics is old hat – when that diapered chucklehead is wearing it.

Look, I always change my views after hearing from my enemies. When Islamic extremists condemn homosexuality as an abomination, it causes me to embrace gay people even more. And when some nutbag emails me to say that radio signals in his fillings are telling him I look awesome in purple sweaters – I know it’s time to stop wearing purple sweaters.

Fact is, sometimes it better to listen to crazy people, just to keep yourself from becoming one of them.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist, homophobic purplephobe.

Tonight:

Tucker Carlson!

Nick DiPaolo!

Imogen Lloyd Webber!

plus, Adam Corolla!

Save the Castroite Terrorist-Murderer! has become Danny Glover’s latest cause, though he words it a bit differently.  The Cuban convict Gerardo Hernandez, who Glover visited in jail last week, “has been unjustly imprisoned,” asserts Glover. “His sentence is unusually harsh,” bemoans Glover while reciting his Castro-propaganda ministry handout

“His crime was simply acting in self-defense of his sovereign nation, and his family,” anguishes Glover before the cameras, shortly before the “Cut!” and the whoops and high-fives from the Castroite director and film-crew.

Leave Gerardo ALONE! wails Danny Glover, in a manner to shame Chris Crocker himself.  Glover also echoes his Cuban case-officers in accusing U.S. jailers of visiting horrific torture upon Hernandez.

Below please find a few items that somehow didn’t make the final cut of Danny Glover’s Castroite videos and press releases:

On September 14, 1998, the FBI uncovered a Castro spy ring in Miami and arrested ten of them. Four others managed to scoot back to Cuba. These became known as the “Wasp Network,” or “The Cuban Five” in Castroite parlance. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the convicted Castro-agent who Danny Glover champions was engaged in, among other acts:

• Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Fla.
• Compiling the names, home addresses and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.
• Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.
• Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.
• Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the U.S. armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.
• Locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosives.

Danny Glover’s poster-boy also infiltrated the Cuban-exile group Brothers to the Rescue, who flew unarmed planes to rescue Cuban rafters in the Florida straits, also known as “the cemetery without crosses.” The estimates of the number of Cubans dying horribly in the “cemetery without crosses,” run from 50-85,000. Brothers to The Rescue risked their lives almost daily, flying over the straits, alerting and guiding the Coast Guard to any balseros, and saving thousands of these desperate people from joining that terrible tally. (Prior to the Glorious Revolution, by the way, Cuba took in more immigrants per-capita than the U.S., including the Ellis Island years.)

By February of 1996 Brothers to The Rescue had flown 1,800 of these humanitarian missions and helped rescue 4,200 men, women and children. That month Danny Glover’s current cause célèbre’ passed to Castro the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights over the Cemetery Without Crosses.

With this info in hand, Stalinist Cuba’s Top Guns, saluted and sprang to action. They jumped into their MIGs, took off and valiantly blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas. Four members of the humanitarian flights were thus murdered in cold blood.

Three of these men were U.S. citizens, the other a legal U.S. resident.  Among the murdered was Armando Alejandre Jr., who came to the U.S. at age ten in 1960.  His first order of business upon reaching the age of 18 was fulfilling his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. His next was joining the United States Marine Corps volunteering for service in Vietnam. He returned with several decorations. As a member of Brothers to the Rescue Alejandre often dropped flowers over the sea, in memory of the thousands they’d been unable to rescue in time. A man with a weapon or with both hands free to fight has always palsied Castro with fright. The notion of Fidel Castro facing a U.S. Marine in combat mode is simply laughable, in a pathetic sort of way. So Castro waited for Armando Alejandre Jr and his Brothers to be carrying flowers–and made his move, murdering them in cold blood. MIGs against Cessnas, cannon and rockets against flowers.

This is a Castro specialty. In high school Fidel got into an argument over a debt (he was always a deadbeat) with a schoolmate named Ramon Mestre, who pounded him like a gong. Fidel cried uncle and slunk away whimpering that he’d go fetch the money he owed Ramon.

Instead he came back with a cocked pistol, hoping to surprise and murder the unarmed Mestre, who’d already gone home. There’s your gen-you-wine Fidel in all his macho splendor. He does have a long memory however. Six months after he grabbed power, Castro had his goons grab Senor Mestre, who then suffered 20 years in Castro’s dungeons and torture chambers. 

The premeditated atrocity against Alejandre and his brothers is what added the “manslaughter” and “conspiracy to commit murder” charges (on top of the ones listed above, 26 charges total) against Danny Glover’s most recent propaganda assignment from Fidel Castro.

Regarding prison-related tortures, here’s Ariel Sigler Amaya, a Cuban journalist just released from Castro’s dungeons. Please note what Mr Sigler looked like upon his arrest in 2003. This arrest, by the way,  was for attempting to write things about Fidel Castro in Cuba similar to what Danny Glover says about George Bush in the U.S.

I think it’s because entertainment journalists seem to think he’s hot.

I mean, after all, Stone “is a man’s man… a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam “

Wow, a Purple Heart “for bravery” – glad we have the MSM’s famous layers of fact-checkers and editors hard at work making sure reporters don’t make basic, embarrassing errors.  But I digress.

The overriding theme of the profile – and Stone’s own personal narrative – is simply how hunky the auteur is.  Whether he’s palling around with Castro and Chavez or simply talking about his Daddy issues – which, trust me, are nowhere near as terrifying as his Mommy issues – we learn that Ollie is all-man, all the time.

“There seems an almost hyper-masculinity to Stone’s oeuvre,” coos the correspondent. She continues:

On paper, he’s so much the alpha male that, as one interviewer put it: “One expects to find antler stubs under his thatch of suspiciously too-black hair.” As well as his war record, there are his various arrests for possession of drugs, as well as his well-rehearsed views on monogamy (“unnatural”).

Cadwalladr spends a lot of time on his monogamy issues – “He is a self-confessed womaniser” – but she allows her subject to provide the reader with the cheery news that he has now found, after several marriages derailed by his rampant philandering, the perfect woman.  Apparently, he imported her from Asia, where they apparently put up with his kind of crap:  “She’s cool.  She’s Korean.  Different mentality.  Mutual respect… she laughs and trills and she sings when she speaks.  I love the sound of her voice.”

No stereotypes there.  Maybe next he’ll remake Teahouse of the August Moon.

—–

And then there’s his art.  “[O]ne of the most appealing aspects of Stone is the sheer depth and breadth of his interests and ambition,” she announces.  Recently, he’s made forays into pro-Chavez propaganda, pro-Castro propaganda, and anti-capitalist propaganda, but now he’s ready for a startling new direction with some anti-American propaganda. 

We’ve all heard how his new series, Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America, promises to put Hitler into context.  Well, apparently his brave vision is in danger.  As Cadwalladr breathlessly writes:

I fear for Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America. Oliver Stone will do it Oliver Stone’s way, whatever the critics think. He exhibits an artist’s singlemindedness, an ideologue’s obduracy.  If his ambition occasionally exceeds his talent, it’s not because his talent is small, but that his ambition is so very, very large.  The Alexander comparison is really not as far-fetched as it might seem: he really is trying to remould the world according to his vision. Watch out, world.

Oh my.  I can only hope she was wearing latex gloves when she made that paragraph happen.  And her article explores literal masturbation as well:

So, I ask him straight out: “Did your mother teach you how to masturbate?”

“Well, I can’t live with denial – sure.”

“She physically showed you?”

“It was no big deal. It’s not English. It’s French. It was no big deal.”

Look, I’m the last to stand up for the Frogs, but I’m not sure even they need to be tarred with that particular brush.  But I do think we’ve found a plausible explanation for why Stone is such a freak.

There’s also this:  “You have to understand that I grew up a Republican conservative,” Stone notes.  It’s unclear if he meant a Larry Craig Republican.

The point of all this is not that Oliver Stone is a dictator-hugging, drug-addled degenerate with an ego orders of magnitude larger than his talents.  It’s that the celebrity press refuses to call him on it.  Hollywood journalism is all Hollywood and no journalism.  Instead of challenging, probing inquirers, we get an uncritical cheering section that whitewashes the contemptible, narcissistic has-beens they profile.

The important issue is not that Ollie Stone is a creep – he is.  The problem is that he is insulated from his artistic failures by the hallelujah chorus just as he is protected from his personal ones.

Stone used to have a modicum of talent – Platoon is dreadfully overrated, but there are those who like Wall Street and JFK, for all its idiocy, was compulsively watchable.  Even Natural Born Killers, as contemptible, confounding and constantly violent as it was, showed some imagination.  But years of people telling Stone just how awesome he is have taken their toll. 

In the off chance you can even remember an Oliver Stone film of the last 15 years, it is likely as a punchline.  Alexander managed to make one of history’s most intriguing figures into one of the goofiest – what drug did he gobble that made him cast then-29 year old Angelina Jolie as then-28 year old Colin Ferrel’s mom?  Yet the closest the crusading Cadwalladr can get to criticism is the tepid, painfully diplomatic observation that “Stone’s passion projects haven’t always ended well.”  Ya think?

The Hollywood journalism circle jerk is a disaster, morally and artistically.  It enables awful behavior and it retards artistic growth.  A soft cushion of acceptance and excuses might soothe the ego of a guy like Stone, but it also ensures that he will never develop, never mature and never improve as an artist.  It is masturbatory in the truest sense of the word – a transitory amusement that tries to compensate for the lack of something real and meaningful.

Stone doesn’t need gentle caress from a Carol Cadwalladr; he needs a butt-kicking by a Simon Cowell.

Correction – his campaign against American victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Moore and the anti-war Left were truly anti-war, they would be protesting the real warmongers – Islamic fundamentalists – or at least protesting both sides equally. But they reserve their condemnation for the world’s greatest terrorists. I’m talking about those jack-booted, nuke-happy imperialists America and Israel, of course.

What should we be doing instead of trying to secure lasting victory in those countries? Plucking an estimate out of his sizeable, um, back pocket, Moore says, “$15 billion is what we’ve been spending almost every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don’t have it.”

Yes, if only the American “killing machine” would stop ravaging innocents abroad in order to steal their resources and enslave their peace-loving peoples, we could turn instead to doing some good in the world. For once. Because God knows Americans need to change our greedy, warmongering, rapacious ways and learn us some generosity, compassion and service to others. Then the world will like us again.

Moore pauses in the interview for an aside about the Catholic Church, which he proclaims a “woman-hating institution.” Again, if Moore and the Left are so opposed to “woman-hating institutions,” why do they remain stone silent about sharia law? While Moore is busy chiding the Catholic Church for its shocking oppression of nuns, was there outrage among Hollywood celebrities, Code Pink, NOW and the rest of the Left over the recent sentence of stoning in Iran for a mother accused of adultery? A mother who had already endured 99 lashes in front of her children, years in jail, and who will eventually be buried up to her chest and pulverized with rocks by a raging mob of Catholic fundamentalists? Oops, I meant Muslim fundamentalists?

(Thanks to international condemnation from those who truly care, however, Iran has been forced to relent – not to reconsider the barbaric practice of stoning or the mother’s ultimate fate, but to either hang her instead or simply wait, as they always do, until the eyes of the world are finally averted again. Then they will stone her.)

But Moore really hits his stride in the interview with this stretch of dialogue:

What do you think is going to happen up at the Pearly Gates when they check your citizenship and go, “Oh, you were an American? Ha, well, here’s your list of crimes”?

“Oh, yeah. No, I was against the war! I was against the war!”

“Did you pay your taxes?”

“Well, yeah, you got to pay your taxes.”

“Well, then you helped fund this, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“OK, well, you know, turn around. You’re not coming in the Gates.”

So in the collectivist Heaven of Moore’s imagination (the only kind of Heaven the Left would be willing to inhabit), you won’t be judged based on an individual accounting of your sins and good deeds; instead, St. Peter will turn away all Americans for their war crimes, presumably sending them to Hell instead. I have a question for Michael Moore: if Americans are being kept out of Heaven, who is being let in? Your friend Castro? Chavez? Ahmadinejad? bin Laden?

In the eyes of Moore’s God, it’s not enough simply to be anti-war (again, meaning anti-American). Because you participate in a democracy, because you pay your taxes to a democratically elected government, you are directly responsible for the actions of that government and are equally as guilty as a fellow citizen who supports war.

Revealingly, this is precisely the same position taken by Osama bin Laden and his Islamist brethren: that no American citizen is innocent of crimes against the ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, because they participate in democracy, a man-made system of governance which is in direct conflict with sharia, the law laid down by Allah himself. This is the very rationale used to justify attacks against American civilians everywhere, most notably of course, the 9/11 attacks in New York City.

(You know, New York City – where Dhimmi-of-the-Year-frontrunner Mayor Bloomberg is facilitating the erection of a massive mosque that will serve as a symbol of Islam’s greatest triumph over America to date).

As bin Laden puts it: “Kill[ing] the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Why? Because “Muslim scholars have issued a fatwa against any American who pays taxes to his government. He is our target, because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation.” “We do not differentiate,” he has asserted elsewhere, “between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa.”

It should come as no surprise that the Left and bin Laden are “not such strange bedfellows,” as Andrew C. McCarthy puts it; check out David Horowitz’s The Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, for example, or more recently, McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left are Sabotaging America. And yet Michael Moore and his ilk take blustery umbrage at such a suggestion. “I love this country,” he sincerely insists. “My films are acts of patriotism.”

Yes, the Left’s version of patriotism. Well, the next time Michael Moore takes offense at accusations of anti-Americanism, remind him that he and Osama bin Laden are united in their condemnation of Americans as war criminals.

His “this” refers to the couple’s new song “Fidelity.” The song and title, they’re proud to announce, bubbled into the puppy-lovers’ consciousness during a recent pilgrimage to Stalinist Cuba, where the cheeky free-spirits and human-rights champions “saw pictures of Fidel Castro everywhere!”

Imagine that!

“I found my perfect lover, but he’s only half my age, “sings Hynde about JP Jones in another recent recording.  (Weren’t Liz Taylor and even Madonna less exhibitionist in these matters?)

At any rate, dutiful  to a maxim  more predictable than the sun setting in the west after rising in the east, champion of  Cuban Stalinism (and segregation) Chrissie Hynde was a  noisy  opponent of South African segregation. You’ll find the identical “inconsistencies” from Charles Rangel to Maxine Waters, from Danny Glover to Jack Nicholson, from Sidney Pollack to Steven Spielberg, from Francis Ford Coppola to Norman Jewison and from Ry Cooder to Bonnie Raitt.

And speaking of Bonnie Raitt, she’s not quite up to Chrissie Hynde’s exacting standards in naming improbable offspring after Stalinist (and segregationist) Fidel Castro. But the anti-apartheid and peace activist Raitt did compose a song in honor of the mass-murderer, segregationist and war-monger who came within a hair of nuking her nation.  “Say hello to my little friends!” Fidel Castro prepared to yell right before the mushroom clouds from those “Missiles of October” in October of 1962.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from his famous sidekick, “If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S., including New York City,” boasted the t-shirt icon of peaceniks and flower children in November 1962. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” Che Guevara thought he was speaking “off-the-record” to Sam Russell of Britain’s Daily Worker at the time. I note that Benicio Del Toro and Stephen Soderbergh left out this surefire dramatic quote from their recent drama on Che. 

Bonnie Raitt titled her paen to the dictator who craved to incinerate her, her family and her countrymen, “Cuba is Way Too Cool!” and performed it in Fidel’s very fiefdom in March 1999 during a star-studded musical extravaganza titled “Music Bridges over Troubled Waters.”

With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots (even then), rasped out her ditty at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffett came on after Bonnie. Joane Osborne, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, former Police-men Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn, delighted to croon, strum and strut as guests of a regime that jailed Cuban “roqueros” en-masse. 

These Cuban “roqueros’ ” crime?  Why growing long hair, wearing blue jeans and listening to “yankee-imperialist rock music.” The testimony of one such Castroite-victim might be considered particularly noteworthy:  “In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” the rock guitarist told Mexico’s Proceso magazine. “The regime demands submission. It persecutes all hippies, homosexuals, poets and free thinkers. It employs total repression against them.”

This “roquero” divulged the truth only because he’d managed to escape the nation-prison Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde, Jimmy Buffet, Andy Summers, etc. all herald. That escapees name is Canek Sanchez Guevara– Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s very grandson! The regime co-founded by his grandfather jailed and tortured Canek for the crime of trying to play Rock music!

A crowd of 5,000 Cubans huddled before Bonnie, Jimmy and friends that day in March ‘99, swaying and clapping. Most were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let’s step back and contemplate the scene: here are these troubadours for human rights. Here’s the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa (“I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City!” thunders Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, “Artists United Against Apartheid.”)

But she’ll GLADLY play in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she’ll happily compose a song in their honor–and all on the house!

Here’s Bonnie, Carole, Jimmy and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning love songs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology who’s minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie and Jimmy’s very audience had a hand in almost 100,000 of these murders. Here are these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists!

These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe.

When Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand in 1986–making it double Latin America’s average, making it triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48–at that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.

In Fidel Castro’s fiefdom Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ records, and where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got tens of thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and herded into prison camps at Soviet bayonet-point.

“Way Too Cool!” indeed, Ms Raitt.

Vicki: Mom, I just did a Tea Party speech in Washington, D.C.  I sang my song, “There’s a Communist Living in the White House!” 

Mom: Oh No!  I don’t want you to get shot! 

Vicki: You see what you just said?  That’s the problem.  “When the people fear the Government it’s Tyranny.  When the Government fears the people, it’s Liberty.”  Thomas Jefferson             

Mom: What?! 

Vicki: When Bush was President they called him horrible names, every day on TV; they even made a movie about him getting shot.  No one was afraid.  That was America; a rude, disrespectful, mean America, but a Free one.  Now, we are actually afraid of the Government, and… 

Mom: Let me get your Dad on the phone…JJJIIIMMM!! 

                                                              **************** 

My best friend called me today and said, “I just got a call from Homeland Security?!  They didn’t leave a message.  What’s that all about?” 

I said, “I don’t know.” 

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At the 9-12 Tea Party in Westwood, a nice couple sort of followed me to dinner and kind of followed me home.  I mean, I let them, but they kind of invited themselves, and they told me they were in the military!  I said, “Oh!  I love the military!  Tell me all about it!  You’re my heroes!”  They told me they were in “Intel” as in “Intelligence.”  I asked my husband what that meant and he said, “They are spies, Vicki.” 

Well, I have nothing to hide, so come on in.  But, it’s still strange. 

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My gym, LA Fitness quit playing Fox News on the overhead TV’s about a month ago.  I called the LA Fitness International Headquarters in Irvine, phone # 949-255-7200, and I was told that they have a cheaper cable plan that does not include Fox News.  Hmm.  So now we are all forced to watch the Liberal/Progressive News Channels?  We aren’t even allowed our one, little, partially-Conservative Channel?  The airports only play CNN – the Progressive Propaganda Channel.  Now, my gym.  Next, my home? 

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Need I mention FlagAtWhiteHouseDotGov?  Last year, we were asked to turn in our friends and relatives who did not agree with Obamacare - report them to flag@whitehouse.gov.  I reported myself twice.  I was shocked and angered at the sheer audacity of an American administration that would do such a Communistic gesture!  This slick attempt at the government control of our thoughts, quickly disappeared.  Maybe the powers-that-be realized they were pushing the Communist agenda a little too quickly.

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All around me I can feel my Freedom disappearing, and there are still people who are not paying attention.  The Cubans are paying attention. 

Tonight at my local Tea Party, I was sitting next to a Cuban couple.  I asked them about the Peter Pan Program. (pedropan.org)  They knew what I was talking about. I first heard of it April 15, 2010, from a Cuban stranger right after I had finished my Tea Party Express Tax Rally speech at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. 

—–

In my speech, I had mentioned Cuba:  ”I know a little about Communism.  I grew up in Miami.  (The crowd laughed.)  During my childhood, my town turned into Cuba.  (The crowd chuckled.)  Cubans were risking their lives coming to America for Freedom on rafts.  (The crowd got silent.)  When I was 15, I dated a boy named Angel Otero.  I asked him where his father was. 

     He said, “He’s in a jail in Cuba.”

     I said, “Why?”

     He said, “Because he resisted Communism.”

(The crowd was very silent.)  I continued, “Then, I asked my neighbor once, “What was it like to grow up in a Communist country?”

She said, “I’ll tell you what it’s like.  The children in kindergarten are told to bow their heads, close their eyes, pray to God and ask Him for candy.  When they open their eyes, there is no candy there.  Then, they are told to bow their heads, close their eyes and ask Castro for candy.  When they open their eyes, there is candy there.”

I then continued my Washington D.C. speech, “I can smell Communism sneaking into my country.  Obama is promising people free stuff so they’ll vote for him.  50% of Americans pay taxes.  The other 50% do not pay taxes.  The 50% who do not pay taxes voted for him.  And, they don’t care if he raises taxes, because they’re not paying any anyway!  (The crowd cheered in agreement.) 

After my speech, I was told that a man was waiting to speak with me by the roped off area.  I went to him.  He was a handsome, older gentleman with a thick Cuban accent.  He grasped my hand, and said, “Thank you so much for mentioning Cuba.”  Tears started to fall down his face.  He said, “When Castro took over, I was ripped away from my family and sent to an orphanage in America.”  He told me that his family had initially supported Castro because they were promised freedom and democracy, but soon after Castro got into power he took over health care and the media and then everything.  I grabbed my video camera and asked the man to repeat his story.  

—–

After the last Tea Party on Tax Day, my last night in Washington, D.C., I wearily shuffled down the street with my teenage daughter, my flags, bags, and cameras, and my friend Chris.  We were exhausted but high on the fumes of FREEDOM.  We were not alone.  There were millions, like us, who had not been duped by this arrogant ‘drunk- with- power’ administration. We caught a taxi. 

Our taxi driver spoke in a thick Indian (from India) accent, “Where have you been?”

I responded, “The Tea Party!”

He didn’t say anything pro or con, so my curiosity asked him, “What do you think of Obama?”

He began gushing his disdain for the policies of the current administration.  We spoke about the surge of government control, the irresponsible spending, the rising taxes which will cripple small business, destroy the middle class, and collapse our already weak economy, the lies, elitism, disappearing Freedom…and the hope of the November election.  We got to the hotel and began disembarking the taxi.  I fumbled for my money.

Standing in the middle of the dark street, a street lamp lighting his face, the Indian taxi driver said, “It reminds me of the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego…”

I interrupted him excitedly, “I was just telling my daughter that yesterday!  Shadrach, Meshach, and…”  It’s the story in Daniel 3 where Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, around 605 B.C., required every citizen to bow down and worship a golden image or they would be cast into the burning, fiery furnace.  Three men refused to bow to the image, saying, “We do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up.”  They were placed in the fiery furnace to die.  Strangely, they did not burn, and a fourth man appeared in the fire with them.  Nebuchadnezzar said, “Look!  I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire; and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.”

Lately these days, the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego often pops into my head.  As a child, I wondered if I would have the guts to do what they did.

As the Indian taxi driver moved my last bag to the sidewalk, he looked me in the eye and said, “I would die for Jesus.”  Our eyes teared up.  I said, “Me too.”  We hugged.  Stranger to stranger.  As he got in his car he shouted, “I will see you soon” and he pointed to the sky. 

These are the times we are living in. 

I’ve been thinking. Christian martyrs are different than Muslim suicide bombers.  For one thing, Christian martyrs are murdered, they don’t commit suicide.  And secondly, they don’t take innocent victims with them.

If we lose our freedom to worship, and Castro and his brother are finally dead, maybe us Americans will be the ones risking our lives on rafts to get to Cuba for freedom.  Wait a minute… why am I even thinking this stuff? 

These are the times we are living in.

These are the times we are living in.

This unforgivable gaffe blasted the bugles for a pile-on by critics. Their fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba, of Che, of Fidel, and of Cubans in general were badly jolted. Their annoyance and scorn spewed forth in review after review.

If only Garcia’s characters had spoken with accents like John Belushi’s as a Saturday Night Live Killer Bee! If only they’d dressed like The Three Amigos! If only they’d hammed it up like Cheech Marin! If only they’d mimicked the mannerisms and gait of Freddie Prinze in Chico and the Man! If only the women had piled a roadside fruit stand on their head like Carmen Miranda in Road to Rio! If only the cast had looked like the little guy who handles my luggage at the hotel in Cancun! Or the guys who do my lawn! Everybody knows that’s what Hispanics look like!

If only masses of Cubans had been shown toiling in salt mines like Spartacus, or picking crops like Tom Joad ,or getting lashed by a vicious landlord like Kunta Kinte, or hustling for a living like Ratso Rizzo!

“In a movie about the Cuban revolution, we almost never see any of the working poor for whom the revolution was supposedly fought,” sniffed Peter Reiner in The Christian Science Monitor. “The Lost City misses historical complexity.”

Actually, what misses is Mr. Reiner’s historical knowledge. Garcia and Infante knew full well that “the working poor” had no role in the stage of the Cuban Revolution shown in the movie. Cuba’s anti-Batista rebellion was led and staffed overwhelmingly by Cuba’s middle and especially upper classes. To wit: twice during the rebellion, Castro called for a “National Strike” against the Batista dictatorship – and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work. And twice Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their “liberators,” reporting to work en masse.

“Garcia’s tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few,” harrumphed Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice. “Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason—or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.”

What was “absolutely absent” was Mr. Atkinson’s knowledge about the Cuba Garcia depicts in his movie. His crack about that “moneyed 1 per cent” and especially his “peasant revolution” epitomize the clichéd idiocies broadcast by Castro’s propaganda ministry and dutifully parroted by America’s idiotic chattering classes even fifty years later.

“The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips,” snorted Stephen Holden in The New York Times. “Political dialogue in the film is strictly of the junior high school variety.”

It’s Holden’s education on the Cuban Revolution that’s of the “junior high school variety.” Actually it’s Harvard Graduate School variety. Many more imbecilities about Cuba are heard in Ivy League classrooms than in most rural junior high schools.

“It fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution,” complained Rex Reed in the New York Observer.

Generally, you’re better off attempting rational discourse with the Flat-Earth Society then with such as the Rex Reed above, but nonetheless I’ll try to dispel the fantasies of pre-Castro Cuba still cherished by America’s most prestigious academics and its most learned film critics. Even better, I’ll use a source generally esteemed by liberal highbrow types, the United Nations.

Here’s a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” it starts. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S.”

In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages in the world. In the 1950’s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco.

The Anti-Batista rebellion (not revolution) was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent (take Fidel Castro himself). Here’s the makeup of the “peasant revolution’s” first cabinet, drawn from the leaders in the Anti-Batista fight: 7 lawyers, 2 University professors, 3 University students, 1 doctor, 1 engineer, 1 architect, 1 former city mayor and a Colonel who defected from the Batista Army. A notoriously “bourgeois” bunch as Che himself might have put it.

By 1961 however, workers and campesinos (country folk)-made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. That (genuine) guerrilla war would REALLY make for an action-packed and gut-wrenching war movie. Hear that, Messieurs Soderbergh and del Toro?

If by some miracle such a movie ever got made, you can bet these learned critics would pan it too. Who ever heard of poor country-folk fighting against their benefactors Fidel and Che?

The New York Times‘ Stephen Holden also sneers at Garcia’s implication that “life sure was peachy before Fidel Castro came to town and ruined everything.”  In fact, Mr. Holden, before Castro “came to town,” Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S.,  And at a time when Cubans could get a U.S visa for the mere asking and emigrate with all their property, family, etc., more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S.  Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and Styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off hammerheads and tiger sharks.

The learned Mr. Holden is also annoyed by “buffoonish parodies of sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders.” Apparently, Communist apparatchiks should be properly depicted as somewhat misguided social workers, or as slightly overzealous Obama operatives.

It’s no “parody,” Mr. Holden, that the “apparatchiks” Garcia depicts in his movie jailed and murdered a higher percentage of their countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his apparatchiks jailed and murdered in their first three years. It’s the equivalent of complaining the guards and police in Schindler’s List or Julia come across as hackneyed caricatures. Instead let’s portray them with more “complexity,” as misguided idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working class from its subservience to snooty barons, who eradicated Germany’s unemployment and who ended Germany’s national humiliation at the hands of Europe’s premier imperialist powers.

How would that go over with you learned critics?

Andy Garcia showed it precisely right. In 1958 Cuba was undergoing a rebellion, not a revolution. Cubans expected political change, not a Stalinist cataclysm. But no surprise that such distinctions are much too “complex” for the typical film critic to grasp.

Filmmaker Jordan Allott’s documentary, “Oscar’s Cuba” paints a compelling portrait of Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet, whom Armando Valladares, former Reagan administration Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and himself a former political prisoner of the Castro dictatorship, cites as the most important living figure in the struggle for Cuban liberty.

—–

In 1998 Doctor Biscet dared to publish a report in which he interviewed many Cuban mothers who testified that their infants had been born alive and then killed by the regime. The totalitarian regime that controls Cuba views problematic pregnancies or unhealthy infants as a threat to their much-touted low infant mortality rates. Cuba has the highest abortion rates in our hemisphere, with 6 in 10 pregnancies ending in abortion. Thanks to Dr Biscet, we now know that many of these abortions were not the choice of the mothers involved, that said abortions were coerced, and indeed that many of these infants were born alive…then terminated. When Dr. Biscet made this issue a matter of public record, he gave the regime a black eye. The regime was not going to let this go unpunished. Dr Biscet continued to speak out for human rights and democracy on the island, and he paid a price for it: in 1998 and 1999 he was arrested more than 20 times.

On March 18, 2003, seven years ago today, Dr Biscet was arrested along with more than 70 other dissidents in what has come to be called “la Primavera Negra,” the Black Spring of 2003.  He was sentenced to a 25-year sentence, which he is currently serving in the notorious Combinado del Este prison outside of Havana. Dr. Biscet spends much of his time in solitary confinement, incarcerated in an underground cell. Yet Biscet endures, and continues to defy the regime.

In the film, Gorki Aguila, lead singer of Cuban punk group Porno Para Ricardo, testifies that Biscet was “like a light” when he met him during his own imprisonment. When we see Biscet interviewed we, too, get a sense of this light, and of the God-given Grace that animates and sustains the deeply religious and avowedly non-violent Dr Biscet- Charisma in the true sense of the word: a divine gift.

We see Elsa Morejon, Oscar’s wife, preparing “la jaba,” the supply of food, water, toilet paper and other necessities that Elsa brings to Oscar when she is allowed to visit, only once every two months. Given that the food provided Oscar by the regime is largely inedible and perhaps even poisoned or drugged, la jaba is all that physically sustains Dr. Biscet.

“Oscar’s Cuba” shows us harrowing evidence of the repressive tactics of the Castros. We have known for years that the regime employs hand-picked mobs of citizens to terrify dissidents; in “Oscar’s Cuba” we see such a mob firsthand, gathered in front of Dr Biscet’s house. An old man yells, bizarrely, “down (abajo) with human rights!” “¡Abajo!” answers another viejo in a Che Guevara t-shirt. A younger man starts chanting, “¡Esta calle es de Fidel! ¡Esta calle es de Fidel!” (“This street belongs to Fidel!”) A couple of middle-aged women join in hysterically and soon the whole crowd is shouting the inane mantra. In a normal society, you would call the police to break up such an unhinged mob in front of your house. In Cuba, the police were the ones who organized and sent this mob in the first place. If the mob gets violent and physically beats you, there is nobody to call for help. In fact, the actions of the mob are considered those of model citizens by the regime.  This is a society that is upside down, crazy.

In Cuba, to shout something as inarguable and universal as “¡Que vivan los derechos humanos!” “Long live human rights!” becomes a deeply courageous and downright subversive act. Indeed, we do hear Dr. Biscet bravely cry out “¡Que vivan los derechos humanos!” just before he is forced into a police car and whisked away. We come away from Mr Allott’s film with an almost palpable sense not only of the courage and determination of Biscet, but of the fear the regime has of him. Biscet knows that he faces a thoroughly ruthless adversary, and yet remains undaunted. What’s most striking about the man is his hope. Not a naive hope, but rather a serene faith that bad ideas fail, and good ideas win.

“Oscar’s Cuba” suggests that the hour of that victory of good ideas over bad may be at hand: Ambassador Valladares affirms that every day more and more Cubans lose their fear of the dictatorship, and begin speaking up.

Beautifully scored by Emmy and Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, “Oscar’s Cuba” will screen on Sunday, March 21, 2010, from 5:00pm – 7:30pm in Hollywood, California. Cuban-born actress Maria Conchita Alonso will host the event.

For more information on Sunday’s screening of “Oscar’s Cuba” visit their website and Facebook page.