[Here we see someone exposing some of the facts, as per Amnesty International, regarding Saint Nelson Mandela. Jan]

Black History Month ignored genuine black heroes

Humberto Fontova
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 27 March 2006

February, known lately as Black History Month, has come and gone while the mainstream media showcased quite a cast of worthies for us. Malcolm X didn™t mince words. œI™m not an American! he sputtered, œAmerica is a nightmare! America practices slavery! The white man is the common enemy! Naturally, Time magazine heralded him to the high heavens during Black History Month.

Harry Belafonte lays it on the line, œBush is the greatest tyrant in the world ” the greatest terrorist in the world! To commemorate Black History Month, Viacom™s TV Land network conducted a reverential one hour chat with Belafonte. Father of the Black Panthers, Stokley Carmichael, was quite explicit: œBlack people should shoot the hell out of all the white people! Carmichael got his kudos and high-fives from National Public Radio.

The unenlightened might consider Nelson Mandela an ingrate when a week after President Bush awarded him America’s highest governmental award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he bellowed: œIf there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America! As you might guess, during Black History Month, hosannas to Mandela were all over the place. I can™t list them all.

From the History Channel to CNN to A&E™s œBiography all of these worthy gentlemen and many more from Danny Glover to Louis Farakhan, to P Diddy received reverential treatment during Black History Month. Their ample œcontributions to civil rights were all catalogued, their speeches quoted, their œcourage, hailed.

No mention by any of the networks of the following, however: œNelson Mandela participated in planning acts of sabotage and inciting violence, so that he could no longer fulfill the criteria for the classification of political prisoners. That’s Amnesty International, not exactly an outpost of the racist White Wing conspiracy.

And no mention that: œThe preparation, manufacture and use of explosives, including 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminum powder and a ton of black powder, 193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963, is what got Saint Mandela jugged in the first place.

Among other choice Nelson Mandela-isms, œThe cause of Communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind! (1961). œThere™s one place where Fidel Castro stands out head and shoulders above the rest ” that is in his love for human rights and liberty! Saint Mandela promulgated that gem as Castro awarded him Cuba™s prestigious œPlaya Giron Award in 1984. œPlaya Giron” by the way, is Cuban for œThe Bay of Pigs, which makes the ironies all the more nauseating.

Don™t look for this in the mainstream media, but the second in command who hit that heroic beachhead to free Cuba from Castroism was a black Cuban (and today a proud U.S. citizen and retired major general of the U.S. Amy) named Erneido Oliva. He was completely abandoned by the Best and Brightest who dumped him and his men on that beachhead with only light arms and no air cover. Oliva™s men were outnumbered 30 to one by Castro™s Soviet led and supplied troops, who had swarms of Soviet T-34 Tanks and jets overhead.

On the third day of unrelenting battle Oliva™s men were virtually out of ammo for their carbines and the battlefield horrors were taking their toll. Crazed by hunger and thirst, they™d been shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. Many were hallucinating. By then they knew damn well they’d been abandoned.

That™s when Castro™s Soviet Howitzers opened up, huge 122mm ones, four batteries™ worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into Oliva™s men over a four-hour period. œIt sounded like the end of the world, one said later. œRommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment, wrote Haynes Johnson in his book, the Bay of Pigs. By that time the freedom-fighters were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders.

But these men were in no mood to emulate Rommel™s crack Afrika Corps by retreating. Instead they were fortified by a resolve no conquering troops could ever call upon ” the burning duty to free their nation, to free their very families. They™d seen Communism point-blank: stealing, lying, jailing, poisoning minds, murdering. They™d seen the midnight raids, the drumbeat trials. They™d heard the chilling œFUEGO! as Castro™s firing squads murdered thousands of brave countrymen. More importantly, they heard the œViva Cuba Libre! from the bound and blindfolded patriots, right before the bullets ripped them apart.

They set their jaws and resolved to smash this murderous barbarism that was ravaging their homeland. And they went at it with a vengeance. Their commander, Oliva, had to scream over that hellish Soviet bombardment but he made himself heard: œTHERE IS NO RETREAT, CARAJO! Oliva stood and bellowed to his dazed, abandoned and horribly outnumbered men. œWE STAND AND FIGHT!

And so they did ” and wrote as glorious a chapter in military history and the annals of freedom as any you’d care to read.

When his betrayed, decimated, thirst-crazed, and ammo-less men were finally overwhelmed (but NOT defeated!) by Castro’s bumblers at the Bay of Pigs, Oliva snarled at his brainless eunuch of an opponent, Jose Fernandez (a Spaniard, technically), œThe only reason you™re holding a gun on us right now, Fernandez, is because we ran out of ammo.

During almost two years in Castro™s dungeons, Oliva and his men lived under a daily death sentence. Escaping that sentence would have been easy: simply sign the little confession (Communists just love bull ” paperwork!) admitting they were œmercenaries of the Yankee imperialists! or otherwise bashing the U.S.

Neither Oliva nor any of his men signed the document. His hundreds of men stood solidly with their commander. œWe will die with dignity! snapped Oliva at the furious Castroites again, and again, and again. To a Castroite such an attitude not only enrages but baffles.

œA soldier to the bone, that™s former Secretary of State Gen. Alexander Haig referring to Erneido Oliva, whom he worked with in the early (152)˜60s. œOne of the most fiercely honorable men I have ever known.

Eusebio Penalver suffered three times as long in Castro™s Gulag as Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin™s. He suffered longer than Mandela suffered in South Africa™s ” 28 years. He™s the longest serving black political prisoner of the 20th century. So you might think he™d been mentioned during Black History Month at least once during the past 17 years, right?

Wrong! He was Fidel Castro’s prisoner, you see. And that doesn™t count.

Eusebio Penalver could have easily escaped such lengthy suffering by playing Castro™s little game, by agreeing to œrehabilitation classes, by wearing the uniforms of common prisoners, by admitting to being a tool of the œYankee Imperialists. Castro made the offer often.

Castro got his answer as swiftly and as clearly as the German commander who surrounded Bastogne got his. Eusebio scorned any œre-education by his Castroite jailers. He knew it was they who desperately needed it. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was they who should don it. Through almost 30 years of hell in Castro™s dungeons, Eusebio Penalver stood tall, proud and defiant.

œIt sounds strange but no man in Cuba is as free as a political prisoner in rebellion, says longtime Castro political prisoner Francisco Chappi. œWe were tortured, we were starved. But we lived in total defiance.”

œInside of our souls we were free, says another former Castro political prisoner (also Black and today a proud U.S. citizen) named Sergio Carrillo, a paratrooper at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and a Catholic priest in America today. œWe refused to commit spiritual suicide.

Think about it: the very things spouted (with one eye on the media) for sensationalist value by the Black buffoons hailed to high heavens by the mainstream media ” the very idiocies and monkeyshines the MSN hailed as acts of œcourage” by these popinjays, had they been spoken in Castro’s jails by Oliva, Penalver and Carrillo would have ” for all they knew at the time ” saved their lives.

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Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club “Book of the Month” for April. He can be reached at [email protected]

URL: http://www.brookesnews.com/062703fontovabayof…/p>