“Top Cuban Communist Party official with eternal allegiance to Fidel Castro to address NYC Bar Association,” headlined the New York Post this week. Yamila Gonzalez Ferrer — the vice president of the National Union of Cuban Jurists and member of the Cuban National Assembly will discuss 'the newest developments in Cuba’s public health law'…Ferrer, 54, is enjoined by Cuba’s 'Code of Ethics of jurists' to 'be faithful to the ethical principles emanating from the history of the Cuban nation of the Communist Party of Cuba' and to be faithful to the teachings of Fidel and Raul Castro.”
Given former President Trump’s recent legal issues with so many New York City “jurists,” might this invitation reflect on the legal convictions and/or aspirations of many of its members?
After all, Cuba’s legal system was imported lock, stock and barrel from Stalin’s. "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime," famously quipped Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria.
But there’s no need to go back so far in history. "I don't need proof to execute a man," snapped the Castro regime’s co-founder Che Guevara to a judicial underling in 1959. "I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him!"
If only the New York City Bar Association had visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from The New York Times to the London Observer - when every pundit from Walter Lippmann to Ed Murrow, every author from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious events since VJ day.
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," they’d have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The firing-squad wall)!"
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To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed, two years later he featured several recently liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters - some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs - on his show for a fundraiser where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.
Che Guevara, co-founder of the very regime the New York City Bar Association just invited to address them with its judiciary wisdom, famously boasted that: "we execute from revolutionary conviction!" Edwin Tetlow, Havana correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph, reported on a mass "trial" orchestrated by Che Guevara in early 1959 where Tetlow noticed the death sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.
Harvard Law School (no less!) merits special attention regarding the celebration of Castroite legal procedures, and from April 1959, well before “woke” and “affirmative action’’ policies kicked in. To wit:
By April 1959, almost a thousand Cubans had been “judged” (see above) and murdered by Castro and Che’s firing squads. Cuba’s prisons were packed to suffocation with ten times the number of political prisoners as during “the Tyrant” Batista’s reign. Among Castro and Che Guevara’s prisoners were hundreds of women, a Stalinist horror utterly unknown in our hemisphere until it was introduced by the “leader” swooned over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and many other “feminists.” Furthermore, the death penalty was being applied retroactively (none had existed under the unspeakable Batista regime).
Habeas Corpus had also been abolished. Cuban defense lawyers attempting to defend the accused were being jailed themselves. That’s when Fidel Castro received a fawning invitation from Harvard Law School asking the honor of his addressing them. Seems that both the student body and faculty were smitten with the Cuban Revolution’s shining judicial record. Castro accepted on the spot, making Harvard the last gig on his 1959 US tour.
“Castro Visit Triumphant!” headlined Harvard’s Law School Forum for April 30, 1959. “The audience got what it wanted: the chance of seeing the Cuban hero in person!”
“Viva Fidel!” roared these fervent foes of capital punishment and double jeopardy upon first glimpsing their hero. Though the adoring crowd was too enormous to fit into any campus arena they remained chipper, “even if we didn’t see Castro at as close a range as might have been desired,” an attendee was quoted as saying.
Interestingly, Fidel Castro had actually applied to Harvard Law School in 1948. This was brought to light by Harvard’s Arts and Sciences Dean, McGeorge Bundy, (later to serve as JFK’s national security advisor). “Caught up in the exuberance of the event,” continues the Harvard Law Forum, “Harvard Dean, McGeorge Bundy, declared that Harvard was ready to make amends for its mistake in 1948. ‘I’ve decided to admit him!’ declared Dean Bundy.”
“Viva Fidel!” The Dean’s quip brought the house down and shook the very roof. “Viva Fidel!” roared and cheered the cream of America’s law students (and their faculty).
Alas, given the law of averages, an independent thinker was bound to pop up—even among ten thousand Harvard students and faculty. One such wiseacre brought up the questionable legal procedures preceding those hundreds of executions in Cuba.
“If the defendant has a right to appeal,” answered a smirking Castro, “then so do the people! And don’t forget, Cuba’s is the only people’s revolution in Latin America!”
Well, this assembly of America’s most nimble verbal gladiators went absolutely wild over Castro’s brilliant riposte. They erupted again, roaring and whooping at the mass-murderer’s incontestable rejoinder. This creme de la creme of America’s most cunning ratiocinators found the Stalinist’s logic not only perfectly airtight but positively dazzling in its ingenuity and completely sound in its principle of justice!
A delirious pandemonium swept the hall as America’s most ingenious and best-tutored law students (along with their tutors) went absolutely berserk with veneration and joy at this point-blank elucidation of Castroite justice.
Similar receptions had come at the National Press Club, Overseas Press Club, United Nations, and on Meet the Press. Not one heckler from among America’s brightest and cheekiest college kids. Not one rebuttal from America’s biggest assemblies of its top journalists. Not one snigger or frown from the top cut of America’s “adversarial” press. Not one raised eyebrow from the nation’s most hard-boiled “investigative reporters.”
In sum, most Cuba watchers know that “Fake News” by the mainstream media and the eastern establishment is hardly a recent phenomenon.
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