American Tabloid - James Ellroy [103]
Castro ousted the democratically-elected anti-Communist Cuban Premier Fulgencio Batista last New Year’s day. The bombastic bushy-bearded beatnik bard promised land reforms, social justice and pickled plantains on every plate—the standard stipends of welfare-waffled Commie commissars. He took over a small bastion of freedom 90 miles off U.S. shores, pathologically picked the pockets of patriotic patriarchs, nauseously “nationalized” U.S.-owned hotel-casinos, fried the friendly fragrant fields of the United Fruit Company and generally absconded with astronomical amounts of America’s most peon-protecting, Commie-constraining export: money!!!
Yes, kats and kittens, it all comes down to divinely-deigned dollops of dollars—U.S., of course, those gorgeously garlanded greenbacks replete with pulsatingly powerful Presidential portraits, caricatures captivating in their corrosive condemnation of Communism!!!
Item: the beatnik bard bamboozled beleaguered bellhops at the formerly swank Nacional and Capri hotels in Havana, nastily nationalized their tips and rapidly replaced them with a regiment of rowdy Red regulators—bandy-legged bantamweight bandidos who also serve as crucifyingly-corrupt craps croupiers!
Item: fruit fields frantically french-fried! Peons passionately protected by America’s altruistically-altered egalitarian economy are now welfare-wilted, pauper-periled Red Recidivists grubbing for Commie compensation!
Item: Raul “The Tool” Castro has flamboyantly flooded Florida with hellishly horrific, hophead-hazarding amounts of the demonically deadly “Big H”: Heroin!!!: He’s bent on needle-notching vast legions of Cuban immigrant slaves: zorched-out zombies to spread the cancerous Castro gospel between bouts of Heroin-hiatused, junkie-junketeered euphoria!
Item: there’s a growing number of Cuban exiles and homegrown American patriots who take egregious exception to the beatnik brothers’ broadside of bamboozlement. Right now they’re recruiting in Miami and South Florida. These men are tantalizingly tough tigers who have earned their orange-and-black—not Red—stripes in the jungles of Castro’s jam-packed, jerry-rigged jails. Every day, more and more men like them are arriving on America’s shores, anxious to sing the mellifluous melodies of “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”
This reporter talked to an American named “Big Pete,” a dedicated anti-Communist currently training anti-Castro guerrillas. “It all comes down to patriotism,” Big Pete said. “Do you want a Communist dictatorship 90 miles off our shores or not? I don’t, so I’ve joined the Cuban Freedom Cause. And I’d like to extend an invitation to all Cuban exiles and native-born men of Cuban descent. Join us. If you’re in Miami, ask around. Local Cubans will tell you we mean business.”
Item: with men like Big Pete on the job, Castro should be considering a new career. Hey! I know a few coffeehouses in L.A.’s way-out Venice West who could use a gone beatnik poet like Fidel! Hey, Fidel! Can you dig it, Daddy-O?
Remember, dear reader, you heard it first here: off the record, on the Q.T. and very Hush-Hush.
DOCUMENT INSERT: 10/19/59. Personal Note: J. Edgar Hoover to Howard Hughes.
Dear Howard,
I greatly eryoyed Peerless Politicopundit’s piece in the October 5th issue of Hush-Hush. It was, of course, far-fetched, but subtract the purple prose and what remains is politically substantive.
Lenny Sands has certainly adapted to the Hush-Hush style. And as a fledgling propagandist he shows promise. I found the subliminally-planted plugs for the Tiger Kab Kompany to be a nice little aside to the cognoscenti, and especially eryoyed the lofty sentiments expressed by our pragmatist friend Pierre Bondurant.
All in all, a most salutary issue.
Warmest regards,
Edgar
DOCUMENT INSERT: 10/30/59. Summary Report: John Stanton to Kemper Boyd. Marked: CONFIDENTIAL/HAND POUCH DELIVER.
Dear Kemper,
A short note to keep you advised of some recent policy decisions. You remain hard to reach,