Next we’ll hear that James O’Keefe attended a dinner party honoring Apartheid South Africa’s former president, P. W. Botha. If so, and the accusation verified, O’Keefe’s “insensitivity” to human (and civil) rights would barely register against that of Max Blumenthal’s boss at The Daily Beast, Tina Brown.
I’ll report. Y’all decide:
“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his suffering. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.
I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, the prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver, whose incarceration and torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinist regime stretched to 29 years, surpassing Nelson Mandela’s record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.
“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries. When during a 1959 press conference a Cuban black asked Guevara, “what his Revolution would do for blacks?” Che sneered: “we’ll do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!”
Che was much too modest. “Nothing” is not at all an accurate description of the Castro/Che treatment of Cuba’s blacks. First, they forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Cuban blacks served as President of the Senate, Miister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, a grandson of slaves who was born in a palm-roofed shack). Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie.
Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90% black while only 9% of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Elsewhere liberals denounce such a thing as “racist apartheid.”
But have you ever heard of Eusebio Peñalver? He became a U.S. citizen and lived in Miami for almost 20 years and would have been a cinch for the media to track down. Ever see a CNN interview with him? Ever see him on 60 Minutes? Ever read about him in the New York Times? The Washington Post? The Boston Globe? Ever hear the NAACP or the Congressional Black Caucus mention him?
This being Black History Month should we expect a special on him on NPR and the History Channel? Why do I bother asking? He was a victim of the Left’s premier pin-up boys…nuff said.
Sr Peñalver served several months of this almost thirty-year sentence in a “punishment cell” barely big enough to stand in, where he languished naked and in complete darkness.
“Castro’s apologists,” he said in an interview with this writer, “those who excuse or downplay his crimes — these people be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious whatever–they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant’s crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere.”
“The Toast of Manhattan!” crowed Time magazine about Fidel Castro’s reception by Manhattan’s Beautiful People on his visit to address the U.N. General assembly in 1996, upon the U.N.’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
“The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” read a Newsweek story that week, referring to the social swirl that engulfed Castro. After Fidel’s whooping, hollering, foot-stomping ovation in the General Assembly, he was fêted by New York’s best and brightest, hobnobbing with dozens of Manhattan’s glitterati, pundits and power brokers.
First, there was dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Bernard Shaw, Barbara Walters and Tina Brown, all jostled for a brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro’s every comment.
All clamored for autographs and photo ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass killer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.
“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the mass-murderer to the smiling throng that surrounded him.
“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee.
More perspective: according to Anti-Apartheid activists a grand total of 3,000 political prisoners passed through South Africa’s Robben Island prison in roughly 30 years under the Apartheid regime. Usually about a thousand were held. These were out of a South African population of 40 million.
According to the Human Rights group, Freedom House, a grand total of 500,000 political prisoners have passed through Castro’s various prisons and forced labor camps. At one time in 1961, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses. This is out of a Cuban population in 1960 of 6.4 million.
A calculator will easily reveal the grotesque disparity between “The Toast of Manhattan’s!” repressions compared to Apartheid repression. The regime headed by the Stalinist dictator whom Tina Brown toasted was roughly twenty times as repressive as the one universally condemned by Manhattan’s enlightened opinion.
More recently “The Toast of Manhattan!”sentenced other blacks (Dr. Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20-year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King in a public square. I will quote Antunez’ sister from a samizdat smuggled out of Cuba last year.
“The Cuban government tries to fool the world with siren songs depicting racial equality in our country. But it is all a farce, as I and my family can attest, having suffered from the systematic racism directed at us by Castro’s regime. My brother suffers the scourge of racial hatred every day. The beatings are always accompanied by racial epithets. They set dogs on him. They deny him medical attention. They kept him from attending his mother’s funeral. The only thing I have to thank Castro for,” she quoted her brother, “is for restoring the yoke of slavery that my ancestors lived under.”
Toast that, Tina.
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