Save the fake horror about Fidel. Media, Wall St., and Beltway elites all adored Fidel Castro. In 1996 Castro dined at Wall St. Journal Board Room luncheon given in his honor. Then you have My Dinners with Fidel Castro, by Mort Zuckerman, 8/6/2006

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Image: 1996, Fidel Castro at luncheon in his honor in Board Room of Wall St. Journal
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8/7/2006, “Mort Zuckerman on Fidel Castro,” Havana Journal, Originally published by USnews.com, 8/6/2006, By Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Link for original US News article, “Letter from Havana: My Dinners with Fidel Castro,” seems to be inactive. 

“Several years and many requests went by before I was finally granted my first one-on-one interview with Fidel Castro. But it was well worth waiting for. When we first sat down, we began talking at about 8 p.m. and didn’t finish till 5 the next morning, with Fidel’s translator, Juanita, providing brilliant support throughout. For the first four to five hours, Fidel pumped me for all kinds of information about America, from the role of the news media to race relations, from politics to the economy. Once he had exhausted his curiosity about the United States, he began answering my questions about Cuba, all of them. 

The [first] interview took place about 15 years ago [1989], and we focused intently on two subjects. One was the Cuban missile crisis; the other was Fidel’s experience with the Russians and their military advisers, whom he utterly disdained. 

Balls and strikes. To my surprise, as I was touring a medical research center after we finished talking, Fidel showed up and offered to serve as tour guide. We spent the rest of the day together, and the next two days after that. Each night, we sat down for dinner at about 8 or 9 p.m. and talked for seven or eight hours. At one point, I asked Fidel what was the biggest mistake he had ever made. He answered immediately: aligning himself too closely with Moscow. [Khrushchev stopped Castro from bombing the US: “Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust just weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger massacre during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “If the missiles had remained,” Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker the following month, “we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.””] 

To this day, I have one regret from that first visit. On my last day in Havana, Fidel invited me to join him at the Cuban World Series, which was to start the next day. In our younger days, both of us had been pitchers, and we both still keenly enjoyed the game. I had pressing business back home, however, and decided to leave. Terrible call. What a gas it would have been to sit next to Fidel in the Havana sunshine, talking balls and strikes. 

We met many times after that, each time talking deep into the night about what was going on with our respective countries and about the prospect of improved Cuban-American relations. During my last visit, just a few months back, Fidel brought up the Cuban missile crisis again and mused sadly about how it had had such an awful effect on relations between our countries. 

Fidel is one of the most intellectually curious men I have ever met, and, despite his advancing age, he showed no sign of flagging when I saw him last. In fact, he was consumed by two issues. Cuba’s energy grid had failed in three provinces during last year’s hurricane season, and Fidel had ordered a top-to-bottom review of the system and its reliance on old Soviet-bloc generators. He decided the old generators had to go, replaced them with smaller ones, and allocated funds to begin providing Cuban families with new energy-efficient appliances—all purchased from China. As he was explaining all this, he escorted me to a room next to his office filled with the new Chinese gadgets and began citing from memory Cuba’s hour-by-hour consumption of energy, the energy efficiencies of the new generators, and the cost savings from reduced energy imports. Without pausing for breath, he then segued into a description of another new program, to reward Cubans who use less energy rather than assessing everyone the same consumption cost. I told Fidel he was becoming a capitalist, but he disagreed. He was no capitalist, he said; he was just approaching the subject rationally. But Fidel, I replied, that’s what capitalists do. Our conversation was filled with moments like that. Indeed, as I reflect on the 150 to 200 hours of conversations with him, I am impressed that a man who maintained such iron-fisted control over such an authoritarian regime could be possessed of such a roving, inquisitive mind. 

One of the things that amused me about Fidel was that he gauged his political strength not by the number of votes he won but by his opposition—the number of ballots destroyed, left blank, or marked with a “No.” From the limited view I had as I strolled around Havana, I had little sense that Fidel’s opposition has increased; if anything, Cuba’s improved economy, thanks to its surge in tourism, has led to a relative degree of contentment in the country. 

It has been my experience in all walks of life, and in all the activities I have been involved in, that you meet people in the most unusual of circumstances, and either you do or don’t strike a bond with them. Fidel Castro was somebody with whom, despite our deep political differences, I was able to establish an extraordinary bond, with a remarkable ease of conversation. I look forward to talking with him again soon.” 

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Added: Fidel Castro was adored by the elites–media, Wall St., and Beltway. Their hearts were aflutter when he came to town in 1996:

Image: 1996, Fidel Castro at luncheon in his honor in Board Room of Wall St. Journal 

After lunch at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, and Barbara Walters" awaited him.…Castro was also “honored in the board room of the Wall Street Journal with a VIP luncheon.” 

““The Toast of Manhattan!” crowed Time magazine in January of 1996. “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” also read a Newsweek story that week. Both articles referred to the social swirl and acclaim that engulfed Fidel Castro upon his visit to New York by the very Manhattan media and business luminaries who barely escaped incineration at his hand. The occasion was UN’s fiftieth anniversary celebration…. 

First on the Stalinist dictator’s itinerary was a luncheon 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 Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, and Barbara Walters, all jostled for photo-ops and stood in line for the warmongering mass-murderer’s autograph. 

Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-murderer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into a toothy smile, wrapped her arms around Fidel Castro, and smooched him warmly on the cheek. 
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“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the mass-murderer to the rapt and smiling throng he’d coming within a hair of incinerating and now surrounded him…. 

Everything above—however outrageous it may seem–is meticulously documented here.

 “God Bless you, Fidel!” boomed Pastor Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church while introducing Castro on another New York visit four years later. The People’s Weekly World described Castro’s visit as such: “The audience which included New York Democratic representatives Charles Rangel enthusiastically greeted the Communist leader with a ten minute standing ovation. Chants of ‘FIDEL!-FIDEL! VIVA-FIDEL!’ resounded from the rafters.” 

Then with Congresswoman Maxine Waters looking on in rapture, a beaming Charlie Rangel waddled up to the podium beside the terrorist (and racist) Castro and engulfed him in a mighty bear hug. Castro had to catch his breath, but he smiled and returned the rotund senator’s passionate abrazo…. 

Above I used the term “genuinely smitten.” Perhaps you think I succumbed to hyperbole, to cheap rhetoric?   

Fine, then you amigos, study these pictures and decide for yourselves.…

Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust just weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger massacre during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “If the missiles had remained,” Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker the following month, “we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.”” 

7/27/2019, “Here’s a GENUINE Racist and Russia-Colluder—But Many Among the Democrat-Media Complex Adored Him,“ Humberto Fontava, Townhall.com

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Added: Mortimer Zuckerman was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1937. He was an associate professor at Harvard Business School for 9 years. 

“Mortimer B. Zuckerman is the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report, the [former] Chairman and Publisher of the New York Daily News, the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Boston Properties Inc.… 

Mr. Zuckerman is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal where he received an undergraduate degree in 1957 with first class honors, a degree in law in 1961 and an honorary LLD in 2011. He received an MBA with distinction from the Wharton Graduate School, University of Pennsylvania, in 1961 and an LLM from Harvard University in 1962.”…Zuckerman was an associate professor at Harvard Business School for 9 years.
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He is a trustee of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a member of the Bank of America Global Wealth & Investment Management Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, and the Vice Chair and Treasurer of the International Peace Institute. He is a sponsor of Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, a former Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a former lecturer of City and Regional Planning at Yale University, a past president of the Board of Trustees of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the former Chairman of the Principal’s International Advisory Board of McGill University. He is a former trustee of New York University and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is a former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and served as President of the America-Israel Friendship League…. 

He has received honorary degrees from Colby College, Southampton College, Hebrew College, Berkeley College, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University and an honorary Doctorate of Laws from McGill University and Columbia University. Mr. Zuckerman was awarded the Commandeur De L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Guild Hall, the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architecture in New York, the Sy Syms Humanitarian award from Yeshiva University and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal from the Canadian government.”

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