How “The Smart and Clever” Jon Stewart was Made a Donkey by Fidel Castro’s Agents

Jon Stewart’s snark-fest against Fox News this week over Benghazi finally prompted a rebuttal (of sorts) from Greta Van Susteren: “Note to Jon Stewart (who I think is smart and clever …but like the rest of us, not always right…but a comedian has, of course, way more latitude – we in the media should get it right.)”

This “latitude,” however, should not allow Jon Stewart to disseminate propaganda from Castro’s KGB-founded and mentored intelligence services uncontested. “I LOVE this book!” Jon Stewart gushed upon greeting author TJ English who a few years ago was publicizing his book titled "How the Mob Owned Cuba, and Lost it to the Revolution," on The Daily Show.

“This is the TRUE story of Cuba!” continued the Peabody award winner (for meritorious public service) barely containing himself. “A fascinating book!” hailed Stewart.

Unknown to “The Smartest guy in the Comedy Central Room” Stewart, the primary source for English’s book-- cited no fewer than 72 times in quotes and footnotes-- is an intelligence apparatchik of Castro’s totalitarian regime named Enrique Cirules.

In fact, Senor Cirules is an official of Cuba’s “La Casa de las Americas” agency that publishes and promotes the Castro regime’s propaganda in books and articles under the guise of “art.” In 1983 a high ranking Cuban Intelligence officer named Jesus Perez Mendez defected to the U.S. and spilled his guts to the FBI. Among his spillings we encounter the following: "The Cuban DGI (Directorio General de Inteligencia, Castro's KGB-trained Secret service) controls Casa de las Americas.”

“We were hoping to have Senor Perez-Mendes on tonight to contribute his views on the veracity of your book’s claims, Mr English,” would have been a properly snarky Stewart introduction to English. “But were thwarted upon discovering that he lives under FBI protection for fear of being assassinated by the KGB-trained folks who hosted you in Cuba and collaborated with you in writing the book!”

“Mr English, in your book’s acknowledgements you describe this Castroite apparatchik Enrique Cirules as a “Cuban author," the properly snarky and Peabody-winning Stewart might have continued. “Wouldn’t this be like describing Julius Streicher as “a German author," and Ilya Ehrenburg as "a Russian author?"

Instead, minutes into the interview and in response to another Godfather-ite cliché by the smug TJ English, Stewart-- this winner of the Television Critics Association award for “Outstanding Achievement in News and Information,"-- gushed: "WOW! So the Mob actually built Cuba's economy! So it was actually worse than shown in Godfather II!"

I know, I know, the “the Mob ran pre-Castro Cuba” meme is so entrenched into the worldwide media/Hollywood/academia Cuba narrative that perhaps we shouldn’t single out Jon Stewart as a Castro dupe when so many other Castro dupes parrot the same propaganda every time Cuba hits the news cycle. Take a Boston Globe editorial just this week:

“Cubans… are also aware that the United States doesn’t have clean hands in Cuba. Under the thuggish reign of US-backed Fulgencio Batista, American sugar plantations exploited laborers and stoked racial anger through segregation; the US mafia, having been dislodged from American cities by the crusading Kefauver committee, took over much of Havana, operating gambling rackets, drug rings, and prostitution.”

Please be informed, Jon Stewart and Boston Globe: better sources on pre-Castro Cuba than Godfather II actually exist.

In 1955 Cuba contained a grand total of three gambling casinos, the biggest was at the Tropicana and featured ten gambling tables and thirty slot machines, the Hotel Nacional, featured seven roulette wheels and twenty-one slot machines. “By contrast, in 1955 the single Riviera Casino in Las Vegas featured twenty tables and one hundred and sixteen slot machines. This means that in 1955: one Las Vegas Casino had more gambling action than all of Cuba.

Also interesting: according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Commission the typical tourist spends five days in their city and spends an average of $580 ($75 in 1957 dollars) on gambling, the main motive for 90 per cent of visitors. Well, throughout the 1950's Cuba averaged 180,000 tourists a year.Let's assume ALL those tourists —men, women, adolescents, children—did nothing in Cuba but gamble, and at the Las Vegas' rate.Well, this would mean an extremely generous total of $13 and a half million for Cuba's gambling industry annually. But in 1957 Cuba's Gross Domestic product was $2.7 billion, and Cuba's foreign receipts were $752 million. How could the beneficiaries of that miniscule fraction of Cuba's income “take over” one of the wealthiest, most modern and economically diverse cities in the Western hemisphere?

Here’s another snark-opportunity for Jon Stewart’s writers in case they again host T.J. English: “Mr English, your book claims that: "Every Monday at noon, a bagman for mobster Meyer Lansky delivered a satchel filled with $1.28 million in cash that was to be delivered to Batista.”

“So Mr English, are you claiming that Mob chief Meyer Lansky was slipping Batista MORE every week than the COMBINED annual GROSS from EVERY casino in Cuba, including those unaffiliated with Meyer Lansky?”

Also interesting: In 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. than Americans vacationed in Cuba. How could the wretched and brutalized residents of that plundered and impoverished nation, (as the Boston Globe, New York Times, Hollywood, NPR, Jon Stewart, etc. depict it) have possibly pulled that off?

“But wait-a-minute Humberto?!” you say. “The media, Hollywood and our professors all swear up and down that Batista was backed by the U.S., who bitterly and violently opposed Castro?!”

Well, here’s the U.S. ambassador to Cuba from 1957-59 Earl T. Smith testifying to the U.S. Senate in 1960: “various agencies of the United States directly and indirectly brought Fidel Castro into power.”

And here’s the CIA’s Caribbean desk chief from 1957-60 Robert Reynolds, another knowledgeable party to the issue, you might think: “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas.”

In fact, during that horrible period for Cubans ( as depicted by Godfather II and Jon Stewart) not only did most Cubans voluntarily remain in Cuba despite open doors both from Cuba and into the U.S.—but the island’s standard of living and booming and diverse economy attracted immigrants from both Europe and the U.S.

During this period people (from nearby Haiti and Jamaica) often jumped on rafts trying to enter Cuba.

Major turnaround. You read that it was the US turning its back on Castro that drove him into the arms of the USSR. BALONEY.
He had it planned from the get-go.
The company I worked for had offices in Cuba. One of the managers fled Cuba. He wasn’t allowed to bring anything but the clothes on his back. All his possessions were confiscated by the State.
He managed to sneak a $50 bill out of Cuba, in his Zippo lighter.
Until the Mariel Boatlift (thank you Jimmie Carter) most of the refugees were good decent, hard working people. Many professionals.
The Boatlift era was full of criminals, the dregs.
Castro cleared out his prisons on us. (thanks again Jimmie)

The refugees were the most virulent anti-communists in the US.
There were 2 homes within a mile radius of mine that were bombed.
The apparent crime? The Cuban owners had had their picture taken w/ Castro. This was years after the takeover, circa 1970. They were in Cuba to try to get loved ones out of the country.

Are they virulent today? Don’t know. I moved away in 1984.
Looking at some of the election results lately I think not.

Formosa, now Taiwan, was an island like Cuba in natural resources and population in the 1950’s. In both countries the principal industry was the Sugar Cane production. Cuba was at that time a country in development with standards of living much higher than Taiwan, the rest of Latin America and also Europe, including Western Europe.

Taiwan took the capitalist road and Cuba in 1959 embraced communism. Very soon Taiwan was transformed in a developed and prosperous “first world” country. In the other hand, Cuba, under communism went from enjoying one of the highest levels of living before Castro, to compete with Haiti for the dishonorable place as the poorest country in Latin America, and what is even worse, thanks to the communist regime, the Cubans are the less free people in this hemisphere.

The results of imposing the communism in Cuba confirmed, once more, the superiority of capitalism over communism. We saw it in the split of Korea and Germany. In South Korea and West Germany capitalism promoted freedom and creation of wealth for all their people. In the communist North Korea and East Germany, in spite of that at the split of those country the communist side was the best developed, in both countries the communist utopia brought to its people only misery and brutal oppression.

Under capitalism the people of two cities, Singapore and Hong Kong, enjoy the freest economies in the world and also benefit from one of the highest standard of living.

As Spanish philosopher stated: “Those who ignore history are damned to repeat its errors.”

History repeats itself, Venezuela, a very rich country with great reserves of oil, was taken over by communists puppets of the Castro’s brothers, now is going bankrupt and its people are suffering the same lack of the most elementary staples of modern life, just as the Cuban people have been suffering for more than five decades.

Modern capitalism offers freedom and progress. Socialism, in all its forms, brings less freedom and more misery. It seems that many people in Latin America prefers to live under communist even though it only brings oppression and misery.

There is a lot of misinformation about Cuba’s standard of living before Castro took over the reins of Cuba. In his scholarly research book “Cuba, The Pursuit of Freedom”, the English historian Hugh Thomas, begins with Colon discovery of the Island all the way to the 1960 (1696 pages). Later on, Thomas wrote another book covering the first years of Cuban Revolution once in power that has been translated into Spanish, “Historia Contemporánea de Cuba, De Batista a nuestros días.” (550 pages, 1971) .

According to Hugh Thomas: “By most criteria, Cuba (in 1957) was now one of the better off countries in Latin America. Income per capita lay between $350 and $550 a year, probably nearer the higher figure. The only Latin American countries which definitely exceeded these figures were Argentina and Venezuela.” (Thomas “Cuba” page 1103).

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 1956, Cuba per head yearly income was $364, was higher than Mexico ($284), Brazil ($281), and comparable to Italy ($404) and higher than Japan ($252) and India ($61). In 1958, Cuba was the greatest exporter of agricultural products; relative to it’s population, of all Latin America. Cuba’s domestic production, together with the imported food staples, made the Cubans one of the best-fed people in the world. (“Cuba, Geopolítica y Pensamiento Económico” by J. Alvarez Diaz, R. Arredondo, R.M. Shelton and J. Vizcaíno, 1964, page 527) This is a fact recognized by the FAO (United Nations for Agricultural and Feeding), as recorded by Ginsburg. The calory intake was: Argentina (3240), Cuba (2730), Mexico (2390), Chile (2,370). (“Cuba Cenit and Eclipse” by Salvador Villa)

In spite of its small population and size, Cuba in 1958 was the fourth exporter in Latin America and the fifth in its capacity for imports. In 1958 Cuba had commercial treaties with United States, Britain, Argentina, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Island, Israel, Japan, Denmark, Peru, Sweden, etc. It also kept commercial relations with Uruguay, Colombia, Panama, France, Holland, Soviet Union, Pakistan, Iran, Morocco, Australia, New Zealand, with favorable trade balance for Cuba. The trade balance with Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxemburg, Norway, India, Hong Kong, was slighted unfavorable to Cuba. (Cuba Cenit and Eclipse” by Salvador Villa, page 50, 51))

There is an interesting report written by the Mexican Marxist economist, Juan F. de Noyola, who was invited to Cuba by Che Guevara. Noyola, who had a large experience in Latin American economies having worked with the CEPAL, was put in charge of a group of foreigners planning the Cuba’s projects for industrialization as well as the study of the Cubans’ technical capabilities.

Noyola wrote: “Considering the supply of technicians and skilled labor, Cuba seems to be in much better position that other Latin American countries. In reference to skilled labor of a level inferior at those to the professional technicians, the level of literacy of the Cuban population is –in Latin American terms – rather high. There are only two countries in Latin American with a higher literacy, Argentina and Uruguay. On the other hand, the Cuban worker, including those in agricultural activities, who constitute a great reserve of labor, have an educational elementary lever, but they are familiar with the modern techniques thanks to they contacts with sugar industry and the use of agricultural machines, something you don’t find in other countries. The farmers in other Latin American countries, including those more developed, have a lower educational and technical level than the Cubans. We are not comparing the Cuban workers with those in the highland of Peru; Bolivia or Mexico, even when compared with the Chilean farmer, the degree of familiarity with modern techniques of the less qualified Cuban laborer is remarkable. As a result, Cuba has a relative advantage in the training of its workers.” (Cuba Cenit and Eclipse” by Salvador Villa, pages 28, 29)

“In reference to the professional technicians, the problem, said Noyola, could have been grave, but the due to the unemployment of the 1930s and the high development of the Sugar industry it produced an excess of professionals in certain areas. For example, affirm Noyola, we find many Cuban physicians in United States; in South America it was brought to my attention that many of the big enterprises had Cuban accountants. Apparently, the unemployment problem and the fact that Cuba had an standard of living very high in the 1920s, allowed for a great sector of the population to have a high level of formal education, including at the university level” (Cuba Cenit and Eclipse” by Salvador Villa, page 29)

When Castro took over on January 1959, Cuba was a country rapidly developing with a solid economy and a well-educated population, a people with a high degree of self-reliance and entrepreneurial spirit. Those traits have been proven everywhere they have had to settle in their quest for freedom after witnessing the ruin and brutal oppression imposed over the unfortunate people living under Castro’s totalitarian communist regime.

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