Following in the footsteps of (among many other flower-children) Stephen Stills, Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde, Jimmy Buffet, and Carole King (who in 2002 serenaded Fidel Castro with a personal “You’ve Got a Friend”) guitar legend Jimmy Page made the pilgrimage to Fidel Castro’s fiefdom this week.

To Led Zeppelin’s former guitarist the visit probably seemed, not only fitting, but long overdue. Cuba was, after all, the first nation ruled by bearded long-hairs. Jean Paul Sartre, after all, hailed Cuba’s Stalinist rulers as “les Enfants au Pouvoir” (the children in power). Fidel Castro, after all, spoke at Harvard in 1959 on the same bill as pioneer beatnik Allen Ginsberg.

Remove the wispy beard and beret from the (late, thanks to Fidel Castro) revolutionary icon on those posters and t-shirts and you’ve got Jim Morrison of The Doors. Remove the cowboy hat from the (late, thanks to Fidel Castro) Revolutionary icon Camilo Cienfuegos and you’ve got Grateful Dead’s Gerry Garcia. Circa 1959, Raul Castro with his blond shoulder-length locks was a ringer for Joe Walsh circa Hotel California. These Cuban Stalinists were on the cutting edge of fashion. They pre-empted the Haight Ashbury look by a decade.

Castro’s captive (literally!) media, reports that Jimmy Page’s visit: “included tours of historic sites, and purchases of souvenirs such as the famous photograph of Che Guevara.”

In an interview with the BBC last year, Oscar and Cannes-winner Benicio del Toro explained the painstaking intellectual exertion that inspired his Che-mania: “I hear of this guy, and he’s got a cool name, Che Guevara! Groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics! So I came across a picture of Che, smiling, in fatigues, I thought, ‘Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!’”

In all likelihood, similar intellectual toil inspired Jimmy Page’s recent souvenir shopping spree in Havana.

For his role as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s movie Che, Benicio del Toro was recently honored by the peace-loving crowd in Hollywood and Cannes. For headlining their Concert for Peace. Jimmy Page was recently honored with the “Global Peace Award from the United Nations’ Pathway to Peace organization.

“We reject any peaceful approach! “declared the souvenir icon of the Concert for Peace’s honoree “Violence is inevitable! To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

“Hatred is the central element of our struggle!” raved this icon of flower-children. “Hatred that is intransigent….Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine… My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm!”

In fact, Jimmy Page should know that many Cuban youths “tuned-in and turned-on” to (smuggled) Led Zeppelin music in the 60’s and 70’s. But rather than meet with his Cuban fans, Jimmy was hosted by apparatchiks of the Stalinist regime that jailed and brutalized them en masse.

In a famous speech in 1961 Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates” commanded the KGB –mentored Guevara. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”

Cuban “roquero” of the time Charlie Bravo recalls the process: “When Castro’s goons caught me with a Led Zeppelin record, they led me to a Stairway alright—but at bayonet-point and this stairway hardly led to Heaven, instead it led down into a dark jail cell.”

On the orders of Jimmy Page’s smiling hosts, Charlie was joined by tens of thousands of Cuban youths. A few years earlier the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German STASI “consultants” who flooded Cuba in the early 60’s, found an extremely eager acolyte in Che Guevara. By the mid 60’s the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle—long hair, blue jeans, etc.–or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today the world’s largest image of Jimmy Page’s souvenir icon adorns Cuba’s headquarters for Cuba’s KGB-trained secret police, a gang of Communist sadists who jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin’s own KGB and GRU—and many of their victims were guilty of nothing worse than listening to music by Jimmy Page.

Without Fidel
by Ann Louise Bardach

Chapter 12 – Raul’s Reign: The Grave Yard Shift

In October 2008, Raul Castro granted his first interview as president of Cuba – and one of the very few he has ever given. The lucky recipient was not one of the dozen accredited reporters based in Havana. Nor was it a journalist who has covered the Miami/Havana beat, nor one of the hundreds of requests from representatives from media organizations and academia who have filed requests with the Foreign Ministry. Rather, Raul Castro’s first interlocutor would be the actor/director, Sean Penn, who periodically weighs in on politics.

Penn had just winged in on a Venezuelan military jet from Isla Margarita, the picturesque island near Caracas, having had spent two days with a convivial Hugo Chavez. With him were the writer Christopher Hitchens and historian Douglas Brinkley, whom Penn had invited to accompany him, presumably to lend gravitas to his efforts. The three had hoped to reprise their luck with Raul Castro and, according to Penn, seemed to have been promised as much.

But the gods – in the form of Fidel, who orchestrated the event, chose only the movie star. Penn had met the Comandante in 2005 and the two quickly took a shine to each other. Moreover, Penn became fast friends with Chavez, of whom he was wont to say, “Chávez may not be a good man, but he may well be a great one.” Penn was now eager for an interview with [Raúl] the new president,” according to his account of the trip published in the left-leaning journal, The Nation.

Typically, journalists, myself included, who have secured interviews with Fidel, wait months, years or more. That was not the case for Sean Penn, however, who said he made a phone call, and the very next day, had his request granted. The Castros had not miscalculated: Penn proved to be as accommodating and charitable as Oliver Stone in his sunny documentaries of Fidel.

Raul Castro was a gracious and amiable host, but he made clear, through his translator, that the interview was not his idea. “’Fidel called me moments ago,” he told Penn. “He wants me to call him after we have spoken. He wants to know everything we speak about. I never liked the idea of giving interviews. One says many things, but when they are published, they become shortened, condensed. The ideas lose their meaning.’”

As it turned out, Raúl thoroughly enjoyed himself and passed seven hours chatting with his guest. He joked that he could now rival his brother in garrulousness. “You are probably thinking, ‘Oh, the brother talks as much as Fidel!’ It’s not usually so.”

Raul also passed on one anecdote that his brother, no doubt, would have preferred remain unsaid. “’You know, Fidel–once had a delegation here, in this room, from China. Several diplomats and a young translator. I think it was the translator’s first time with a head of state. They’d all had a very long flight and were jet-lagged. Fidel, of course, knew this, but still he talked for hours. Soon, one [sitting] near the end of the table, just there, his eyes begin to get heavy. Then another, then another. But Fidel, continued to talk. Soon all of them, including the highest-ranking of them, to whom Fidel had been directly addressing his words, fell sound asleep in their chairs. So Fidel, turns his eyes to the only one awake, the young translator, and kept him in conversation till dawn.”…..

Hollywood visits Fidel : from Part Three – Without Fidel

The Castro brothers had a motive for periodically broadcasting the trophies of their spycraft. They had a message for both citizens and visitors: Be careful what you say; we may have compromising data on you. One Cuban security official, Delfin Fernández, who defected in 1999, claims that the surveillance of foreign diplomats, businessmen, and even visiting movie stars with sophisticated listening devices and hidden video cameras, is routine. Fernández said he had personally spied on Jack Nicholson, Leonardo di Caprio, and supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss during their visits to Havana….

If you didn’t know any better, you would almost think that Sean Penn wants to make it extremely easy for conservatives to criticize Hollywood for being overly liberal. He’s flown to Cuba to interview his hero Fidel Castro:

Oscar-winning actor and political activist Sean Penn flew to Cuba hoping to interview its revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, entertainment news website TMZ reported Sunday.

“Sean (Penn) is going to the land of Fidel as a journalist, writing a story for Vanity Fair (magazine) about how the (Barack) Obama administration has affected Cuba,” TMZ reported…

“Barclays sources say Sean and Diana are going to meet (Fidel) Castro — presumably because that’s what Diana told them,” the website reported. Penn’s representative also told TMZ a meeting was possible.

Vanity Fair sent Penn shortly after Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that President Obama asked Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, to talk to Cuba. “Tell Raul that if he does not take steps, neither can I,” Obama told the PM. “We are making efforts, but if they do not make efforts, it will be very difficult for us to continue.”

Is Penn truly acting on VF’s behalf, or will he go to Cuba because the Obama administration wants him to convince Fidel and Raul Castro to reach out to the U.S.?

It never ceases to amaze me that Hollywood-stars sympathize so much with ruthless dictators like Castro. You would think they understand that associating with mass murderers is harmful to their reputations. But no, they have been inside Hollywood’s leftist bubble for so long, they do not even realize the impact these kinds of adventures have on their image, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Next time Penn feels the need to interview a head of state, perhaps he could travel to Poland to talk to President Vaclav Klaus. Unlike Castro, Klaus is pro-America, pro-free markets, pro-freedom and anti-global warming; such an interview would at least be surprising.