“To support and honor womankind Pomelatto and The New York Times collaborate to spread a message of positive female empowerment for International Women's Day. Through a NYT article (and video) detailing important milestones in the women's movement…with an international cast of powerful women (prominently including Jane Fonda), the new partnership champions female achievements, leadership, and gender equality.”
“What makes me angry are bullies & liars who are in control,” declares an earnest-looking Hanoi Jane in the Pomelatto/New York Times video.
Fine, Ms Fonda and New York Times, let’s talk about some bullies and liars:
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed 35,150 Cuban women (many of them actually girls in their late teens) for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown--not only in Cuba--but in the Western Hemisphere. This is the regime hailed by so many western “feminists.” Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.
And yet here’s the New York Times: “Fidel Castro is one of the most extraordinary men of our age…Cuba is now a happy island,” (Herbert Matthews, The New York Times, 1959.)
And yet here’s Jane Fonda: “My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.” (Jane Fonda as quoted by her biographer Patricia Bosworth.)
Indeed, what could be more appropriate than champions of the Stalinist regime that jailed and tortured the most and longest-suffering women political prisoners in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere collaborating to celebrate female achievements?
What examples in modern history could define “female empowerment and achievements” better than how so many of the Castro regime’s long and horribly tortured women political prisoners have “gotten their groove back” upon again breathing freedom in the U.S. ?
Wouldn’t these ladies (many of them residing nowadays within a short Uber ride from mainstream media and women’s chat-show studios) make absolutely IDEAL examples of “female empowerment and achievements”?
HAH! Don’t be ABSURD! Instead of these ladies, we get Jane Fonda and The New York Times, who qualify as among modern history’s top media and celebrity champions of these ladies’ JAILERS and TORTURERS!
And regarding your carnal lament, Ms Fonda? Read carefully here, honey, for some consolation:
“I used to call him El Gallo (the rooster)” recalled Carlos Figueroa who was Ernesto Guevara’s adolescent friend in Alta Gracia, Argentina. “I’d be visiting him and eating in his family’s dining room and whenever the poor servant girl would enter Ernesto would promptly grab her and force her to lay on the dining room table where he’d have rapid intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he’d throw her out and continue eating as if nothing had happened.”
“Es un gallo—un gallo! (He’s a rooster!—rooster!”) complained a scowling Berta Gonzalez a few years later upon emerging from her Mexico City bedroom summer of 1955. This was shortly after his Motorcycle Diary trip, when the pathetic failure and hobo Ernesto Guevara was scribbling unreadable poetry and mooching off women in Mexico City, where he met Fidel and Raul Castro. Berta Gonzalez was a Cuban exile in Mexico at the time.
Gallo, as you might have guessed, amigos and amigas, is a common pejorative by Spanish-speaking women against men who culminate carnal encounters prematurely….Comprende?
But enough about Jane Fonda’s lament.
The prison conditions of the women jailed and tortured in Cuba were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo: "The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high."
Many of these heroic ladies, including Ana Rodriguez, Miriam Ortega, Georgina Cid, Caridad Roque, Mercedes Pena, Aída Díaz Morejón, Ana Lázara Rodríguez, Ágata Villarquide, Alicia del Busto, amd Ileana Curra live in the U.S. today.
But no producer for Oprah or Joy Behar or Katie Couric, none from the Lifetime or Oxygen TV--much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either.
“The national media has never shown the slightest interest in any of our stories,” shrugs Caridad Roque from Miami today. Ms Roque was arrested by Castro’s KGB- trained police at the age of 19 and suffered 16 years of prison and torture in Cuba.
Ms Roque’s torturer, on the other hand, has been fawningly interviewed by feminists from Barbara Walters to Andrea Mitchell and from Maria Shriver to Oriana Fallaci. On a visit to Cuba in 2002 Feminist pioneer Carole King (prominent in most “Women’s Marches”) sang Fidel Castro a personal and heartfelt “You’ve Got a Friend.”
On Christmas Eve of 1961 a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Castro’s Soviet-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding "bandits" (Cubans who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet–style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that International Women’s Day was first celebrated in the Soviet Union.