"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
A reflection on the 54 year alliance between the Assad and Castro regimes.
Hafez al-Assad
seized power in November 1970 in a bloodless coup, and remained in power through brutal means until his death on June 10, 2000. The Syrian dictator ruled his country for over 30 years, and when he died in power, was succeeded by his equally brutal son
Bashar al-Assad who ruled Syria for another 24 years. Throughout these 54 years, the Castro brothers maintained a close relationship with the Assad regime.
Fidel Castro broke relations with Israel on the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. This was required for all Soviet-aligned regimes, as the international communist line defined Israel as a colonial state and an arm of U.S. imperialism. However, the Cuban dictatorship went above and beyond in their hostility to the Jewish state. Noticias de Israel (News of Israel) provided a more in-depth description of what took place next.
From the highest levels of power in Havana, a secret operation was orchestrated to send military support to Syria.A tank brigade, helicopter pilots, communications agents, and intelligence and counterintelligence officers were meticulously selected for this mission.It was imperative that these men did not arouse suspicion and that they were perfectly prepared for the task entrusted to them.
The Military Brigade of Senén Casas Regueiro was mobilized, and under the command of General Leopoldo Cintra Frías, a recognized name in military circles, this surreptitious plan was put into action. In a carefully planned diversionary maneuver, the soldiers left Cuba dressed in civilian clothes, with forged passports that identified them as university students. They traveled on separate flights to East Germany, where they made a technical stopover, before reaching their final destination: Syria.
Once on Syrian territory, Soviet military equipment, including modern T-62 tanks and SAM rocket artillery, was ready for operation. Figures vary, but it is estimated that between 1,800 and 4,000 Cubans were present in Syria during the 1973 confrontation.
The surprise of this operation resulted in a series of significant losses for Israel, both in human lives and military equipment. Some civilian areas were also hit during the clash.
On March 31, 1974, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan announced on US television that 3,000 Cuban troops had been dispatched to support Syria during the Yom Kippur War. The Economist published two articles in its Foreign Report in 1978 that highlighted Cuba's role in Syria beginning shortly after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Cuban tank crews fought with Syrian troops. According to Foreign Report, 180 Cubans were killed and 250 were injured.
The bodies of hundreds of victims of the 1982 massacre that Hafez al-Assad ordered against Palestinians and Lebanese in the Tel al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, northeast of Beirut, Lebanon are still interred in unidentified graves. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people, primarily civilians, are thought to have been killed, although some estimate that the total number of victims during the siege may exceed 4,000.
No criticism was made by Havana regarding the massacre of these Palestinians by Assad. On the contrary the relationship between Havana and Damascus remained strong.
"An August 1985 cable from Assad to Fidel Castro on the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Syria and Cuba praised the two countries' friendship as beneficial 'for the two peoples in their joint struggle against world imperialism and its allies.' A telegram from the
Syrian foreign minister on the same occasion expressed 'Syria's admiration for the fraternal Cuban people's great achievements and their firm stands against imperialist aggression on the Latin American people.'”
In 2011, a nonviolent movement against the Assad regime emerged, which was met with extreme brutality, and resulted in a civil war.
When the international community, belatedly, demanded an accounting for the rights violations committed by the Assad regime in Syria, the regime in Havana was one of a handful of governments that voted against investigating the crimes of the dynastic dictatorship in Damascus.
On August 23, 2011 the Cuban
government along with China, Russia and Ecuador voted against investigating
gross and systematic human rights violations in Syria.
On June 1, 2012 at a Special
Session on the deteriorating human rights situation in Syria with a special
focus on
the massacre in El-Houleh the Cuban regime and its allies took a stand against holding the Assad regime accountable for its gross and systematic human
rights abuses.
The Associated Press reported that
the U.N. Human Rights Council voted overwhelmingly on September 25, 2014, to share its
evidence of Syrian atrocities in hopes it will be forwarded to the
world's war crimes tribunal. By a vote of 32-5, with 10 abstentions, the
47-nation council adopted
the resolution condemning the lack of cooperation by
President Bashar Assad's government with a U.N. commission investigating
rights violations since March 2011 in Syria. Cuba was one of five nations—the other four being Algeria, China, Russia, and Venezuela—that voted against sharing evidence of
gross and
systematic human rights violations in Syria.
Ten years of civil war and bloodshed with tens of thousands disappeared, millions displaced, and over 500,000 killed, yet the Syrian regime was being normalized in 2023 by too many in the international community.
It
appears that the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria over two generations of
incredible levels of brutality and terror has come to an end. Let us
pray that what comes next after so many decades of depravity and
repression is an improvement. Assad's
decision to engage in the mass murder of the Syrian nonviolent
opposition in 2011 sparked a civil war that has claimed hundreds of
thousands of lives. Now
is the time to make an assessment of the governments who backed the
Assad regime, and call them out as we learn of the crimes of this
dynastic dictatorship.This includes the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. All supported Assad, and legitimized his rule.
"It appears that the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria over two generations of incredible levels of brutality and terror has come to an end. Let us pray that what comes next after so many decades of depravity and repression is an improvement." https://t.co/5dO3DpvHFn 1/4
Vaclav Havel,
a man who had both head and heart, understood why this kind of regime
was so profoundly inhuman: "As soon as man began considering himself the
source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of
everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began
to lose control of it."
The optimism expressed by Gorbachev and the nostalgia of Cohen fail to
take into account the human cost of the USSR. The Soviet Union took the
lives of an estimated 61 million human beings. It was a brutal and evil system that allied with Nazi Germany to start WW2 in 1939, and afterwards spawned other brutal regimes around the globe that claimed over 100 million lives. Their lives mattered. Vaclav Havel, in his 1990 New Years Speech, called on his countrymen to remember.
"The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and
recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of
blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten.
First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human
being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is
these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today's
freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc,
and thus the background of our own newfound freedom."
The
number of lives lost is only the material accounting and does not take
into account the spiritual ruin visited upon billions and its aftermath
to the present day. The late Czech president explained it in the same address.
"The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We
fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different
from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore
one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love,
friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and
dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological
peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient
times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships."
The
destruction, both material and spiritual, generated by the Soviet Union
over seventy years will take centuries to repair and transcend. That
hard truth may not be cause for celebration, but the end of the system
that wreaked so much damage is cause for celebration, not regret. To do
otherwise is to be heartless. The fact that it happened without violence
on Christmas Day in 1991 is also cause for joy.
Criminally, Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022 expanded his war into Ukraine in what some view as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet empire and the rivers of blood are flowing again, and we do not know how it will end. Gorbachev passed away on August 30, 2022 a respected figure abroad, but reviled in Russia. He was in many ways the polar opposite of Vladimir Putin.
Secondly, the largest remaining communist regime, the Peoples Republic of
China, remains in power and with
the aid of smaller communist powers (Cuba, Laos, Nicaragua, North Korea,
Venezuela, Vietnam, and their networks) is backing Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The Chinese Communist Party
celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2021. It is a
tragedy that they did not go the same way as the Soviet Union in 1991.
People of goodwill must continue to work for and pray for
the day that a second miracle can be celebrated with the the end of
communism in China, and a third miracle with the defeat of the Russian invaders in Ukraine.
“All the races of the world are men, and
of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this
is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free
choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the
entire human race is one.” - Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas (1550)
Since it is akin to asking what color Napoleon's white horse is, the definition of human rights ought to be self-evident at first glance. Human rights are those that you have just by virtue of being a person. These rights ought to apply to everyone since they are fundamental to being a human.
The modern concept of a universal human rights standard, despite its simplicity, was not even discussed until the 1550s. In a discussion concerning the rights of the native people of the Americas, Bishop Bartolomé De Las Casas presented a universal concept of human rights for the first time.
“All the races of the world are men, and
of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this
is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free
choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God . . . Thus the
entire human race is one.”
The French revolution is tied the emergence of rights to a particular national experience while appealing to enlightenment values. At the same time critical voices, such as Edmund Burke, emerged that challenged the abstract rights discourse with concrete examples and through his own prior actions provided a working alternative rooted in tradition, and moral values.
Theologian Nigel Biggar and The European Conservative's monthly
show, The Forge, "hosted by Harrison Pitt which aims to revive the art
of Socratic dialogue and intellectual combat," discuss questionsthat this blog has previously addressed and returns to them because of their conversation which raise important questions. "What is the proper relationship of these alleged rights to other important concerns, from duties and virtues to democratic politics and national traditions? Do natural and/or human rights exist at all? And even if they do, how did rights-talk come to be so effectively weaponized by utopian activists?
The failed enlightenment human rights project
Enlightenment liberalism is committed to full equality, individual
rights, dignity and has a discourse to protect the marginalized. All of
that is true and is backed up in the historical record. An excellent
example of a document that is a pure product of enlightenment liberalism
is "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," also known as the "Declaration of Human and Civic Rights" adopted on August 26, 1789 and is a product of the French Revolution as is the even more egalitarian document produced in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the Constitution of Year I. Article 1 of the 1789 declaration reads: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
Enlightenment liberalism constructed abstract models that failed to take
into account the full complexity of human nature and its
contradictions. The French human rights charter declares men absolutely
both free and equal. Edmund Burke believed that
"full equality" outside of the moral and spiritual sphere is
unattainable and a dangerous fiction. First, to permit absolute freedom
is to tolerate profound inequalities because people if left to their own
devices develop hierarchies. Secondly, to enforce absolute equality
requires an all powerful state to repress natural inequalities. The French Revolution: How utopian aspirations led to dystopian results
The end
result is not absolute equality but a small group with great power at
its disposal making slaves of the majority. This is what happened in the
French Revolution and reached its apex with Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794 with an observation that he applied in governance: "The
government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against
tyranny." It is a contradiction in the same way that combining absolute
freedom and equality as revolutionary goals are in contradiction and
doomed to failure. Robespierre was only applying the logic of enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau's who spoke of "forcing men to be free."The "rights" that emerged out of the French Revolution were a rejection
of tradition, the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church more specifically, gave Europe its first modern genocide of peasants in which men, women, and children were systematically exterminated, The Vendee, and the end result was the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and a world war that took three million lives. Edmund Burke, and a conservative conception of Human Rights
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, written less than a year into the French Revolution, Edmund Burke predicted in 1790 that the follies of enlightenment liberalism and its abstractions would lead to widespread slaughter, tyranny, and ultimately a dictatorship.
Burke provides an alternative approach to the defense of human rights that rejects abstractions, defends tradition, but also has a moral sense informed by his Christian faith.Edmund Burke's lifelong opposition to "entrenched and arbitrary power" led him to clash with enlightenment liberalism at pivotal moments. He was the prosecutor who attempted to remove Warren Hastings, the Governor General of India, ten years before the French Revolution, for poor leadership, personal corruption, and mistreatment of the Indians he was responsible for. On February 15, 1788, Edmund Burke
opened with a speech which is excerpted below:
My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give
him; the King has no arbitrary power to give him; your Lordships have
not; nor the Commons, nor the whole Legislature. We have no arbitrary
power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man
can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself
according to his own will; much less can one person be governed by the
will of another. We are all born in subjection—all born equally, high
and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable,
pre-existent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our
contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations,
antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in
the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.
Edmund Burke in the trial against Hastings advocated for the idea that people of different races should not be exploited and
of the need for accountability. It was not the first time Burke spoke
out against arbitrary rule. In his March 22, 1775 speech on conciliation with America
he explained to the British government that the way to keep the
allegiance of the colonies was to maintain the identification with civil
rights associated with colonial rule warning that if that relation were
broken it would lead to dissolution.
Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil
rights associated with your government-they will cling
and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of
power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once
understood that your government may be one thing and
their privileges another, that these two things may exist
without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the
cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and
dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the
sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of
liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith,
wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship
freedom, they will turn their faces towards you.
Edmund Burke's concept of human dignity as derived from the creator
combined with a concept of man's moral equality has deep roots in the
Christian tradition which incidentally is where the very language and
concept of human rights first emerged in the 1200s in the Catholic
Church and was refined by Thomas Aquinas.
Edmund Burke's defense of the marginalized, the colonized, and the
conquered was rooted not in abstract enlightenment theory but a
Christian moral vision of the universe. According to Burke, in his 1796 Letters on a regicide peace, man has freedom but it is not absolute:
As to the right of men to act anywhere according to their pleasure,
without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of
total independence of each other. It is not the condition of our
nature: nor is it conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable
course of action without its having some effect upon others; or, of
course, without producing some degree of responsibility for his
conduct.
Conservative skepticism
The skepticism expressed by conservatives Nigel Biggar and Harrison Pitt in their conversation on human rights is not new. Paleo-conservative writer Thomas Fleming in The Morality of Everyday Life
asks: “If rights are claims to be enforced by government, then what are
‘international human rights’ if not the theoretical justification for
world government?”[Fleming, T. 2007 ] American conservatives are also concerned with the proliferation of rights into areas that undermine traditions.
It has been demonstrated that governments have a history of mass
killing. Why should one think that a world government would be any
better? The question has not only been raised by American conservatives but also by a man who the official media of the Soviet Union described as a reactionary utopian upon his death in 1948. Mohandas Gandhi
looked upon an increase in the power of the State with the greatest
fear because, although it appeared to be doing good by minimizing
exploitation, it did the greatest harm to mankind by destroying
individuality. Furthermore Gandhi believed that: “Centralization as a system is inconsistent with [a] non-violent structure of society.”
Nature abhors a vacuum. Despite this skepticism the fact remains
that both human rights discourse and the universality of human rights
emerged out of one of the most conservative institutions: The Catholic
Church. Conservatives must not abandon the conversation on human rights to the Left. Therefore, if one wants to understand how human rights came to be and what can be done to ensure that they can be preserved in a way that, while acknowledging that utopia is unattainable, aims to improve the lives of their fellow humans, one must have a conservative conception of human rights. The Revolution in China, France, Russia, Cuba, and many other countries demonstrate that, when left to their own devices, the Revolutionary's imposition of expanding abstract rights results in a dystopian hellscape rather than a utopian paradise.
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.
Eight 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 asidefor
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."
Eight 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
On this eighth 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.
"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
“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."
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.
"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."
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
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 14th of January.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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