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Redford: Tyranny's
useful idiot
WorldNetDaily.com.
Joseph Farah. January 29, 2004.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro wooed Robert
Redford in Havana this week.
It was hardly necessary.
Redford has been doing Castro's bidding
for years without being seduced by the tyrant
of the Caribbean.
"He came to me," Redford told
Reuters. "He seemed to be in good health,
good humor, good spirit."
Castro wanted to congratulate Redford on
his new film, "The Motorcycle Diaries,"
lionizing his old comrade-in-arms, Marxist-Leninist
revolutionary Che Guevara.
"I came to present the film that I
produced on Che Guevara and I am very happy
to be in Cuba," said Redford.
Redford last saw Castro in 1988 when they
went scuba-diving together.
Isn't that special?
I have a few choice words for Redford and
other Hollywood elites, such as Sean Penn,
Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and Harry Belafonte,
who have taken similar trips to pay homage
to Castro.
Congratulations. You are the moral equivalents
of people who gave aid and comfort to Adolf
Hitler and Josef Stalin.
These Hollywood pilgrimages to Cuba have
been going on for a long time. Let me give
you a little background and tell you what
no one else is willing to say about them.
About a decade ago, a good friend of mine
- and one of the best investigative 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
as her editor - 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 new 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 Stone, Sidney
Pollack, Spike Lee, Francis Ford Coppola,
George Lucas, 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 pilgrimages to the island police
state and its famous film school continue.
Some of 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.
Castro kills people who disagree with him.
He lines them up against the wall and shoots
them. He locks up others in dungeons where
they never see the light of day, as Armando
Valladares, a survivor, documented in his
seminal book on the Cuban gulag.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the way Castro
uses Hollywood stooges to make him look
like a hero to the rest of the world.
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com,
Inc.
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