"Fidel Castro is a genius!" gushed Jack Nicholson after a visit with the Cuban Fuhrer in 1998. "We spoke about everything," the actor rhapsodized further. "Castro is a humanist like President Clinton. Cuba is simply a paradise!"
Jack Nicholson has been saying such things for years now. Many of his Hollywood cohorts follow suit. Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Costner, Steven Spielberg, Woody Harrelson, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Leo DiCaprio, Chevy Chase and Robert Redford, among many others, have all waxed euphoric on Castro and his island prison.
While holding up the book "
Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant" on his TV show, Bill O'Reilly called these celebs "Hollywood pinheads."
But there might be more to these celebrity plugs for a tyrant who jailed more of his subjects than did Hitler or Stalin than the usual celebrity vacuity upstairs.
"My job was to bug their hotel rooms," says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez. "With both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself."
And according to some sources, Havana, given the desperation of its brutalized and impoverished residents, has recently topped Bangkok as the world mecca for child sex.
"He [Delfin Fernandez] has not only met some of the most famous men in the world," says the London Daily Mirror about the Cuban defector, "he's also spied on them and been witness to some of their most innermost secrets."
"When the celebrity visitors arrived at the hotels Nacional, Melia Habana and Melia Cohiba," says Fernandez, "we already had their rooms completely bugged with sophisticated taping equipment. But not just the rooms, we'd also follow the visitors around. Sometimes we covered them 24 hours a day. They had no idea we were tailing them."
Famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was a special target for this bugging, but nothing of value for Castro came of it. "Everybody already knows I'm a maricon!" Almodovar laughed at Castro's blackmailers. "So go right ahead! Knock yourselves out!"
"Fidel Castro is a special connoisseur of these tapings and videos," Fernandez says. "Especially of the really famous."
And not even his closest "friends" are safe from this bugging. The best example is Castro's longtime "friend" Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In what appeared as a touching act of generosity and friendship, Castro gave his friend "Gabo" his very own [stolen] mansion in Havana.
"We had remodeled it right before," remembers intelligence honcho Fernandez, "and we installed more cables for bugging devices than for the normal electrical appliances. We taped EVERYTHING! Fidel doesn't trust ANYONE."
Castro's top intelligence people would gather for the screenings of these tapes almost like Hollywood types for an upcoming movie. "Hmmmm, these scenes are more scandalous than anything in any of her movies!" Fernandez recalls a top intelligence officer chortling while watching the nighttime cavortings of a famous Spanish actress.
"Now it really seems to me, companeros," the Castro intimate chortled as he looked around the room, "that this senora should be making more respectful comments about our regime, right?"
"But famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro's intelligence," says Fernandez. "When word came down that models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss were coming to Cuba, the order was a routine one: 24-hour-a-day vigilance. Then we got a PRIORITY alert," recalls Fernandez, "because there was a rumor that they would be sharing a room with Leonardo DiCaprio. The rumor set off a flurry of activity, and we set up the most sophisticated devices we had."
"The American actor Jack Nicholson was another celebrity who was bugged and taped THOROUGHLY during his stay in the hotel Melia Cohiba," states Fernandez, the man in charge of the bugging.
Turns out, however, that at least one visiting dignitary foiled Castro's intelligence. On his visit to Cuba in 1998, Pope John Paul II's assistants discovered and removed several bugging devices from His Holiness' hotel room.
Perhaps Castro had a grudge against the papacy. Most don't recall, but in Janurary 1962 Pope John XXIII ex-communicated Fidel Castro from the Catholic Church. It seemed fitting, considering the hundreds of Cuban men and boys crumpling to Castro's firing squads while yelling "Long Live Christ the King!" during their last seconds alive.
