Castro regime officials jump on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon, but their crimes against Black Cubans may boomerang

 Black Lives Matter Everywhere


Currently jailed and victims of beatings by prison officials.

Today in Cuba, Black Cuban men and women are being brutalized for their independence of thought, and refusal to obey the dictates of a white minority government that has ruled the island for 61 years.
Please let others know of their plight and raise your voice in solidarity with them.

Prisoner of Conscience: Silverio Portal Contreras

Silverio Portal Contreras is an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, a former activist with the Ladies in White, who is serving a 4-year sentence for "contempt" and "public disorder." Amnesty provided the following description of his plight.

"According to a court document, Silverio was arrested on the 20 June 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 tourist 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 the victim of a sever beating in mid-May 2020 that has cost him his sight in one eye, according to a report from his wife. 

Political prisoner in Cuba today: Aymara Nieto Muñoz

Aymara Nieto Muñoz is a black woman, a dissident, and today a political prisoner. She was beaten up by prison officials two days ago. Aymara's family fears for her life, and they have every reason to be concerned. She is also being denied contact with her family.

Black Cubans killed by Castro regime agents
The stakes are life and death, and other Black Cubans did not survive the encounter with the Castro regime. Here is a very partial listing of some recent high profile cases. Sadly, there are many more that stretch back over the decades to 1959.

 It was ten years ago at 3:00pm on February 23, 2010 that it was announced that Orlando Zapata Tamayo had died. This humble bricklayer who became a human rights defender, spent nearly seven years being mistreated and tortured by the Castro regime.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was arbitrarily detained by the secret police on December 6, 2002 together with other activists, including Dr. Biscet, to stop them participating in a human rights workshop at the home of human rights defender Raúl Arencibia Fajardo. Three months later on March 8, 2003 Orlando was released.

Orlando Zapata photographed with prominent dissidents

Twelve days later on March 20, 2003 Orlando Zapata was re-arrested in the midst of the Black Cuban Spring when over 75 activists and independent journalists were jailed during a crackdown and sentenced to long prison terms. He had been taken part in a fast and vigil demanding the freedom of Dr. Biscet, who had remained jailed since the December 6, 2002 arrest.

Amnesty International reported that on October 20, 2003 Orlando was dragged along the floor of Combinado del Este Prison by prison officials after requesting medical attention, leaving his back full of lacerations. Orlando managed to smuggle a letter out that was published in April of 2004:

"My dear brothers in the internal opposition in Cuba. I have many things to say to you, but I did not want to do it with paper and ink, because I hope to go to you one day when our country is free without the Castro dictatorship. Long live human rights, with my blood I wrote to you so that this be saved as evidence of the savagery we are subjected to that are victims of the Pedro Luis Boitel political prisoners [movement]."*

 This did not silence him. When prison officials chose to attack his human dignity, and engaged in acts of physical and psychological torture, Orlando Zapata would respond with nonviolent defiance. He carried out hunger strikes within the prisons he was transferred to. The regime's response to his nonviolent defiance was to pile on prison years to his sentence. Between May 2004 and December 2009 they carried out nine trials without due process guarantees for a total sentence of 25 years and six months.

Reina Luisa Tamayo, with her son's blood stained shirt

What we know is a partial accounting of what he suffered. On July 26, 2008 in the Holguin Provincial Prison he was brutally beaten, on the orders of the prison director, Major Orelvis Miraldea, and Orlando's body was covered in bruises, but especially suffered blows to the head that caused a intracranial hematoma in the lower part of his brain, and a year later he needed to be operated on for this brain injury. 

Despite this, because of his refusal to be re-educated and silenced, the beatings continued on August 29, 2009, September 24, 2009, and a more severe beating on November 26, 2009.

On December 3, 2009 he is transferred to Kilo 8 in Camaguey, a maximum security prison. Upon his arrival the food that his mother had turned into him the day before was confiscated, and they wanted to force him to wear the uniform  of a common prisoner. Orlando refused and begins his last hunger strike.

Major Filiberto Hernandez Luis, director of Kilo 8 prison, retaliates placing him in isolation without clothes and sleeping on the floor. Over 18 days they deny him water in an effort force him to end his hunger strike, and break his spirit.  On January 3rd and again on January 6th he is taken to Amalia Simoni Hospital  and undergoes intravenous rehydration and is returned to his isolation cell.

On January 21, 2010 he is transferred to the Amalia Simoni Hospital prison ward where he is kept under strong air conditioning unit with a thin blanket that causes him to develop pneumonia, aggravating his health situation. At the same time on several occasions members of the political police film Orlando Zapata in his hospital bed.

On February 16, 2010 he is transferred to Havana in a military operation, and his mother is not allowed to accompany him in the ambulance. This is the last time that she sees her sons conscious.

On February 20, 2010 after strong protests by his mother to the secret police, she is able to see Orlando at the Combinado del Este prison ward, but he unconscious and intubated.

On February 22, 2010 she is called to a late night meeting with doctors, where she is filmed without her knowledge. There she is told for the first and only time that her son is alive thanks to an artificial  respirator.  ( However, in a later article in the official newspaper Granma it is reported that he had been on a respirator for days.)

On February 23, 2010 around mid-day, the secret police and military doctors in form Reina Luisa Tamayo, Orlando's mother, that he is being transferred to Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in a critical state. He dies three hours later at 3:00pm according to the information by the political police to his mother.

Castro regime book “The Dissidents” mentioned OZT as an opponent.

Following his death the Castro regime sought to destroy Orlando's reputation and went as far as to deny that he had been a dissident. This campaign failed, because even the dictatorship's own propaganda had recognized his activism, published a picture of him with other activists and attacked him years earlier.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo: Before and after Castro's imprisonment

They killed his body, but they did not obtain his obedience, and his spirit of defiance lives on.

However, one need not be a black political opponent to be killed.

Angel Izquierdo Medina, a 14-year old child was shot and killed by Amado Interian, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from State Security, in Mantilla, Cuba in 2011 because he stole some mamoncillos. When 400 friends, family members and neighbors decided to attend the dead child's wake they were subjected to Cuban state security agents laying siege to the dead child's wake.

Mother, Raiza Medina, and Ismael Suarez Herc, cousin of the victim

 Raiza Medina demanded justice for her son Ángel Izquierdo Medina, who was killed on July 15, 2011. Pictured with Ángel's cousin, Ismael Suarez Herc, 17, who was an eyewitness to the crime.

The reaction by the dictatorship's security forces no longer made this a simple indictment of one retired state security agent but of an unjust system with a total disregard for human life. 

14 year old shot and killed in Cuba for stealing Mamoncillos in 2011

Three Black Cubans were shot by firing squad following a speedy "trial" in 2003 for trying to flee Cuba. On April 2, 2003 eleven Cubans hijacked a ferry traveling to Regla from Havana with 40 people on board with the intention of traveling to the United States of America but ran out of fuel 28 miles off the Cuban coast and were towed back to the island.  

Despite verbal threats made against the safety of the passengers to maintain control of the vessel, the situation, according to the authorities, ended without violence and that “all of those who had been on board were rescued and saved without so much as a shot or a scratch.”

The hijackers were tried by the "Court for Crimes against State Security of the People’s Court of Havana. The Court had applied the specially expedited summary proceeding contemplated in Articles 479 and 480 of the Criminal Procedure Act. The petitioners add that the trials took place from April 5 to 8, 2003." At the "end of the expedited summary trial, the alleged victims were sentenced to death for violating the 'Cuban Law against Acts of Terrorism,' of December 2001. 

Lorenzo Enrique Copello, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla and Jorge Luis Martínez

Although the legally defined offenses committed by the hijackers, the law prescribes imprisonment, not the death penalty.  The three Black Cubans sentenced to death, Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac, appealed against their death sentences to the Supreme People’s Court. The Court ratified the sentences in less than a day. In keeping with current laws in Cuba, these death sentences were submitted for consideration by the Council of State, which proceeded to ratify them, condemning them to death.

In the early morning of April 11, 2003, following the decision handed down by the Council of State, the sentences were carried out and Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac were executed by firing squad. Nine days after the hijacking and three days after the trial.

How were family members informed of their loved ones' summary executions? "Ramona Copello, Mother of Lorenzo Enrique Copello interviewed by the Associated Press:

 "They came to my home at 6 in the morning and knocked on the door and told me to go to the cemetery at 10:00. He was already dead and buried. Go to the cemetery at 10 (am) so we can tell you where your relative is buried." 

"That was it. He was already buried, he was covered. I asked and implored and even kneeled so they would let me see his face. Since they are liars, I couldn't believe it was him. I uncovered the crypt. I uncovered it because I wanted to see if it was really him, but I couldn't see his face because the security and police arrived and so I didn't get to see his face. I'm not sure if it's my son or a dog buried there."

Lorenzo Enrique Copello

Lorenzo Enrique Copello had a daughter, Yanisleydis Copello, she was 11 when her dad was killed, but she is now a dissident and demands justice for her father:

They executed her dad by firing squad when she was 11.

 "I was only 11 years old when my father was shot, because he tried to leave Cuba in a boat, at all times we were deceived, I say we, because my dad was also deceived, my father was a worker at the Reina Polyclinic, he had no criminal record." 

"At that time they told us that they guaranteed his life, however he was shot at dawn on April 11, 2003. After being buried they informed the relatives; I suffered a trauma from which I never recovered, with medical treatment and when I became an adult I demanded JUSTICE for my father's murderers."  

  
The executions created a firestorm of international criticism in quarters that usually backed Castro's  regime. The dictatorship demanded tacit support in a statement titled "LETTER OF CUBAN INTELLECTUALS AGAINST THE ATTACKS TO THE REVOLUTION" signed by prominent Cuban figures asking their usual allies on the Left criticizing the summary executions  of these three young black men to be silent. The list of signers are a who's who of Cuban arts and culture: Alicia Alonso, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Miguel Barnet, Julio García Espinosa, Leo Brouwer, Fina García Marruz, Abelardo Estorino, Harold Gramatges, Roberto Fabelo, Alfredo Guevara, Pablo Armando Fernández, Eusebio Leal, Octavio Cortázar, José Loyola, Carlos Martí, Raquel Revuelta, Nancy Morejón, Silvio Rodríguez, Senel Paz, Humberto Solás, Amaury Pérez, Marta Valdés, Graziella Pogolotti, Chucho Valdés, César Portillo de la Luz, Cintio Vitier, and Omara Portuondo. 

Some of them, like Cuban singer and dancer Omara Portuondo, and Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Chucho Valdés were Black Cubans themselves, but had to sign off on three young black men, who had not physically harmed anyone, being tried and executed by firing squad in the space of nine days for reasons of national security, despite it not being punishment that should have been applied by the laws on the books.

The question of anti-black racism was raised because of the executions. “By executing [three young black Cubans], Castro was sending a clear message to the Afro-Cuban population” that dissent will not be tolerated, observed Dr. Jaime Suchlicki, director of Cuban studies at the University of Miami, in a report on Cuban racism in June of 2003. 


Systemic racism under the Castro regime documented, despite dictatorship's denials

The New York Times on January 25, 2020 published an opinion piece by French journalist and essayist Jean François Fogel that reports that Cuba under the Castro dictatorship is "a segregated society: 70 percent of black and mixed-race Cubans said they didn’t have access to the internet, compared with 25 percent of white Cubans. The racial wealth gap was also vast: While 50 percent of white Cubans had a banking account, only 11 percent of black Cubans said they had one. Moreover, white Cubans received 78 percent of remittances to Cuba, and they controlled 98 percent of private companies."

The Cuban government has denied there is a problem before the United Nations in what was supposed to have been an examination on how it was combating racism in Cuba. This should not be surprising when one considers that the inner leadership circle is uniformly white, and outer circles have black representation well below what is found in the general population.

Image taken from the Cuban Studies Institute.

On August 16, 2018 the Castro regime "categorically denied the existence of racial discrimination in Cuba to the group of independent experts of the United Nations (UN) that form the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) during the review of Cuba under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination," reported the non-governmental organization Race and Equality.

The purpose of the review was for the Castro regime to present information on how it had implemented action plans to combat racial discrimination in Cuba.

Juan Antonio Madrazo barred by Castro regime from talking about racism in Cuba

Voices from the island with a different point of view, that could have attended the gathering, were barred by the dictatorship from traveling. Juan Antonio Madrazo, Coordinator of the Citizen’s Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadano por la Integración Racial), was prevented from leaving Cuba to participate in the review, and Roberto Mesa, Coordinator of the Black Brotherhood (Cofradia de la Negritud) was arbitrarily detained a few days before he was scheduled to travel.

Roberto Mesa blocked by Castro regime from testifying on racism in Cuba.

In 2015 when a group of black Cuban human rights defenders were protesting for human rights that was video recorded, a woman was shouting about them in racist terms:"They’re a bunch of blacks who had no rights before and now want everything handed to them!"

Dissatisfaction by Black Cubans with the Castro regime became self-evident in 1980 when about half of the Mariel Exodus was made up of Cubans of African descent.

Cuba has a complicated history with regards to race relations that involves centuries of brutal slavery, and a plantation system centered around sugar and tobacco production. While at the same time long wars of independence from Spain that brought together slave owners and slaves in wars of liberation that changed relations, but following independence led to profound tensions in society that in the early days of the Republic led to blood shed, but in later years forged a new national identity.

Despite this history Castro regime officials try to jump on Black Lives Matter bandwagon

Castro regime officials, Comandante Ramiro Valdes Menendez and Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez are both playing a dangerous game highlighting the problems of racism in the United States.  

Bruno Rodriguez tweeted a 44 second excerpt of the video of the killing of George Floyd, and wrote: "George Floyd did not "pass away". He was brutally murdered. Unfortunately it's a story that African Americans know. He was unarmed. He shouted "I can't breath", but it was not enough to prevent an injustice. The color of the skin should not define us. #BlackLivesMatter"


 Ramiro Valdes Menendez  retweeted the Cuban Foreign Minister adding the observation: "That is the democracy and human rights that the empire defends: The oppression of the powerful, the hatred between the races. The most basic human right, life, is trampled on in the United States and its president remains silent in the face of such injustice."

They are inviting an examination of their own record, which has its own horrors, but highlighting what is happening in the United States in official Cuban media may boomerang as Black Cubans reflect on their own plight, and take matters into their own hands.

On Friday, June 5, 2020 news broke that a police station may have been assaulted and two policemen killed and a third seriously injured by assailants that had grievances with the police over poor treatment when making a complaint and harassment. We are still waiting to get additional confirmation. 

Cubazuela: Maduro reveals once again that Venezuela is a Cuban colony

"To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself." - Martin Luther King Jr. Stride to Freedom (1958)

Down with Cuban Imperialism in Latin America. Save Latin America

On January 20, 2020 Nicolas Maduro at the XX Meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission of the Cuba-Venezuela Integral Cooperation Agreement revealed the colonial status of his government: "I've told our older brother and protector, Raúl Castro Ruz, and he agrees. And it has been discussed in this mixed commission and we agree. The ambassadors are practically part of the Council of Ministers, the ambassador of Cuba has open doors in each ministry to coordinate, to move forward."

Maduro plantea que el Embajador de Cuba se integre al Consejo de Ministros de su régimen en Venezuela. #20Ene pic.twitter.com/UkZhH0Sv8F

— Gabriel Bastidas (@Gbastidas) January 20, 2020

This has been a long term objective of the Castro brothers. The Cuban dictatorship beginning in 1959 had strategic designs on taking over Venezuela to exploit its natural resources in order to magnify its regional impact.

On January 23, 1963 Cuban Communist leader Blas Roca made it public when he told a Havana rally that when the communists gained full control in Venezuela and they “make themselves owners of the great riches in oil, aluminum and everything their earth imprisons, then all of America shall burn.”  A cache of three tons of weapons was found on a Venezuelan beach in November 1963 that was to be used to disrupt the democratic elections there.

Fidel Castro would continue to agitate for revolution in Venezuela. A well documented incident occurred on May 8, 1967 and was reported in The Washington Post that described how: "two small boats carrying a dozen heavily armed fighters made landfall near Machurucuto, a tiny fishing village 100 miles east of the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. Their plan was to march inland and recruit Venezuelan peasants to the cause of socialist revolution." An all night gun battle with the Venezuelan military led to nine guerrillas dead, two captured, and one who had escaped.

Cuban Commandant Ramiro Valdes and President Hugo Chavez

Venezuelans successfully defended themselves from repeated ventures, and the Castro regime relented pledging not to attempt the violent overthrow of the democracy, but years later they succeeded with Hugo Chavez at the ballot box what they had failed to do through force of arms.

In 1992 Hugo Chavez was involved in a failed coup against the Andres Perez government. Pardoned by Andres Perez's successor, Rafael Caldera, in March 1994 Hugo Chavez made his way to Cuba later that same year where he was received by Fidel Castro as a hero not a failed coup plotter.

Fidel Castro greets Hugo Chavez in Cuba on December 13, 1994

Four years later, in a reaction to generalized disgust with the corruption endemic to the Venezuelan democratic order epitomized by the Carlos Andres Perez administration the former coup plotter was elected president.  President Caldera, who pardoned Chavez, handed power over to him in 1999. Together with Fidel Castro, as a mentor, Chavez began the process of turning a flawed democratic order into the regime it is today.

Maduro's action on Monday, was just the latest statement echoing what Hugo Chávez had already announced. In 2007 Chávez had declared that Cuba and Venezuela were a single nation. “Deep down,” he said, “we are one single government.”  

In February 2010  Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, then age 77, was hired "as a consultant for that country's energy crisis" but his expertise is not in energy.  Valdes was the Vice President of the Council of State and Minister of Communications in the Cuban government. His role in Communications was figuring out in 2007 a way to muzzle the internet, what he called a "wild colt of new technologies."

Nicolas Maduro and Ramiro Valdes

Commander Ramiro Valdes, founder of the Castro regime's feared Ministry of the Interior, head of the organization between 1961 and 1968 and was viewed by some as "the No. 3 man in the Cuban hierarchy." He is the architect of Cuban totalitarianism's repressive apparatus and assisted Chavez and Maduro in building the Venezuelan version.    

The Castro regime turned Venezuela into their colony. Today it is Cuban occupied territory.

Caracas Chronicles is right when it observes: "Amazing how everything the left accuses the U.S. of wanting to do in Venezuela —siphon off oil wealth, install a puppet dictator, run hundreds of spies, crush democratic institutions— is stuff Cuba is *actually* doing. And has been. For years."

Thousands of Cuban military advisers and intelligence officials assisted the Chavez and Maduro regime's consolidate power to entrench the dictatorship in Venezuela. OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro has described it as "being like an occupation army."

Maduro and the Castro regime are attempting to complete the installation of a communist dictatorship in Venezuela. One of the instruments that these regimes have used to subjugate populations is famine and rationing food to those who are loyal and denying it to those who are not.

Famine is a tool communists have traditionally used to remake societies. 

The deadliest famines in the 20th century were not in Africa but in Europe (Ukraine) and China.
Social science research has demonstrated that famines "happen only with some degree of human complicity."  Human decisions "determine whether a crisis deteriorates into a full-blown famine."

Jean Pierre Planchart malnourished inVenezuela. Pic: Dr. Livia Machad

In the case of Venezuela, Chávez and Maduro destroyed the market in food by imposing price controls "that resulted in underproduction when the official prices did not meet costs of production. Their governments expropriated farms, ranches, and even food distributors such as butchers. There’s very little if anything produced on these expropriated territories." Rhoda Howard-Hassmann's article "Famine in Venezuela" published on August 21, 2018 in the World Peace Foundation reports:

"By 2017 malnutrition was confirmed in Venezuela, precipitating the political unrest now roiling the country. According to Antulio Rosales (“Weaponizing Hunger is a New Low for the Venezuelan President,” Globe and Mail, March 12, 2018, p.A11) and Enrique Krauze (“Hell of a Fiesta,” New York Review of Books, March 8, 2018, pp. 4-7), by early 2018 more than half of all Venezuelans had lost between 19 and 24 pounds, and 90 per cent said they do not have enough money for food."

Despite this reality, on February 4, 2018 Maduro shipped 100 tons of aid to Cuba. Maduro's regime issued ration cards for food in a country were mass hunger is an ever present reality and it is understood by many that following regime instructions, such as going to vote in the last sham election, was necessary to be eligible for rations.  The electoral calculus was clear: "Everyone who has this card must vote," said Nicolas Maduro and continued, "I give and you give."

This is a very old playbook.

According to Felix Wemheuer, professor of Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne, in his book Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union," during the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union." 

Maduro, and his Cuban allies issued denials about the extent of the problem of hunger in Venezuela. The rejection and destruction of humanitarian assistance combined with images of tons of humanitarian assistance shipped from Venezuela to Cuba appears bizarre, but it needs to be placed in the context of previous episodes involving other communist regimes.

Both the USSR and China used Western journalists, such as Walter Duranty in Moscow and Edgar Snow in Beijing to deny that a famine was taking place and to defend the official lies of the regime. This practice continues today in Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere.

Fidel Castro lounging with Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Ethiopia in 1977

In Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime, reproduced Soviet and Chinese practices when he blacked out communications, and refused access to aid agencies.

In December 1979, during an Ethiopian military offensive, this time including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, it “was more specifically directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”

Worse yet, as starvation took hold in Ethiopia, Mengistu ordered planeloads of whisky to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his taking power. Denying that a famine was taking place. Once that could no longer be denied he then used the famine as a cover for ethnic cleansing and removing opponents.

Despite all of this the Castro regime on too many occasions is being given a pass, and this is not only a disservice to Cubans, suffering under a 61 year old dictatorship, but also to Venezuelans that have been colonized by the Castro regime.
  

Cuba's problematic legacy in Africa: A look back to Ethiopia and South Africa

 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.



Human Rights Watch in their 2008 report on Ethiopia titled outlined "Collective Punishment War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region" some of the practices carried out by Cuban troops sent there by Fidel and Raul Castro excerpted below: 

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.

Meanwhile today in South Africa medical students join those of other African nations in protesting their treatment by both African and Cuban officials.

Venezuela's Maduro and Ethiopia's Mengistu: Brothers in crimes against humanity.

History repeats itself.

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."

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall visit Cuba: Did they see the real Cuba or just the Potemkin Village?

Normally, travel broadens the mind but what about visiting a totalitarian state?

Photo op: Prince Charles (Left) with Comandante Ramiro Valdes (Center)

Prince Charles is pictured above with Ramiro Valdes. Commander Ramiro Valdes is "a historic leader of the revolution." He is the founder of the Castro regime's secret police and was the first head of the Ministry of the Interior between 1961 and 1968. Ramiro Valdes is an architect of the Cuban police state. This Cuban Dzerzhinsky with a bloody track record has been white washed with this royal visit.

Commander Valdes went to Venezuela in 2010 supposedly to address the then already existing electricity crisis . In February of 2010  Ramiro Valdes, then age 77, was hired "as a consultant for that country's energy crisis" but his expertise is not in energy. He is viewed by some Cuba experts as "the No. 3 man in the Cuban hierarchy."

Valdes in 2010 was the Vice President of the Council of State and Minister of Communications in the Cuban government. His role in Communications was figuring out in 2007 a way to muzzle the internet, what he called a "wild colt of new technologies." Afro-Cuban scholar Carlos Moore offered the following observation on Commander Valdes in 1961 and in 2010:

Ramiro Valdes was an inflexible, totalitarian and brutal person. He was the most feared man in Cuba. The repressive policies of the regime were crafted by him. Valdes struck fear into the hearts of Cubans (even revolutionary ones).

In 2013, Juan Juan Almeida, the son of another commander of the revolution, listed some of his nick names:  "The Master of Censorship; The Prince of Terror; The Cuban Dzerzhinsky; … and in his native district he is known as the Butcher of Artemis." This is who Prince Charles has been photographed with during his visit to Cuba. This is not an accident.

Visitors to totalitarian states become targets of both the state security service and the propaganda ministries. These regimes will pull out all the stops to show themselves in the best light possible and make sure that high profile visitors have a great time but within a reality fabricated by them. It has paid back with big dividends in the past with a partial list including: Lincoln Joseph Steffens, Charles Lindbergh, Jane Fonda, Linda Ronstadt, and Dennis Rodman that wittingly or unwittingly became agents of influence after visiting totalitarians and being photographed with them. Sadly,  Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall have been added to this long list.

Prince Charles grinds sugar cane with the Duchess of Cornwall looking on.

Great mojitos, fine cuisine, and visits to the nicest part of the island while avoiding all the unpleasantness provides a skewed vision of Cuba. The reality that Cubans know on and off the island is far different, and there are also respected international human rights bodies and organizations that would also provide the royal couple with a profoundly different perspective. 

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall make their own mojitos

This is has been going on for a long time and the techniques of hospitality are so refined that one need not be an ideological fellow traveler to be converted.  These totalitarian tactics are ideologically neutral and often very successful in creating the Potemkin village experience.  They create an impressive facade or show designed to hide undesirable facts and conditions.

Totalitarians have a track record of effectively using tourism, athletic events, and academic exchanges to present their regimes in a way that historically legitimized them and covered up their hostile objectives often with disastrous results not only for their own countries but the international community as a whole. An excellent accounting of these practices and their impacts on national and international politics is found in Paul Hollander's book Political Pilgrims that should be required reading for anyone traveling to Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela, or Vietnam.

Ribbon cutting ceremony with Prince Charles and Ramiro Valdes, the Cuban Beria 

It may have been useful for Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall to have had a briefing about Hollander's book, and meeting with Cuban dissidents to gain a understanding of the real Cuba, and perhaps avoid being used as a prop by the Castro dictatorship.