When La Babwa Metfidel
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television WHEN LA BABWA METFIDEL BY MARVIN KITMAN AS Fidel Castro kicked off his campaign to undermine the American people through the medium of their own TV sets the night of June 9, the...
...He is no authority on television...
...Don't be surprised if he breaks into a Desi Arnaz imitation to grab the audience," warned noted Cubanologist Lewis Cheseler...
...Also, she deliberately made herself look very girlish and silly...
...We're lucky no one at the network thought five or six hours was needed to capture the man's true flavor...
...Still, it unnerved me to realize that only an intensive Berlitz course stands in the way of Castro's takeover of the free world...
...Bill Moyers' remarkable documentary was extremely old-fashioned: It made you feel outrage about the widespread indifference to violations of our traditional sense of fair play...
...Speaking a foreign language on American TV automatically requires the presence of a translator...
...For two hours Moyers and associate George Crile III told how the CIA had engineered, primarily through the emigre community in Miami, the many plots to kill Castro and undermine the Cuban revolution...
...If nothing else, one can praise Moyers' loyalty to his old boss, although he would probably resent it, arguing that the Johnson Administration didn't know anything about the affair and that it was too preoccupied with its own infamous dealings in Vietnam...
...She more than held her own against the feared Communist demagogue...
...Yet she was glad to do it for her country...
...If i seem a little paranoid about the CIA, it's probably due to that week's second program on Castro and Cuba, CBS Reports: The CIAs Secret Army (June 10...
...The very clever plot called for Barbara to go to Cuba within 12 months and ask Castro questions the CIA couldn't get answered through normal channels...
...Replaying the show, as I've done six or seven times on my Sony videotape machine, I can truly appreciate what a remarkable job she did upholding her country's honor...
...Watching Walters toss her objective-journalist image out the window was thrilling, too...
...There I go being paranoid again...
...The assassination bureaucracy that grew over the years, the program suggested, may have been JFK and RFK's fault...
...Smile a lot...
...Too bad this wasn't public television, where Moyers could assume his Boy Scout air and explain away all the hanky-panky...
...For Castro, 60 minutes on the tube is the equivalent of having one lip tied behind him...
...And everybody knows what a cigar is a euphemism for...
...While I approve of rerunning the Moyers show, I can't help being a little resentful...
...The nation's leading investigative reporter, La Babwa flew to Havana for what her network, ABC, had scheduled as a half-hour show...
...They break for mass on Sunday morning, and the guest is thanked for taking time off to stop by the studio sometime late Sunday evening, when the interview ends...
...Schlesinger objected to Moyers' perspective on Kennedy...
...This would remind us who to root for in TV's colossal confrontation of the year...
...Are we the first Americans on the Bay of Pigs since the invasion...
...I suppose older people had the same reaction to Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame...
...Am I married...
...The second advantage the free world had was the language barrier...
...The American people would not do that," La Babwa cooed at him, looking up into his eyes...
...Lately, there has been a loud clamor to rerun the Moyers piece...
...The Communist leader announced that he would answer only one or two questions in English...
...They were glued to their tacky little entertainment programs, like Quincy on NBC, which thanks to Moyers' two-hour documentary (the opposition) got its highest Nielsen ratings ever...
...On public television, they always rerun documentaries a day or two later...
...Walters is very brave to have used this ploy...
...Whatever, ABC gave in to Castro's wishes, seemingly unconcerned that he could say such things to the audience in Spanish as, "Come over to our side, gringo pigs...
...In fact, translators doom a video show...
...I kept expecting her to rub noses with him any minute and say, "Que pasa, big boy...
...He was on the verge of offering her a cigar...
...La Babwa bawlked: She was determined to grill Castro until well done, and eventually ABC gave her a whole hour for Fidel Castro Speaks...
...Look at his shoes...
...Why do you think More cigarettes sell so well...
...Of what interest is that to the American people...
...Barbara could ask him 'What do you think of the African intrusion?' and Castro could suddenly blurt out 'Ay-yi-ay-yi' and sing 'Babalu.' It would bring the American people to its knees...
...to turn Socialist as if she were not merely an ordinary overpaid TV newscaster, but the chosen representative of the American people...
...Shuffle papers...
...Viewers want to see it because they have heard a lot of people talking about it...
...I had been scoffing at Fidel's charges as early as the night before, on the Walters show...
...The last time anyone had seen anything remotely similar was when Barbara interviewed Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and delivered the line, "Be kind to us, Mr...
...So despite all of Castro's problems, there remained reason to wonder what precautions ABC would take to protect the viewers...
...She spoke in the first person plural, a sort of anchorwoman-elect...
...That the Castro hour failed to overthrow our Republic was ultimately a testimony to Barbara Walters as well...
...It must be known, so the CIA can kill his wife, if there is one, and do away with the crown prince or princes, if any...
...This is open espionage openly arrived at, as befits a democracy...
...I didn't like what Nixon said," one old-timer recalled...
...was one of her brilliant questions...
...What did LBJ think about the Cuban plots...
...It's cigar-envy...
...A psychologist has hypothesized that Barbara may have a Godfather complex...
...his area of expertise is movies...
...This documentary proved that even paranoids can have real enemies...
...I wouldn't even be surprised if there is a conspiracy between Moyers and Schlesinger to make the commercial networks break new ground by putting on the CIA show one more time...
...I think a better explanation for what drives her is that she is a CIA agent...
...She answered Castro's questions about whether the CIA would allow the U.S...
...What can the translatee do while the translator casts his pearls of the Antilles to the swains at home...
...Do you remember when she asked Fidel if he was married...
...He talked to David Susskind for approximately three hours on a show called Open End in the late 1950s...
...And Castro's marital status is actually a matter of great interest...
...On the other hand, so would his pure Cas-tillian...
...And how about Bill Moyers, who worked for Johnson at the time...
...You do a great piece of journalism and it's here today, gone tomorrow...
...But I admired his kidneys...
...The hair-raising story—more bizarre than some of the ABC movies of the week—had its minor flaws, however...
...He didn't move a muscle for three hours...
...He looks like a bearded bear and plays to the camera with a lot of handwaving...
...Moyers has reportedly been depressed about the nature of commercial TV...
...Maybe he thought his relatively unaccented, fairly fluent English would turn off some Hispanic-Americans...
...The Cuban is a very visual person...
...Neither Juanita nor Juan could carry the hour...
...It appears to have been stimulated by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s letter in the Wall Street Journal, published almost a month after the documentary was aired...
...There were two on this broadcast: a lovely, dark-haired woman named Juanita Vera and a man, Juan Ortega...
...By contrast, only about one line of text was devoted to Lyndon Johnson's role...
...On Television WHEN LA BABWA METFIDEL BY MARVIN KITMAN AS Fidel Castro kicked off his campaign to undermine the American people through the medium of their own TV sets the night of June 9, the least of his obstacles was Barbara Walters...
...Castro replied in astonishment...
...By the way, the United States interview record was set by Richard Nixon...
...Si," the bearded one replied, "24 times...
...Indeed, the whole "Barbara-is-worth-a-mil-lion" caper at ABC was set up by the CIA, since the network simply does not have that kind of money to throw around on a glorified news reader...
...What Castro did not know was that the CIA allowed the interview to be arranged in the first place just for this one question...
...After all, the usual Castro interview on Havana TV, reliably informed sources say, starts on Saturday at the crack of dawn...
...12,980 people threw up...
...Frankly, I don't care what Schlesinger has to say about the CBS production...
...Muchas gracias, Dios...
...Under his interrogator's image they could have had, "Walters-Capitalist...
...At the very least, I wanted to see an identification slide under the bearded leader's picture...
...He has what the news consultants call charisma...
...It would have read, "Castro-Communist...
...For instance, one discerned a certain disdain for the Kennedys...
...It made her seem so foolish...
...Along with most Communists, though, Castro has a reputation for being a sneaky character and there was a chance that he would get around his language barrier...
...I recognized this immediately as the old tourist dodge—you pretend you are stupid in order to smoke out information...
...President...
...Where were they when we were watching it, before the word-of-mouth began...
...I went to sleep the week before the show thanking God that he was insecure with English at this critical point in his media career...
...Buttering up Castro with her seductive tone, she asked, "You don't mean to say the Central Intelligence Agency was actually trying to assassinate you...
Vol. 60 • August 1977 • No. 16
