The Cuban Program

The “Cuban Program” that Fidel Castro ran at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as the “Zoo," serves as a window of insight into what the POWs endured. The main purpose of the “program” was to decipher how much agony could be inflicted on a human being. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban sadist nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer heading the project, perpetrated his own personal reign of terror.

The horrifying ordeal of Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force F-105 pilot, reflected the tragic reality of the Nazi-like experiment. Fidel tortured Cobeil in slow agonizing stages, solely for the sake of torture, beating him without remission and, aside from myriad other vicious techniques, mercilessly whipping him with a fan belt without pause on all of his body. [7]

Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of former fellow POW Colonel Jack Bomar:

The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . .He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . .

Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . .His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs. [8]


[6] Holzer and Holzer "An American Traitor: Guilty As Charged,” FrontPageMagazine.com, June 10, 2005.

[7] Humberto Fontova, Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant (Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc. 2005), pp.141-142.

[8] Rochester and Kiley, Chapter 19, “The Zoo, 1967-1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” p.400.


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I wonder if any of the torturers of American POWs have been prosecuted.