WorldNetDaily.com.
Thursday March 8 2001.
I noticed many of Hollywood's worst and dumbest recently returned from a
visit to the totalitarian island prison known as Cuba.
The group included the editor of Vanity Fair, the head of MTV, the president
of CBS TV, movie producers and talent agents.
Reportedly, they had a good time with Fidel Castro and found Cuba to be "the
most romantic, soulful and sexy country" they had ever visited.
Not surprising. These Hollywood pilgrimages to Cuba have been going on for a
long time. And this latest excursion reminds me of a personal experience I had
more than a decade ago.
A good friend of mine, and one of the best reporters I've ever worked with,
Merle Linda Wolin, got a feature assignment from the entertainment magazine
Premiere to visit Cuba and report on the renowned cinema school headed by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Wolin, by way of background, was one of the founders of Mother Jones
magazine and her "progressive" credentials were impeccable. I had the
pleasure of working with her as her editor when she served as Latin American
bureau chief in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Though, indeed,
Wolin was personally sympathetic to the causes of the left, as a reporter she
always sought the truth -- no matter what the assignment.
Shortly after the Sandinistas assumed power in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Wolin
spent weeks on the scene, interviewing all the top officials of the Marxist
government and digging in all the right places. Her six-part "Portrait of
the Enemy" series for our paper was, perhaps, the most devastating profile
of the Sandinistas ever written.
So, from my point of view, she was just the right person to explore Cuba's
cinema school and its links with Oliver Stone, Sidney Pollack, Spike Lee,
Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Robert Redford and other Hollywood icons.
What Wolin found did not surprise me, but it did shock her editors at
Premiere:
Student work at the cinema school was subject to censorship like everything
else in Cuba;
Cuban intelligence agents permeated every facet of the school and watched
over all activities like hawks;
Fidel and Garcia Marquez played Hollywood like a flute -- entertaining
stars, persuading them that the cinema school was a bastion of freedom and
creativity and that real art, not propaganda, was the result.
Wolin interviewed Antonio Valle Vallejo, Garcia Marquez's former personal
assistant at the school who defected to the United States. Valle explained the
school was little more than a Cuban propaganda operation whose principal
objective was to use the film project to expand the Cuban political model
throughout Latin America while improving the police state's image around the
world.
"The school is the hook for Hollywood," said Valle. And, back in
the early 1990s, Redford was the fish. He fell for the bait -- hook, line and
sinker.
Meanwhile, the story inside the story was even more interesting. When Wolin
finished her major investigative piece for Premiere, her editors were aghast.
They spiked the story.
"Our liberal readers will never believe this," Wolin was told.
Despite having invested tens of thousands of dollars in the research and
travel, Premiere decided not to share the information with Hollywood. Wolin
switched gears and wrote the story for the New Republic.
But it's no wonder Hollywood has never learned the painful lessons Redford
learned from his exploitation by Fidel and Garcia Marquez. The entertainment
industry magazine that uncovered the details never published a story for
Hollywood.
So, the occasional pilgrimages to the island police state and its famous
film school continue. The names and the faces change, but the money and
influence they bring with them continues to bolster the lie that Cuba is
interested in art and that its film school is somehow independent of Castro's
totalitarian political policies.
It's no surprise, because Hollywood supported Soviet Stalinism until it was
no longer possible to do so and remain fashionable. Castro's Cuba is one of the
last remnants of Stalinism -- the evil ideology that murdered and enslaved
hundreds of millions. And Hollywood is still making excuses for it, providing
cover, dressing it up and even subsidizing it.
Joseph Farah is editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com and
writes a daily column.
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