Image shattered
Humberto Fontova lives in New Orleans but was born in 1954 in Havana to a family that fled Cuba — and Fidel Castro's revolution — in 1961. To him, the damage done to Cuba and Cubans by the Castro dictatorship that Fidel and brother Raul have maintained since is a story deliberately neglected, sometimes actively suppressed, by media, political and academic elites.
Fontova's new book, “The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro” (Encounter Books), doesn't go easy on Fidel's revolutionary comrade Che Guevara, either, asserting that Fidel and Che ran one of history's most successful and enduring propaganda campaigns.
As Fontova notes, Che wrote in his memoir of the revolution: “Foreign reporters — preferably American — were much more valuable to us than any military victory. Much more valuable than recruits for our guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” He also notes that Castro wrote in 1955: “Propaganda is vital — the heart of our struggle.”
That propaganda campaign, Fontova maintains, has made Fidel's image one of an anti-American celebrity, with media accounts of how he “freed Cuba from the greedy clutches of U.S. robber barons and mobsters and rewarded his downtrodden countrymen with free health-care and education” obscuring his warmongering, racism, sexism, Stalinism and pioneering role in modern international terrorism.
The author of four previous books including volumes on Che and Hollywood's fascination with Fidel, Fontova writes that no one would guess from mainstream-media reporting that Fidel “jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror” or “murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six.”
Among the figures Fontova criticizes are Ernest Hemingway, who watched execution squads at work from Che's office, yet described the revolution as “pure and beautiful;” Barbara Walters, who spoke of Fidel's “personal magnetism” after a 2002 interview; and Dan Rather, who in 1978 said Fidel “could have easily been Cuba's Elvis.”
Fontova also discusses Cuban “agents of influence” among those who shape the tone, direction and agenda of public U.S. and global debate from positions in think tanks and academia.
The author's family experience clearly induced in him a passion for exposing the Castro regime's true nature. No single book should be expected to fully offset the image that Che, Fidel — and now, Raul — have so carefully crafted for so long, but “The Longest Romance” should leave its readers much better informed about the reality of the revolution and its aftermath for Cuba and its people.
BREWING UP SUCCESS, BUILDING ON BLOCKS & SHAPING THE MIDEAST
“The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution” by Tom Acitelli (Chicago Review Press) — The author, a regular contributor to brewing-trade magazine All About Beer, traces U.S. craft breweries' proliferation in recent decades back to 1965, when Fritz Maytag, heir to washing-machine and blue-cheese fortunes, saved San Francisco's Anchor Steam from oblivion and improved its recipe. Today, craft breweries are all but a few of the more than 2,700 active U.S. breweries — an all-time record, according to the Beer Institute. This book tells the stories of many leading craft-beer figures, who often found inspiration in beers encountered abroad. Achieving not only bottom-line success — at the expense of bland, mass-market domestic lagers whose “Big Beer” makers have been consolidated into international conglomerates — theirs is a movement that also has burnished American beer's global reputation, fostered more sophisticated American tastes and restored the more locally focused, decentralized nature that characterized the pre-Prohibition U.S. beer industry.
“Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry” by David Robertson with Bill Breen (Crown Business) — The lead author, a Wharton School professor, was the Lego Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland's Institute for Management Development from 2002 through 2010. He had remarkable access to both the family-owned Danish toymaker and partner companies that he draws on for this book. It recounts Lego's turnaround from record losses that threatened its independence a decade ago to become what the publisher calls “one of the world's most profitable, fastest-growing companies” today. It took new management and painful lessons — many applicable beyond the toy business — that taught Lego to include both children and passionate adult fans in product development; rely on both elite expertise and the “wisdom of crowds;” find new, uncontested markets; and balance design teams' direction and creative freedom to make innovation profitable.
“Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East” by Scott Anderson (Doubleday) — This book, billed by the publisher as one that “definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed,” explores the real story of former archeologist T.E. Lawrence, who created that “received wisdom” about the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Turks and his role therein. The revolt actually was led by Mecca's Hashemite family; the British and French backed it, rewarding the Hashemites by making them rulers of post-war creations Transjordan (today's Jordan) and Iraq, and of Arabia's Hijaz region before their ouster by the founder of Saudi Arabia. But with his “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” Lawrence set the dominant narrative, which the epic movie “Lawrence of Arabia” reinforced. The book places him in historical context along with obscure German, Jewish and American figures, interweaving his story with theirs.
Alan Wallace is a Trib Total Media editorial page writer (412-320-7983 or awallace@tribweb.com).
