MEDIA MAVENS HUG A THUG IN HAVANA

By ROD DREHER

August 14, 2001 -- IT'S fair to suppose Fidel Castro's mail yesterday didn't include 75th-birthday cards from MTV chief Tom Freston, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and CBS head Les Moonves.

They're all under investigation by the Treasury Department for possibly breaking the law earlier this year by traveling to Cuba, where they visited clubs, saw the sights and had dinner with Castro.

The trio, along with a handful of Left Coast showbiz machers, were wined and dined by the dictator, who reportedly joked with one about the guy's kooky hairstyle.

The scandal is that there is no scandal over the visit. If Treasury weren't poking its nose around, the trip would have been forgotten. Celebrity glad-handing with the Communist tyrant always is.

It is particularly nauseating, though, that these men, who represent the elite of American media, had the nerve to accept the hospitality of a dictator who imprisons journalists, writers, gays, peaceful democracy activists and anyone else he dislikes.

It's one thing to visit Cuba, as many do, for valid reasons, like visiting relatives.

It's quite another to swill cocktails with a murderous thug who has turned his island nation into a squalid prison camp where ordinary people have to prostitute themselves to Western sex tourists just to pay the rent.

On the other hand, I hear Fidel throws a hell of a dinner party.

"It still staggers me how people who consider themselves liberal and enlightened could suck up to a man who dragooned homosexuals into concentration camps, outlawed any political opposition, and is responsible for the murder and imprisonment of thousands for political crimes," writes Andrew Sullivan, the gay political columnist.

Hear, hear! As these men should know, being openly gay is enough to get yourself arrested on the streets of Havana, under the notorious Article 303 of the country's penal code.

The harsh repression of Cuban homosexuals, including establishing penal colonies for them, has been widely documented. The late Reinaldo Arenas, the celebrated Cuban exile writer, was but one victim of these policies.

He wrote of his horrifying experiences in a memoir titled "Before Night Falls," which was made last year into an Oscar-nominated film.

The artist Julian Schnabel, director of the biopic, is the rare member of the smart set to remember exactly who Castro is. He told The New York Observer that he stood 10 feet away from Castro at a Havana reception, but refused to shake the dictator's hand.

"I just couldn't bring myself to do it," Schnabel said. "I think there's too much blood on his hands."

If Tom, Les and Graydon wiped any of that blood on their fancy pants, it doesn't matter. Nobody notices these things anyway.

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