CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

December 14, 2001



Our Man From Havana

The U.S.S. Bulkeley and its skipper symbolize everything that is great about America.

Wall Street Journal. Friday, December 14, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

Most Americans today would have a hard time placing the name John Duncan Bulkeley, notwithstanding that the Medal of Honor winner and World War II hero was once given a ticker-tape parade through Manhattan. But at the Del Toro family table, they know all about the Navy legend. And not just because Carlos Del Toro now commands the latest addition to the U.S. fleet and arguably the most sophisticated warship ever built: the U.S.S. Bulkeley.

Cmdr. Del Toro, you see, was born in Havana and fled Cuba when Fidel Castro, who once imprisoned the commander's father, came to power. At about the same time the Del Toro family left for America, Castro was trying to push America out of its military base at Guantanamo Bay. The commander of that base was Rear Adm. John Bulkeley.

Plainly Castro did not know whom he was dealing with. Scarcely a generation earlier, then-Lt. Bulkeley had earned his Medal of Honor when he rescued the man who would win the war in the Pacific. Put it this way: Gen. Douglas MacArthur would have never said "I shall return" had it not been for the young lieutenant who spirited him out of Corregidor and through Japanese-infested waters to safety on his plywood PT boat.

In 1964, Fidel accused the American base on Cuba of stealing water even as he cut off the flow. Bulkeley responded by taking reporters out to the two water pipes, cutting off a section of each and showing that the insides were dry--and that Castro was a liar. Such was the Cuban communists' appreciation for Bulkeley that they honored him with a wanted poster offering a bounty for a man they described as "a guerrilla of the worst species."

At the commissioning ceremony for the U.S.S. Bulkeley last Saturday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the audience that "when a ship is named, the name is never chosen lightly." The name, he said, "forms the heart of the ship's identity." Surely if there's any Navy man who appreciates the power of that particular name, it's the ship's skipper.

"I am living the American Dream," Cmdr. Del Toro told us. "As a kid my father and I used to stand on the docks of the Hudson to watch the ships go by. From this same harbor I became the first commanding officer of a ship whose motto is 'Freedom's Torch.' " And when the Bulkeley sailed past the ruins of the World Trade Center on the way to last Saturday's commissioning ceremony, the commander told his sailors "to take a long hard look." "Freedom," he said, "does not come cheap."

Few countries in this world possess the greatness necessary to build a ship as magnificent as the U.S.S. Bulkeley. Fewer still would entrust the command of such a ship to an immigrant son. Only America could do both.

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