Sympathy for the devil

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Russell Brand

A few months ago we weighed in on British comedian and actor Russell Brand, a self-identified “big fan of Castro and Che Guevara” who produced a book described by one critic as “a meandering and pretentious mélange of student politics, junk history, and goofy mysticism.” 

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One of several pictures Katy Perry posted on Instagram of her visit to Cuba

A while back, with immense fanfare, Brand married American pop star Katy Perry. They both did the talk-show circuit and prattled endlessly about how deeply in love they were. Then they promptly divorced. Not knowing much about Katy Perry, we thought that perhaps Brand’s foolish, ill-informed politics – and all-around narcissism and puerility – did the marriage in. Last month, however, Katy did something that caused us to push that theory onto the back burner: in a move that must have made her ex green with envy, she hung out at a Havana bar with Mariela Castro, the daughter of Raul Castro. The supposed topic of discussion was their supposed shared interest in LGBT rights – this in a country where nobody has any rights.

To be fair to Katy, she’s only one of the latest of many American celebrities to make the now apparently obligatory trip to the island prison.

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Mick Jagger on the dance floor at Havana’s Shangri La Club

Septuagenarian British rocker Mick Jagger was also there in October, reportedly scouting locations for a Rolling Stone concert. While he was there, he also visited several nightclubs in Old Havana; the Daily Mail ran a picture of him tripping the light fantastic, apparently with some young locals of the female persuasion, on the dance floor of a place called the Shangri La Club.

Meanwhile celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz was in town, too, snapping ultra-chic pics of globally adored Barbadian songstress Rihanna at a multitude of glamorously shabby Havana locations for this month’s issue of Vanity Fair. 

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One of Annie Leibovitz’s photos of Rihanna in Havana

But let’s flash back to last February, when the slummer du jour was Celebrity Without Portfolio Paris Hilton, who flew down to Havana and did the one thing she apparently has a talent for: she partied.

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Paris Hilton posing outside the Habana Hilton

It was a busy sojourn for the aging yet enduringly ditzy heiress/celebutante. She dropped in at the 25-story, 500-room Habana Hilton, once the biggest hotel in all of Latin America. In an unfortunate case of less than impeccable timing, Paris’s great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton, built this pile just a year before Fidel, Che, and company drove Fulgencio Batista out of town; needless to say, they nationalized the thing pronto (“nationalize,” of course, being the Communist euphemism of choice for “steal”). Judging by the pictures Paris posed for outside the hotel, looking all saucy and sprightly, she would appear to have forgiven the Commies for relieving her family of its property all those years ago. 

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Paris Hilton snapping a selfie with Fidel Castro’s son

Paris also took part in Cuba’s 17th annual Cigar Festival, where – as if to confirm that there’s no hard feelings – she chummed around with Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, the son of the man who stole her great-granddaddy’s hostelry. The pictures – including selfies taken by Paris herself – would seem to testify that they both had a jolly time together. Also involved in these cheery totalitarian festivities was Naomi Campbell, a British woman who was famous for being a fashion model in the previous century.

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Naomi Campbell joins in the fun

Capitol Hill Cubans, a website devoted to “the promotion of human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Cuba,” wasn’t impressed by these high-profile folks’ visits to the home of rum, cigars, and oppression:

Under the guise of “supporting the Cuban people” – and completely aloof to the island’s brutal realities– these celebrities are enjoying the hospitality of the Castro dictatorship and supporting its repressive apparatus.

Meanwhile, innocent Cuban men, women and children are being beaten on the streets for their peaceful democracy activism, and artists imprisoned for their attempts at critical expression.

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Gloria Estefan

In closing, we’ll just take off our hats to Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan, who, when asked in late October when she plans to visit Fidel’s Caribbean penal colony, supplied an unequivocal, and excellent, answer: “I’ll go to Cuba when it’s truly free, and not just open to foreigners, to celebrate with the Cuban people a new beginning.”

Happy Thanksgiving. 

Fidel’s Hollywood Rat Pack

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Fidel Castro, Gabriel García Márquez

Last time around, we pondered the late author Gabriel García Márquez‘s friendship with Fidel Castro, for whom he informed on fellow writers who were insufficiently loyal to the great caudillo. This despicable conduct, however, didn’t prevent García Márquez from being celebrated in the recent Academy Awards ceremony’s “In Memoriam” segment alongside movie stars and film directors.

Let’s look at a couple more high-voltage international figures who have sucked up to Castro.

In 2002, Steven Spielberg – the most successful and most honored of living movie directors – visited Havana for a film festival in his honor and dined with Castro long into the night, an encounter that he described as “the eight most important hours of my life.” Spielberg’s only critical remark on the occasion was not about Fidel’s tyranny but about America’s Cuban policy. Among those who were outraged by Spielberg’s enthusiasm for his meeting with the dictator was actor Robert Duvall, who, in a reference to Spielberg’s support for the U.S. Holocaust Museum, said he’s like to ask him: “Would you consider building a little annex on the Holocaust museum, or at least across the street, to honor the dead Cubans that Castro killed?”

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Steven Spielberg, Fidel Castro

Nicolás Calzada, an NYU film student who confessed to an ardent admiration for Spielberg, was also upset by the director’s chumminess with Fidel. In a passionate open letter to Spielberg, Calzada wrote: “I expected you on this trip to be the eloquent enemy of tyranny that you have always been, but instead you insulted the memory of the people you have portrayed and those of all the Cuban people who have died at the hands of Fidel Castro,” whom Calzada described as “a tyrant whose 43-year rule has seen many of the same atrocities so powerfully depicted in your Schindler’s List.” Calzada asked : “Did you know that a mere two days before your visit, Oscar Elías Biscet finished serving his three-year prison sentence for hanging a Cuban flag upside down in protest of his government?”

Cuban emigré Humberto Fontova actually wrote a whole book entitled Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, in which he cited praise for the dictator by celebrities ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Naomi Campbell, from Jesse Jackson to Gina Lollobrigida, from Norman Mailer to Chevy Chase. A visit to Havana, complete with a courtesy call on Castro, has long been de rigueur for a certain type of American celebrity – such as Robert Redford, who went scuba-diving with Fidel in 1988 and hung with him again in 2004.

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Jesse Jackson, Fidel Castro

But even in the company of knee-jerk leftists like Redford, director Oliver Stone is a standout. He’s called Fidel “one of the Earth’s wisest people.” In 2003, he made a documentary about Castro, Comandante, that, according to one observer, Damien Cave of the Washington Monthly, “should have been titled From Cuba With Love.” Asks Cave: “Who but the director of Salvador, a preachy indictment of U.S. policy in Central America, would take Castro at his word when he says ‘we have never practiced torture,’ a statement that Human Rights Watch contradicts pretty much annually?” Comandante and two later Stone documentaries, Looking For Fidel (2004) and Castro in Winter (2009), are pure hagiography.

Castro is isolated in the hemisphere,” Stone said in 2006, “and for those reasons I admire him because he’s a fighter. He stood alone, and in a sense he’s Don Quixote, the last revolutionary, tilting at this windmill of keeping the island in a state of, I suppose, egalitarianism, where everyone would get the break, everyone gets the education, and everyone gets good water.”

Except, of course, for opponents of his autocracy, who get arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. If not executed.

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Fidel Castro, Oliver Stone