Falsehood, Injustice and the Un-American Way

You may have been lulled into thinking that the Cold War is over, what with the fall of the Berlin Wall and all. If so, you obviously haven’t been keeping up with 20 de Mayo, a Cuban American weekly published in Los Angeles for the past 30 years.

A column in the paper’s July 3 edition transports us nostalgically to the days of Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, to that vigorous era of blacklists, guilt by association and a Commie under every bed. Columnist Fulgencio Gil purports to unmask three Orange County Cuban Americans who, he suggested, were using a benign scholarship foundation as a cover for the hated dictator himself, Fidel Castro.

“Red pigeons,” the writer labeled the prominent trio. With righteous gusto, Gil rips away the “pink masks” of these young men--a lawyer, a mortgage broker and a Realtor--who run the scholarship fund. He’s not fooled by their fine hairstyles and tasteful attire.

His allegations appear under the alarming headline “Becas Comunistas,” or “Communist Scholarships.” Gil charges that the Cuban American Scholarship Fund was paying students to study at the University of Havana from Marxist texts that denied the existence of God.

His expose was fearless--and groundless.

Gil, his publisher admits, had never interviewed the three men he was accusing of being communists, Victor Cueto, Santiago Martin and Desi Reyes. His entire indictment was based on secondhand reports and a newspaper article that he clearly misunderstood. He wrongly concluded that the scholarship money was being used for study in Cuba, thereby indirectly funding Castro and his “atheist swine (canallas ateos).”

In fact, the scholarships go only to students enrolled in U.S. universities, and organizers don’t ask candidates if they ever plan to study in Cuba. That wouldn’t be right in our free country, now would it? Well, almost free. Amazingly, Americans still have to ask Big Brother for permission to travel to Cuba, unlike the rest of the free world.

It so happens that this year two scholarship recipients had gone there on their own and another told a reporter he intended to. One of them just returned from her semester in Havana and has yet to receive a dime from the maligned scholarship fund.

Her name is Sasha Maria White de las Cobas, 21, a senior on the honor roll at Pennsylvania’s Allegheny College. Sasha was raised by a single mother and got a full scholarship to go to Allegheny. So where did she get the money to go to Cuba?

From her longtime employer, Steven Silverstein, a lawyer from Orange who is an active Republican. Sasha says Silverstein, who’s “like my Jewish godfather,” encouraged her to go because she could learn a lot.

Yes, Sasha read Marx and Lenin in Havana, as she had at Allegheny. But she also read Ayn Rand, the American writer who espoused “rational selfishness” and defended capitalism. Her relatives remaining in Cuba, whom she had never met before, were divided between young critics unhappy with the harsh economic conditions and older, hard-core believers.

“I was there to learn from them,” she says. “I never went with the arrogant attitude that I was going to show them how wonderful we live and how they messed up and stuff.”

Messed up? Oh, that reminds me. Last week, 20 de Mayo published a retraction. It came after the publisher received the threat of a libel suit from an Irvine lawyer representing the three aggrieved do-gooders. Gil’s “clarification,” however, disingenuously blames an Orange County Register story for giving him the wrong impression, although that original story did not say the students used the money to visit Cuba. I guess anti-communism means never really having to say you’re sorry.

Anyway, the damage is done. One of the fund’s biggest backers has already withdrawn its support. F. Gavina & Sons, makers of Don Francisco brand coffee, even returned plaques it had received for its faithful contributions.

Such wild accusations can wound reputations and cripple a worthy cause, says Cueto, who nevertheless vows the fund will continue. He was singled out because he endorsed a performance by the visiting Cuban National Ballet and because he has a friend who travels to Cuba and brings back cigars.

“My anti-communist fervor may be as great as theirs, maybe greater, but I don’t go around labeling people as communists just because they don’t agree with me,” he said.

Sasha sees irony in such divisive attacks by extremists: “They’re persecuting everybody the way they were persecuted at the beginning of the revolution.”

Spoken like a true American.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or online at agustin.gurza@latimes.com.