American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [21]
I’d grown up in fear of Fidel Castro. I was young when his revolution took place in 1959, but I remember the propaganda. I vaguely recall hearing about the Bay of Pigs invasion, because it dominated the news when I came home from school. As a kid, the name fascinated me. Why would they name a place after pigs? As an adult, when I started reading books trying to figure out what really happened to President Kennedy, Castro and Cuba of course loomed large: Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his attempt to get a visa to Cuba on a trip to Mexico. So Cuba had fascinated me for years, though I never dreamed I’d have a chance to actually go there, much less to spend an hour with Castro himself.
The last day of our visit, around noon, Castro was waiting for me in a room at the trade fair. I’ve never known a handshake like Castro’s. He comes up to me, winds up, pulls back his hand all the way to his shoulder, and thrusts it out with great excitement. We sat down in two chairs right across from each other. He had his interpreter along, and some of his security people.
The first words out of his mouth were, “You are a man of great courage.”
I was puzzled by this and said, “Well, Mr. President, how can you say that? You don’t know me.”
He looked back at me and said, “Because you defied your president to come here.” I guess he has pretty good “intel.”
And I looked right back at him and said, “Well, Mr. President, you’ll find that I defy most everything.”
Castro laughed. Who knows, maybe he felt this was something we had in common.
The whole conversation, on my part, was in English and interpreted to him by a lady in Spanish. But I don’t think he really needs her. Because now and then, I’d say something that was funny and he’d laugh before the interpretation happened. As good as Castro is at masking the fact, I think he understands English very well. Let’s put it this way: I’m sure he does English far, far better than I do Spanish.
We covered a lot of ground in our conversation. Just as I have great pride in Minnesota, he has the same for Cuba. He was extremely proud of the fact that they have the highest literacy rate of any Latin-American country in the hemisphere. He’s also proud that they have the best medical care. I found him very engaging. He’s a master of hyperbole. I told him that I felt the U.S. boycott was wrong. It did nothing positive for either of our countries, and it was time for America to get over it. His questions of me were mainly about my political future. He was interested in the fact that I was an independent and didn’t belong to either of the two major parties. A kind of rogue element being the governor of a state.
Time passes very quickly when it’s only an hour and you’re sitting with Fidel Castro. He’s so perceptive. At one point I glanced at my watch and immediately Castro said, “I’m sorry, do you have to be somewhere?” I said, “No, sir. But I’m only here a short time with you, and there are some personal questions I wanted to ask you before our hour is up. So I was just checking my watch to see how much more time I had. So—can I ask you one?”
His answer was, “Ask me anything you’d like.”
I told him about how I was only twelve years old when John F. Kennedy was killed. And how later, as an adult, I started studying the murder. I told him that I came to not believe the Warren Commission, or what my country has portrayed as what happened. I said, “Naturally, in studying this, there are a few scenarios where you come up very strongly as being a part of it, that Oswald was somehow linked to you. You were around