RUTHFULLY YOURS

“What the United States couldn’t accomplish in more than 50 years they are now trying to do virtually,” complained Castro’s press agency, CubaDebate. ”This new video game is doubly perverse,” it continued. “On the one hand, it glorifies the illegal assassination attempts the United States government planned against the Cuban leader, and on the other, it stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents.” Let’s examine these intriguing claims:

In the early 60s, the late E. Howard Hunt was head of the political division of the CIA’s “Cuba Project.” “So far as I have been able to determine,” Hunt clarified in his book Give Us This Day, “no coherent plan was ever developed within the CIA to assassinate Castro, though it was the heart’s desire of many exile groups.” Interestingly, Hunt stressed that killing Castro was his own recommendation. But he couldn’t get any serious takers within the agency.

This may have been because there were so many Castro supporters in the CIA at the time. Consider these quotes from CIA officials:

“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas.” (Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s “Caribbean Desk’s chief from 1957-1960.)

“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except [Republican] ambassador Earl Smith.” (CIA operative in Santiago Cuba, Robert Weicha.)

Howard Hunt, himself, has denied that any assassination attempts were undertaken by the CIA.  Hunt has been recorded on video admitting:  “We never got that far.”

Even the pro-Castro Frank Church Committee has claimed that the assassination stories were largely mythologized:

In August 1975, Fidel Castro gave Senator George McGovern a list of twenty-four alleged attempts to assassinate him in which Castro claimed the CIA had been involved…The Committee has found no evidence that the CIA was involved in the attempts on Castro’s life enumerated in the allegations that Castro gave to Senator McGovern.

Now on to the second item of concern for the Cuban regime — the claim that the video game will cause “sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents.” It is doubtful that such a game would be permitted to circulate in Cuba. Stimulating sociopathic attitudes in Cuban children, after all, is the exclusive privilege of the Stalinist regime itself. “We will be like Che!” chant all Cuban schoolchildren every morning upon the commencement of their Stalinist indoctrination. They are speaking, of course, of the famed Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.