"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)
Showing posts with label Mengistu Haile Mariam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mengistu Haile Mariam. Show all posts
Fidel Castro in Addis Ababa with Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1977.
William M. LeoGrande makes a number of claims that do not stand up to
closer scrutiny. [”Biden should act fast on Cuba | Opinion,” Jan. 28]
He called President Obama’s 2014 opening “a historic achievement.” The
opening was followed by a collapse in U.S. trade with Cuba, a historic
increase in repression against Cuban dissidents, and beginning in
November 2016, American diplomats suffering brain injuries. The cause,
according to the National Academies of Sciences, is “consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed, radiofrequency energy.”
Mengistu visits Cuba in Havana,Cuba on May 1, 1978.
LeoGrande’s claim that engagement with Cuba “was necessary for ending the conflict in southern Africa in the 1980s” fails to mention that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s drove the end of conflict in southern Africa with the end of Soviet subsidies. It was not the good offices of the Castro regime.
The professor ignores the role played by the Castro brothers in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Ethiopia, sending thousands of Cuban troops to assist war criminal Mengistu Haile Mariam carry out a genocide that claimed over a million Ethiopian lives. When formulating policy it is important to provide full context. The Castro regime has been and continues to be a bad actor, and belongs on the list of state terror sponsors.
The Biden administration should take its time in formulating an effective policy.
John Suarez, executive director, Center for a Free Cuba
CNN journalist Jake Tapper spoke the truth when observed that "Fidel Castro was a murderous despot who oppressed the LGBTQ community and many others and pointing that out is actually part of being a news anchor."
He was responding to Afghan American filmmaker, musician, and activist, Ariana Delawari who was making a number of claims that do not stand up to scrutiny about Fidel Castro and his regime.
Mauvaise Conduite (Improper Conduct) is a 1984 documentary film directed by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal that explores the oppression of the LGBTQ community in Cuba, and is required viewing.
Fidel Castro declared in 1965 that “[w]e 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.”
Castro apologists claimed that the Cuban dictatorship had changed since then, but the events of May 11, 2019 demonstrated just the opposite.
Pride March shut down by Castro regime on May 11, 2019
The hostility to Gays began early and from the top. 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.”
In 1964 the Cuban government began rounding up Gays and sending them to Military Units to Aid
Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). These
forced labor camps were for those suspected of or found guilty of
"improper conduct." Persons with effeminate mannerisms,
what the Cuban government called "extravagant behavior," were taken to
these camps.
This history should be taken into
account when considering the Cuban quarantine of HIV positive Cubans
from 1986 to 1997. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic it was
associated with the Gay community. Furthermore the claim that HIV rates
are lower in
Cuba should also be taken with a grain of salt when considering the
failure to report on other outbreaks.This is motivated by their need to
justify the existence of the dictatorship with supposed successes in
health care.
Cuban biologist, environmental activist, and Gay man, Dr. Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, documented his case to the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR)
in Frankfurt, Germany, where he denounced how agents of the Castro regime purposefully infected him with HIV in 2018.
After a staged assault of two policemen Ariel Ruiz Urquiola was
arrested on May 3rd, 2018 and sentenced to prison for twelve months by a
kangaroo tribunal. He was remanded in jail on May 8th, 2018 and
protested from June 16th to July 2nd with a successful hunger strike
which led to an early release from prison on July 3rd, 2018. On June
16th, 2019 he got informed that he is HIV positive. He eliminates a
natural infection strictly. He believes that he had been infected with
the HI virus on purpose in prison.
According to a statement of Dr. Ruiz Urquiola the doctor’s reports
show that he got infected during his imprisonment. The lab results also
confirm an infection on purpose. That’s how the short time between
hospitalization and illness with a high inoculum (infective material or
one as an antigen acting part of a germ), e.g. from a lab virus, can be
explained.
The Castro regime is also a murderous regime. Glenn Garvin wrote an important essay in the Miami Herald on December 1, 2016 titled "Red Ink: The high human cost of the Cuban Revolution"
and in it addresses the question of how many extrajudicial executions
have taken place in Cuba and cites an authoritative source.
"University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel,
who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the
killing of people by their own government, reported in 1987 that
credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."
The killings have continued to the present day under Fidel Castro's replacement, his brother Raul Castro, who has head of the Cuban Communist Party remains the maximum authority in Cuba in 2020.
Inner power circle of the Castro regime (Cuban Studies Institute)
Ironically, some who attacked Mr. Tapper's claims raised the issue of racism. It is the Castro regime that has exercised white supremacy when the dictatorship's inner circle of power are old white men that have ruled over a majority black country for 61 years silencing black voices.
Black voices silenced by the Castro regime are numerous and many remain unknown. Others such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a brick layer and human rights activist tortured and taunted with racial insults for eight years until his death on hunger strike on February 23, 2010 became known worldwide.
Others such as Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike, but due to a lack of international solidarity passed on in anonymity.
It remains a sad reality that as the world begins to pay attention to extrajudicial killings of black men by the police. There is one place that when a police man shoots a young unarmed black man in the back those who would normally speak out if it was the United States are a European country, remain quiet.
Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano shot in back and killed
Castro's Revolutionary National Police shot Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano (age 27) in the back on June 24, 2020, but there was little or no protest outside of dissidents in Cuba, who were rounded up and roughed up for attempting to protest the killing.
Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano killed at age 27
Even the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus launched blue lives style campaign to rehabilitate the image of their murderous police that they called "Heroes of the Blue", the usual suspects remained silent and continued to claim that Cuba was an example to follow.
Heroes of the Blue (Heroes de Azul) campaign by the Castro regime
On the broader front, Racist attitudes persist in Cuba under the Castros and is reflected in rates of interracial marriage being lower in Cuba than in Brazil that has a much higher level of inequality, and has not undergone a communist revolution.
On the economic front the glaring differences between black and white Cubans are shocking with 95% of Afro-Cubans having the lowest incomes compared to 58% of white Cubans.
Annual income by race in Cuba.
It is too late to help Orlando, Yosvany and Hansel, but it is not too late to help Silverio Portal Contreras, but time is running out for him.
Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience Silverio Portal Contreras
Silverio Portal Contreras,a former activist with the Ladies in
White, is serving a 4-year sentence for "contempt" and "public
disorder." According to a court document, he was arrested on the June
20, 2016 in Old Havana after shouting “Down Fidel Castro, down Raúl...”
The document states that "the behavior of the accused is particularly
offensive because it took place in a touristic area." The document
further describes the accused as having “bad social and moral behavior”
and mentions that he fails to participate in pro-government activities.
According to Silverio’s wife, before his arrest he had campaigned against the collapse of dilapidated buildings in Havana.
Silverio was recognized as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International on August 26, 2019. He was beaten by prison officials in mid-May 2020 and lost sight in one eye.
Lucinda Gonzalez Gomez, wife of the activist, has put out a desperate
plea for help after receiving a call from her husband on June 10, 2020.
“Silverio called me and put an official on the phone to explain the
situation,” said Gonzalez Gomez to CubaNet.
The official told her that “he was taken to the ophthalmologist and
because of temporary loss of blood flow, he was losing sight in both
eyes.”
Raul Castro and Fidel Castro with Mengistu review troops in Ethiopia
Castro apologists in their push back against Jake Tapper's criticism of Fidel Castro, cited the Cuban tyrant's relationship with Nelson Mandela, but ignored the Cuban autocrat's relationship with Ethiopian dictator, Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Castro's involvement in the genocide in that African country.
Fidel Castro with Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia
These apologists also ignored that Mandela also had friendships with both war criminals Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, and Charles Taylor of Liberia. Both men are responsible for the murder of many Africans in their respective countries. That Mandela would be friends with Fidel Castro, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and Charles Taylor is dark corner of an otherwise bright legacy.
Mandela was friends with Charles Taylor and Mengistu Haile Mariam
The second President of the United States, John Adams, when defending British soldiers in a court of law, who had fired on a crowd during the Boston Massacre, stated: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our
inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the
state of facts and evidence." This holds true today for Castro apologists, the facts are against them in their defense of the Castro dictatorship.
Revisiting the nonviolent end of the Apartheid regime, and Castro's genocidal crimes in Ethiopia
Castro with war criminal Mengistu in 1970s and Nelson Mandela in 1990s
April 27th is recognized as Freedom Day in South Africa. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first post-apartheid
elections held on that day in 1994. This presents a great opportunity to reflect on the role played by the Castro regime in Africa.
Nationalist narratives tend to glorify violent narratives, at the expense of successful nonviolent initiatives. In India for example, the 3,000 nationalists who joined ranks with Hitler and the Third Reich to fight the British get credit with speeding up Indian Independence. However the millions who took part in nonviolent actions in Gandhi's movement get short shrift as the Hindu nationalists grow in power in India.
The same holds true in South Africa. Piero Gleijeses. a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies writing in The National Interest in 2014 gives a positive assessment of the Cuban intervention in Angola quoting Nelson Mandela that their victory “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor ...
[and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa ... Cuito Cuanavale
was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my
people—from the scourge of apartheid.”
For the record both sides claimed victory in the battle of Cuito Canavale.
Professor Gleijeses failed to look at the historical context, and Nelson Mandela's commitment to the violent overthrow of the Apartheid regime. In the case of South Africa the decision of the African National Congress to adopt violence as a means to end Apartheid in 1961 may in fact have prolonged the life of the racist regime by decades. It also led to Nelson Mandela spending decades in prison refusing to renounce his violent stand.
Sean Jacobs writing in The Guardian in 2016 repeats the same narrative portraying the Castro regime's agenda in Africa as anti-colonial and noble, but left out a massive Cuban intervention in Ethiopia that abetted war crimes and genocide.
Left to right: Ramiro Valdes, Raul Castro, Fidel Castro and Mengistu Haile Mariam
Fidel and Raul Castro were both deeply involved in sending 17,000 Cuban
troops to Eastern Africa in order to assist Mengistu in consolidating
his rule and eliminating actual and potential opposition. The last Cuban
troops did not leave Ethiopia until 1989 and were present and complicit
in the engineered famine that took place there. Also present was Ramiro Valdes, the founder of the Cuban secret police, who decades later would play an important role in Venezuela.
In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time
including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically
directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning
and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”24
Militarily, the counter-insurgency operations succeeded in greatly
weakening the insurgents or driving them across the border into Somalia.
Charles Lane of The Washington Post raised the issue of the Cuban role in Ethiopia's famine:
The last Cuban troops did
not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as
hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by
Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.
Mandela became a symbol of resistance, and later an agent of national reconciliation, but he was not the agent of regime change in South Africa.
UDF boycotted elections
It was not
the armed struggle of the ANC that brought the Apartheid regime to the
negotiating table but the United Democratic Front
(UDF). The history of how the Apartheid regime was brought to an end is often overlooked. This is the
history of the UDF and the successful nonviolent struggle it carried out that is documented in A Force More Powerful:
In the city of Port Elizabeth, Mkhuseli Jack, a charismatic 27-year-old youth leader,
understands that violence is no match for the state's awesome arsenal. Jack stresses the
primacy of cohesion and coordination, forming street committees and recruiting
neighborhood leaders to represent their interests and settle disputes. Nationally, a
fledgling umbrella party, the United Democratic Front (UDF), asserts itself through a
series of low-key acts of defiance, such as rent boycotts, labor strikes, and school
stay aways.
Advocating nonviolent action appeals to black parents who are tired of chaos in their
neighborhoods. The blacks of Port Elizabeth agree to launch an economic boycott of the
city's white-owned businesses. Extending the struggle to the white community is a
calculated maneuver designed to sensitize white citizens to the blacks' suffering.
Beneath their appeal to conscience, the blacks' underlying message is that businesses
cannot operate against a backdrop of societal chaos and instability.
Confronted by this and other resistance in the country, the government declares a
state of emergency, the intent of which is to splinter black leadership through arbitrary
arrests and curfews. Jack and his compatriots, however, receive an entirely different
message: the country is fast becoming ungovernable. Apartheid has been cracked.
Undaunted by government reprisals, the UDF continues to press its demands,
particularly for the removal of security forces and the release of jailed African
National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. White retailers, whose business districts have
become moribund, demand an end to the stalemate. The movement also succeeds in turning
world opinion against apartheid, and more sanctions are imposed on South Africa as
foreign corporations begin to pull out many investments. In June 1986, the South African
government declares a second state of emergency to repress the mass action that has
paralyzed the regime.
End of the Cold War coincides with End of Apartheid
The negotiations to
end Apartheid began in 1990 after the collapse of the East Bloc and ended in 1991 the year the Soviet Union peacefully dissolved. The ANC no longer had the weapons and financial support provided
by the Castro regime and Soviets from the 1960s into the early 1980s. There are those in South Africa who in 1989 mourned the passing of the Berlin Wall but if not for the end of the Cold War things may not have changed. Paul Trewhela in politicsweb offered the following analysis:
On 9 November 1989, twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall cracked open, the Cold War in Europe
came to an end, the Soviet empire tottered to its grave and the ANC
military option lost whatever teeth it might have had. The
military/security state erected by the National Party never lost a
centimeter squared of its soil. Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of
the ANC and the South African Communist Party, never won a centimeter
squared of soil. True, the repeated mass mobilizations and popular
uprisings within South Africa
through the Seventies and the Eighties placed a colossal strain upon
the regime, and, true, the economic strain upon the state - especially
in conditions of attrition exercised against it by the US
banking system - placed it under further serious pressures.
Nevertheless, honest accounting must say that, given the continuation of
the Cold War system in Africa, this nuclear-armed state at its southern tip was nowhere near collapse.
The international situation that undermined the ANC's armed struggle
combined with the successful nonviolent campaigns of the United
Democratic Front (UDF) facilitated the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
In South Africa there was a far older tradition of
nonviolence going back to 1893 - 1914 with Mohandas Gandhi's experiments with nonviolence against anti-Indian racism there. It was in South Africa on September 11, 1906 that the word Satyagraha came into existence. It is
this legacy of nonviolence that has endured and gives hope for the
future unfortunately abandoning it and embracing the false and violent
narrative of Castroism and the ANC is a recipe for endangering South African
democracy.
Dictator spends years denying there is a humanitarian crisis in his country and orders the importation of high cost luxury items while people die of hunger. Eventually the outcry of the humanitarian catastrophe forces him to allow humanitarian assistance to enter his country, but after years of suffering for the populace. A music concert is held to raise awareness and funds for humanitarian assistance.
In 1985 for Ethiopia and 2019 for Venezuela concerts were held to save lives.
This is Venezuela today with Nicolas Maduro, but it was also Ethiopia in 1984 under Mengistu Haile Mariam. Both shared two things in common: Marxism-Leninism and a close alliance with the Castro dictatorship that included thousands of troops and intelligence agents to assist them. The first shipment of Red Cross humanitarian aide finally arrived on April 16, 2019. According to Reuters, the "United Nations estimates that a quarter of Venezuelans are in need of humanitarian assistance, with 1.9 million suffering from malnutrition and some 300,000 whose lives are at risk due to lack of medicine."
Fidel Castro lounging with Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Ethiopia in 1977
Famine is not due to inefficiencies in the system or incompetence but rather it is a feature of the system that uses hunger to consolidate political control and power. This is why in 1984 in the midst of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians dying of hunger, Mengistu Haile Mariam was importing cases of Scotch Whisky and denying their was a crisis.
This is why over at least the past three years Maduro has denied there is a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and rejected aid shipments as war material or more recently an imperialist provocation. One should not be surprised if one looks at who he idolizes.
Mengistu's portrait hangs alongside a banner with Marx, Engels and Lenin in Ethiopia
Last year Maduro celebrated the life of Chinese mass murderer Mao Ze Dong on the anniversary of his death. On Monday, April 22, 2019 he celebrated the birth of Russian mass murderer Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, known better by his revolutionary name of Lenin, over social media claiming that "Lenin continues today to be living history."
It is important to recall that famine was used as a political weapon in Russia, China, and Ethiopia under the communists. It is also important to remember that the Cubans played a role in the manufactured famine in Ethiopia and may be doing it again in Venezuela today.
The Spanish scholar George Santayana was right, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
“History teaches us that unity is strength and cautions us to submerge
and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals; to strive,
with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood
and unity.” Emperor Haile Sellasie I
PM Abiy Ahmed with Presidents of Rwanda, Ghana & the Chairperson of the AUC
Haile Selassie is being honored today with a statue of his likeness unveiled at the African Union's headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is being honored for his role in establishing the African Union's predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The first meeting of the OAU was in Addis Ababa in May of 1963.
At the League of Nations in 1936, Emperor Selassie condemned the use of chemical weapons
by Fascist Italy against the people of Ethiopia. Ethiopia was the one
independent African state during a time when the rest of the continent
was under colonial rule. H.I.M. Haile Selassie , the lion of Judah,
resisted the Fascist invasion of
his homeland Ethiopia and warned the world of its threat when he addressed the League of Nations. He would go into exile in Great Britain but returned home after the defeat of the fascists.
Raul Castro & Fidel Castro with close ally Mengistu Haile Mariam
Winston Churchill had described Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie I as "the only enlightened Abyssinian prince." In December 1994 The New York Times reported that an Ethiopian court described "how Emperor Haile
Selassie was 'strangled in his bed most cruelly' in 1975 by order of
the leaders of a Marxist military coup."
Fidel and Raul Castro were both deeply involved in sending 17,000 Cuban
troops to East Africa in assisting Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam in consolidating his rule
and eliminating actual and potential opposition in Ethiopia.
In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time
including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically
directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning
and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”
Charles Lane of The Washington Post in the December 1, 2016 article "Castro was no liberator" raises the following question that touches heavily on Ethiopia:
Mengistu participated in a
successful military coup against the U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie
in 1974, eventually seizing power on Feb. 3, 1977,by massacring his
rivals in the officer corps. Castro admired this bloody deed as a
preemptive strike against “rightists” that showed “wisdom” and cleared
the way for Cuba to support Mengistu “without any constraints,” as he
explained to East German dictator Erich Honecker in an April 1977
meeting whose minutes became public after the fall of European
communism. [...] With the Cuban forces watching his back, Mengistu wrapped up
his bloody campaign of domestic repression, known as “the Red Terror,”
and sent his own Soviet-equipped, Cuban-trained troops to crush a
rebellion in Eritrea. The last Cuban troops did
not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as
hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by
Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.
Mengistu fled into exile on May 21, 1991. Less than a decade later on November 5, 2000, Haile Selassie was given an Imperial funeral by the Ethiopian Orthodox church. Bob Marley's widow, Rita Marley, participated in the funeral.
PM Abiy Ahmed with Presidents of Rwanda, Ghana & the Chairperson of the #AUC unveiled the statue of HIM Haile Sellasie. This historic event acknowledges one of the founding Fathers of the OAU - the African Union’s predecessor - for his contributions. #PMOEthiopia#AUSummit2019pic.twitter.com/Q4cjaR03l9
— Office of the Prime Minister - Ethiopia (@PMEthiopia) February 10, 2019
"Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have
destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered
by Scripture to have saved the whole world." - Mishnah (1135-1204)
Sofia Ayele
Some psychologists argue that as the number of victims increase into the
hundreds, and thousands that compassion collapses
out of the human fear
of being overwhelmed. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin put it more
succinctly: "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's
statistics." In the case of Cuba the communist regime has
killed tens of thousands, and many have become numb in the face of this
horror. Therefore on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first
communist regime in Russia, that caused so much harm around the world,
will focus on an infinitesimal sampling
of some of the victims of Cuban communism.
The tenth entry concerns Sofia Ayele, student arrested for unknown reasons during the Red Terror in Ethiopia. She was imprisoned in the "Kefetegna 15" (Higher 15) prison in Addis Ababa. She was murdered in February of 1978.
Previous entries in this series were about Cubans trying to change the system nonviolently. The first entry
concerned Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a humble bricklayer turned courageous human rights defender
who
paid the ultimate price in 2010 for speaking truth to power. The second entry focused
on Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, a Catholic lay activist, nonviolence icon, husband, father of three
and the founder of a Cuban opposition movement that shook up the Castro regime with a petition drive demanding that human rights
be
respected and recognized in Cuba. This action and speaking truth to
power led to his extrajudicial killing in 2012. The third entry focused on one of the great crimes of the Castro regime that has been well documented by international human rights organizations and reported on ABC News Nightline
that claimed the lives of 37 men, women, and children. They were trying
to flee the despotism in Cuba to live in freedom and were
extrajudicially executed. In the fourth focused on an act of state terrorism when two planes were shot down
on a Saturday afternoon at 3:21 and 3:27 on February 24, 1996 over
international airspace while engaged in a search and rescue flight for
Cuban rafters killing four humanitarians. Their planes were destroyed by air-to-air missiles fired by a Cuban MiG-29 aircraft on the orders of Raul and Fidel Castro.
In the fifth focused on Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Wilman Villar Mendoza who died on hunger strike
protesting his unjust imprisonment on January 19, 2012 at the age of 31
left behind two little girls, a young wife and grieving mother.The sixth entry focused on one of the many non-Cuban victims
of Cuban communism. Joachim
Løvschall was studying Spanish in Havana in the spring of 1997. He was
gunned down by a soldier of the Castro regime in Havana, Cuba twenty
years ago. The identity of the soldier was never revealed to Joachim's family. No one was ever brought to justice. The seventh entry focused on a young woman, Yunisledy Lopez Rodriguez,
who tried to warn a friend who was being targeted by the secret police
for a violent end. They went to the authorities to make a formal
complaint, but nothing happened. Four months later she was murdered in
front of her two children stabbed 18 times. Eight months later her friend
was the victim of a brutal machete attack and nearly killed. Yunisledy was just 23 years old. The eighth entry focused on Yuriniesky Martínez Reina, a young men
shot in the back and killed by a state security agent in 2015. His "crime"?
Building a boat with other friends to flee the Castro dictatorship and
live in freedom. The ninth entry focused on student leader Pedro Luis Boitel, who fought by Fidel Castro's side to bring an end to the Batista
dictatorship and restore Cuban democracy. However as Castro came to
impose a communist regime on Cuba and
to achieve that the University could no longer be a bastion of academic
freedom and independent student activism. This led to this young man
opposing the regime and being sent to prison for 11 years in 1961. He
served his sentence, but the dictatorship refused to free him. This
drove Pedro Luis Boitel to start a hunger strike that ended in his death in 1972.
Sofia Ayele, a student arrested for unknown reasons during Ethiopia's Red Terror. Sofia was imprisoned in the Kefetegna 15 prison in Addis Abeba. She was jailed in an Ethiopian prison during the Red Terror, and extrajudicially executed by Kefelgn Alemu Worku, a prison guard, in February of 1978 but the intellectual authors of this crime were Cuban intelligence officials engaged in counterinsurgency warfare in Ethiopia. This included targeting students, like Sofia Ayele, and children considered a potential threat.
During 1977-78, a conservative estimate of over 30,000 Africans perished as a result of the Red Terror unleashed in Ethiopia by the communists and their Cuban allies. 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." Donald R. Katz in the September 21, 1978 Rolling Stone article "Ethiopia After the Revolution: Vultures Return to the Land of Sheba" gave the following description of the wave of terror and repression unleashed by Mengistu.
"Toward the middle of last year [1977], Mengistu pulled out all the stops.
"It is an historical obligation," he said then, "to clean up vigilantly
using the revolutionary sword." He announced that the shooting was about
to start and that anyone in the middle would be caught in the cross
fire. In what came to be known as the "Red Terror," he proceeded to
round up all those who opposed the military regime. According to Amnesty
International, the Dergue killed over 10,000 people by the end of the
year. One anti-government party, mostly made up of students and
teachers, was singled out as 'the opposition.'"
Like Venezuela today, the murder of students suspected of being political opposition was a practice aided and abetted by Cuban state security agents present on the ground in Ethiopia in the 1970s.
Fidel and Raul Castro were both deeply involved in sending 17,000 Cuban
troops to South Africa to assist Mengistu in consolidating his rule
and eliminating actual and potential opposition. The last Cuban troops
did not leave Ethiopia until 1989 and were present and complicit in the
engineered famine that took place there. Cuban troops would round up
starving Ethiopian farmers when they got close to the cities, with grain
stores, and drove them back out into the countryside to starve.
Africa Watch (the precursor to Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division)
analyzed Ethiopian counter-insurgency operations in this period and
found that they followed a four-pronged approach: i) the forced
displacement of much of the civilian population into shelters and
protected villages; ii) military offensives against people and economic
assets outside the shelters; iii) the sponsoring of insurgent groups
against the WSLF and Somali government; and iv) attempts to promote the
repatriation of refugees.23
In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time
including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically
directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning
and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”24
Mengistu was found guilty of genocide in Ethiopia on December 12, 2006, and was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007. He was sentenced to death in absentia on May 26, 2008
following an appeal. Mengistu currently resides in Zimbabwe under the
protection of African dictator Robert Mugabe. Question now arises that
if Mugabe is forced to resign, will the new government turnover the now
80-year old war criminal to Ethiopian authorities to face justice?
In the same manner that Fidel
Castro defended the revolution in Cuba in the early 1960s exterminating
Cuban peasants who resisted the imposition of communist rule, with the critical help of 400 Russian advisors, and forcibly moved populations around. This practice was repeated in Ethiopia. "Resettlement was portrayed as a key part of the government’s relief
efforts, although it was in fact a component of their counterinsurgency
strategy (similar resettlement programs had occurred in southeast
Ethiopia and Eritrea). This blunt policy of “draining the sea to catch
the fish” occurred in three phases: November 1984 – May 1985, October
1985 – January 1986, and November 1987 – March, 1988."
The Castro brothers were involved in genocide and terror in Ethiopia
Charles Lane of The Washington Post in the December 1, 2016 article "Castro was no liberator" outlined Cuban involvement in the Red Terror in Ethiopia:
Mengistu participated in a
successful military coup against the U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie
in 1974, eventually seizing power on Feb. 3, 1977,by massacring his
rivals in the officer corps. Castro admired this bloody deed as a
preemptive strike against “rightists” that showed “wisdom” and cleared
the way for Cuba to support Mengistu “without any constraints,” as he
explained to East German dictator Erich Honecker in an April 1977
meeting whose minutes became public after the fall of European
communism. [...] With the Cuban forces watching his back, Mengistu wrapped up
his bloody campaign of domestic repression, known as “the Red Terror,”
and sent his own Soviet-equipped, Cuban-trained troops to crush a
rebellion in Eritrea. The last Cuban troops did
not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as
hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by
Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.
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