The man who invented Castro

By Aussiegirl

Bruce Bartlett reveals the man who invented Castro -- New York Times writer Herbert L. Matthews. Matthews scored the first interview with Castro and for all intents and purposes, put him on the map. Like all useful idiots, and like Walter Duranty before him who covered up the Ukrainian genocidal famine of 1933 in his series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles, Matthews never stopped believing in the cause of Castro, and defended the mass murderer to his dying day.

What is it about useful idiots that makes them eager to excuse mass murder and executions? It is stubbornness? Or the concept of cognitive dissonance -- the idea that once you subscribe to an idea you have to keep believing it even when you see evidence to the contrary because the contradiction is just too disturbing to consider? Is it ego? Or is it plain simple stupidity coupled with moral blindness and a fanatical desire to achieve some utopian end regardless of the human cost?

It's fine to break those eggs as long as it's not your shell that's being cracked. But this once again shows the influence of the Darwinist creed -- in order to make a more perfect world, extinction of certain less-than perfect members of the species is necessitated.

I remember when Castro first rode triumphantly into Havana. I was a little girl but I remember it distinctly. My father was convinced he was a democratic reformer. My mother however, always the realist, said no -- he's a communist -- just wait and see. She was right.

Matthews just never got over his impossible dream.

Townhall.com :: Columns :: Castro's inventor by Bruce Bartlett - Jun 13, 2006

Feb. 17, 2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most famous interviews in the history of journalism. On that date in 1957, Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times first interviewed Fidel Castro, then leading a small, ragtag group of insurgents fighting against Cuba's corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. To this day, we are living with the consequences of that interview.

By 1957, Castro had already been fighting Batista for several years and had mounted a failed coup against him on July 26, 1953, for which he was jailed and later deported. On Dec. 2, 1956, Castro re-entered Cuba with an armed force of 80 men. This mini-invasion was crushed by the army, which claimed that Castro had been killed.

Thus the most important news coming from Matthews' interview, which took place deep in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba, was simply that Castro was still alive. Knowing that this fact would be denied by the Cuban government, Matthews documented his interview with photographs and even had Castro sign his interview notes.


After his three-hour interview, Matthews quickly headed for New York to file his story, which ran on Page One of the Times on Feb. 24, 1957. It was nothing short of sensational. Matthews painted Castro in glowing terms, as a legitimate heir to the revolutionaries who established the United States in 1776.

[...]The problem was that Matthews clearly became smitten for Castro, whom he viewed as one of history's great men. This blinded him to Castro's faults. For example, even after Castro admitted publicly in 1960 that he was and always had been a Communist, Matthews continued to deny it. To his death in 1977, Matthews maintained that Castro was not a Communist at the time of his interview, but only became one subsequently due to mistaken American policy.

Even when Castro began slaughtering his enemies by the hundreds, after overthrowing Batista in 1959, Matthews defended him. In a Jan. 18, 1959 news story in the Times, Matthews wrote that Castro was "by any standard a man of destiny." To criticize him, Matthews said, one must criticize all Cubans, "as there are very few Cubans indeed who would disapprove of the executions that have been and are taking place."

The mass murders were justified, Matthews said, because Cuba had just "lived through the most brutal reign of terror in recent history." To be sure, Batista was a bad guy. But calling his regime the most brutal in recent history was extraordinary hyperbole, given that the genocides of Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin were still fresh memories