According to an article by Humberto Fontova pubished in the Canada Free Press, it was the task of a high ranking former Cuban intelligence official to bug the hotel rooms of visiting celebrities:
“My job was to bug their hotel rooms,” says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez. “With both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself.”
...“He [Delfin Fernandez] has not only met some of the most famous men in the world,” says the London Daily Mirror about the Cuban defector, “he’s also spied on them and been witness to some of their most innermost secrets.”
“When the celebrity visitors arrived at the hotels Nacional, Melia Habana and Melia Cohiba,” says Fernandez, “we already had their rooms completely bugged with sophisticated taping equipment. But not just the rooms, we’d also follow the visitors around. Sometimes we covered them 24 hours a day. They had no idea we were tailing them.”
Of course, blackmail can work only if the targets fear the revelations. In the case of Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar, the blackmail attempt failed for that very reason:
Famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was a special target for this bugging, but nothing of value for Castro came of it. “Everybody already knows I’m a maricon!” Almodovar laughed at Castro’s blackmailers. “So go right ahead! Knock yourselves out!”
It seems that Castro had a highly voyeuristic side when it came to these blackmailings:
“Fidel Castro is a special connoisseur of these tapings and videos,” Fernandez says. “Especially of the really famous.”
And not even his closest “friends” are safe from this bugging. The best example is Castro’s longtime “friend” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In what appeared as a touching act of generosity and friendship, Castro gave his friend “Gabo” his very own [stolen] mansion in Havana.
“We had remodeled it right before,” remembers intelligence honcho Fernandez, “and we installed more cables for bugging devices than for the normal electrical appliances. We taped EVERYTHING! Fidel doesn’t trust ANYONE.”
Castro’s top intelligence people would gather for the screenings of these tapes almost like Hollywood types for an upcoming movie. “Hmmmm, these scenes are more scandalous than anything in any of her movies!” Fernandez recalls a top intelligence officer chortling while watching the nighttime cavortings of a famous Spanish actress.
“Now it really seems to me, companeros,” the Castro intimate chortled as he looked around the room, “that this senora should be making more respectful comments about our regime, right?”
Some of the American celebrities who were bugged and subject to intense surveillance were listed by Fernandez:
“But famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro’s intelligence,” says Fernandez. “When word came down that models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss were coming to Cuba, the order was a routine one: 24-hour-a-day vigilance. Then we got a PRIORITY alert,” recalls Fernandez, “because there was a rumor that they would be sharing a room with Leonardo DiCaprio. The rumor set off a flurry of activity, and we set up the most sophisticated devices we had.”
“The American actor Jack Nicholson was another celebrity who was bugged and taped THOROUGHLY during his stay in the hotel Melia Cohiba,” states Fernandez, the man in charge of the bugging.
I'm not so sure that Jack Nicholson could be blackmailed because we already know he is a wild and crazy guy. It brings to mind the situation of Indonesian President Ahmed Sukarno in the1960s when he visited Moscow. He was secretly filmed in his hotel suite having a big orgy with young women:
...The orgy was filmed by two candid cameras that were fixed behind mirrors. It seemed that the operation was just perfect. Before starting the blackmail, KGB invited Sukarno in a small private movie theatre and showed him the pornographic video, in which he was playing the main part. KGB agents were expecting him to get really frightened, that he would agree to cooperate with them at once, but everything happened vice versa: Sukarno fondly decided that it was a gift from the Soviet government, so he asked for more copies to take them back to Indonesia and show them in movie theatres. Sukarno said to flabbergasted agents that the people of Indonesia would be very proud of him, if they could see him doing the nasty with Russian girls.
Mostly likely Jack Nicholson would have had a similar reaction if any such blackmail attempt were made upon him. However, what of Dan Rather seen standing happily in the photo above with Castro? Was such chumminess forced upon him by blackmail? In the case of Rather, your humble correspondent gives him a pass. That look of absolute joy on the face of the normally dour Rather is much too authentic to have been forced upon him by blackmail. Dan was genuinely enthralled by Fidel Castro. No blackmail needed in his case but how many other journalists and celebrities fell prey to Castro's blackmail?