Does Cuba pose a threat to U.S. national security?

The case for the affirmative.

The first victims of Cuban communism are the Cuban people.

They were the ones that suffered the terrorism of the July 26th Movement that carried out a hundred bombings in Havana in one night.

They were the ones that suffered the summary executions in the early days of the revolution.

There are over a thousand political prisoners currently in Cuba’s prisons today.

Jose Daniel Ferrer was a member of the Christian Liberation Movement that sought through the existing legal system to pursue change through the Varela Project.

The response of the dictatorship was to lock up Jose Daniel Ferrer and 74 others in 2003 to long prison terms.

In his case they threatened him with a death sentence for gathering signatures in a citizen petition drive.

Oswaldo Payá who was the head of the initiative together with his youth leader Harold Cepero were murdered by agents of the Cuban government in 2012.

We also cannot forget that next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of the shoot down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes.

Brothers to the Rescue was an effort by Cubans and Cuban Americans to save the lives of Cubans in the Florida Straits.  Because they were nonviolently engaging with the dissidents on the island the regime felt  it was unacceptable and they sent out MiGs that blew two civilian planes out of the sky in international airspace.

However that is not our focus today but the harm Havana has done to U.S. national security, and the role the Cuban dictatorship has played in destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba remains a threat to U.S. national security

I would like to begin by dispelling some myths that all too often are spread in the Academy. One is that Fidel Castro was driven into the arms of the Russians by the Americans.

This is not true. We now know thanks to the Soviet archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the initial contacts with the KGB and the Castro brothers was in 1953.

Early contacts with the KGB (1953)

Leonov (c). On his right, R. Castro. To his left, Bernardo Lemús

“The KGB’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the first to make contact with [Raul] Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities.’- The charismatic appeal of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara extended far beyond Latin America,” wrote Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin in The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the the Third World – Newly Revealed Secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive published in 2006.

Raul Castro and Nikolai Leonov first met in 1953, and struck up a relationship that would endure for 69 years, until Leonov’s passing in 2022. On March 11, 2016, Leonov was interviewed on official Cuban television in the Mesa Redonda program about his supposed first encounter with Raul Castro on a trans-Atlantic voyage. Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992, offers a different report obtained from classified files. Leonov and Raul Castro “became ‘firm friends’ in Prague in 1953 and then worked together with Fidel from 1956 and after he took power in 1959.”

The U.S. Arms Embargo on Batista

At the same time that the United States was placing an arms embargo on Fulgencio Batista in early 1958, and receiving representatives of Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement in Washington DC, the Soviet KGB already had a firmly established relationship with the Castro brothers.

On March 17, 1958 Fidel Castro’s future candidate for provisional president, Manuel Urrutia, along with a delegation of other supporters in exile of the July 26th movement, met with officials at the State Department. They successfully lobbied the U.S. government arguing that arms shipments to Cuba were for hemispheric defense, and they claimed that Batista using them against Cuban nationals was in violation of the conditions agreed to between the two countries.

Batista’s regime presented to the U.S. Embassy in Havana a formal note protesting the delay in the shipment of M-1 rifles to the Cuban Army, and warned that it would weaken the Cuban government and lead to its possible downfall.

The United States placed an arms embargo on the Batista dictatorship in March 1958.

On March 26, 1958 in another telegram from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Havana the view was expressed how the arms embargo could lead to the fall of Batista’s regime:

“Department has considered the possibility its actions could have an adverse psychological effect on GOC and could unintentionally contribute to or accelerate eventual Batista downfall. On other hand, shipment US combat arms at this time would probably invite increased resentment against US and associate it with Batista strong arm methods, especially following so closely on heels of following developments:
Government publicly desisted from peace efforts.Government suspended guarantees again.Batista expressed confidence Government will win elections with his candidate and insists they will be held despite suspension guarantees but has made no real effort to satisfy public opinion on their fairness and effectiveness as possible means achieve fair and acceptable solution.Batista announced would increase size arms and informed you he would again undertake mass population shift Oriente, and otherwise acted in manner to discourage those who supported or could be brought to support peaceful settlement by constructive negotiations.”

The United States would continue to pressure Batista to hold free elections and leave office for the remainder of 1958. Earl E. T. Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, on December 17, 1958 delivered a message from the State Department to Fulgencio Batista that the United States viewed “with skepticism any plan on his part, or any intention on his part, to remain in Cuba indefinitely.”

The U.S. government had dealt the Batista regime a mortal blow, and fourteen days later the Cuban dictatorship fell.

Fulgencio Batista fled into exile on January 1, 1959, and the United States quickly recognized the revolutionary government of the Castro brothers.

The Castro brothers’ newly established Cuban government was acknowledged by the U.S. on January 7, 1959. The new regime was recognized in a mere seven days. Comparatively, after Fulgencio Batista’s March 10, 1952 coup, it took the US seventeen days to recognize his government.

Fidel Castro visited Caracas on January 23, 1959 and met with Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt, a social democrat, “to enlist cooperation and financial backing for ‘the master plan against the gringos.’”In April 1959 Fidel Castro visited the United States on an eleven day trip that concluded with a three hour meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon on April 19, 1959.

The Castro brothers carried out mass executions, expropriated U.S. companies, and sent armed expeditions to overthrow governments in Latin America beginning in 1959.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, representing Fidel Castro’s new regime, visited Gaza in June 1959, and encouraged Palestinian refugees to “continue the struggle to liberate their land” “through resistance to occupation,” according to the publication Palestine Land Society. He asked, “where are the training camps? Where are the factories to manufacture arms? Where are people’s mobilization centers?” … According to the publication Palestine Land Society, “Guevara was accompanied by General Caprera, an expert in Guerilla warfare. Caprera met with community leaders to advise on methods of resistance.”

 

Soviet Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan visited Havana in February 1960. The Soviet Vice Premier arrived in Cuba on February 4, 1960.

Regime insider Carlos Franqu in his book Family Portrait with Fidel described the visit as follows.

In the early days of February, Anastas Mikoyan, vice-prime minister of the Soviet Union, came to Cuba. Fidel Castro, Raúl, Che Guevara, and President Dorticós met him at the Havana airport. He was given a huge reception and an extended tour of the island-with Fidel at his side-which lasted for weeks. A major topic was the Soviet Union’s purchase of Cuban sugar and our purchase of Russian oil.

Castro diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union on May 8, 1960.

To say that the United States pushed the Castro brothers into the arms of the Soviet Union is absurd. The Castro brothers had already been conspiring with Moscow for six years in 1959.

[ Continue here ] 

First Secretary, President, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General, Comandante Fidel Castro is still dead.

 Breaking news. Lying communist thug and tyrant Fidel Castro is still dead.

Fidel Castro: Cuba's tyrant turned power over to his brother

First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, President of the Council of State of Cuba, President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, Comandante Fidel Castro is still dead.   

Nine years ago, on a Black Friday that fell on November 25, 2016, Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro died at the age of 90 never having had to answer for his many crimes against humanity both in and out of Cuba. From Nicaragua, to Ethiopia, to Venezuela, and in many other places Fidel Castro assisted tyrants and dictators to take power, hold on to it, and consolidate their rule while terrorizing and murdering dissenters. One day later in a blog post I predicted what would come next.

"Predictably over the next few weeks inside Cuba the world will see spectacles organized by the totalitarian dictatorship to "mourn the great leader." The regime has already started with nine days set aside for official mourning. This will not be the first time that monsters are mourned by an oppressed people through different methods of command, control and manipulation. The world has witnessed it before in the Soviet Union in 1953 and more recently in North Korea with the Kim dynasty. The death of Stalin as dramatized in the film "The Inner Circle" is recommended viewing for those about to follow the circus in Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro's death.  Meanwhile in Cuba as the regime prepares its state funeral the Castro dictatorship's secret police begin to make threats, round up and take dissidents to undisclosed locations and commit acts of violence." 

Nine years later the fans of the late Cuban dictator are out trying to defend his legacy and repeating the lies to maintain him in a positive light in Leftist circles. These apologists of the dictator are silent on the role played by the United States government and The New York Times in undermining Fulgencio Batista's rule and helping to bring Fidel Castro to power.

IN TODAY’S MIAMI HERALD: When Cuban leader Fidel Castro died, exiles flooded Miami’s streets, unloading complicated emotions at the news that the man responsible for the upheaval of their lives was gone. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/cMls3NPcUP

— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) November 24, 2021

There are other inconvenient truths that are well documented and available for those seeking facts about the Cuba that existed prior to 1959 with warts and all, and what came after.

On this ninth anniversary of the tyrant's death it is a good time to remember some of his more memorable statements.

Relationship with the truth

Fidel Castro in the 1950s repeatedly claimed that he was not a communist because he knew that advocating a communist revolution would lead Cubans to abandon him. On December 2, 1961 he explained his reasoning.

 

"If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains."

 

On March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist, Castro explained: 

"I conceive the truth in terms of a just and noble end, and that is when the truth is truly true. If it does not serve a just, noble and positive end, truth, as an abstract entity, philosophical category, in my opinion, does not exist."  

Jose Ignacio Rasco, who knew Fidel Castro from school and afterwards concluded that the Cuban revolutionary had been a committed communist by 1950.

 

Denied universality of human rights 

 

 

Fidel Castro in the above interview in Havana in 1986 divided freedoms i.e. rights as one set being revolutionary liberties and another being bourgeois liberties and claiming that there are two different concepts of liberty he is rejecting the Latin American tradition which was best expounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that there are basic human rights that are universal and not separated by political/ideological or as in the Islamic claim by religious differences but are the same for everyone.

 

In 1961 in a speech that became known as "Words to intellectuals" Fidel Castro labeled dissenters "counterrevolutionaries" and explicitly stripped them of their rights. 

What are the rights of writers and artists, revolutionary or non-revolutionary? Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, no right (applause). And this is not some special law or guideline for artists and writers. It is a general principle for all citizens. It is a fundamental principle of the Revolution. Counterrevolutionaries, that is, the enemies of the revolution, have no rights against the revolution, because the revolution has one right: the right to exist, the right to develop, and the right to be victorious." ... "In other words: Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing."

 

This is not an original statement, but an echo of speeches and writings made by other tyrants. A close parallel is found in Benito Mussolini's 1935 speech: "Everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State."   

 

Consequences of this policy in Cuba were seen internationally in the Padilla Affair in 1971. 

 

Homophobic: Put Gays into forced labor camps

 

We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” - Fidel Castro, 1965

On March 13, 1963 Fidel Castro gave a speech were he openly attacked “long-haired layabouts, the children of bourgeois families,” roaming the streets wearing “trousers that are too tight,” carrying guitars to look like Elvis Presley, who took “their licentious behavior to the extreme” of organizing “effeminate shows” in public places. The Cuban dictator warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degenerates.”

Both Gays, and rock n rollers were sent to forced labor camps. 

Ended Black Cuban agency 

Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960)

"In Cuba, the exploitation of man by man has disappeared, and racial discrimination has disappeared, too." - Fidel Castro, quoted in Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel By Lee Lockwood, 1967

Castro’s communist revolution ended Black Cuban's agency in Cuba. Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay "Castro and the Cuban Negro" published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961 detailed how it was done.

“Of the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”

Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian rule. It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while criticizing racism in the United States. 

For decades, the Castro regime expected Black Cubans to be obedient, submissive, and grateful to the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist tropes. Black Cubans who think for themselves are punished.

 On Walls and border controls

 

Castro encouraged East German border guards in their deadly work

 

Fidel Castro visited Berlin in 1972 and encouraged the border guards to continue shooting Germans trying to flee to freedom by crossing the Berlin Wall. At Brandenburg gate on June 14, 1972 in the afternoon (pictured above) he addressed the men charged with shooting East Germans fleeing to West Germany as "the courageous and self-denying border guards of the GDR People's Army who stand guard in the front line of the entire-socialist community." Castro addressed the Nikolay Bezarin Barracks in East Berlin:

"It is very important to know that the people of the GDR have great confidence in you, that they are truly proud of you. The comrades of the party and the citizens of socialist Berlin have told us with great satisfaction about the activity of the border troops, speaking with great admiration for you and for your services."

No doubt this inspired the Cuban tyrant to turn the Florida Straits, and the border of the Guantanamo Naval Base into barriers to kill fleeing Cuban refugees. 

Anti-Black purge in Angola

On November 5, 1975, 30,000 Cuban troops were dispatched to Angola in what was called Operation Carlota, and today pro-Castro sympathizers over social media are celebrating this anniversary with excerpts of a speech the Cuban dictator gave announcing the move at the time. Cuban troops, beginning on May 27, 1977, took part in a massacre in Angola following a split in the governing Communist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party. Amnesty International cites reports that 30,000 Angolans "had disappeared" in the purge; other sources place the number at 80,000 killed. 

There was a racial component, with those massacred being young, black revolutionaries, and those in power who Castro allied with: mixed race and white Angolans and Eurocentric, although they were Marxist-Leninists so it was not a problem for Leftists, including those in power in Portugal. The definitive account of this massacre in English is found in Lara Pawson's 2014 book, "In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre." A 2017 review of the book by Fernando Arenas published in Luso-Brazilian Review provides the following summary.

In the Name of the People offers major insights regarding the history of May 1977, including the key role played by Cuban military forces, who defended Agostinho Neto and the ruling MPLA against the attempted coup, in defiance of the Soviet Union, while committing atrocities against Nito Alves's supporters. It also highlights the centrality of racial politics in Nito's movement against the perceived political dominance of mixed race and white Angolans in the MPLA to the exclusion of the majority poor black population, emphasizing the movement's rejection of endemic corruption within the MPLA and its betrayal of the socialist revolution.

Nelson Da Silva on his Youtube channel provided video excerpts of a book talk in 2015 with the author Lara Pawson, and questions and comments by Angolans.

Creating a planned famine in Ethiopia 

Castro with ally and war criminal Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia 1977

Fidel Castro on April 3, 1977 met in East Berlin with Erich Honecker about the need to help the revolution in Ethiopia and talked up Mengistu Haile Mariam, a then emerging new Marxist-Leninist leader. Fidel Castro celebrated the initiation of the Red Terror on February 3, 1977 in Ethiopia: 

"Mengistu strikes me as a quiet, serious, and sincere leader who is aware of the power of the masses. He is an intellectual personality who showed his wisdom on February 3. […] The prelude to this was an exuberant speech by the Ethiopian president in favor of nationalism. Mengistu preempted this coup. He called the meeting of the Revolutionary Council one hour early and had the rightist leaders arrested and shot. A very consequential decision was taken on February 3 in Ethiopia. […]Before it was only possible to support the leftist forces indirectly, now we can do so without any constraints."

Fidel Castro took part in mass murder in Eastern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1977-78, a conservative estimate of over 30,000 Africans perished as a result of a Red Terror unleashed in Ethiopia by Mengistu and his Cuban allies.

 

Ramiro Valdez, Raul Castro and Fidel Castro with Mengistu Haile Mariam

Amnesty International concluded that "this campaign resulted in several thousand to perhaps tens of thousands of men, women, and children killed, tortured, and imprisoned." Sweden's Save the Children Fund lodged a formal protest in early 1978 denouncing the execution of 1,000 children, many below the age of thirteen, whom the communist government had labeled "liaison agents of the counter revolutionaries."

 

 Advocating for and actively trying to start a nuclear holocaust

 

Castro freaked out Khrushchev with call for a first strike

 On October 27, 1962, the same day that Fidel Castro ordered artillery to fire on American reconnaissance aircraft, successfully knocking one down, Khrushchev received a letter from the Cuban dictator, that historians call the Armageddon letter, in which he called for a Soviet first strike on the United States, in the event of a US invasion of Cuba.

If an aggression of the second variant occurs, and the imperialists attack Cuba with the aim of occupying it, then the danger posed by such an aggressive measure will be so immense for all humanity that the Soviet Union will in circumstances be able to allow it, or to permit the creation of conditions in which the imperialists might initiate a nuclear strike against the USSR as well.

Thankfully, Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a peaceful outcome, but the Castro regime continued to protest and was unhappy with their Soviet allies for not launching the intercontinental ballistic missiles that would have started a thermonuclear war.

Comandante Castro ordered students to the streets to chant "Nikita, mariquita, lo que se da no se quita" ("Nikita, little queer, what you give you don't take away").

 

The Brothers to the Rescue shoot down.

 

 

 

Dan Rather:-The incident of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft…But you gave the order.  It was not your brother Rául or a general.

Fidel Castro:-I gave the order to communicate to the Air Force that what happened on the ninth and thirteenth could not be permitted again.  But these operations are very quick.  They enter in a matter of minutes and leave.  It is very difficult to establish a mechanism of communication and consultation.  They had the general order of not permitting them…They acted with full awareness that they were following the order.  At that moment there was not…The air force had the responsibility.  As a rule they can communicate with each other, but everyone is not always there.  In fact, they had the authority to do it, and I assume the responsibility.  I am not trying to elude the responsibility in the least, because they were instructions given in a moment of really great irritation.  They were given to the pilots, I believe, if I remember correctly, on the 14^th of January. 

Source: FIDEL CASTRO INTERVIEW BY DAN RATHER -  MADE PUBLIC SEPT 3, 1996

Detailed investigation into the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown available here.   

 

Alliances with Fascists and Nazis

 

Fidel Castro in 1962 when Otto-Ernst Remer was selling him weapons

 

In the early 1960s the Nazi who saved Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1944, Otto-Ernst Remer, had contacts with and assisted Fidel Castro in Cuba with the purchase of weapons. Ernst-Remer along with Ernst Wilhelm Springer sold the Cuban dictator 4,000 pistols. The German foreign intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), reported that "evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives." 

 

The Cuban autocrat was friendly with his Spanish counterpart Francisco Franco, and declared days of mourning when the Generalissimo, Prime Minister, Head of State, and Caudillo died on November 20, 1975. 

In the picture below is Fidel Castro with Argentine foreign minister Nicanor Costa Mendez, one of the planners of the Falkland's invasion, of the Argentine military junta that extra-judicially executed and disappeared as many as 30,000 Argentinians between 1976 and 1983 in the Dirty War meeting in Havana at the Non-Aligned Movement gathering. He died of lung cancer on August 3, 1992.

Argentine foreign minister Nicanor Costa Mendez and Fidel Castro

This is not the only member of the junta that Castro commiserated with. The Cuban dictator was also photographed with "President" Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón who, like Fidel Castro then and Raul Castro today , was"President" in name only, but in reality a brutal military dictator between 1982 and 1983. On April 20, 2010, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of 56 people in a concentration camp.

 

Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón with Fidel Castro

 Whereas Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International sought to expose and end the Dirty War, as well as later document the crimes committed and demand justice on behalf of the victims, the Cuban government did everything possible at the time to obstruct efforts to investigate the disappearances from their perch at the United Nations Human Rights Commission. 

Drug trafficker

John Simpson of BBC Newsnight interviewed Castro's former bodyguard, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, where he explained how he became disillusioned with Fidel Castro because of his links to drug traffickers, despite the dictator's public denunciation of the practice. Sanchez died within a year of publishing his memoir in May 2015 at the age of 66 in Miami.

What have joint anti-drug operations with Cuba, and sharing intelligence done in concrete terms for US citizens? In 1999, the year when Washington intensified these efforts 3,186 U.S. citizens died of cocaine overdoses. In 2021, after 22 years of this "cooperation" 23,513 Americans died in 2021. 

Anti-Semite

Cuban Jewish family targeted by the Castro regime for being Jewish.

 The Cuban dictatorship has a history of domestic antisemitism. Cuban officials in 2019, in an act of continuity with Fidel and Raul Castro's hatred of Jews, barred Jewish children from wearing kippahs in school. Fidel Castro in 1994 prohibited the importation of kosher meat into Cuba, despite allowing Halal food, which complies with Islamic dietary laws. Castro supported the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism and opposed its repeal in 1991.  

From 1959 through 1973, Havana maintained diplomatic relations with Israel while supporting terrorism against Israelis. Castro hailed the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1965 and established ties with the Palestinian Fatah in Algiers and Damascus. Castro introduced PLO members at the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana in January 1966. This conference backed revolutionary and terrorist organizations across Europe, the Americas, and Asia with the objective of changing the world order in an authoritarian direction.

Fidel Castro compared Israel to Nazi Germany on October 15, 1979. “From the bottom of our heart, we repudiated the merciless persecution and genocide that the Nazis once visited on the Jews,” he said. “But there is nothing in recent history that parallels it more than the dispossession, persecution and genocide that imperialism and Zionism are currently practicing against the Palestinian people.”

In 2014, Castro called Israeli efforts to defend themselves from Hamas terrorism “a repugnant new form of fascism,” and a “macabre genocide against the Palestinian people.” 

The Cuban dictatorship’s hostility to Israel was not limited to rhetoric and its assistance to terrorists. Cuba also involved itself in direct military action.

Castro severed diplomatic ties with Israel on September 10, 1973, just days before the Yom Kippur War began. During that war, 3,000 Cuban soldiers participated in the attack on Israel, alongside forces from Egypt and Syria, and expeditionary forces from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco, and North Korea.  

Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat meet in Havana in 1974.

Good riddance.

Until his death in 2016, Fidel Castro was a consistent enemy of democracy and human rights. He had many titles, including First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, President of the Council of State of Cuba, President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba, Prime Minister and Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Comandante, but tyrant is the most appropriate. Fidel Castro, Cuba's despot, is still dead, and good riddance. 

 

May the death cult that has formed around this tyrant soon join him.

Celebrate Celia Cruz, Forget Fidel Castro

One is celebrated around the World for their profound Cubanness, pride, and rejection of racism, while the other ended Black agency in Cuba, and committed cultural genocide.

Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain.” – Celia Cruz

Tonight, November 22nd Celia Sinfonica, in partnership with Loud & Live in Miami will honor the Queen of Salsa's legacy by reimagining her songs for symphony.

“On Saturday, November 22nd, her legacy will be honored through Celia Sinfónica, at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, with a spectacular tribute unlike anything experienced before. Produced by Loud And Live and the Celia Cruz Foundation, Celia Sinfónica is a groundbreaking tribute concert that reimagines Celia Cruz’s most iconic songs as symphonic masterpieces. For the first time ever, her timeless repertoire including anthems like “La Vida Es Un Carnaval”, “Quimbara”, and more, will be transformed by sweeping orchestral arrangements together with the vibrant rhythms of Afro-Caribbean soul in an unforgettable evening, performed live by the Florida International University (FIU) Symphony Orchestra and accompanied by a lineup of renowned vocalists and instrumentalists, soon to be announced. ‘Celia Cruz was more than a music legend, she was a force of culture, identity, and inspiration for millions around the world,’ said Nelson Albareda, CEO of Loud And Live. ‘With Celia Sinfónica, we are honored to celebrate her enduring legacy in a way that’s never been done before. This production is not only a tribute to her iconic voice and music, but also a testament to her lasting impact on generations past, present, and future.’”

 

On December 5, 2025 the Miami Film Festival will screen the documentary La Cuba Mia (My Cuba) at the Koubek Center which focuses on a concert held in Little Havana in April 2001, which brought together Celia Cruz and her dear friend, Spanish artist Emilio Alberto Aragón—better known as Miliki—a beloved singer, accordionist, and clown who delighted Cuban children on 1950s television alongside his brothers Gaby and Fofó. 

Who is Celia Cruz?  

The centennial of Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso’s birth was observed and celebrated on October 21, 2025. She is better known by her stage name Celia Cruz.

She was born on October 21, 1925 in the poorest section of the Santos Suárez neighborhood in Havana and lived in a small home with 13 relatives. Her mother, Catalina Alfonso, was a stay-at-home mom who looked after her vast extended family, while her father, Simon Cruz, worked as a railroad stoker. He monitored steam pressure, managed water levels, maintained the fire, and regulated steam-powered jets that distributed coal within the firebox of the locomotive engine.

She began singing as a child, and to compete on radio programs as a young woman. Cruz’s cousin Serafín entered her in a competition on the radio program La Hora del Té (Tea Time) in 1947. She received first prize, a meringue cake, for her performance of the tango “Nostalgia.”

Fifty two years later on April 30, 1999 in the Spanish program, Séptimo de caballería”, in which she sang and took part in a panel discussion with other artists: Ángela Carrasco, Lolita Flores, and Miguel Bosé. Celia briefly discussed the role her mom played in circumventing her dad’s objections to his daughter having a career in show business. “My father didn’t want me to be a singer or an artist. My mother told me, ‘Forget it, I’ll get it sorted out with him.’”

To appease her father, who was embarrassed that his daughter was involved in show business, Celia pursued her studies to become a teacher, but continued to compete in singing competitions. She recorded her first track in Venezuela in 1948.

FBI files, declassified in 2004, revealed that she had allegedly flirted with Cuban communists in the early 1950s. This was at the moment that Celia was a breakout star in all of Cuba having joined the Sonora Matancera Orchestra in August 1950.

At the height of her popularity in Cuba, Fidel Castro took power in 1959.

Miguel Angel Quevedo, a Cuban businessman, hired Celia Cruz to perform with a pianist in his home at the beginning of 1959. The most influential magazine in Cuba, Bohemia, which had backed the revolution, was owned by Quevedo. … On the night of the performance at Quevedo’s house, Celia was singing when all of a sudden the guests began to rush to the front door. Fidel Castro had arrived. She kept singing.

Fidel Castro attempted to force the salsa singer to pay him homage prior to that, but Celia refused. Salserísimo Perú, a Youtube site founded by three Peruvian journalists to disseminate knowledge on salsa and tropical music. The following is their account of Celia Cruz’s first “encounter” with Fidel Castro.

“In the early months of 1959, Celia Cruz was hired to sing with a pianist at the house of the Cuban businessman Miguel Angel Quevedo. Quevedo owned the magazine Bohemia, the most influential in Cuba and who had supported the revolution in the last few years. The guerrilla movement with a certain Fidel Castro in front proclaimed in Santiago the beginning of the revolution. At that moment Celia enjoyed great popularity for “Yebero Moderno”, “Tu voz” and “Burundanga” songs she had recorded with the Sonora Matancera. As a guest artist of Rogelio Martinez’s group the Guarachera (Celia) was free to accept other contracts as a soloist. This allowed her to show her talent on different radio stations in Havana, and perform in Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru. Since the regime of Fidel took power, it had begun to systematically seize businesses, radio and television stations. [Fidel Castro speaking: ‘The revolution was something like a hope and that joy, possibly, prevented us from thinking all that we still had to do.’ For the Guarechera, Fidel was ending free expression and the arts in her country. The night of the show in the home of Quevedo, Celia was singing standing next to the pianist, when suddenly the guests started to run to the front door of the house. Fidel Castro had arrived. Neither she nor the pianist moved and continued singing. Suddenly, Quevedo approached Celia and told her that Fidel wanted to meet her because in his guerrilla days, when he cleaned his rifle he was listening to Burundanga. Celia replied that she had been hired to sing next to the piano, and that was her place. If Fidel wanted to meet her, he would have to come to her. But the commandant did not do that.”

  

Castro barred Celia Cruz from visiting her dying mother

Since Celia Cruz refused to bow to the new dictator, and wanted to continue to live the life of a free artist, she had to leave Cuba on July 15, 1960. However, when her mom was ill she tried to return to see her in 1962, but was barred from entering the country by Fidel Castro. When her mother died Celia was again blocked by the dictatorship from attending her funeral. Because she was not an active supporter of the regime, her music was banned in Cuba.

She was finally able to return to Cuba in 1990, but not on territory controlled by the Castro dictatorship, when she played a concert for Cuban employees who worked on the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base, and collected Cuban soil that would be entombed with her in 2003.

In the same Spanish program, Séptimo de caballería, mentioned earlier she was repeatedly asked to reconcile with the Cuban dictatorship, “to open the door.”

Celia's assessment of the Cuban government

Celia responded to them, “I’m not going to tell you she is above Cuba. But Catalina Alfonso [ her mom] is right next to Cuba, and for her I’m not the one who’s going to open the door. I’m not there, because they closed it to me. My mother died, and I couldn’t go and bury her because they didn’t want to let me in. Let that regime leave then, because it has to go. But should I go there? What you told me are pretty words but I won’t...”

Celia Cruz was punished by Fidel Castro for refusing to bend the knee, and for wanting to live in freedom on her own terms.

“I don’t want to go to a country where I can’t speak like I’m speaking to you now. They were the first to [distance] themselves. Now, since the dollars are so convenient for them, they send all those poor old people here.” …“[Cuba is] a farm, and he’s the owner.” … “There’s a book of Cuban music that couldn’t be released to the world if it didn’t feature Celia Cruz. And it didn’t, because I’m out. So they’re the most unjust and narrow-minded. Because Celia Cruz has to be included there, whether they like it or not, I am Cuba, period.”

The program ended with Celia Cruz responding to the Spanish actress and singer Lolita Flores with a sound bite to sum up her view of the Cuban government. “Let me tell you nicely: May the cancer that this country suffers from disappear.”

Her music still banned in Cuba

Regime apologists and their agents of influence have attempted to pretend that things have changed with regards to artistic freedom.

On August 8, 2012 BBC News reported that Cuba’s ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted and on August 10 the BBC correspondent in Cuba, Sarah Rainsford, tweeted that she had been given names of forbidden artists by the central committee and the internet was a buzz that the ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted. Others soon followed reporting on the news. The stories specifically mentioned Celia Cruz as one of the artists whose music would return to Cuban radio.

There was only one problem. It was not true. Diario de Cuba reported on August 21, 2012 that Tony Pinelli, a well known musician and radio producer, distributed an e-mail in which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT) confirmed that the music of the late Celia Cruz would continue to be banned. The e-mail clearly stated: “All those who had allied with the enemy, who acted against our families, like Celia Cruz, who went to sing at the Guantanamo Base, the ICRT arrogated to itself the right, quite properly, not to disseminate them on Cuban radio.”

Cuban cultural genocide

Celia is in good company. Other major Cuban artists who have had their music banned by the Castro regime are Olga Guillot, Rolando Lecuona, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Israel Cachao López, Ramón “Mongo” Santamaría, Mario Bauza, Arsenio Rodríguez, Willy Chirino, and Gloria Estefan.

According to the 2004 book Shoot the Singer!: Music Censorship Today edited by Marie Korpe, there is growing concern that post-revolution generations in Cuba are growing up without knowing or hearing censored musicians such as Celia Cruz, Olga Guillot, and the long list above. This could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations. This approach has been referred to as a Cuban cultural genocide, denying generations of Cubans their history.

How Fidel Castro destroyed Black Cuban civil society

In September 1960 when Fidel Castro met with Malcolm X in Harlem for a photo op, his communist revolution was ending Black Cuban's agency in Cuba.

This was known publicly by 1961 when Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay, "Castro and the Cuban Negro", published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961 detailed how it was done.

“Of the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”

Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian rule.

It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while criticizing racism in the United States.

For decades, the Castro regime expected Black Cubans to be obedient, submissive, and grateful to the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist tropes. 

Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960)

 

The elimination of Afro-Cubans from this dynamic by the new communist revolutionary elite turned racism into a political tool outside of Cuba to advance the Castro regime's communist agenda, but turned it into a taboo topic by ungrateful blacks, labeled counter-revolutionaries by the dictatorship.

Black Cubans who think for themselves are still punished today, and often with greater severity than their white counterparts.

Cuban blacks today that would have been political leaders in the 1940s and 1950s are dissidents persecuted, hunted and killed by the secret police.

Based on the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, according to the January 13, 2020 article by EuropaPress, Cuba today h as the largest per capita prison population in the world. Although official data is unavailable, it is known that a disproportionate number are Black Cubans.

Castro said he ended anti-black racism in 1959, Blacks saying it still existed were punished.

On March 22, 1959 Fidel Castro declared that racism no longer existed in Cuba, to question that was to be a counter-revolutionary. The regime claimed for decades that there was no racism in Cuba.

Abdias Nascimento born in the town of Franca, State of São Paulo, in March 1914, Nascimento was the grandson of enslaved Africans. His father was a cobbler and a musician; his mother made and catered sweets and candies. He received his B. A. in Economics from the University of Rio de Janeiro in 1938, and post-graduate degrees from the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (1957) and the Oceanography Institute (1961).

Nascimento participated early in Brazil’s equivalent of the civil rights movement, the Brazilian Black Front (São Paulo, 1929-30). He led the organization of the Afro-Campineiro Congress, a meeting of Brazilian blacks to protest discrimination in the city of Campinas in 1938. Nascimento passed away in 2011.

This is what he said in an open letter on October 30, 2009 concerning racism in Cuba:

“The facts as I have come to know them indicate that we are facing a clear case of political intimidation against those, in Cuba, who raise their voices in protest against racism, discriminatory practices, and all kinds of intimidations meted out to citizens who dare call for the establishment, in their country, of a State that is respectful of Civil Rights, of the right of citizens to freely congregate and form organizations and to freely demonstrate their opposition to discriminatory practices of which they feel they are a target for one reason or another.”

Meanwhile poverty disproportionately impacts black Cubans with 95% having the lowest incomes compared to 58% of white Cubans, after six decades of communism, and independent black voices continue to be silenced.

Celebrate Celia, Forget Fidel

Communists are already celebrating the centenary of the birth of Fidel Castro in with a series of propaganda stunts over the next year. They should be called out and fact checked.

However, supporters of freedom and beautiful music should continue to commemorate Celia Cruz’s entire life and legacy through her music, and words.

There are other events being organized to celebrate her life and legacy that you can still attend.

On November 7, 2025 the Coral Gables Museum in South Florida opened a Celia Cruz photo exhibit of the work of photographer Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte in collaboration with Tico Torres. It is titled “Happy 100th Birthday Celia!”

 

In September 2025  the Latin Grammys celebrated her Latin Grammy win.

A special way to honor and celebrate the memory of Celia Cruz: Celebrate black artists jailed in Cuba today for acts of conscience.

Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara jailed for their art

Celia spoke out for Cuba’s political prisoners in life, and she would have spoken up for prisoners of conscience Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and others if she were still with us.

Despite winning two Latin Grammys, their music is also banned in Cuba by the dictatorship.

Celebrate Celia by lifting them up, and letting others know about their plight, and that of other Cuban prisoners of conscience.