Remember Milada Horáková, who was martyred on this day in 1950, by the Communist regime for her nonviolent defense of Czechoslovak democracy.

Remember her 

Milada Horakova at her show trial in 1950.

Milada Horakova was hanged with three others in Prague’s Pankrac Prison as a spy and traitor to the Communist Czechoslovakian government on June 27, 1950. She was a  lawyer, social democrat, and a prominent feminist in the interwar and postwar periods. 

Milada had been a member of the Czech resistance to the Nazi occupation of her homeland and survived a Nazi prison. After Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 by the Soviets she became a member of parliament in 1946 but resigned her seat after the Communist coup of 1948. 

However she refused to abandon her country.  She was arrested at her office on September 27, 1949 "on charges of conspiracy and espionage against the state." 

Milada was subjected to a show trial. 

Oxford Languages defines a show trial as "a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice." 

Vladimir Lenin called them "model trials", but they would eventually become known as show trials under Josef Stalin with hundreds of thousands executed and millions sent to work camps in Siberia, and they would take place not only in the Soviet Union, but in the East Bloc including Czechoslovakia, and as far away as Cuba. The Nazis also copied the practice, and so have other repressive regimes.

🕯️ Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Communist Regime

Today, we honour the memory of all those who were stripped of their freedom, dignity, and lives under the communist regime. Seventy-six years ago, Milada Horáková, Záviš Kalandra, Jan Bouchal, and Oldřich Pecl were… pic.twitter.com/Pw9gAaxjAk

— Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs (@CzechMFA) June 27, 2026

"I have declared to the State Police that I remain faithful to my convictions, and that the reason I remain faithful to them is because I adhere to the ideas, the opinions and the beliefs of those who are figures of authority to me. And among them are two people who remain the most important figures to me, two people who made an enormous impression on me throughout my life. Those people are Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Eduard Benes. And I want to say something to those who were also inspired by those two men when forming their own convictions and their own ideas. I want to say this: no-one in this country should be made to die for their beliefs. And no-one should go to prison for them."

Her life story was brought to big screen in 2017and on January 12, 2018 was available on Netflix, and is now available on Amazon. Below is an English trailer for this important film.

 Adam D. E. Watkins in his 2010 paper "The Show Trial of J U Dr. Milada Horáková: The Catalyst for Social Revolution in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1950" explains the importance of the show trial in gutting democratic traditions and replacing them with Stalinism:

The study deconstructs the show trial’s influence on inducing a country to foster the Communist movement against decades of democratic traditions. The research reveals the impact of the show trial of Dr. Milada Horáková in 1950 and how it was instrumental in reforming a society, marked the beginning of Stalinism, and ushered forth a perverted system of justice leading to a cultural transformation after the Communist putsch. Furthermore, the revolution truncated intellectual thought and signified the end of many social movements – including the women’s rights movement

According to D. E. Watkings Horáková was seen by the public as a symbol of  the First Republic and of democracy. Unlike others who did break under the relentless psychological and physical torture she never did. The communists tried to edit her testimony for propaganda purposes but as Radio Prague in their 2005 report on the discovery of the unedited tapes of her trial:

[S]he faced her show trial with calm and defiance, refusing to be broken. Audio recordings - intended to be used by the Communists for propaganda purposes - were mostly never aired, for the large part because for the Party's purposes, they were unusable.

Because she refused to cooperate with the Stalinists her punishment was particularly severe, even for the death penalty. In 2007 her prosecutor Ludmila Brozova-Polednova who in 1950 had helped to condemn Horakova to death, now 86, was tried as an accomplice to murder. 

During the trial Radio Prague reported that a note written by an anonymous eye-witness to Milada Horakova's execution quoted the young prosecutor recommending: "Don't break her neck on the noose, Suffocate the bitch - and the others too." Milada Horáková  was executed in Pankrác Prison on 27 June 1950 by a particularly torturous method: "intentionally slow strangulation, which according to historians took 15 minutes^. She was 48 years old." The urn with her ashes was never given to her family nor is it known what became of them.

In a letter to her 16 year old teenage daughter Milada explained why she had refused to compromise with evil. Her daughter received the letter 40 years later after the end of communist rule:

The reason was not that I loved you little; I love you just as purely and fervently as other mothers love their children. But I understood that my task here in the world was to do you good … by seeing to it that life becomes better, and that all children can live well. … Don’t be frightened and sad because I am not coming back any more. Learn, my child, to look at life early as a serious matter. Life is hard, it does not pamper anybody, and for every time it strokes you it gives you ten blows. Become accustomed to that soon, but don’t let it defeat you. Decide to fight.

Hours prior to her execution she reaffirmed her position to her family:

I go with my head held high. One also has to know how to lose. That is no disgrace. An enemy also does not lose honor if he is truthful and honorable. One falls in battle; what is life other than struggle? (Both quotes excerpts taken from here)

Ms. Brožová-Polednová, the prosecutor,  was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison in 2008 but was given a presidential pardon by Vaclav Klaus on humanitarian grounds one year and six months into her sentence and released in 2010. The former prosecutor defended her actions claiming that what she did was legal and that she was "following orders." She tried to appeal her conviction at the Strasbourg Court in 2011 and lost.

⚖On June 27, 1950, the Czechoslovak communist regime executed #FreedomFighter Milada Horáková. In Czechia, we commemorate today as the #DayOfPoliticalPrisoners. The number of #PoliticalPrisoners worldwide is unknown, though rough estimates by human rights orgs are around 1mill. pic.twitter.com/lnx1jkABpA

— People in Need (@people_in_need) June 27, 2024

Today, June 27, the day of Milada Horakova's execution is now recognized in the Czech Republic as  “Commemoration day for the victims of the Communist regime.” 

El legado de Milada Horáková https://t.co/p43HYSJ6tp via @CADAL

— John Suarez ن (@johnjsuarez) June 28, 2026

Yesterday in Argentina, CADAL activists screened the film MILADA.

Biopic of the life of Milada Horáková (2017)

 

Remembering José Martí and his legacy on his 173rd birth anniversary both in Cuba and in exile

 "Freedom can not be fruitful for the peoples who have their forehead stained in blood." - José Martí*

José Martí, 28 January 1853 – 19 May 1895

 
He re-launched an independence struggle, but he did so without inciting hatred or dehumanizing his opponents. He was a fervent supporter of civil liberties, particularly the freedom of thought and expression. 

Additionally, he worked as a journalist and poet, having previously been imprisoned by the Spanish monarchy for his political views. 

 On this day in 1853 José Julián Martí Pérez was born.
 
Cubans of all ideological stripes claim him as their own, but objectively who has maintained the spirit of his words and ideas?

Not the Cuban dictatorship.

Falsifying Martí 

Sadly, the Castro brothers over the past 67 years has been misrepresenting his writings with the assistance of international institutions such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). They have re-written the real Jose Marti in an Orwellian fashion to advance their totalitarian narrative.

This is not unique to the Marxist-Leninist regime in Cuba but a common practice among other totalitarian regimes to legitimize their rule.

Carlos Ripoll, an expert on the life and thought of Jose Marti in 1994 wrote in the journal Cuban Studies published by the University of Pittsburgh Press the article titled, "The Falsification of José Martí in Cuba" and provided an abstract of his argument:

"Marxist-Leninist governments have traditionally falsified history to justify their rise to power and the political systems they have imposed. In response to the worldwide collapse of Communism, Cuban authorities have intensified their adulteration of history so as to offer a nationalistic rationale for their continuation in power. The highest exponent of the revolutionary tradition in Cuba is José Marti and, therefore, the falsification of his thought and doctrines is the first priority of many historians and critics. They concentrate, in particular, on the Cuban Revolutionary party founded by Marti, which they misrepresent as a forerunner of the Cuban Communist party, the basic institution that holds the monopoly of power and consequently is responsible for all the misfortunes and injustices that afflict the country. This study shows some of the forms this falsification takes in Cuba, its objectives, and attempts to disprove the inconsistent and false arguments of those who purport to find similarities or coincidences between the free, democratic republic that Marti wished for his country and the totalitarian state there in existence." 

In a letter in 1988 to The New York Review of Books, Professor Ripoll revealed how José Martí in a letter to his friend, Valdes Dominguez, written just a year before Martí’s death, criticized the “arrogance and hidden rage” of “socialist ideology” whose adherents, “in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless.”

Seven months after the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Cuban independence leader, in 1953, a failed armed attack on the Moncada barracks by Fidel Castro and a group of revolutionaries, led the future Cuban dictator,  during his trial to declare José Martí the "intellectual author" of the attack.

Castro was lying.

In 1972, the Cuban dictatorship created the "Order of Jose Marti" and over the next  54 years awarded it to dictators and war criminals such as: Alexander Lukashenko, Jiang Zemin, Xi Jinping, Kim Il-sung, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Hugo Chávez, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Robert Mugabe, Erich Honecker, Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and Nicolas Maduro.

 

The modern counterparts of Martí 

There is a movement in Cuba that seeks to restore human rights and liberties using nonviolent means. 

There are courageous Cubans who risk everything standing up to dictatorship and some of them have been assassinated in the process and their families targeted for reprisals, and forced into exile.

They embrace the principle expressed by José Martí that "There is no forgiveness for acts of hatred. Daggers thrust in the name of liberty are thrust into liberty's heart." 

Following this statement to its logical conclusion leads us over a century later to new generations carrying on his legacy.

"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.’" - Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, December 17, 2002

"Those who steal the rights of others steal from themselves. Those who remove and crush freedom are the true slaves." -  Harold Cepero Escalante, November 3, 2002  

In their writings and in their lives, Oswaldo and Harold exemplified the best qualities of José Martí, rejecting hatred and continuing to defy injustice while pursuing liberation and national reconciliation. 

Cuban Martyrs: Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and Harold Cepero Escalante,

 Oswaldo and Harold were leaders in the Christian Liberation Movement. They sought freedom for their fellow Cubans.

One of their most important efforts was the Varela  Project. 

The Varela Project, named after the Cuban Catholic Priest Felix Varela, sought to reform the Cuban legal system to bring it in line with international human rights standards. They had followed the letter of the law in organizing the campaign and yet the dictatorship's response to a nonviolent citizen's initiative was to first coerce Cubans into signing another petition declaring the Constitution unchangeable and quickly passed it through the rubber stamp legislature without debating the Varela Project, which according to the Cuban law drafted by the dictatorship meant that it should have been debated by the National Assembly. 

 

The Economist in its December 14, 2005 issue published a conversation with Oswaldo Paya titled "An unsilenced voice for change" that outlined what the Christian Liberation Movement had accomplished.

Between 2001 and 2004, Mr Payá's movement gathered 25,000 signatures in a vain attempt to persuade Cuba's National Assembly to change the constitution to allow multi-party democracy. Activists of his Christian Liberation Movement made up more than two-thirds of the 75 dissidents and journalists rounded up and jailed for long terms in April 2003. [...] Spain is “complaisant” with Mr Castro's regime, Mr Payá says. “We need a campaign of support and solidarity with peaceful change in Cuba” of the kind that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa and to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

 Oswaldo and Harold were assassinated by Cuban government agents on July 22, 2012.

Today in Cuba over a thousand Cubans are jailed for calling for freedom, and an end to dictatorship. 

This tradition also exists in exile, and was best reflected by Brothers to the Rescue.

How and why Brothers to the Rescue formed
In February of 1991 news accounts of the death by dehydration of 15-year-old Gregorio Perez Ricardo, a rafter fleeing Cuba, as U.S. Coast Guard officials tried to save his life shocked the moral imagination of several pilots. 

This was not an isolated event. Academics Holly Ackerman and Juan Clark, in the 1995 monograph The Cuban Balseros: Voyage of Uncertainty reported that “as many as 100,000 Cuban rafters may have perished trying to leave Cuba.” Anecdotal evidence documents that some of them were victims of the Cuban border patrol using sand bags and snipers against defenseless rafters.

Gregorio Perez Ricardo

It was within this context that on May 13, 1991 Brothers to the Rescue was founded with the aim of searching for rafters in the Florida Straits, getting them water, food, and rescued. In December of 1993 Brothers to the Rescue inaugurated their permanent hangar naming it after Gregorio.

Brothers to the Rescue by November of 1995 was collaborating with the Florida Martin Luther King Institute for Non-violence and took part in the King Day parade in 1996. On February 8, 1996 The Miami Times reported “that this group has come around to the belief that change can be brought about in Cuba in the same way that it was brought about by Dr. King in the United States.” The Miami Times concluded in the editorial “Spreading King’s Message” that “In throwing Dr. King's principle into the volatile mix of Cuban exile politics, Brothers to the Rescue is showing a willingness to be creative.” 

Brothers to the Rescue logo

 

They risked their lives in the Florida Straits to rescue Cuban rafters and at the same time Brothers to the Rescue challenged the Cuban exile community to abandon both the failed violent resistance and appeasement approaches in order to embrace strategic nonviolence.  This path followed the way of Martin Luther King Jr. with both civil disobedience and a constructive program. What was the end result? Brothers to the Rescue saved more than 4,200 men, women, and children ranging from a five-day old infant to a 79 year old man, and rescued thousands more during the 1994 refugee crisis.

One year after the July 13, 1994 tugboat massacre in which 37 men, women and children were killed Cuban exiles organized a flotilla to travel in a civic non-violent manner to the spot six miles off the Havana coastline where the "13 de Marzo" tugboat had been attacked and sunk to hold a religious service for the victims. The Brothers to the Rescue overflight of Havana, where they dropped bumper stickers in Spanish that read "Comrades No. Brothers" was in response to Cuban gunboats ramming the lead boat of the flotilla.

Brothers to the Rescue also served as a bridge between a nonviolent civic movement inside of Cuba and an exile community seeking a different approach. Cuban dissidents announced on October 10, 1995 the intention to hold a national gathering of the opposition in Cuba on February 24, 1996. The coalition of over a 160 groups named themselves the Cuban Council. Brothers to the Rescue in an open and transparent manner sent $2,000 of privately raised assistance to this coalition on February 13, 1996. In the days leading up to February 24 over a 180 dissidents were imprisoned in a nationwide crackdown. 

 

Coretta Scott King and Jose Basulto of Brothers to the Rescue

 

They risked their lives to serve a great idea, and paid the ultimate price thirty years ago on February 24, 1996.

 

 

On February 24, 1996 at 3:21pm and 3:27pm two Brothers to the Rescue planes were shot down by two Cuban MiGs over international airspace killing four. Two more MIG’s chased a third plane to within three minutes of downtown Key West, but that plane made it back and provided critical information on what had occurred.

 

  

The four men who were killed represented all aspects of the Cuban diaspora: Armando Alejandre Jr, a child who arrived with his parents from Cuba in 1960, Carlos Costa, born in Miami Beach in 1966 and Mario Manuel de la Peña, born in New Jersey in 1971 the children of Cuban exiles. Pablo Morales was born in Cuba in 1966, raised there and was saved by Brothers to the Rescue when he was 26 years old while fleeing the island on a raft. Two were from Havana, one was from New Jersey and the other from Miami Beach. 

These four men, and many other members of Brothers to the Rescue who volunteered their time to save lives, were living out the values and example of Jose Marti in exile. 

"Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who avails himself of a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if he too risks his life, observed Marti." 

 They, both inside and outside of Cuba, are the direct heirs of José Martí. Let us continue to honor and remember them, and Cuba's apostle in campaigning for their freedom, and for the liberation of Cuba from the present communist dictatorship.

*"La libertad no puede ser fecunda para los pueblos que tienen la frente manchada de sangre." - Jose Marti  

A Christmas Miracle: The Collapse of the Soviet Union on this day in 1991

"My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him. " - Mohandas Gandhi

 

Christmas returned to the Kremlin

Thirty four years ago, on December 25, 1991, a regime born in 1917 and formerly named in 1922 came to an end. 

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or as it was also known, the Soviet Union, was formerly brought to an end on Christmas day and replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States. 

 The last day of the Soviet Union was Christmas day. 

Let that sink in.

 Now there are those who claim that the world is a less stable place without the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev claims that it could have been reformed. 

Academic Stephen F. Cohen goes further and quotes approvingly both Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky with the adage: "Anyone who does not regret the breakup of the Soviet Union has no heart. And anyone who thinks it can be reconstructed has no head." 

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.

This is why Ukraine is celebrating the end of the Soviet Union over social media this Christmas.

On this day in 1991, the Soviet Union finally ceased to exist. A moment that went down in history as a triumph of liberty.

Its dissolution ended a regime built on repression, censorship, political terror, genocidal famines, mass deportations, and the systematic erasure of… pic.twitter.com/4xVa7YhpYe

— MFA of Ukraine 🇺🇦 (@MFA_Ukraine) December 26, 2025

People of goodwill should join them in celebrating the end of this evil regime. 

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.

Over seven million people have died due to a pandemic unleashed by the communist dictatorship in Beijing. However, this is a small number for the Communist Chinese Party that has killed more than ten times as many Chinese people to advance communist policies in China alone. 

People of goodwill must also 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.  

Note to His Admirers: Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still dead, and his ideas are toxic.

"I'd like to confess, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing." Ernesto "Che" Guevara, in a letter to his father after executing an unarmed man.

 

Guevara executed for trying to overthrow Bolivian govt on October 9, 1967

Che Guevara was captured during a guerrilla fight to topple the Bolivian government and create a communist dictatorship, similar to what he did in Cuba, and was executed in Bolivia 58 years ago today.

Unfortunately, his ideas did not die with him.

Ideas have consequences and those ideas are sometimes represented in iconic images. This is the case of the image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his toxic philosophy of political action that others seek to emulate.  He embraced hatred and dehumanization of the other as the means to carry out what he thought necessary actions.

“Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.”

Guevara's claim to fame was his collaboration with Fidel and Raul Castro in establishing a totalitarian communist dictatorship in Cuba using violent tactics, including terrorism, and then attempting to expand this model throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

His efforts failed while he lived.  

The Castro brothers executed tens of thousands of Cubans, locked up hundreds of thousands of Cubans, built a police state, with the assistance of the KGB, the East German Stasi, former Nazis, and imposed revolutionary terror to consolidate power.

Credible and conservative estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll against Cuban nationals ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000. In the beginning executions were televised in Cuba to terrorize the populace. 

Che Guevara addressing the United Nations on December 11, 1964

Che Guevara, speaking to the United Nations on December 11, 1964, did not mince words: "We must express here something that is a well-known truth and that we have constantly asserted before the entire world: executions? Yes, we have executed individuals; we are currently executing others, and we will continue to do so as long as required. We know what the outcome of a losing struggle would be, and the worms must know what the outcome is today in Cuba." 

In addition to the Hellscape in the Middle East, Ernesto "Che" Guevara laid the groundwork for much of the additional misery in Latin America today.

Guevara with a Cuban delegation visited Mainland China and met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other high ranking Chinese officials in November 1960 to discuss conditions in Cuba and in Latin America, and the prospects for communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere.

Guevara meets Mao Ze Dong in November 1960.

Mao Ze Dong caused the deaths of an estimated 45 million Chinese people in his communist project through famine and mass executions.  He is the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, and someone Guevara stayed allied to, even after the Castro regime cooled relations with Beijing siding with Moscow.

 

Weeks after the world came perilously close to a nuclear holocaust in October 1962, Che Guevara was disappointed in Moscow’s loss of nerve in launching a first strike, and argued that Cubans were ready to make the ultimate sacrifice in a nuclear conflagration to end Capitalism.

“Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice. We have demonstrated our firm stand, our own position, our decision to fight, even if alone, against all dangers and against the atomic menace of Yankee imperialism.”

The Argentine went further declaring in November 1962 his continued willingness to engage in a nuclear holocaust to achieve the communist utopia which Guevara called “liberation”.

“We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims. In the struggle to death between two systems we cannot think of anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.”

Guevara explained it more succinctly to London’s Daily Worker in 1962 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he also rejected the possibility of peaceful co-existence.

“If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish a peaceful coexistence.”

Ernesto Guevara was executed  summarily on October 9, 1967 in La Higuera, Bolivia after he and his band of guerrillas were captured trying to overthrow the legitimate government there and install a Castro style dictatorship. His legacy at the time was already one of blood and terror that should be lamented not celebrated.

Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still dead, his ideas are still toxic, and need to be buried along with him. For example, the barbarism visited upon the Israeli people by Hamas and Hezbollah, on October 7th and October 8, 2023 respectively, both receiving support from the Cuban dictatorship, demonstrates how the idea of resistance Guevara promoted remain an obstacle to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Che's so-called "achievement" with the Castro brothers was to replace an authoritarian dictatorship with a totalitarian communist one, all while claiming to be restoring democracy and the 1940 Constitution in Cuba.

The motorcycle diaries do not make up for this bloody legacy that for 66 years and counting continues to rob Cubans of their freedom, and spread totalitarian dictatorship to Nicaragua, and Venezuela, negatively impacting tens of millions of lives.

 

75 years ago today: Milada Horáková sentenced to death in Communist show trial in Czechoslovakia

"When you realize that something is just and true, then be so resolute that you will be able to die for it.”   – Milada Horáková, in a letter to her daughter

 

Image of Milada Horáková at her show trial

First wrote about Milada Horáková, the Czech democrat who resisted both Nazis and Communists, back in 2014, and her refusal to go along with the political show trial organized against her in 1950. 

She had been a member of the Czech resistance to the Nazi occupation of her homeland and survived torture in a Nazi prison. After Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 by the Soviets she became a member of parliament in 1946 but resigned her seat after the Communist coup of 1948. 

However she refused to abandon her country. 

She was arrested at her office on September 27, 1949 "on charges of conspiracy and espionage against the state." 

The show trial of Horáková and twelve of her colleagues began on May 31, 1950. 

Oxford Languages defines a show trial as "a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice." 

Vladimir Lenin called them "model trials", but they would eventually become known as show trials under Josef Stalin with hundreds of thousands executed and millions sent to work camps in Siberia, and they would take place not only in the Soviet Union, but in the East Bloc including Czechoslovakia, and as far away as Cuba. The Nazis also copied the practice, and so have other repressive regimes.

Adam D. E. Watkins in his 2010 paper "The Show Trial of J U Dr. Milada Horáková: The Catalyst for Social Revolution in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1950" explains the importance of the show trial in gutting democratic traditions and replacing them with Stalinism.

"The study deconstructs the show trial’s influence on inducing a country to foster the Communist movement against decades of democratic traditions. The research reveals the impact of the show trial of Dr. Milada Horáková in 1950 and how it was instrumental in reforming a society, marked the beginning of Stalinism, and ushered forth a perverted system of justice leading to a cultural transformation after the Communist putsch. Furthermore, the revolution truncated intellectual thought and signified the end of many social movements – including the women’s rights movement."

According to Watkins, Horáková was seen by the public as a symbol of  the First Republic and of democracy. Unlike others who did break under the relentless psychological and physical torture she never did. The communists tried to edit her testimony for propaganda purposes but as Radio Prague in their 2005 report on the discovery of the unedited tapes of her trial.

[S]he faced her show trial with calm and defiance, refusing to be broken. Audio recordings - intended to be used by the Communists for propaganda purposes - were mostly never aired, for the large part because for the Party's purposes, they were unusable.

Milada Horakova addressed the court in the final day of her show trial on June 8, 1950 in which she refused to go along with the script prepared for her. 

"I have declared to the State Police that I remain faithful to my convictions, and that the reason I remain faithful to them is because I adhere to the ideas, the opinions and the beliefs of those who are figures of authority to me. And among them are two people who remain the most important figures to me, two people who made an enormous impression on me throughout my life. Those people are Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Eduard Benes. And I want to say something to those who were also inspired by those two men when forming their own convictions and their own ideas. I want to say this: no-one in this country should be made to die for their beliefs. And no-one should go to prison for them."

Because she refused to cooperate with the Stalinists her punishment was particularly severe, death by hanging.

During the trial Radio Prague reported that a note written by an anonymous eye-witness to Milada's execution quoted the young prosecutor recommending: "Don't break her neck on the noose, Suffocate the bitch - and the others too."  

Milada Horáková  was executed in Pankrác Prison on June 27, 1950 through "intentionally slow strangulation, which according to historians took 15 minutes. She was 48 years old." 

The urn with her ashes was never given to her family nor is it known what became of them.  She wrote letters to her mother-in-law, husband, and daughter. Only her daughter, Jana, would learn of the contents of the letter when it was published in an underground publication in Czechoslovakia in 1970. She finally received the letters in 1990.

In the letter to her 16 year old teenage daughter Milada explained why she had refused to compromise with evil. 

The reason was not that I loved you little; I love you just as purely and fervently as other mothers love their children. But I understood that my task here in the world was to do you good … by seeing to it that life becomes better, and that all children can live well. … Don’t be frightened and sad because I am not coming back any more. Learn, my child, to look at life early as a serious matter. Life is hard, it does not pamper anybody, and for every time it strokes you it gives you ten blows. Become accustomed to that soon, but don’t let it defeat you. Decide to fight.

Hours prior to her execution she reaffirmed her position to her family:

I go with my head held high. One also has to know how to lose. That is no disgrace. An enemy also does not lose honor if he is truthful and honorable. One falls in battle; what is life other than struggle?  

In 2007 her prosecutor Ludmila Brozova-Polednova who in 1950 had helped to condemn Horakova to death, then 86, was tried as an accomplice to murder.  She was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison in 2008 but was given a presidential pardon by Vaclav Klaus on humanitarian grounds one year and six months into her sentence and released in 2010. 

The former prosecutor defended her actions claiming that what she did was legal and that she was "following orders." Brozova-Polednova tried to appeal her conviction at the Strasbourg Court in 2011 and lost. She died on January 15, 2015 at age 93.

Milada's life story was brought to the big screen in 2017, was available on Netflix, and can be purchased on Amazon. Below is an English trailer for this important film.

Bacardi’s long fight for a free and independent Cuba continues

 NBC’s The Today Show featured a segment looking back at the spirited history of BACARDI on April 3, 2025, from the company’s founding in Santiago de Cuba in 1862, expropriation by Castro’s communist dictatorship, to their ongoing success, but much was left out.

Bacardi’s history is intrinsically related to the fight for Cuban independence from Spain, the defense of democracy during the Republic, and the ongoing struggle for the restoration of democracy and the rule of law under the current communist dictatorship. The Bacardi family arrived in Colonial Cuba from Spain in the early 1800s. In 1828, Don Facundo Bacardi Massó joined his older brothers in Santiago, Cuba, where Bacardi Limited was founded by him on February 4, 1862. Don Facundo had three sons who went into the family business: Emilio Bacardi Moreau, Juan Bacardi Moreau, and Facundo Bacardi Moreau.

Emilio Bacardi Moreau was born in Santiago de Cuba on June 5, 1844, the son of Facundo Bacardí Massó,who together with his father was arrested by Spanish loyalist forces for their support of Cuban independence. Don Facundo was released shortly afterwards, but his son Emilio spent four years imprisoned, and then forced into exile. Don Facundo passed away at age 71 on May 9, 1886.

Emilio Bacardi Moreau’s son, Emilio Bacardi Lay, actively took part in Cuba’s war of independence. In 1895, he was a field officer for Gen. Antonio Maceo during the invasion of Cuba by independence forces. He reached the rank of colonel by the age of 22. After a life of entrepreneurship and patriotic service, Emilio Bacardi Moreau died on August 28, 1922, of a heart ailment. He was 78 years old. The city of Santiago suspended all public events for two days to mourn and celebrate his life. He had been nicknamed “Cuba’s foremost son.”

Emilio Bacardi Lay, who had fought for Cuban independence and been opposed to the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista but remained in Cuba and repeatedly resisted authoritarianism, was forced to flee when Castroism consolidated control in 1961. Emilio Bacardi Lay, who was born in Santiago de Cuba on June 12, 1877, died in exile in Miami on October 14, 1972 at the age of 95. He was the last surviving ranking officer from Cuba’s war of independence with Spain.

Emilio Bacardi Lay ( Source: Cuba en la memoria )

A history of the Bacardi family written by Tom Gjelten, a reporter for National Public Radio, titled “Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba :The Biography of a Cause,” led to renewed interest in their role in Cuba’s independence.  A 2008 review of the book in The New York Times by Randy Kennedy touches on the figure of Emilio Bacardi Moreau.

Emilio Bacardi, especially, comes to life as the book’s most powerful character, though one so strange that Gabriel García Márquez might have invented him. Emilio was imprisoned twice by Spain off the coast of Morocco for his revolutionary activities. But he still managed to hold the company together, to serve as Santiago’s mayor during the unsettled years of the American occupation, to help found a salon called the Victor Hugo Freethinker Group, to practice theosophy in a predominantly Catholic country and to track down a genuine mummy on a trip to Egypt, which he bought as the centerpiece for a museum he had founded in San­tiago. (Modest he was not; he signed his revolutionary correspondence with the name Phocion, after the Athenian statesman known as “the good.”)

Bacardi Imports, Inc., re-established its headquarters in Miami in 1963 after having been based for a century in Santiago de Cuba.

This is the history that the Castros would like to erase but have been unable to. Meanwhile, to all who read this, please consider that if you wish to make a toast to freedom with alcoholic spirits, do it with Bacardi or the real Havana Club.

However, it is important to point out that Bacardi, in addition to having a great history, also retain an enlightened vision for the future that is human centered.  Today, an article appeared that revealed how Bacardi is putting money behind people to make sure artificial intelligence doesn’t replace human bartenders.

Bacardi also has a positive track record on environmental stewardship that has been repeatedly recognized. Bacardi USA was awarded the SmartWay® Excellence Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the fourth time in 2020.

In contrast, the Cuban dictatorship continues to sell their stolen version of Havana Club, that today “pumps 1,288 cubic meters of waste liquids into the Chipriona inlet in Cuba every day, mostly vinasse (a residual liquid remaining from the fermentation and distillation of alcoholic liquors). It has been doing that since the 1990s, although the problems became more acute starting in 2007,” according to Julio Batista in his 2017 report described the impact of this pollution as follows:

“The Chipriona inlet is a place where no one goes, where no one fishes, that doesn’t need a fence because no one wants to swim in the boiling filth that flows into its waters every day. The waters of what used to be a beach are now soupy and have the sour smell of decomposition. No studies about the marine life in the inlet are publicly available, but fishermen say there’s no fish there.” …”In the last decade, Chipriona has become the drainage point for the Ronera Sana Cruz, the biggest distillery in the country and one of the four owned by Cuba Ron S.A. It’s the end point of the sewage of the only place where the white and 3-year-old brands are distilled by Havana Club International (HCI). And the dumping ground for a company that earned $118.5 million in profits in 2016 from the sale of 4.2 million boxes each with nine liters of rum.”

 Bacardi has recognized the work of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, and in 2017 that of his daughter, Rosa María Payá and they are supporting the Cuba Decide initiative to push for a democratic transition in Cuba.

Bacardi is synonymous with the best of Republican Cuba. Generations of the Bacardi family fought for Cuban independence with one family member fighting alongside General Antonio Maceo, and during the Republic the family not only had enlightened business practices but also engaged in civic activities that promoted a democratic culture based in the rule of law. Through their marketing, Bacardi put Cuba on the map. They continue in the long fight for a free and independent Cuba.