Remember When the United States Media Presented Fidel Castro As A Hero Back In 1957?

(Fidel Castro arrives MATS Terminal, Washington, D.C., c. 1959, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

In December, 1956, Fidel Castro and more than eighty armed guerrilla fighters disembarked their ship, the Granma, and landed in a swampy area of Cuba near the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Despite their subtlety, Castro’s landing did not go unnoticed—military forces loyal to Cuba’s military dictator, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, were already there to intercept the guerrillas. In the intense firefight that followed, around fifty of Castro’s men were killed. The rest of the survivors fled to the mountains, where they regrouped, reorganized and began recruiting.

After the initial bloody skirmish, the Cuban military pumped out heaps of propaganda claiming that Fidel Castro and other revolutionary leader were all dead. One United States reporter, however, would soon disprove the military’s claims after an interview with Castro, face-to-face.

On February 24, 1957, The New York Times published the first of Herbert L. Matthews’ three articles about the situation in Cuba. The first article was given huge coverage—it was the headline on the newspaper’s front page. With modern hindsight, the observations and descriptions given by the reporter about Castro are endlessly ironic and even humorous.

Before describing his meeting with Castro, Matthews gave a brief description of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement. He described the rebels as a youthful socialist and nationalist group that, while not very warm to the United Sates, was also anti-communist. Their goal, he claimed, was to topple Gen. Batista and reinstitute a constitutional democracy. At the time of Matthews’ article, this was actually a fairly accurate description for portions of the movement. Many revolutionaries were solely focused on ousting Batista and restoring democracy—only after Fidel Castro was in power would the more democratic revolutionaries be arrested, made to mysteriously disappear, forced into exile, or simply massacred. Yet, that is a digression from this particular story.

Along with his wife, Matthews worked with the Cuban revolutionary network near the Sierra Maestra Mountains to gain an audience with Fidel Castro. The rebels advised Matthews to bring his wife along for the journey, so that the military roadblocks would find the reporter less suspicious. After they passed the checkpoints, Matthew’s wife was left at the home of a warm and hospitable Castro sympathizer. From there the reporter posed as an American sugarcane plantation owner, with a rebel acting as his interpreter. Together, they trudged through flooded fields until they reached the mountains, where they searched for Castro’s scouts. Matthew’s guide repeatedly signaled with two low whistles, until two responding notes were heard in the distance. The scouts then led Matthews to an outpost where the Castro brothers soon arrived for their interview.

In his article, the reporter lavished the rebels with an abundance of praise. He appreciated their generous hospitality. He enjoyed their simple, but delicious, food and drink. Even a blanket he was given by the rebels was praised as luxurious. To top it all off, Fidel Castro brought Cuban cigars to the interview. In these accommodations, Matthews and Castro sat down for a hopeful conversation about the future of Cuba. Unfortunately, many of Castro’s responses turned out to be misleading propaganda.

In his interview with Matthews, Castro commented that he had no ill will toward the United States or its people. His only verbal attack against the U.S. in the interview was criticism over United States weapon shipments to Gen. Batista, a practice that the U.S. ended in 1958. Castro and his men went on to claim that they always paid for any materials that they commandeered from the countryside. The rebels even reported to Matthews that their policy toward captured soldiers was to simply disarm and release them.

Matthews challenged very little, if any, of Castro’s claims in his article, and the United States people, at that time, had a fairly positive attitude toward Fidel Castro—he was seen by many at as a modern Robin Hood figure, a man who used disreputable tactics to achieve honorable goals. United States respect for Castro would eventually plummet, however, as the dictator allied himself closer and closer to the Soviet Union as the Cold War continued to rise in tension.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• The Cuba Libre Story. Documentary series published by Netflix, 2016. 
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fidel-Castro 
• http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/matthews/matthews022457.pdf#page=2&zoom=auto,-65,417  

Torture in the Spanish Civil War

(Soldiers on their way to the front during the Spanish Civil War, c. 1936-1939, [Pubic Domain] via Creative Commons and Flickr)

A Horrid War

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was an astoundingly brutal war. Fueled by a frenzied hate between opposite political spheres, the civil war was filled with torture, executions and all sorts of ugly atrocities on both sides of the conflict. For those who have not studied the Spanish Civil War, here is a brief description of the sides involved in the conflict. The war began when a large conservative contingent of the Spanish military (eventually led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco) rebelled against the left-wing government of the Second Spanish Republic. To the confusion of many readers from the United States, historians often label the supporters of the left-wing government in the war as ‘Republicans’ and Franco’s forces are often called the ‘Rebels’ or the ‘Nationalists.’

While hardly any war can be called pleasant to study, the Spanish Civil War is an especially discouraging topic. Some historians and statisticians propose that around the same number of people died off the battlefield as those who fell on the war front. Possibly 200,000 deaths were caused by regular warfare, and another 200,000 caused by execution, terror and reprisals. While unimaginable violence, murder and post-mortem mutilation was prevalent in the Spanish Civil War (again, on both sides) this short article will focus on another gruesome topic—torture.

The first problem posed by this undertaking is how to define torture. That is a question still very much in debate, today. For the purpose of this article, an act will be labeled as ‘torture’ when violence and pain was inflicted on a victim with an intention of not merely causing punishment or death, but of a prolonged, unjustifiable suffering, both physically and mentally. Fair warning: some of the acts described below will likely be disturbing. They will escalate from the least gruesome to the most horrific, some ending in a slow, drawn-out death.

Humiliation and Beatings

Franco’s forces had a standard torture that was used prevalently throughout the war—victims were forced to drink castor oil (often mixed with sawdust or dry crumbs) to cause severe abdominal pain. After the victims drank the oil, they were usually beaten, shot, or both. Another common torture used by Franco’s troops involved shaving women’s heads, sometimes leaving only a tuft on which they would tie a ribbon. Many of these women would also be forcibly separated from their children—a simple, but extremely effective torture.

Sexual and Psychological Torture

In Republican territory, religion came under heavy attack. Priests and military officers were frequent victims of torture and execution. Monks and priests were often stripped naked and paraded around, or driven through rough and jagged terrain. There are many accounts of priests being tortured through mutilation and castration of the genitals. Nuns, for the most part, were spared horrific death—but that did not mean they were safe. There were multiple (but fairly rare) accounts of nuns being sexually tortured, raped and murdered. In one of the worst incidents, five nuns were attacked in Riudarenes village, Girona. Three other holy women suffered at Peralto de la Sal in 1936.

Franco’s soldiers surpassed the Republicans in rape. There are accounts of captured women being locked in rooms with twenty-to-fifty hardened, merciless soldiers who had lost any sense of morality in Spain’s brutal colonial wars in Morocco. John T. Whitaker recorded one soldier’s observation after two captured women were handed over to around 40 soldiers from Morocco: “Oh, they’ll not live more than four hours” (Whitaker, We Cannot Escape History). The soldiers also seemed to use some intense psychological torture, as there are reports of victims being driven to commit suicide.

Dismemberment And Graves

The Republicans, too, would inflict psychological terror on their victims. There are accounts of prisoners being forced to dig their own graves, after which they would be killed with their own pickaxes or shovels. The Republican executioner, Santiago Aliques Bermúdez, is known to have used this particular method of execution. There was also at least one account of nuns being dismembered, and priests, as said earlier, often were put under the knife, with the extreme being the amputation of their genitalia and the possibly of decapitation.

Franco’s troops matched the Republicans here, too. In one instance, a military chaplain named Juan Galán Bermejo captured five people (one was a woman) in a cave. Convinced they were Republicans, the chaplain—who was a deputy priest of the Church of La Candelaria—had his captives dig their own graves. When the graves were dug, he shot them and buried his victims while they were still alive. As for dismemberment, the execution of Juan Sosa Hormigo in January of 1937 demonstrates the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. He had basically been drawn and quartered—his arms and legs had been ripped from his body.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.  
• Franco: A Personal and Political Biography by Stanley Payne and Jesús Palacios. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

The Amusing Stalking Horse Method Of Hunting

(Gaston Phoebus, “Livre de Chasse” (1387), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Hunters will often do odd things to approach their prey—they dress up like foliage, imitate strange animal sounds and climb into precarious tree stands. Yet, one of the most bizarre hunting methods ever used was the stalking horse, a technique definitely practiced in the Middle Ages. The concept, however, probably has been around since the days horses were tamed and first used in hunting. In modern times, however, political scientists and economists have cruelly hijacked the term,  “stalking horse,” for their own theories, but let’s get back to the history of this peculiar hunting technique.

The concept of the stalking horse is simple—wild game is more afraid of humans than horses. Therefore, hunters started to creep up (‘stalking’, if you will) on the unsuspecting animals by keeping the horse between the hunter and the hunted. By using the horse as a screen, the hunter could supposedly get much closer to the prey than if the horse was absent.

Of course, humans love to build and improve; so new versions of the stalking horse were invented. Real horses were interchanged for various horse-shaped decoys and illusions. Some of these decoys were just wooden or canvas screens the hunter could hide behind, but there were also cloth stalking horse suits that the hunter could wear to approach unsuspecting prey, probably with the addition of some added scent to make the stalking horse actually smell like a genuine horse.

Unfortunately, not much information remains about the medieval and ancient uses of the stalking horse, and even fewer sketches or paintings have survived. Nevertheless, a few of the public domain images we managed to find are included below.

  (Image extracted from page 215 of Life on the Upper Thames …, by ROBERTSON, Henry Robert, c. 1875, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

  (Image of a Stalking Horse from Life on the Upper Thames by ROBERTSON, Henry Robert, c. 1875, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Sources: 

• Going Medieval (Documentary). Written by Mike Loades and directed by David Hutt. History Channel/Lion Television, 2012.  
• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stalking%20horse 
• http://www.epsilontheory.com/notes/stalking-horse/ 
• http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2003/09/what_exactly_is_a_stalking_horse.html 
• http://www.thefreedictionary.com/stalking-horse  

Adolf Hitler Was Sleeping On The Job At The Onset of D-Day

(Landing ships putting cargo ashore on Omaha Beach, at low tide during the first days of the operation, mid-June, 1944, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

During the night of June 5, 1944, Allied aircraft dropped paratroopers inland in Normandy. Their mission was to disrupt and hinder German reinforcements from reaching the coast, for one of the most diligently planned invasions in military history was about to occur. By the dawn of the next day, American, British, Canadian and other forces would invade the Norman beaches labeled (from east to west) Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah. The key event leading to the success of Operation Overlord—the battle for Normandy—was about to take place; D-Day, perhaps the most famous military operation of World War Two, had finally arrived.

The Allies could hardly have found a better day to attack Normandy. On June 6, the German forces in Normandy were surprisingly leaderless. Erwin Rommel, who had overseen the construction of Normandy’s iconic defenses and obstacles, was away in mainland Germany to see his family. Similarly, many officers and division commanders were away from their posts to participate in war games. Nevertheless, Allied forces were spotted by German scouts as early as 0400 hours (4:00 A.M.), but very little was done with the information.

The German defense of Normandy was also crippled by none other than Germany’s own Führer. Adolf Hitler maintained enormous control over the German reserve divisions. When messages were sent to Hitler (again, around 0400 hours) in the early morning, reporting of an Allied attack at Normandy, the Führer was still sound asleep. General Alfred Jodl, the chief of operations who received the report from Normandy, was terrified at the thought of waking Hitler from his slumber. Therefore, he did not act on the request for reinforcements to be sent to Normandy, hoping that the Führer would soon wake and release the reserves.

Once Hitler was finally awake and informed of the attack at Normandy, he largely disregarded the information. He believed the attack was a feint—a decoy—to distract German defenses from a larger invasion near Calais. The German high command was so cautious that they hesitated until the afternoon of June 6 to give the 21st Panzer Division approval to reinforce Normandy.

By this point, however, it was too late to push the Allies back to the English Channel. At the end of June 6 (D+1), it is believed that around 177,000 Allied troops had poured into Normandy.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• Warfare in the Western World: Military Operations Since 1871(Volume II), by Robert A. Doughty and Ira D. Gruber et al. Massachusetts: D. C. heath and Company.  
• https://www.britannica.com/event/Normandy-Invasion 
• http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/d-day  
• https://www.army.mil/d-day/

A Traditional Ancient Bard Would Need Around 50 Hours To Completely Sing Homer’s Epics, The Iliad And The Odyssey

(A Reading of Homer, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema  (1836–1912), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

The great works of Homer were written in an oral style, which was traditionally sung or chanted by bards. The carefully crafted hexameter lines of poetry could be accompanied by music to summon more drama and emotion from the audience. Historians are unsure whether Homer intended The Iliad and The Odyssey to be narrated out loud, or if the poems were written in an oral style merely because Homer was comfortable and familiar with that format. Either way, if a bard did choose to narrate Homer’s two lengthy epics, it would take a formidable amount of time to accomplish the task.

Generally speaking, The Iliad has around 15,000 lines of poetry. In addition, the continuation of the story in The Odyssey consists of around 12,000 more lines of poetry. According to Peter Jones, who worked on the Penguin Classic translations of Homer’s works, the average bard would need around thirty hours to completely sing The Iliad and then another approximate twenty hours to perform The Odyssey. With an average minimum time of about fifty hours, completing Homer’s epics would be a daunting challenge for any live performer.

If, by chance, ancient Greek bards did indeed chant or sing Homer’s poetry, historians hypothesize that these performances would have only been witnessed by the elite and wealthy that could afford a bard for days at a time. One of the more plausible scenarios is that a bard would perform the epic poems piecemeal, over a long span of time, perhaps, singing a chapter every evening during or after the employer’s meal, until the poems were completed.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Source:

• The Iliad by Homer, translated by E. V. Rieu and edited by Peter Jones. New York: Penguin Classics, 2014. 
• The Odyssey by Homer, translated by E. V. Rieu and edited by D. C. H. Rieu. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009.  

According To Ancient Legend, Multiple People Supposedly Attempted, And Succeeded, In Committing Suicide By Drinking Bull’s Blood

(Blood graphic and bull statue, both Public Domain via Pixabay)

Despite bull’s blood not being innately poisonous—unless laden with bacteria or disease—stories of death by bull’s blood, surprisingly, recurred in ancient sources more than you may initially think. This bloody method of ancient suicide continues to baffle historians to this day. Some believe “bull’s blood” may have been a nickname for another poisonous substance. Others propose that the ancients believed the quick coagulation and clotting of bull’s blood would be deadly if ingested while fresh. Perhaps, it was a choking hazard, or the quick thickening of the blood could damage a person’s innards. Still, other historians argue that the whole bull’s blood idea was simply a legend that storytellers loved to repeat because of its immense shock-value and vivid imagery—coagulating, metallic-smelling, warm blood and all that…

Nevertheless, a slew of ancient sources seemed to believe the idea that bull’s blood was deadly. Among these were Pliny, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Plutarch and Diodorus. Two stories come to mind about historical figures dying by bull’s blood. One is the Athenian statesman and military leader, Themistocles—many of the aforementioned sources claimed he committed suicide by drinking the blood of a bull after he was exiled from Greece. The other historical figure is Psamtik III of Egypt, who, according to Herodotus, also killed himself by drinking bull’s blood some time after Egypt fell to Cambyses II of Persia, near the end of the 6th century BCE.

Modern commentators, however, all seem to agree that bull’s blood would have been largely useless and ineffective as a poison. Yet, the bizarre idea of death by ingesting bull’s blood continues to fill our imaginations with odd and grotesque mental imagery, just as it must have for the many ancient sources that kept the peculiar legend alive.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• The Histories by Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and revised by John Marincola. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.  
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Psamtik-III 
• http://www.ancient.eu/Themistocles/  
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cambyses-II 
• http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/CP/27/2/Poisoning*.html  
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/643228?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents