Careful when Castro praises you
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| Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter in Cuba in 2002 |
Fidel Castro in
2011 had words of praise for former President Jimmy Carter upon his
second visit to Cuba describing him as someone with “enough serenity and courage to deal with the issue of relations with Cuba” and continued:
“His administration was the only one that took some steps to lessen the
criminal blockade imposed on our people.” ...“The Revolution always appreciated his valiant
gesture. In the year 2002, it received him warmly. Now, I reiterated to
him its respect and esteem.”
Castro also claimed that it was the “extreme fascist right in the United
States” that led to
President Carter’s Cuba policy failing at the time. However,
a book written by his chief body guard, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez Crespo,
gives a better insight as to how Castro viewed President Carter and how he applied this knowledge at the time.
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| Book written by Castro's chief body guard |
Brian Latell, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and presently an academic at the University of Miami,
in a June 8, 2015 oped in The Miami Herald giving an overview of the above book focused on how Castro dealt with the Mariel boatlift during the Carter presidency:
For me, Sánchez’s most appalling indictment of Fidel concerns the
chaotic exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans in 1980 from the port of
Mariel. Most who fled were members of Cuban exile families living in the
United States. They were allowed to board boats brought by relatives
and to make the crossing to South Florida.
But many of the boats
were forcibly loaded by Cuban authorities with criminals and mentally
ill people plucked from institutions on the island. Few of us who have
studied Fidel Castro have doubted that it was he who ordered those
dangerous Cubans to be exported to the United States. He has persuaded
few with his denials of any role in the incident.
Yet Sánchez adds
an appalling new twist to the saga. We learn that prison wards and
mental institutions were not hurriedly emptied, as was previously
believed. Sánchez reveals that Castro insisted on scouring lists of
prisoners so that he could decide who would stay and who would be sent
to the United States. He ordered interior minister Jose Abrahantes to
bring him prisoner records.
Sánchez was seated in an anteroom just
outside of Fidel’s office when the minister arrived. The bodyguard
listened as Fidel discussed individual convicts with Abrahantes.
“I
was present when they brought him the lists of prisoners,” Sánchez
writes, “with the name, the reason for the sentence, and the date of
release. Fidel read them, and with the stroke of a pen designated which
ones could go and which ones would stay. ‘Yes’ was for murderers and
dangerous criminals; ‘no’ was for those who had attacked the
revolution.” Dissidents remained incarcerated.
A number of the criminal and psychopathic marielitos put on the boats to Florida went on to commit heinous crimes — including mass murder, rape, and arson.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article23537077.html#storylink=cpy
This episode was a contributing factor, along with a terrible economy, the hostage crisis in Iran that led the American public in 1980 to elect Ronald Reagan president
who reversed Carter's policies on Cuba. What should worry citizens of the United States is that Obama's
new Cuba policy is a
sequel to Carter's 1970s Cuba policy.
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