February 13, 2006
Crosses we bear
At 5 PM on February 25th of this year, a very solemn event will be held an the Tamiami Youth Fair Grounds: The Cuban Memorial.
I had planned on writing about this, but our dear friend Humberto Fontova has said it much more eloquently than I could over at Human Events Online:
Cuban Memorial Honors Castro's Victimsby Humberto Fontova
Posted Feb 13, 2006You'll often find people with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst the long rows of white crosses at Tamiami Park on Coral Way and 107 Avenue in Miami.
It's a mini-Arlington cemetery called the Cuban Memorial, in honor of Castro's murder victims and those who fell trying to free Cuba from the murderous barbarism he imposed with his Soviet overlords while "The Best and Brightest" dithered, bumbled and finally betrayed. But the tombs are symbolic. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of Ted Turner's fishing buddy, Harry Belafonte's bosom pal and Barbara Walter's favored dinner companion.
Never heard of this Cuban Memorial in the mainstream media? Well, it honors the tens of thousands of Fidel Castro's and Che Guevara's victims (many of them U.S citizens, by the way). Need I say more about the media blackout? ... I didn't think so.
Some of these Cuban Memorial visitors will be kneeling, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You remember a similar scene from the opening frames of Saving Private Ryan. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies will be pressing their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.
Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt are contagious. Yet he's often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle, father, or cousin -- the name they just recognized on the white cross.
"Fusilado" -- firing squad execution -- it says below it.
These total 14,000, all at the orders of the man being swamped and feted by U.S. trade delegations from Louisiana to Nebraska to Maine. Even many of the older men walking among these crosses will be red-eyed, choked up. No denying it, we're an emotional people. And not ashamed to show it, at the proper time.
The elderly lady still holds a tissue to her eyes and nose as they wait to cross the street after leaving the memorial. Her red-eyed grandson still has his arm around her. She told him about how his freedom-fighter grandfather yelled "Viva Cuba Libre!" and "Viva Cristo Rey!" the instant before the volley shattered his body.
They cross the street slowly, silently and run into a dreadlocked youth coming out of a music store. His T-shirt sports the face of her husband's cowardly executioner, Che Guevara. They turn their heads in rage and toward the store window. Well, there's the murderer's face again, on a huge poster, $19.95 it says at the bottom, right next to the inscription, "Fight Oppression!"
You, friends, tell me how she might feel?
Another woman will go home after placing flowers under her father's cross -- a father she never knew. "Killed in action, Bay of Pigs, April 18th, 1961" reads the inscription on his cross. She was 2 at the time. "We will not be evacuated!" yelled her father's commander into his radio that day, as 41,000 Red Troops and swarms of Stalin tanks closed the ring on her father and his 1,400 utterly abandoned Band of Brothers. "The Best and Brightest" all had important social engagements that day.
"We came here to Fight!" her father's commander kept yelling at the enraged and heartsick CIA man offering to evacuate them from the doomed beachhead. "Let it end here!" was his last yell, barely audible over the deafening blasts from the storm of Soviet artillery.
Her 23-year-old father -- an accountant in Cuba a year before, a dish-washer in a Miami Hotel only two months before, and now grim-faced, thirst-crazed and delirious after three days of continuous ground combat -- heard the order from his commander: "No Retreat! We Stand and Fight!" and rammed in his last clip. By then he'd long realized he'd never see his daughter's graduation.
His ammo expended, and no more coming on the specific orders of "The Best and Brightest," he fell among the bodies of 100 of his Band of Brothers, after mauling his communist enemies to the score of 20 to one. "Wimps! Yes, Wimps!" the woman hears Michael Moore label her father and his Band of Brothers in one of America's best-selling books. "Crybabies too!"
Again, friends, you tell me, how she might feel.
Castro murdered her relatives, shattered her family and plunged a nation -- which had double Japan's per capita income in 1958, plus net immigration from Europe -- into a pesthole that repels even half-starved Haitians. He jailed, tortured and murdered more political prisoners than pre-war Hitler, and about 20 times as many as Mussolini.
He asked, pleaded and finally tried to cajole the Butcher of Budapest into an obliterating nuclear strike against America. Failing there, he tried to blow up Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdales and Grand Central Station with more TNT than used by Madrid subway terrorists.
Yet he's hailed as "One Helluva Guy" by Ted Turner; as "Very likable, a man I regard as a friend!" by George McGovern; and "Way Too Cool!" by Bonnie Raitt, among dozens upon dozens of other accolades by dozens of other liberal scoundrels and imbeciles. Today the U.S. is his biggest food supplier.
Tens of thousands of Cubans (and dozens of Americans) fought him. "We were fighting for Cuba's freedom as well as America's defense. To call us mercenaries is a grave insult," says Alabama Air guard officer Albert Persons about his and his Alabama comrades' heroism during the battle of The Bay of Pigs. The Ivy League's Best and Brightest might sell our comrades out, they snorted. We sure as hell won't.
It was more than bluster, too. Four U.S. volunteers -- Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Barker and Wade Grey -- suited up, gunned the engines and joined the fight. These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty, of who America's enemies really are. Their Cuban comrades -- men they'd trained and befriended -- were being slaughtered on that heroic beachead. Knowing their lumbering B-26s were sitting ducks for Castro's unmolested jets and Sea Furies, all four Alabama air guard volunteers flew over the doomed beachhead to lend support to their betrayed brothers in arms.
All four were shot down. All four have their names in a place of honor next to their Cuban comrades on the Bay of Pigs Memorial, plus streets named after them in Little Havana, plus their crosses at the Cuban Memorial.
When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: "People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil -- soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples."
Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.
"My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality," wrote Winston Churchill. "It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained."
Sir Winston Churchill did not loose a single family member or close friend to that "bloody and devastating terrorism." Yet to this day his every utterance and note is revered as an exemplar of judiciousness and heroism. But let a Cuban-American who lost half his family to Communist firing squads and prisons express the identical sentiment and he's promptly denounced by liberals as a "screaming, irrational hot-head!"
"Disgusting!" spat Bryant Gumbel while watching Cuban-American demonstrators in front of Elian Gonzalez' uncle's house six years ago.
Some very dedicated and selfless folks are holding a memorial service including a Mass and vigil at the Cuban Memorial in Miami's Tamiami Park this February 25. The service is open to the public. Attend and you'll be surrounded by a sea of crosses, many heroes and heroines, along with their surviving friends and kin. If ever a group merits a memorial service it's the heroes and heroines here honored. Even if you're not related to any of these folks, even if their story is new to you, attend and you'll honor heroes who fought America's most rabid enemy -- and you'll poke a sharp finger into the eye of the liberal media.
I will be there and I hope those of you in Miami will join me.
Posted by Val Prieto at February 13, 2006 12:51 PM
Comments
What a contrast to the flags.
Posted by: AcademicElephant at February 13, 2006 12:56 PM
This might be the most poingant piece I've ever read detailing the horrors of the regime and what it truly means to be a Cuban-American. Though not Cuban by birth, my long-term girlfriend's parents fled communist Cuba soon after Castro took over (her mother fled in 1960-her father was a lawyer and spoke out against the regime; her sister was vocal as a law student at the university of Havana; her father's parents fled in 1968, and her grandfather was soon sent to a work camp in Cuba before fleeing to Puerto Rico and finally to the United States).
The stories they told me are still fresh in my mind. A story about pictures arriving from Cuba from a distant cousin. In the picture, you can see a circa-1960 toy car in the driveway. My girlfriend's father stated that the toy car in the picture was his - in 1960.
My favorite story (and most inspiring) about the family's Cuba experience dealt with their first day in America. Somehow, my girlfriend's father's family had won the "lottery" and was able to board a plane for Miami. So many of us take for granted being able to call someone before we fly to make sure they're waiting for us at the airport when we land. Instead of making such a call, the way the relatives in the family found out that their family had made it to freedom was by listening to the radio in Miami. Name after name read off aloud, just waiting to her the name of a family member that had been left behind. Finally, the uncle in Miami, after listening to the radio day after day, heard the names of his brother, his brother's wife, and his nephew and niece. Arriving elated, they didn't even care that they did not speak the language; that they had no job; that they had no money (after all of their personal possessions had been seized by Castro's minions before leaving the island); and that they had no other help except for the love and graciousness of family.
These types of stories put into perspective how great we have it here in the United States. I've never heard my girlfriend's family complain about their life here in the U.S. They know it could have been much worse, living in communist hell.
I know that this comment is a little long, I just wanted to display how great it is to be free, and how I understand what it is to be a Cuban-American.
Posted by: Hunter at February 13, 2006 01:08 PM
Val,
You know I'm coming down to Miami next week. And I hope you'll allow me to visit the Cuban Memorial together with you and your family.
We can work on a photographic report for Babalublog.com about it.
Man, I'm crying *already* and my heart really hurts at the mere thought of it, but regardless of as painful an experience as it will be, we HAVE to do it.
JulioZ
Posted by: Julio C. Zangroniz at February 13, 2006 01:44 PM
The incalculable pain and loss inflicted on Cuba by the terrorist dictator castro should have been stopped long ago by an outraged world citizenry. If this poignant article were read by all, that day would surely arrive. The fact that it's not won't be forgotten. Thank you Humberto Fontova and thank you Val.
Posted by: ziva at February 13, 2006 02:32 PM
Excellent article by Humberto Fontova! Val we should all join you that day! We should never forget the many heroic Cubans who have sacrificed their lives trying to save our country.
Posted by: Jose Aguirre at February 13, 2006 02:41 PM
Val, I'll be there. Let's get a Babalu contingent together to go and pay our respects.
Posted by: George L. Moneo at February 13, 2006 03:35 PM
Fontova never ceases to inspire me. He really tells the truth and captures the sentiments of Cubans in exile and the pain they have endured and the way that the MSM not only does not mention us, but when it does, tries its hardest for the most part to skew the news against us.
Go figure..
Posted by: Max at February 13, 2006 05:43 PM
... the magnitude of the horror is hard to comprehend.
Posted by: j.scott barnard at February 13, 2006 08:06 PM
Humberto:
Wonderful article. Will see the monument this summer.
Meanwhile I must report a lost very minor electronic battle.
Well that ended badly, Wikipedia "editors" held a mock trial, in which "evidence" was entered continuously. And although 205.240.227.15 was able to address all matters, in my view successfully additional charges were entered continuously. This process went on until the "editors" ran out the clock... and 205, using the pretext of excess “reverts” was banned for 8 days...the accuser "Colle" then, apparently immune to charges of excess reverts, proceeded to revise the article on Cuba to his liking. "Colle" proceded to eliminated mention of the persecution of dissidents especially the "free librarians, disposing of citations did not like (e.g. that of Ray Bradbury author of Fahrenheit 451); and avoiding and then continuously deleting mention that his principal source for evidence of a putative "Democracy in Cuba" Arnold August was a member of the Canadian Communist Party... etc etc...
Posted by: Larry Daley at February 13, 2006 09:06 PM
Castro's crimes need to be repeated over and over and over again until his defenders cry mercy and cut him loose. Anyone who defends this excuse for a human is a miserable wretch who deserves nothing less than to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic on a leaky raft so he can meet the souls of the dictator's victims.
Posted by: Dax at February 13, 2006 09:31 PM
I no longer use Wikipedia because of its left-wing bias. A boycott is in order.
Posted by: George L. Moneo at February 14, 2006 09:50 AM
George:
Thank you. However, we need to tell the world about this left wing bias of Wikipedia. There are few people fighting and they are being berated as anti-socialist etc etc...
Posted by: Larry Daley at February 16, 2006 06:58 PM
i would really like to know more and understand what really happened. as i could not attend the memorial or visit miami, i think i would honor them by knowing and remembering them, by learning about them. is there a book you may suggest i could read? thank you
Posted by: elizabeth at February 21, 2006 12:08 AM
Elizabeth, among the most recent books on the subject, I highly recommend. Decision for Disaster by Grayston L Lynch, and Fidel... by Humberto E Fontova. (Both easily available, or you may borrow my copies) There are other sources, but these are an excellent place to start. The writing is concise and the information is very accurate on both books. Good Luck
Posted by: omar at February 22, 2006 11:29 AM
Elizabeth
There is a book simply titled BAY OF PIGS that was originally published about twenty-five years ago but it is not hard to find.
Regarding Humberto's piece it is "poignant" but I want to know what were his methodologies in arriving at the "tens of thousands" number for victims?
Thank you and good luck.
Posted by: Phil at February 22, 2006 03:18 PM