Once upon a time in Canada, you and I were lied to, over and over again. The Trudeau fairy tale is one long lie from start to end. Official accounts of Trudeau’s 1960 canoe stunt off the Florida Keys are just one instance of the endless fabrications that have been sold as “history”. Here is the real story, from Red Pierre, himself.
Communist Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Communist Dictator Fidel Castro reminisce together for Trudeau’s Memoirs about their meeting together in 1960. Castro is saying, You should have brought me “an aircraft carrier.”
Trudeau Memoirs – DVD set, co-produced with staff of the CBC
Download Key West Canoe Coverage 1960 in a zip file.
Read the stories here: Canadians Plan Canoe Trip To Cuba By Don Daniels.
FOREWORD:
When Did Pierre Trudeau and Fidel Castro
meet for the first time?
The Official Story: they first met in 1976
Robert Wright, the author of Three Nights in Havana, contributed an opinion piece to The Globe and Mail on 26 November 2016, updated 11 April 2017; accessed 2 October 2019: “Castro and Trudeau: a famous, but also fraught friendship.”
In a three-paragraph segment, Wright establishes the “first time” Trudeau and Castro “crossed paths” (1970) and their subsequent alleged first meeting on a state visit to Cuba when Trudeau was prime minister:
“Pierre Trudeau’s and Fidel Castro’s paths crossed for the first time in 1970, when the Canadian government sought to negotiate the exile of members of the FLQ, who had kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross. Fidel Castro obliged the Canadian PM by providing a refuge, and in a private letter Mr. Trudeau later extended his heartfelt gratitude.
In January, 1976, when it looked as though the United States was about to lift its trade embargo and normalize relations between Washington and Havana, Pierre Trudeau embarked on a state visit to Cuba. Practically from the moment he stepped off his Armed Forces Boeing 707, Mr. Trudeau, his wife Margaret and his newborn son Michel endeared themselves to Fidel Castro and vice-versa. Three days later, it became obvious that the two leaders had become fast friends.”
The National Post is a bit more precise, although the title is half the length of the article: “No, internet, Fidel Castro isn’t Trudeau’s real father. The Canadian prime minister just really, really looks like him” by Tristin Hopper, February 14, 2017, 1:59 PM EST; Last Updated February 14, 2017 6:08 PM EST. Accessed 2 October 2019. Two paragraphs of note:
“Meanwhile, any personal contact between Castro and the Trudeaus was still years away. By early 1971, the only real contact between the prime minister’s office and Cuba had been a 1970 exchange of letters during the October Crisis to arrange the exile of FLQ terrorists.
The spear-fishing trips, the ‘Viva Castro!’ speeches, the glowing descriptions in Margaret and Pierre’s autobiographies; those would all come following Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s first meeting with Castro in 1976.”
The REAL Story: Pierre and Fidel met in 1960
Sixteen years before their alleged first meeting in 1976, Pierre Elliott Trudeau “encountered” Fidel Castro while apparently only pretending to “fail” in a bid to row a three-man, home-made canoe to Havana.
The true historic moment is revealed in a 1-minute, 25-second clip from Volume I of Pierre Trudeau’s DVD Memoirs, featured at this page along with a transcript.
The voice-over is apparently by Terence McKenna, who according to the production credits at the end of the full-length installment, wrote and narrated the Trudeau Memoirs for this big-production 10-GB epic sold on DVD.
The documentary was produced by Les Productions La Fête Inc. in association with The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and La Société Radio-Canada (the French-language CBC) with the participation of Téléfilm Canada. Trudeau himself, interviewed in studio and filmed revisiting the scenes of his past with old red colleagues, Gérard Pelletier and Fidel Castro, collaborates in this production to commemorate his life.
Someone has put the whole first segment, Trudeau Memoirs V1, at Youtube. The 1960 canoe-trip to Cuba is in that segment @ 36 minutes 24 seconds in. If it’s missing from Youtube, you can view the full-length Volume 1 of the Memoirs here: https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZrrlRkZ5why1k4EY14YrajWlWGWWbSfWDuy
If the canoe clip excerpt is missing from YouTube, you can view it here: https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZTvlRkZDMpWknMeme5ODC7FHzkkxLhRt9S7
Download the canoe clip in a zip file.
TRANSCRIPT:
[ Male Voice-over by Terence McKenna: ]
Some of Trudeau’s travels in the 1950s contributed to his reputation as a radical. He didn’t worry about it. He attended an economics conference in Moscow and wrote about it for Le Devoir.1 He would eventually visit Communist China, and he came here to Cuba in the early days of the Castro regime. All this at a time when anti-Communist hysteria was raging in North America.
His 1961 [sic] attempt to row a gerry-rigged canoe from Florida to Cuba was a source of great amusement to Fidel Castro, whom Trudeau encountered at the time, and with whom he eventually developed a close friendship.
[ A retired Trudeau, at a table with Castro, is heard reminiscing in Spanish. ]
[ Male Voice-over by Terence McKenna continues, clearly interpreting the Spanish conversation: ]
Trudeau was accused of trying to smuggle arms to the Cuban revolutionaries in his canoe.
Castro says it would have been more useful at the time if Trudeau had brought him an aircraft carrier.
[ Trudeau and Fidel embrace and take leave of each other. ]
[ Male Voice-over by Terence McKenna continues: ]
Trudeau’s trips to the Communist world and his reputation as a radical are amusing now; but back then, they had serious consequences.
– END CLIP –
The Year Trudeau met Castro was 1960, and
Here’s the Proof
Terence McKenna says “1961” is the year of Trudeau’s “attempt to row a gerry-rigged canoe from Florida to Cuba”. The year is wrong. It could have been a typographical error, or a slip while McKenna was reading the script he wrote. But, the canoe stunt and the Quebec election of Jean Lesage both took place in 1960. I have an article here on that election: “June 22nd 1960 — the Election of Jean Lesage”. Also see: “The Quebec Elections of 1960 – Lesage Minority ‘Liberals’ Make First Attempt at a Communist Plan”.
Other Trudeau biographers and sources on Trudeau confirm the canoe escapade took place in 1960. Here are some of them:
Max and Monique Nemni, two official biographers of Pierre Trudeau (and two fellow Reds), confirm the year of the canoe escapade was 1960 in Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman 1944-1965. (Volume Two of Trudeau, Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, translated by George Tombs, A Douglas Gibson Book, McClelland & Stewart, 2011) They also identify Trudeau’s two rowing companions:
“With all this excitement, one might think that Trudeau would stay in Quebec, at least until the elections. But no. He threw himself into a crazy scheme, dreamed up and meticulously organized by Alphonse Gagnon, director of Gagnon Frères, a Chicoutimi furniture store. On April 29, 1960, the Key West Citizen of Florida reported that three men — Alphonse Gagnon, Pierre Trudeau, and Val Francoeur — planned to take a canoe from Florida to Cuba in twenty-four hours: ‘The technique calls for one man paddling in conventional fashion while another lies backward in the boat and rows with oars attached to his feet. The third man rests. They plan shifts of two hours on the oars and one resting and will switch positions for each shift.’ These daredevils fortunately took the precaution of being escorted by another boat. On Monday, May 2, the Montreal Star reported the adventure had come to an end: They had covered 50 miles of the 90 miles distance across the rough Florida straights (sic) when they quit Saturday night. The three said they would have continued if the salt water had not put their flashlights out of commission. They feared they might lose their escort boat in the darkness.’ Trudeau returned to Quebec and became active once more in the struggle to bring about democracy in Quebec.”
The millionaires brought flashlights that weren’t water-proof on a sea-going exploit. Sure.
Before we move on, I have to clarify, When the Nemnis say “Trudeau returned to Quebec and became active once more in the struggle to bring about democracy in Quebec,” they mean “industrial democracy,” also called “participation” or “worker control,” the form of communism at that time in Tito’s Yugoslavia and long promoted in Canada by the NDP (Trudeau’s first political party). This is the same “participation” referred to in Quand nous seront vraiment chez nous (I now call my English, “When we are truly on our own”); see my translation of the 1972 PQ manifesto, linked in the sidebar. This is what the “separatists” (communists) have been working on for decades and still is the goal today: third-world Communism for Canada.) Sometimes, things are so bad, all I can do is make a cartoon about them; this link is caricature and satire based on the truth (industrial democracy): Jagmeet Singh, the NDP and World Government.
Back to the canoe. I contacted the Key West Citizen of Florida newspaper, hoping to buy a scan of their article, and any follow-up. However, the Citizen hasn’t got those old issues any more. Library and Archives Canada claims not to have them, either. Local Key West libraries also claimed they were not on microfilm, which despite the listing to 1976 only goes to 1954.
The Montreal Star article quoted by the Nemnis was titled: “Stormy Seas Spell Defeat for Canoeists”. It appeared on Monday May 2nd, 1960 on page 49. The issue is preserved on Microfilm: Roll 664, The Montreal Star, 1960 May 1-15, NJ.FM.821, AMICUS No. 8404664 by Preston Microfilming Services, 2215 Queen St., East, Toronto, Ontario, M4E 1E8.
Robert Wright, in his book, Three Nights in Havana, excerpted for the National Post (Latest Edition) on 28 Apr 2007 as “Halfway to Havana” (Press Reader) notes:
“On the first day of May 1960, just a year after Fidel Castro’s visit to Montreal, two 40-something Canadian millionaires and a 30-something friend set out to paddle a homemade canoe from Key West to Havana.”
The Ottawa Citizen of January 12, 2008 confirms the year as 1960:
“On the first day of May 1960, Trudeau and two other Montrealers tried to paddle a home-made canoe from Key West to Havana. No match for the powerful currents, pounding waves and blistering sun of the Strait of Florida, the three exhausted Canadians agreed to abandon the crossing the next day.”
Trudeau’s other official biographer, John English (fellow member of the CIIA, Canadian branch of the international bankers’ world-government front in London, the RIIA, headquarters of the Rhodes Scholarships—the CFR in the USA being a “sister institute”), confirms the canoe-trip year as 1960:
“Certainly, he made himself difficult to contact — a small canoe in the middle of the ocean could not have been more impossible to reach — as the forces of opposition to Duplessis swelled behind Lesage and his team.
Once the Cuban canoe escapade was over, Trudeau returned to Montreal and wrote an editorial in Cité Libre that appeared before the election of Jean Lesage on June 22, 1960.”
Nino Ricci, in his ‘Extraordinary Canadians: Pierre Elliott Trudeau,’ confirms the canoe escapade took place during the 1960 election campaign in Quebec:
“Even Cite Libre was slipping from him, caught up in a factionalism to which his own anti-nationalist views had given rise. The moment had come for change, and he had not been part of it. When the chance had come to replace the Union Nationale after Duplessis’s death, several of Trudeau’s colleagues and friends had run for the Lesage Liberals as René Lévesque had. Trudeau, however, had been down in Key West during the campaign, attempting to paddle to Cuba in a homemade canoe. Lévesque later claimed that Trudeau, too, had been asked to run, but others said he had never been approached.”
And, one more time: the naive Edith Iglauer, who gushes over Trudeau, is recorded by The Free Library in “Pierre Trudeau: Champion of a Just Society” (Circa 2000):
“The attraction of Cuba for Trudeau began as early as 1960, when he made a legendary if unsuccessful attempt when he was forty with two Montreal friends to row in an experimental canoe from Key West, Florida, to Havana. Trudeau is said to have lain on his back in the vessel, working oars with his feet while his two companions steered and rowed with what would appear in photographs to be traditional oars. The second morning out, about half way across the turbulent Florida Straits, three very seasick men gave up.”
As we now know from his DVD Memoirs, the “attempt” was indeed “successful”: for “Trudeau encountered” Castro at the time.
In his book, Three Nights in Havana, excerpted for the National Post (Latest Edition) on 28 Apr 2007 as “Halfway to Havana”, author Robert Wright sums up the canoe stunt:
“When he [Trudeau] was fished out of the Straits of Florida on that balmy spring day in 1960, he betrayed no disappointment about the failed crossing. ‘That would call for a demonstration of emotion,’ recalled Don Newlands, the cameraman in the shrimp boat, ‘and that was not in him.’”
Trudeau “encountered” Castro on “May Day,” 1960
If Trudeau, according to Newlands, “betrayed no disappointment about the failed crossing,” perhaps he had not been disappointed; because the canoe trip was the front and not the objective; the objective being achieved. And that was for Trudeau to meet Castro at a critical moment in Canada’s history being crafted by these two men. The claim the trip had “failed” would avert all risk of Trudeau’s later being linked with Castro’s FLQ, once it emerged. For, Castro was recruiting and training the terrorists to be loosed on Canada when Trudeau and he had their “encounter” … apparently on “May Day”.
And what is May Day?
Observed in many countries to celebrate the coming of spring, May Day is observed in Russia and related countries in honour of labour. A telegram sent by Jean-Louis Gagnon to a Communist May-Day rally in Montreal on May 1st, 1946 illustrates the importance of May Day to Communists. Here is the English translation published by Alan Stang in the John Birch Society’s offprint of Stang’s April 1st, 1971 “CANADA” article in American Opinion (look for my post, “Singing tomorrows”):
“On this first post-war victorious May Day we
can foresee the victory of the working
class STOP Fraternal greetings to all trade
union leaders STOP Let us go forward to Peace STOP
Long live the glorious Soviet Union STOP Long live
singing tomorrows STOP”
Personally, I prefer the classic definition: “An internationally recognized distress signal via radiotelephone (from the French m’aider, “help!”)”.
What are the odds that Trudeau and friends were cruising over the Strait to Communist Cuba … on May Day … just as a lark to ridicule the Balseros (more below)?
When Pierre ascended the Throne of Canada, Stang reports he “created Information Canada, named Gagnon to run it at $40,000 a year. … And he (Jean-Louis Gagnon) is a dues-paying member of the Communist Party.”
Fred Rose, a Soviet spy convicted of espionage and jailed for treason was Gagnon’s boss in the Party. Igor Gouzenko, who defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, revealed that Jean-Louis Gagnon had supplied Soviet Colonel Zabotin with the information that the exact date of D-Day was June 6, 1944.
D-Day was the date of the Allied landing in France in World War II. World War II is another kettle of fish. What misguided country would enter a war with Stalin as their ally? But, anyway.
We have, I think, corrected Terence McKenna’s typographical error. The sentence he wrote now reads:
“His 1960 attempt to row a gerry-rigged canoe from Florida to Cuba was a source of great amusement to Fidel Castro, whom Trudeau encountered at the time.”
THE REAL VEHICLE TO HAVANA WAS
THE “ESCORT BOAT” (OBVIOUSLY)
Pierre Trudeau sets out with two companions on his unsuccessful (sic) May, 1960, canoe trip from Key West to Havana. PressReader, “Halfway to Havana” by Robert Wright.
In our final extract above, from “Halfway to Havana,” author Robert Wright confirms that the Nemnis’ “escort boat” for the canoeists was indeed a “shrimp boat”. Shrimp boats off the Keys in 1960 looked like this:
“Two girls standing in front of shrimp boats – Key west, Florida.” Photographed in February, 1960. Source: Barron, Charles Lee, 1917-1997. Two girls standing in front of shrimp boats – Key west, Florida. 1960. Black & white photoprint, 4 x 5 in. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. , accessed 1 October 2019.
There were only two vehicles on the Straits according to every version of the story: the home-made “gerry-rigged” canoe, and a “shrimp boat”.
Based on that information, there is only one conclusion. The shrimp boat, the escort boat, made it to Havana late in the day on May 1st, 1960. Or Trudeau met Castro far out at sea off the radar.
“The Donald Gordon Incident” (November-December 1962)
(The “DGI” was scripted by Trudeau, published in his pro-Soviet CITE LIBRE in early 1961, play-acted by Canada’s number one bureaucrat, Donald Gordon, pulled off by the federal government and a parliamentary committee, with Trudeau’s Communist friends running both major French dailies who escalated it with riots and near-riots led by Trudeau’s Marxist law student, Bernard Landry, and by communists in the street. That is how the Reds got a “royal commission” they could use to crack the Constitution and replace it; that’s how the Red carpet was unrolled to bring in the FLQ to sharpen the need to break Confederation. And the reason, as always: You need all the powers to construct a Communist Plan. An independent State of Quebec would have had all the powers. Subscribe and look for it.)
The story told in the DVD Memoirs, that the US Coast Guard suspected the men of trying to “smuggle arms in their canoe” is a cartoon to make you laugh and stop thinking.
Referring once again to author Robert Wright in his excerpt for the National Post “Halfway to Havana”:
“When he [Trudeau] was fished out of the Straits of Florida on that balmy spring day in 1960, he betrayed no disappointment about the failed crossing. ‘That would call for a demonstration of emotion,’ recalled Don Newlands, the cameraman in the shrimp boat, ‘and that was not in him.’”
But, Trudeau wasn’t “disappointed.” The crossing didn’t “fail.” Trudeau’s DVD Memoirs tell us he “encountered” Castro “at the time”.
THE ATMOSPHERE IN CUBA IN 1960
The Trudeau canoe stunt was a gesture of ridicule toward people who were desperately trying to escape the communist-humanist paradise of Fidel Castro. Thousands of Cubans are reported to have drowned in the attempt to flee.
Before the boat people of Vietnam, there were the Balseros of Cuba. Tens of thousands of them left the island on rafts made from recycled materials. Thousands of them perished at sea.
Blogger Richard Martineau, in “Le penchant de Pierre Trudeau et de ses fils pour la tyrannie” (“The fondness of Pierre Trudeau and his sons for tyranny”) describes the Cuba toward which Trudeau and friends were rushing via canoe and shrimp boat in May of 1960. Says Martineau:
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En 1960, alors que des milliers de Cubains assoiffés de liberté bravaient la mer à bord d’embarcations de fortune, Trudeau, lui, a fait le chemin inverse : il a tenté de joindre Cuba à bord d’un canot en partance de la Floride ! |
In 1960, when thousands of Cubans thirsting for liberty braved the sea aboard makeshift rafts, Trudeau was going the other way: he tried to reach Cuba aboard a canoe bound from Florida! |
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(Rappelons qu’en 1960, on a répertorié 631 condamnations à mort, 146 fusillés et 70 000 prisonniers politiques à Cuba. Pour le respect des droits de la personne, on repassera …) |
(Remember that in 1960, there were 631 death sentences, 146 executions by firing squad and 70,000 political prisoners inventoried in Cuba. As to respect for individual rights, we’ll skip it …) |
SCHOETERS: FLQ LEADER IN CUBA 1960
Georges Schoeters, Teaching Assistant, Université de Montréal
Louis Fournier, a Sorbonne-trained French-Canadian journalist and partisan of the Marxist left, called jailed FLQ terrorists “political prisoners” We already know that both Schoeters and René Lévesque met Castro in Montreal at the end of April 1959. Fournier documents the sequel to the Schoeters meeting: the beginning of training in Cuba for Schoeters, a future leader of the first cell of FLQ terrorists. Said Fournier:
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“Georges Schœters est une sorte de marxiste humaniste, surtout tiers-mondiste. Il a effectué un voyage à Cuba aux débuts de la révolution, en août 1959, en compagnie d’une douzaine d’étudiants de l’Université de Montréal où il vient de terminer sa scolarité de maîtrise en science économique. Le groupe, invité par l’Institut national de la réforme agraire, a rencontré Fidel Castro et le commandant Camilo Cienfuegos. À l’automne 1959, Schœters retourne à Cuba pour travailler pendant quelques mois à la réforme agraire. Il y rencontre alors Che Guevara.” |
“Georges Schœters is a kind of Marxist humanist, above all a third-worldist. He took a trip to Cuba at the beginning of the revolution, in August of 1959, accompanied by 10 students from the Université de Montréal where he had just completed his Masters in Economics.2 The group, as guests of the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agrariae (National Institute of Agrarian Reform), met Fidel Castro and commandant Camilo Cienfuegos. In the Fall of 1959, Schœters returned to Cuba to work for a few months at agrarian reform. At that time, he met Che Guevara.” |
In Last Stop Paris: The Assassination of Mario Bachand and the Death of the FLQ, author Michael McLoughlin places Georges Schoeters in Cuba in 1960. Speaking of others (Raymond Villeneuve, Gaston Collin and André Garand), McLoughlin says:
“Three weeks later, the three would-be revolutionaries ran out of money and were taken under the wing of ICAP, the Cuban Institute for the Support of Peoples, the organization that in 1960 gave hospitality to Georges Schoeters, two years before he became a founder of the FLQ. They were given free room and board and 250 pesos a month. There was, of course, a price for such generosity. ICAP was an arm of the Cuban Tourist Bureau, which was an arm of the General Intelligence Directorate (DGI), the Cuban intelligence service, so it was not a typical tourist agency. One of its roles was to invite to Cuba foreigners who had the potential to become agents of influence after they returned home.”
CONCLUSIONS
Pierre Elliott Trudeau met Castro on May Day in 1960 while the first cell of the Communist Front de Libération du Québec was being hand-picked and groomed in Cuba. Why admit it now? At the end of his life, his vanity got the better of him. He wanted to leave a note at the scene of his crime, in grand contempt for those he had betrayed. The victims he had charmed with his lies would surely never notice it.
This admission, in Trudeau’s DVD Memoirs, shatters the Trudeau myth. He manipulated his way to power to consummate from above the treason he commenced below.
Pierre had a busy year in 1960. First, he met Castro who was organizing the FLQ to attack Canada. Then he got the Reds to vote Liberal when Jean Lesage was planning a communist regime for Quebec and a referendum to secede to do it. Then Pierre went to Beijing to celebrate the victory of the Reds imposing their power on mainland China. That was not a State visit. That was a personal visit by Communist Pierre, supporting his own cause.
EL TERRORISMO
This is the dictator that Pierre and Margaret found charming and sexy when they allegedly “first met” him, the year Castro was filmed below (1976):
TRANSCRIPT:
EL TERRORISMO
(We Warn You)
[Fidel Castro:] “If the Cuban government were to dedicate time to doing terrorism, and to respond with terrorism to terrorism, we believe that we would really be very effective terrorists.”
[Audience: wild applause (compulsory)]
“Let no one be mistaken. If we were to dedicate ourselves to terrorism, with all certainty, we would be very effective. But the fact that the Cuban Revolution has never applied terrorism, doesn’t mean that we never will.
We warn you.”
[Credits:] Discurso de Fidel Castro por el 15to aniversario del MININT en el Teatro Carlos Marx, La Haban, 6 de junio del 1976.
Discourse of Fidel Castro on the 15th anniversary of the MININT, in the Karl Marx Theatre at Havana on 6 June 1976.
The Ministero del Interior (known as MININT) is Cuba’s state agency responsible for internal security.
In Canada on 26 April 1959, Belgian immigrant Georges Schoeters met Fidel Castro at the Montreal Airport. Schoeters would go three times to Cuba to be trained by Castro to set up the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) and recruit other terrorists.
English translation by cubacenter The Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) at YouTube.
MUSIC: Life is So Short.
Artist: Shane Newville
Album: Beats Collection Vol. 1
Thanks, again, to cubacenter, for the great translation. A decade later, it still packs a punch. This video was produced at Montreal on 21 April in 2009.
For more information on the planned end of Canada, visit:
HABEAS CORPUS CANADA
http://www.habeascorpuscanada.com
__________
1. Trudeau’s 1952 7-part series on the Moscow conference is now available in English from NoSnowInMoscow, and also at AntiCommunist Archive: I’m Back From Moscow, by Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1952).
2. “A very interesting Belgian source online who did in-depth research published in 2013, says that Schoeters finished his Masters while in prison for an FLQ bombing that took a life. Christophe Lamfalussy of La Libre Belgique says that on early release, Schoeters was put on a plane and expelled from Canada on 25 September 1967. Then, in 1968, (translation): “Schoeters obtained his Masters in Economics from the Université de Montréal because he had been able to pursue his studies in prison.” (“Georges Schoeters, le Belge qui voulait libérer le Québec”). Schoeters therefore did not have a Masters when he went to work for Castro. We have a battle of sources here, and frankly, I’m more inclined to Mr. Lamfalussy because unlike Fournier, the Belgian doesn’t appear to have an agenda. Lamfalussy in French: “Schoeters obtient cette année-là de l’université de Montréal une maîtrise en sciences économiques car, en prison, il avait pu poursuivre ses études.”
– 30 –
CANADA How The Communists Took Control 
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