Communist Morality: Why Fidel Castro denied he was a communist as he planned to turn Cuba into a communist dictatorship

"'To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim." - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

"If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains."  - Fidel Castro, December 2, 1961 

Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries wore medallions of the Virgin Mary

Fidel Castro was a shrewd rascal, as his classmate and future political adversary Jose Ignacio Rasco described him in his writings, but there was more to the wholesale lying and denial of his political ideology and the regime he and others imposed by stealth on Cubans in 1959 and together with his brother remained in total control for six decades. 

Before they consolidated total control in early 1959 they spoke publicly of democracy, human rights and respect for press freedom while privately threatening Cuban journalists of dire consequences if they published anything negative. In the February 14, 1959 letter to journalist Jules Dubois, Fidel Castro claimed that "every person in the society of free nations -- and even those who are oppressed under the heels of dictators -- has a right to express his or her opinion," and in the letter he also recognized the freedom of the press.

Once the Castro brothers had consolidated power and declared their regime openly Marxist Leninist, freedom of expression was subordinated to the goal of a building a communist state, and freedom of the press declared a "bourgeois liberty" that no longer applied to Cuba. Fidel Castro in a 1986 interview spoke on freedom:

"There is revolutionary liberty and there are other liberties which are bourgeois. It's difficult for me to talk about them to Europeans because bourgeois liberties were born there. In England, France, those countries. You talk of equality, liberty, fraternity. I think only our society can truly speak of equality. There's no equality between millionaires and beggars."

Mr. Castro had a point, that with wide disparities of wealth, the poor are at a disadvantage in exercising their rights. However in Cuba the disparity between those in the inner circle of power and the rest of the population is far more extreme and an even worse assault on human dignity. Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas in his book Before Night Falls described it as follows: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream."


What Castro failed to mention, and Arenas described in the quote above, is that in a society where the rule of law exists a beggar has greater protections that is to say "more equality" than a poor person in Cuba who is entirely subject to the whims of Mr. Castro who also happens to be worth $900 million dollars while the vast majority of Cubans live in squalor.  In the same interview the Cuban dictator expanded on his argument:

"Bourgeois liberties, no. We have two different concepts of freedom. Europeans have one, we have another.  Capitalism and socialism are not at all alike. Your political concepts of liberty, equality, justice are very different from ours. You try to measure a country like Cuba with European ideas. And we do not resign ourselves to or accept being measured by those standards."

For a Marxist Leninist there is no morality beyond whatever serves you to take power. Vladimir Lenin stated it clearly in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920:

"The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

Years later on March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist in 1961, Fidel Castro explained: "I conceive the truth in terms of a just and noble end, and that is when the truth is truly true. If it does not serve a just, noble and positive end, truth, as an abstract entity, philosophical category, in my opinion, does not exist." Jose Ignacio Rasco, who knew Fidel Castro from school and afterwards concluded that the Cuban revolutionary had been a committed communist by 1950.

This is why Fidel Castro denied being a communist and along with his fellow guerillas wore medallions of the Virgin Mary when they emerged from the Sierra Maestra in 1959, why Hugo Chavez called Fidel Castro a dictator during his first presidential campaign in 1998, and why Senator Sanders claimed to be critical of Cuba and Nicaragua, in 2020 when he has been a long time apologist. Because to tell the truth would deny them power, and their revolutionary objective is to seize absolute power, transform society into a totalitarian dictatorship that cannot be removed at the polling booth.

Morality and truth are means to an end, and if they do not serve the end of achieving absolute power then they are not recognized as either moral or truthful.

Nazi Foreign minister von Ribbentrop (L), Josef Stalin, Soviet Foreign minister Ribbentrop (R)

This also means that in the service of seeking power everything is moral. Communists in Weimar Germany allied with Nazis to destroy German democracy in the mistaken belief that the National Socialists would quickly implode and they would take over.  

On the international stage Josef Stalin allied with Adolf Hitler on August 23, 1939 and their foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed a Non-Aggression Pact that was in reality an Aggression Pact to divide up Eastern Europe and led to Soviet and Nazi armies meeting and marching together in the middle of Poland to celebrate their victory. 

Nearly two years later, Hitler double crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union ending the totalitarian dictatorships honeymoon, but after the end of WW2 Stalin and the East German Stasi were funding Neo-Nazi parties to undermine and embarrass West Germany's democracy.

Fidel Castro in 1962 bought weapons from Otto-Ernst Remer

In the early 1960s Otto-Ernst Remer, the Nazi who saved Hitler's Third Reich from being overthrown internally in early 1944, had contacts with and assisted Fidel Castro in Cuba with the purchase of weapons. Ernst-Remer along with Ernst Wilhelm Springer sold the Cuban dictator 4,000 pistols. German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) reported: "Evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives." 


This is not saying that the Soviet and Castro Communists are Nazis, but that their moral vision does not preclude allying with Nazis to advance their class struggle agenda to achieve power. It is saying that Communists will say and do anything to achieve power. Communists will ally with the worse of the worse and lie about their beliefs and intentions to deceive their way into power. Venezuelans and Nicaraguans have learned this lesson the hard way.


If a political leader honestly told  the citizens of his or her nation: "I am going to take absolute power, strip you of your rights, erect a police state, and rule the country for life, and if you disagree then you have three options: death, prison, or exile" how many votes would they get?


This is why they lie.

Postscript: Fidel Castro and his communist revolutionaries wore medallions of the Virgin Mary, but on September 17, 1961 the communists at gun point collected 131 priests, brothers and a bishop, placing them on board the Spanish ship Covadonga and deported them from Cuba. 

The US State Department 2003 International Religious Freedom Report reported that "from 1965-67 the Government forced many priests, pastors, and others 'who made religion a way of life' into forced labor camps called Military Units to Aid Production (UMAPS), alongside homosexuals, vagrants, and others considered by the regime to be 'social scum.'" 

Fidel Castro canceled Christmas in 1969 under the pretext to prevent work shortages for the 1970 ten million ton sugar harvest but continued the ban until 1997, and sent mobs to intimidate Cubans who attended religious services. Three Kings Day and Easter were also abolished.  In 1976 the Castro dictatorship adopted a constitution which turned Cuba into an atheist state.  

Things improved in the 1990s, but  still today, the Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), an arm of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, oversees religious affairs in Cuba, and exists to monitor, hinder and restrict religious activities.  

Priests were taken at gun point and forced out of Cuba in 1961

 

Black Ribbon Day 2020: The Hitler-Stalin Pact that started WW2 and that communists would like to erase.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera

Eighty one years ago on August 23, 1939 the world was shocked to learn that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was named after their respective foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Observers would have been even more horrified had they known of the secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers. What they called a "peace treaty" in reality was a war treaty.

Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).

 Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland. On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together.

Nazi and Soviet soldiers greet one another in Poland (1939)

About 230,000 Polish soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Russians. The Soviet precursor to the KGB was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.  

Thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders were taken into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, shot in the back of the head or in the neck and buried in mass graves.
Months later, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed the Baltic States in June 1940. 

This should not have come as a complete surprise.
 
The same people who would join Hitler's brown shirts were also susceptible recruits to join Antifa. Communists viewed the SA as a "proletarian-revolutionary paramilitary wing"of the Nazi movement and susceptible to being recruited to the communist cause. The case of Richard Scheringer, a supporter of Adolf Hitler and army officer who converted to communism in the early 1930s is a high profile example of this.
 
Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emeritus, at Emory University, described how communists had mistakenly viewed the Nazis as a means to achieving power and undermining capitalist democracies. Antifa identified all political parties that were not communist as fascist. This meant that social democrats, centrist political parties, and conservative parties were together with the Nazis all labeled fascist. Fascism, according to Antifa, is anti-capitalism. This was the Comintern's class against class approach and fractured any potential broad anti-Nazi coalition.

"Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1932 had been immeasurably aided by the German communists' steadfast support for the Comintern tactic of “class against class,” which demanded no cooperation with other anti-Nazi forces. German communists blithely insisted that Hitler’s triumph would be evanescent—summarized in their optimistic slogan, Nach Hitler, kommen wir ('After Hitler, us'). 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is this strategy but on a grander scale. Let the Western democracies and the Nazis exhaust each other in the conflict and then seize everything. Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. reported that "Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West."

Soviet and Nazi soldiers fraternize after conquering Poland in 1939

The Communist International (Comintern) issued new orders to their members once the non-aggression pact had been made public.  Professor Klehr described the new directive.

Good communists were ordered to oppose anyone intending to stand in Hitler’s way.  With Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow at the end of September and the signing of a German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, the Comintern emphasized that the primary adversary was those countries that were at war with Germany, and those socialists and social democrats fighting against fascism. Germany had concluded a pact with the USSR, while “reactionary” England, at the helm of a vast colonial empire, was the “bulwark of capitalism.” Thus, communist parties in England and France were ordered to call for the defeat of their countries—ordered, in other words, to officially embrace treason. 

According to Klehr, Nazi reports confirmed that Communists were fulfilling their part of the agreement siding against Western Democracies. 

A June 1940 Gestapo report approvingly noted that the Soviet government was favorably disposed to the Third Reich and had endorsed its invasions of the Scandinavian states and Belgium and Holland “as necessary and proper.” The report went on to note that the Comintern had avoided open attacks on Germany,  and that the parties and publications allied with the Comintern were not pushing for communists to struggle against National Socialism or denounce fascism.

This arrangement only ended on June 22, 1941 when the Nazis double crossed their Soviet allies and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet foreign minister, Molotov

Communist morality has no problem with any of it because as the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin observed in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920:

"The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

The myth that the communists were anti-fascists is a dangerous one, and the fact is that they viewed the Nazis as an instrument to wipe out Western Democracies and replace them with communist regimes believing that the fascists would quickly fade out of power.

This reckless strategy cost 22 to 28 million Russian lives in World War Two, and nearly led to the Nazi conquest and occupation of Russia.

It also led to Poland spending another half century under Soviet domination and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia occupied by the Russians.  A conquest that arose out of the Hitler-Stalin pact that endured following the end of the war. 

The Baltic Way brought an end to one key element of Molotov Ribbentrop

It was a nonviolent movement thirty years ago that liberated the Baltic nations. The Baltic Way brought an end to this part of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

On June 4, 1989 the Solidarity labor movement won in free elections and the Polish people finally regained their sovereignty after nearly 50 years under Soviet domination. They did it nonviolently.

So did the people of the Baltic states when two million Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians joined hands together in a giant human chain stretching 370 miles on August 23, 1989. Fifty years to the day after the treaty that brought them so much grief had been signed.

This history must not be forgotten. The Spanish scholar George Santayana understood that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Embassy of Estonia, Embassy of Latvia, Embassy of Lithuania, JBANC, Estonian American National Council, EU Delegation to the USA, Lithuanian American Council, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation organized a reenactment of this nonviolent action that freed three peoples on the 80th anniversary of the signing of the pact.

In Washington DC on August 23, 2019, we held hands in a human chain to celebrate freedom in front of the U.S. Capitol and afterwards gathered at Biergarten Haus. 

At a time when communists are using the Antifa label to legitimize their deadly ideology it is important to remember their alliance with Nazism, and call on others to learn from this history.
 

Fidel Castro, Carlos Franqui and the 1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia

"Totalitarian or authoritarian forms of government tend to have very inconspicuous beginnings and employ very ingenious means of controlling society. Only now, in hindsight, do many of us realize how deviously they were entangled in the totalitarian web."  -Vaclav Havel November 11, 2009 Brussels

Czechs nonviolently resisted the 1968 invasion of the Warsaw Pact that ended the Prague Spring

Invasion and Occupation as described by Czech radio with images
Czechoslovakia had its Prague Spring in 1968, a moment when reformers in the government sought socialism with a human face and it was ended 52 years ago today with the arrival of Warsaw Pact tanks and occupation that crushed the reformist initiative. Two days after the Soviet led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 23, 1968 Fidel Castro publicly supported the invasion and occupation of the central European country.

Part of Castro's defense of the invasion and occupation was that basic human rights standards such as freedom of expression were being re-established or in Castro's words:

A series of slogans began to be put forward and in fact certain measures were taken such as the establishment of the bourgeois "freedom" of the press. This means that the counter-revolution and the exploiters, the very enemies of socialism, were granted the right to speak and write freely against socialism. 

This led to Carlos Franqui, one of the early backers of Fidel Castro's July 26 movement and a leader of the Revolution to break with the regime in 1968 over Castro's support of the invasion. 

Dissident figure erased 

Carlos Franqui's protest of conscience would lead him to then suffer a Stalinist erasure from Cuba's revolutionary history. 

Josef Stalin had pioneered airbrushing colleagues who had fallen out of favor. Nikolai Yezhov ,a Stalin loyalist, had written the treatise that intellectually justified the need for purges in 1935 and became head of the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in 1936. He staunchly maintained that it was better for "ten innocent people to suffer than one enemy of the people to escape." He presided over the execution of hundreds of thousands only to fall out of favor with Stalin in 1939 and disappeared, but unlike Franqui, not just in official photos and publications, he was never heard from again.In the picture below Nikolai Yezhov, appears next to Josef Stalin only to be airbrushed out in the picture directly below redone years later. 

Nikolai Yezhov, erased by Josef Stalin

In the picture below Carlos Franqui appears on the right (in the middle of the picture) and is airbrushed out of the picture on the left. 

Carlos Franqui erased by Fidel Castro from official photograph

Franqui wrote a short poem about being erased that is translated and reproduced below:

I discover my photographic death.

Do I exist?

 I am a little black,
I am a little white,

I am a little shit,

On Fidel's vest.

Four decades later Carlos Franqui would return to the Czech Republic which he had visited in 1960 to contrast
 what he characterized the slave society of 1960s and the free society of today. He offered the following description of Prague in 1960 as he 
lived it:

The Prague I saw in 1960 under communism was a Prague with tense, dramatic people there were many police everywhere, gross corruption on the part of the regime. I came with a delegation of journalists and went to the hotel Jalta. There was a dance and there were very pretty young Czech girls ... Most of the journalists who were with me were good dancers and they began to dance. And they were very happy because they thought they were going to have an affair with these girls. But when the dance ended at midnight the girls told them that if they wanted to go with them that it would cost them the equivalent of thirty dollars. Then, as I was the treasurer of the delegation they came to borrow the money. I said I was sorry but could not justify it and they spent all night together with these girls. These girls told them that the police gave them apartments, and that they had to deliver foreign currency to the police chief the next day, that they had to ask the foreigners questions about politics, record and then deliver them . After that we went to the shops where only Tuzex could be purchased with foreign currency and actually saw official representatives doing the currency changes.

Contrasting with what he saw on his return to Prague in 2000:

I believe that slavery affects people in many ways. In countries where there is tyranny, where communism, normally people faces are tense, everybody is worried. It is difficult to find the relaxation, people simply smiling on the streets. And of course there were some great privileges among the Communist leaders, who lived as upper hierarchy, and people who had to work and obey. Now with what I have seen I have a different impression. It is clear that the heritage communism left is difficult to overcome because it is a legacy not only material but spiritual. Communism destroys the individual. And when the individual is free it is hard to recover the idea of being free. Under communism it is as if the state was the father of all the children. Then, to change that mentality is difficult but very important. A society can progress only through the efforts of all ... in all walks of life. [...] I think it was a country with a great industrial development, with a culture with certain traditions, which despite everything communism failed to destroy. I also think that having Václav Havel as a president has contributed mightily to create a balance, to solve serious problems like the thing with Slovakia in a peaceful and civil manner.

Fifty two years later and the totalitarian temptation continues to threaten free nations through academic and cultural institutions on the one hand and an ascendant communist China on the other hand, but the legacy and writings of Vaclav Havel continue to be relevant and required reading.

We also remember that end of the Prague Spring in 1968 was the prelude to the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that ushered in thirty years and counting of freedom.  

Castro regime and dictatorship linked Council of Churches of Cuba leaders reject humanitarian aid in midst of COVID pandemic crisis

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” – Martin Luther King Jr.,

Rosa María Payá led effort to gather humanitarian aid for Cubans on the island.

From CubaBrief

Two leaders of the Council of Churches of Cuba are denouncing a young Cuban dissident who organized a humanitarian aid drive and are refusing to accept the assistance. Reverend Joel Ortega Dopico, Executive Secretary and Rev Antonio Santana Hernández, president of the Council of Churches of Cuba have criticized the efforts of Rosa María Payá to get much needed humanitarian assistance to Cubans on the island.  Only problem is that the aid was not theirs to reject.

The Pan American Foundation for Democracy, in coordination with the City of Miami, called on all Cuban residents of South Florida and the U.S. to send donations to provide humanitarian assistance to Cuba, which is in the midst of a crisis of shortages in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.  Humanitarian aid was collected on Saturday, May 16, at the Mana Wynwood Convention Center and the containers filled with assistance reached the Port of Mariel in Cuba. Now the Castro regime is blocking the delivery of the aid.

The Castro regime in Cuba was an atheist dictatorship openly hostile to religion until their Communist Party Fourth Congress in 1991 when religious belief was declared to no longer be an obstacle to membership in the officialist party. The hostility remains but it is now more covert.

This "opening" led Pablo Odén Marichal, then president of the Cuban Council of Churches (Consejo Cubano de Iglesias), who was also a deputy in Cuba's National Assembly to become a Communist Party member. Baptist Minister Raúl Suárez Ramos, with the Cuban Council of Churches, who was also a deputy in Cuba's National Assembly, joined the Communist Party. Human Rights Watch reported in their 1999 report Cuba's Repressive Machinery that "Suárez Ramos earned government acclaim in 1990 when he lauded the revolution as "a blessing for our poor people" and criticized U.S. policy toward Cuba as an "economic, political, radio, and television aggression."

T @RosaMariaPaya,coordinator of #CubaDecide, responded that "the #help does not belong to Reverend Santana and Dopico. The president and secretary of the #CouncilofChurches have nothing to reject because the #humanitarian aid was not sent to them." https://t.co/V1EHmLbJLj

— Center for Free Cuba (@cubacenter) August 19, 2020

The leaders of the Council of Churches of Cuba parrot the official government line and are rewarded with both benefits and privileges denied to others. Their response attacking Rosa Maria is simply doing the Castro regime's bidding.

Meanwhile, those who do not follow the government line and engage in "subversive acts" such as Father Patrick Sullivan who "posted copies of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in his church and had urged his parishioners to defend those rights"  was pressured by the Cuban government into leaving Cuba in April 1988, continue to suffer similar or worse consequences.

In May, despite the pandemic the diaspora gave time and treasure for Cubans in the island

 Second, this is not the first time that the Castro regime has denied badly needed humanitarian aid sent by the Cuban exile community. Eight months after the February 24, 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, following Hurricane Lili's devastating impact on Cuba the United States government in October 1996 waived a then existing ban on direct flights from Cuba for a Catholic Church charity to send a planeload of aid to help victims of the hurricane.

Ulises Cabrera in an article published by Cubanet on October 23, 1996 described the grim situation on the island."To the hundreds of thousands of homeless Cubans now there's a fresh crop. Hunger worsens by the day. The sugar industry and the rest of the economy will have even worse results. The government has informed us that they have used up the State's reserves for emergencies, therefore we will be subjected to even greater misery amidst the misery, and even the faint hope that some fools clung to, will vanish."

30 tons of assistance arrived in Cuba, but were held by regime officials for over a week and not sent to impacted areas. On November 2, 1996 the Cuban dictatorship said that it "was not accepting part of a planeload of food aid for victims of Hurricane Lili sent by Cuban-Americans because packages had been adorned with political, ''counter-revolutionary'' slogans."

According to then Father Thomas Wenski, "some packages were adorned with messages such as ''exile'' and 'love can do everything.' Wenski reiterated on Saturday that the donors had not meant any harm by putting such lettering on the packages."

Now in 2020, leaders of the Council of Churches of Cuba echo the positions of the Castro regime, but other religious leaders such as Pastor Alayn Toledano and  Pastora Maria Cristina Rodriguez Penton are bravely speaking out that the aid is needed and wanted by Cubans. This is a courageous position because independent religious spaces and practices continue to be targeted by the dictatorship.

In desperation, the Castro regime's official website CubaDebate warns that humanitarian aid "could have bombs," in an effort to spin what is becoming a public relations debacle for the dictatorship.  Cuban rapper and dissident Maykel Castillo was detained for four hours by the secret police and received veiled threats for having called for the release of the aid to help Cuban families in need.

Collection point for humanitarian assistance in May 2020.

Time for the Castro regime to get out of the way for Cubans to help each other at this time of crisis and great need.

Message of solidarity with the people of Belarus and eternal hostility to Lukashenko, the "Fidel Castro of Europe"

 "It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so." - Mr. Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General

Hispanics demonstrate their solidarity with freedom struggle in Belarus

Presidential elections were held in Belarus on August 9, 2020 and official provisional results claimed that the "incumbent President of Belarus Aleksandr Lukashenko received 80.08% of votes, whereas his opponent Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya received 10.9%." Elections were marred by government "violence, unjustified detentions and falsification of election results."

Protests broke out across the country against Lukashenko, who has been the communist dictator of Belarus since 1994. Despite brutal repression and torture by government officials the populace has taken to the street to protest the latest stolen presidential election.

Pro-regime rally on the left dwarfed by opposition rally on the right on the same day

 We are approaching the 29th anniversary of Belarus achieving its independence from the Soviet Union after more than seventy years of occupation. Nevertheless, this day is not cause for celebration because for the majority of that time and currently Belarusians have been subjected to what today is the last dictatorship in Europe under the autocratic regime of Alexander Lukashenko.

Fidel Castro and Alexander Lukashenko: Birds of a feather

Belarus dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, is called the "Fidel Castro of Europe" and upon Fidel Castro's death in November 2016 he sent his effusive condolences to Raul Castro that give an insight into the Belarus dictator's character fawning over one of the great despots of the 20th century, and his close relationship with the current Cuban dictator.

 “It is with deep pain and sorrow that I have learned the news about the death of my Friend and your Brother,” the message of condolences reads." ... “Fidel Castro left his bright mark in history as a true patriot who dedicated his life to the selfless service to the Homeland and the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. ..." His wise ideas and advice are very important for me. I am convinced that this invaluable legacy will help me in state activities and personal life,” Alexander Lukashenko stressed. Addressing Raul Castro, he remarked: “Raul, we lost a close and dear person, and a unique thinker.”

One hopes that Lukashenko is not the Castro of Europe because after 25 years in power, he would still have another 22 years in power before handing the dictatorship to a close relative in a dynastic succession in 2042 as Fidel Castro did to Raul Castro in 2006 after he fell ill, and was unable to continue running Cuba's communist dictatorship after 47 years.

Raul Castro and Alexander Lukashenko

For anyone to remain in power for 25 years, much less 47 years, normally does not rely on the consent of the governed through a democratic process, but use a repressive apparatus and the willingness to punish, torture and kill those seeking a democratic change, even if they are pursuing it nonviolently. The Castro regime had secret police fire into marching protesters on August 5, 1994. There has been a report of at least one Belarusian shot by police during current protests against Lukashenko.

Andrew Roth writing in The Guardian on August 13, 2020 reported disturbing practices committed by the authorities against those already in custody.

Those detained in police stations, jails and makeshift prisons spoke of ritual beatings, up to 55 women being crammed into a cell meant for two people and men who were kept in stress positions for hours on end. Leaked audio files and other testimony has corroborated the reports of widespread torture as Lukashenko tries to hold on to power.

One 31-year-old builder from Minsk, who asked for his name not to be used, described being arrested at 6pm on Sunday evening, a few hours before polls closed, after he filmed a column of riot police in central Minsk.

For the first few hours, he was treated well, but was then moved to a notorious holding centre on Okrestina Street on the outskirts of Minsk, where he was placed in a cell meant for four people that eventually had 21 men inside as more and more were arrested during the evening.

After two days, in which he was given water but no food and could hear the screams of people being beaten in the courtyard, he was forced to sign a paper with false information about where and when he was arrested. He was then given an 11-day prison sentence in a makeshift trial inside the prison. A few hours later, at 3am on Wednesday morning, he was told he could leave.

“They called me to the exit, but then in the courtyard riot police with their faces covered told us to lie down on the floor and then they started beating us. They were smashing me with batons all over my body. Then they were smashing me with fists. Then they told us to stand up to see if we could stand up. I didn’t really know what was happening.”

Similar and worse practices have been carried out under the Castros since 1959 and in Belarus under Lukashenko since 1994. In addition to their brutality they have also played the race card. Black dissidents have died on hunger strikes in Cuba, black Cubans have been executed by firing squad for trying to hijack vessels to flee the island, and revolutionary police shot a young man in the back and regime officials prevented protests over the killing. Today, Lukashenko tried to rally his supporters using the race card declaring "they want to impose on us NATO forces... Including black and yellow soldiers. Not on my watch!!"

Belarus and Cuba maybe thousands of miles apart with different languages and national histories but both share the ill fortune of having communist totalitarian regimes and their methods of repression are similar. The languages and customs may be different but the repression and human rights violations are the same, and so are their lies and denials. In addition the regimes in Belarus and Cuba have close bilateral ties.

In the early years of the Communist Revolution in Cuba when the Castros old compatriots had returned to the hills and mountains of the Escambray carrying out a guerilla struggle to achieve democracy, the regime brought in hundreds of Soviet counter insurgency experts to assist the Castro regime in crushing this democratic resistance in what Mary O'Grady in The Wall Street Journal in 2017 called a Soviet cleansing.

Today in Belarus it is a mass nonviolent movement of millions, and although the Soviet Union ceased to exist 29 years ago, its KGB agents are still in positions of power.
Lukashenko has a choice: listen to Belarusians demands and reach a democratic accommodation or appeal to the former KGB officer, now despot of Russia, Vladimir Putin to assist him in cracking down on the democratic aspirations of his countrymen.

The historical rally is happening in Minsk. Now there are two options for Lukashenka:
1) negotiations with opposition;
2) Putin to come pic.twitter.com/v1txzVzyCl

— Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 16, 2020

It appears that repression tactics are universal which offers another reason why a universal human rights standard is not an idealistic abstraction but a concrete response to real world problems.

Finally, the close relationship between these two brutal dictators demonstrates once again the need for victims of repression to work in solidarity with each other. A Czech dissident who died under interrogation by state security over three decades ago called it the solidarity of the shaken. His name was Jan Patočka.

This is why on the 20th anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union we joined in worldwide protests of solidarity, and it is why today we are speaking out for Belarusians experiencing repression and torture for wanting to be free. 

This evening concludes the largest protest in the history of #Belarus. By different reports up to over a million people gathered on the streeets of #Minsk demanding freedom, free election results and step down of #Lukashenko. pic.twitter.com/uEsNdFUJsc

— Belarus Free Theatre (@BFreeTheatre) August 16, 2020