The Longest Romance (19 page)

As Hondurans saw it, the action labeled as a “coup” by Obama's administration was a democratic uprising to uphold the constitution and thwart the creation of a client narco-state for the Chavez-Castro axis. In late June 2009, after Manuel “Mel” Zelaya's relentless trashing of Honduras's democratic constitution, that nation's Supreme Court voted unanimously to oust the serial outlaw from the presidency. The Honduran legislature voted 125-5 to do the same. The five contrarian legislators belonged to Honduras's Communist party, long known as dutiful water-carriers for Papa Fidel.

The Obama State Department promptly fell in line with the five card-carrying Communists. “We don't recognize Roberto Micheletti as the president of Honduras,” declared State Department spokesman Ian Kelly in June 2009. “We recognize Manuel Zelaya.”

The Honduran minister, Enrique Ortez, knew full well what had been at stake. On the day before his legal ouster, Zelaya had led a Chavez-funded mob to break into an army barracks and steal ballots for an illegal referendum. Ortez also knew the meticulously legal procedure his countrymen had followed and was quite understandably,
if also quite undiplomatically, blowing his cool at the U.S.

The Honduran constitution mandated that the nation's president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, replace Zelaya. One of President Micheletti's first official acts was to fire minister Ortez for his insulting comments regarding the U.S. president. Not that Honduras'
de jure
president didn't know full well how his nation's legal machinery had functioned in the nick of time to save both his nation's and the U.S.'s interests by ousting Zelaya.
⁴

The Obama State Department showed its gratitude by cutting millions in aid for Honduras, cutting visa services for her citizens and by yanking President Micheletti's own U.S. visa. Today it's easier for a Cuban DGI agent to travel to Washington than for a Honduran textile-salesman to visit New Orleans for a convention. Indeed, Roberto Micheletti was denied a U.S. visa to testify at a U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing in June 2011.

By contrast, in May 2012 Raul Castro's daughter Mariela was issued not only a U.S. visa but a security detail from the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security (at an estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers of $50,000) for a U.S. visit. This apparatchik of the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to herd thousands of men and boys into forced labor camps under Soviet bayonet for the crime of fluttering their eyelashes, flapping their hands and talking with a lisp was granted a U.S. visa and security entourage in order to lecture Americans on “Gay Rights.” The venue for Stalinist Cuba's first daughter to lecture Americans on freedom and civil rights was a panel on “sexual diversity” at a conference organized by the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco, May 23-27, 2012.

From San Francisco this official for the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to fuel bonfires with Orwell's
Animal Farm,
and to jail librarians for stocking it, traveled to the New York Public Library where she lectured Americans on artistic freedom and the evils of censorship.

When Cuban-American legislators including Senator Marco Rubio, House Committee on Foreign affairs chairman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen and Congressmen David Rivera and Mario Diaz-Balart protested this State Department feting of Raul Castro's daughter,
The Washington
Post quickly rushed to the Stalinist regime's defense. In an editorial the paper sniffed at “the absurd outcry from Cuban-American politicians, including members of Congress, bent out of shape that a visa was granted to Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban president Raul Castro and an advocate of gay and transgender rights. What are they so frightened of?”
⁵

The least laudatory term that can be found in the pages of
The Washington Post
for Al Sharpton, for instance, is “flamboyant.” There is no record in that paper's pages of any “absurdity” or “getting bent out of shape” by this fine figure of an agitator.

Actually few Cuba-watchers were surprised by the editorial.
The Washington Post
boasts a long history of affection for the Castro regime. Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media was an eyewitness to this warm relationship. Here we'll turn over the floor to him:

“When Laurence Stern, the national news editor of
The Washington Post,
passed away in 1979, Reed [Irvine, founder of Accuracy in Media] asked me to attend and observe his memorial service. I was astounded when a man identified as Teofilo Acosta was introduced and told the service: ‘I'm from Cuba. I am Marxist-Leninist. I am human. Larry Stern was my friend, one of my best friends. I loved him.' Acosta was publicly known as a first secretary in the Cuban Interests Section that has been set up inside the Czech Embassy in Washington. In reality, he was a Cuban intelligence agent.”

Kincaid then saw executive editor Ben Bradlee warmly greet the Cuban DGI officer and repeatedly call him by his first name. The
London Daily Telegraph
of September 3, 1979 quoted Teofilo Acosta boasting of “having a number of U.S. senators and congressmen in my pocket”
⁶

To say nothing of U.S. editors and reporters.

If only President Micheletti had sent Manuel Zelaya to the firing squad, along with every Honduran who looked at him cross-eyed,
then perhaps the U.S. State Department and media would treat him with the same deference they extend to Stalinist Cuba's First Daughter.

During a week-long visit to Honduras immediately following Zelaya's ouster, this writer found himself amidst hundreds of thousands of Hondurans demonstrating in the streets. Just the type of thing to get the media cameras rolling and the mikes shoved in front of demonstrators' faces, wouldn't you think?

Hah! These demonstrations by hundreds of thousands in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa supported Zelaya's ouster, you see. So there was no sign of the international mainstream media. A very common placard carried by the Honduran demonstrators read,
“CNN, Why Don't You Show This!”
Others read,
“CNN—The Chavez News Network.”
Surely American Tea Partiers recognize the sentiment.

In fact, up until this demonstration CNN had been running regular reports from Honduras by their local reporter, Krupskaia Alis. The blackout on the pro-Micheletti demonstrations was explained to me by Honduran officials. Ms. Alis, you see, had been an official of the Daniel Ortega's Sandinista regime and was still married to a Sandinista official. But you will search CNN in utter vain for a clue to Ms. Alis's political affiliations.

Now when it came to Mariela Castro's U.S. visit in 2012 CNN was on full alert; Christiane Amanpour smiled her way through a lengthy interview with Raul Castro's daughter. While the diehard Communist denounced U.S. lawmakers of Cuban heritage as “Mafiosi” and Cuban dissidents as “liars, crooks and mercenaries,” Amanpour flashed cutesy family pics of the Castro family in the background.

As it happened, concurrent with the Mariela-CNN lovefest a black Cuban dissident named Jorge Luis Garcia Perez was testifying about Castroite murder, torture and repression to a U.S. Senate subcommittee via teleconference. For his peaceful dissidence the regime represented by Mariela Castro had condemned Garcia Perez to the same term in Castro's dungeons as Nelson Mandela had gotten in South Africa's for planting bombs. You might think Garcia Perez's testimony was newsworthy?

Hah! Not a single U.S. network carried the Cuban dissident's testimony. And right after his testimony he was arrested by Mariela Castro's dad's KGB-trained police, beaten comatose and again tossed in a jail cell.
⁷
When Ann Coulter was asked on ABC's “The View” if she had ever seen two women having sex, she replied: “Not since Katie Couric interviewed Hillary Clinton.” Christiane Amanpour's interview of Mariela Castro came close to such a spectacle—while a black victim of Mariela's lily-white family regime was being beaten and jailed for the crime of speaking truth to power.

“We were convinced that Zelaya was scheming to turn your military base in Palmerola over to Chavez,” Honduran interim President Roberto Micheletti told this writer in June 2009. “We started getting suspicious when suddenly in mid-2008, and seemingly out of the blue, Zelaya declared that Honduras desperately needed another international airport.

“‘What?' we legislators asked ourselves, while looking at each other wide-eyed. Honduras' airports are perfectly adequate for our needs, and everyone knew that.

“‘That U.S. base in Palmerola would make a great location for that airport,' Zelaya continued. ‘And Venezuela has promised to finance the project.'

“‘Whoops!' we all said. Then we started inquiring more closely, and got to the bottom of this scheme. Zelaya, we finally concluded, planned to boot out the U.S. military and convert this base, essentially, into a way-station for Chavez-FARC drug shipments to the U.S.”

During the last 18 months of Zelaya's term, 14 Venezuelan-registered planes crashed in Honduras. All carried cocaine or traces of the substance. During Micheletti's interim presidency not one such plane was discovered. Note: those were only planes that crashed. Imagine the overall traffic Zelaya was facilitating through Honduras for his sugar-daddy Hugo Chavez and his drug-running partners, the FARC.

Given a free hand to investigate by Micheletti, Honduran authorities quickly discovered nine clandestine airstrips in remote portions of the nation. “I've always been a friend and great admirer of the United States,” Micheletti stressed to this writer. “No legally elected president of Honduras will give the U.S. base in Honduras to Hugo Chavez, who is so closely allied with the soon-to-be nuclear-armed Iranian regime.”

As mandated by the Honduran constitution, Roberto Micheletti resigned his interim presidency in January 2010—ceding his office to a political rival who had won it in a regularly-scheduled election.

CHAPTER13

“Learn some history! The movie is
Che.
Go! Learn!”
(Stephen Colbert while hosting Che leading man and producer Benicio Del Toro, July 1, 2009)

 

“A great piece of work. This movie is based on history. It went to the source. If you own the poster and t shirt you owe it to yourself to go learn about the man.”
(MSNBC's Willie Geist while hosting Benicio Del Toro, January 6, 2009)

 

“I still have my Che Guevara poster. Che Guevara was a freedom fighter.”
(Bob Beckel, Fox News, September 5, 2011)

W
hile accepting the “best actor” award at the Cannes Film Festival for his role as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's movie
Che,
Benicio Del Toro gushed: “I'd like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!” As the crowd erupted in a thunderous ovation, he continued: “I wouldn't be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you'll have to pay your respects to the man!” In a flurry of subsequent interviews in Europe, Del Toro equated Che Guevara with Jesus
Christ and again told a Spanish interviewer, “Ideologically I feel very close to Che.”
¹

“Dammit, this guy is cool” is the title of an interview with Del Toro in The Guardian. As a teen, he said, “I hear of this guy, and he's got a cool name. Che Guevara!” Years later, doing film-work in Mexico, “I went to a library and I was looking at books, and I came across a picture .... I thought, ‘Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!'”
²

Right here Benicio Del Toro, who fulfilled an obvious fantasy by starring as Che Guevara in the four-and-a-half-hour movie he also co-produced, probably revealed the inspiration (and daunting intellectual exertion) of most Che fans worldwide, including Beckel and Colbert. It wasn't enough that Stephen Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro produced what even
The New York Times
recognized as an “epic hagiography” of the Stalinist who co-founded a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror; murdered more Cubans than Hitler murdered Germans during the Night of Long Knives; craved to incite a worldwide nuclear war; and in the process converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe into a pesthole that repels Haitians.