Fidel Castro on the Berlin Wall

"The future belongs to socialism" - Erich Honecker

"It is your duty to use your combat … skills in such a way as to overcome the cunning of the border breacher, to challenge or liquidate him in order to thwart the planned border breach... Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.” Order to Border Guards October 1, 1973.

"If we get shot, will you write about us?"
- E. German Student, demonstrating against GDR regime question to journalist




Fidel Castro's first visit to Berlin began on June 13, 1972 and at various points addressed the border guards that policed the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West. At Brandenburg gate on June 14 in the afternoon (pictured above) he addressed the men charged with shooting East Germans fleeing to West Germany as "the courageous and self-denying border guards of the GDR People's Army who stand guard in the front line of the entire-socialist community." Later in the evening Premier Castro addressed the Nikolay Bezarin Barracks in East Berlin:

It is very important to know that the people of the GDR have great confidence in you, that they are truly proud of you. The comrades of the party and the citizens of socialist Berlin have told us with great satisfaction about the activity of the border troops, speaking with great admiration for you and for your services.

Later on in the same speech Mr. Castro offered his take on what he saw there and prospects for the future:

We have no doubt that a great political and revolutionary victory has been won in the GDR. You have created the foundations for the future, a truly revolutionary state, a border state to whom the future belongs. You are the new generation, which will continue this work.

He spent most of his visit accompanied by Erich Honecker, who as Central Committee secretary for security matters in 1961 was the individual in charge of building the Berlin Wall, and by 1971 via a power struggle and Soviet support had become the defacto head of state. Below Mr. Castro following the signing of a communique with Mr. Honecker presents him with a map of Cuba.


Seventeen years later the people of the German Democratic Republic were finally able to let the border guards and the GDR leadership know what they really thought of the Berlin Wall and the activities at the border. The GDR was dissolved in 1990 and a short time later Mr. Honecker had to flee Germany for the Soviet Union to avoid being prosecuted for the extrajudicial executions of 192 East Germans who had "illegally" tried to leave the GDR. Only to be extradited by Boris Yeltsin back to Germany to be placed on trial in 1993 - where as in the case of Pinochet- he was released due to the belief that he would not live long enough to be punished but had exaggerated his health status and on January 13, 1993 fled to exile in Chile where he died on May 24, 1994 of liver cancer. German courts tried and convicted 126 Germans ranging from politburo members to border troops for the extrajudicial killings of East Germans trying to escape to the West. The Castro brothers have demonstrated similar cruelty with fleeing Cubans and some cases are fully documented but the full number remains unknown.

Nineteen years later on July 20, 2008 in Nicaragua Daniel Ortega awarded Margot Honecker, the widow of the GDR fugitive and former of head of state Erich Honecker, the Ruben Dario Award. This despite the fact that Ms Honecker is unrepentant of seizing the children of dissidents and East Germans who attempted to flee to the West and placing them in foster homes. More than 2,000 Germans are searching for missing family members. During the dictatorship East Germans reviled her hard line politics and nicknamed her the purple witch for the tint of her hair.

The images, censored even today in Cuba, of the German people celebrating their freedom and the end of the GDR police state in 1989, have circled the globe. If you have friends in Cuba with access to internet please make copies of the videos below and send it to them so that they can see what is possible.


Berlin Wall Opens (November 1989)


Berlin Wall Opens (November 1989)

Exposing one of the myths about the dictatorship in Cuba: Cult of Personality

"[W]e have never preached cult of personality. You will not see a statue of me anywhere, nor a school with my name, nor a street, nor a little town, nor any type of personality cult because we have not taught our people to believe, but to think, to reason out. " - Fidel Castro 1985

In an extraordinary June 1998 statement, Cuban Justice Minister Roberto Díaz Sotolongo justified Cuba's restrictions on dissent by explaining that, as Spain had instituted laws to protect the monarch from criticism, Cuba was justified in protecting Fidel Castro from criticism, since he served a similar function as Cuba's "king." -Human Rights Watch, Cuba's Repressive Machinery, 1999



There are numerous myths that have been refuted but with these myths repeated time and time again by the numerous propaganda agencies of the dictatorship in Cuba it is important to revisit them in an attempt to exercise what Vaclav Havel called the power of the powerless which is to live in truth.

Myth #1: Fidel Castro has not erected a cult of personality in Cuba.

Reality: There is a profound cult of personality surrounding Fidel Castro. Totalitarians were the pioneers in the 20th century in using the mass media to create an idealized heroic image of a political leader. Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy and Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany are early examples, but the Castro dictatorship has taken it to new heights. The preamble of the Cuban constitution features Fidel Castro by name prominently. Images of the dictator litter the landscape. A small sampling is provided above of these images. Book stores offer Fidel Castro's literary works and those of his deceased revolutionary compatriots like Che Guevara.



Fidel Castro is featured on the back of the Cuban 1 peso bill.



Castro has appeared on the back of the 10 pesos bill addressing a multitude.



He has also been featured on a 40th anniversary of the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks on a 1 Peso coin.



One of the problems with a cult of personality and an absolute totalitarian dictatorship is when the dictator begins to lose his mind it is a crisis without a simple solution. Castro had been a frequent commentator on the evening news even when he was babbling and talking about mercenary hurricanes as seen below. It took a serious physical ailment for him to resign the presidency. Although to the present day he remains the head of the Cuban Communist party. Those with the courage to speak out are defined by the regime as dissidents or when elements within the regime in the privacy of a living room poke fun at the revolutionary leader they can find themselves out of a job or worse before the firing squad.

Berlin Wall's Fall and the walls that still remain

Prague 1989 and Havana 2009









"To forgive is not to forget. The merit lies in loving in spite of the vivid knowledge that the one that must be loved is not a friend. There is no merit in loving an enemy when you forget him for a friend."

- Mahatma Gandhi

November 1989 in Prague


November 2009 in Havana

This past week in Havana, Cuba on the corner of 23 and G the spirit of November 1989 erupted in a small demonstration against violence by young Cubans. At the same time bloggers and activists were abducted by plainclothes Cuban state security in broad daylight beaten and later released to prevent them from attending the demonstration. When the victims cried out for help and attracted the attention of bystanders the government agents responded: “Don’t get involved, these are counterrevolutionaries.” This is the part that is troubling the bystanders did not get involved and allowed these innocent people to be kidnapped in broad daylight. This is why the dictatorship is still operating in Cuba. It is the same mindset that operated in East Berlin for more than three decades. It is the type of mindset that went along with martial law in Poland and fired on unarmed workers.



The names of 171 people murdered by their fellow citizens for trying to cross a barrier called the Berlin Wall between August 13, 1961 and November 9, 1989 are known. There are probably many more that remain unknown and memorials throughout Berlin in their memory. It is important to celebrate the end of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany amidst a rebirth of freedom, but what of all those lives lost? As we celebrate the wave of freedom that changed the face of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union we must not forget that 1989 had another date June 4 that marks a massacre of students and workers demanding reforms and freedom in China. Freedom that is still denied today.



Twenty years have passed since the Berlin Wall's fall and the world is a better place for it today but we must not forget what took place there and the other Walls that remain intact today in places like North Korea, Cuba, Burma, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, and China. What lessons can activists in these nations take from the movements that achieved liberation in 1989? In Poland the workers movement led by Lech Walesa was called Solidarity and in Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel wrote important essays on the power of the powerless and living in truth where the word solidarity also arose within the context of anti-political politics:

When Jan Patocka wrote about Charter 77, he used the term 'solidarity of the shaken'. He was thinking of those who dared resist impersonal power and to confront it with the only thing at their disposal, their own humanity. Does not the perspective of a better future depend on something like an international community of the shaken which, ignoring state boundaries, political systems, and power blocs, standing outside the high game of traditional politics, aspiring to no titles and appointments, will seek to make a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power—the phenomenon of human conscience?

The sign that change is in the process of taking place is when you see bystanders not sitting idly by when the state security agent arrives to abduct a fellow citizen off the street. To demonstrate solidarity with the other and live in truth are great risks to take in a totalitarian dictatorship where fear is an important factor of control, but once that decision to take a risk for a fellow person is made by a large enough number of people the regime will begin to tremble and freedom will be on the horizon.

Berlin Wall's end in 1989: Opportunities taken and missed

Berlin Wall's end in 1989: Opportunities taken and missed

“Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”

– Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless 1978

The moral dynamics of this universal quest for freedom clearly appeared in Central and Eastern Europe during the non-violent revolutions of 1989. Unfolding in specific times and places, those historical events nonetheless taught a lesson which goes far beyond a specific geographical location. For the non-violent revolutions of 1989 demonstrated that the quest for freedom cannot be suppressed. It arises from a recognition of the inestimable dignity and value of the human person, and it cannot fail to be accompanied by a commitment on behalf of the human person.

- Pope John Paul II, Address to the United Nations 1995

In 1978 Vaclav Havel asked whether freedom was really something far off in the distance or that perhaps it had been there to grab but that "our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us?" This is a provocative and necessary question. It is provocative because it was being asked ten years after the Czechs had stood up to Soviet tanks and suffered for it. Nevertheless it was a necessary question recognizing that real power always comes from the consent and tolerance of the governed be it a democracy or the most horrid of dictatorships for it to survive it requires consent.

At the same time losing or gaining allies internationally does not necessarily determine victory or defeat for those in power. There are two of the many instances that arise from the circumstances of 1989 worth taking a look at: South Africa and Cuba . On the face of it the collapse of the East Bloc and the Soviet Union should have been at least indirectly positive for the South African Apartheid state which had as its principle adversary the African National Congress that had relied heavily on the Soviet Union and their Eastern European Satellites and a death blow for Fidel Castro. The communist dictatorship in Cuba had been a client state of the Soviet Union and heavily dependent on their subsidies and military support.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire the African National Congress's military option was taken off the table, and this allowed negotiations and non-violent action to achieve what political violence had not done in more than four decades: an end to the racist apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela as president of a multiracial South Africa. 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 offers 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.

Andres Oppenheimer in 1992 had written the best seller Castro's Final Hour and around the world Cuba watchers waited for the inevitable collapse of the communist regime. Harvard professor Jorge Dominguez writing in Foreign Affairs in 1993 outlined in material terms what the Cuban dictatorship had lost with the collapse of the Soviet empire:

Gone was the Soviet economic subsidy worth no less than one-sixth of the island's total gross product; gone were the weapons transfers, free of charge. From 1989 to 1992 the Cuban economy contracted sharply, with imports shrinking from $8.1 billion to $2.2 billion.

Nevertheless as time passed almost everyone continued to wait, but the Cuban dictatorship had been working overtime. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union the Castro regime had banned Soviet publications and taken a dim view of both Gorbachev and Perestroika. Instead it redoubled its efforts in imposing Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and political terror on their opponents. As the Soviet bloc imploded and the orthodoxy came into disrepute in Cuba the censorship and repression increased as did political violence. The extrajudicial killing of Cuban rafters fleeing the island in circumstances rivaling the brutality of the Berlin Wall reached its nadir in the massacre of 37 Cuban refugees many of them women and children on July 13, 1994.

On August 5, 1994 there was a social explosion in Cuba that threatened the dictatorship, but the opposition both inside and outside of the island was not ready to seize the moment. Instead the Cuban dictatorship cracked down internally and opened the ports turning a political crisis for the dictatorship into an immigration problem for the United States that led to a negotiated immigration agreement and a new lease on life for the dictatorship. The shoot down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes on February 24, 1996 brought an end to attempts by the Clinton Administration to reach a rapprochement with the Castro brothers. At the same time outreach by the dictatorship to the People's Republic of China and the European Union kept the regime from imploding completely until 1999 when one of Fidel Castro's ideological offspring Hugo Chavez took power in Venezuela and the regime's international prospects began to slowly improve.

Despite the regime's improved international prospects events within the island would challenge them as never before when Cuban dissidents inspired by The Power of the Powerless and Charter 77 challenged the dictatorship using its own Constitution with the Varela Project. While others embraced Gandhian nonviolence and Universal Declaration of Human Rights to educate Cubans on how to exercise their rights even in a totalitarian dictatorship. This led to greater international and domestic recognition of the Cuban opposition and a sense of panic in the dictatorship that resulted in a massive crackdown on March 18, 2003 and increased international solidarity for the Cuban opposition.

The abandonment of Marxist-Leninist methods and the willingness to negotiate while at the same time pressuring the South African regime with both sanctions and civic non-violent resistance by the opposition led to a peaceful transfer of power between a nuclear armed racist minority government and the black majority. In the Cuban case there was a missed opportunity in the 1990s and unlike the Soviets an unwillingness by the regime to embrace perestroika (openness) and a willingness to defend the Chinese massacre in Tienanmen Square by, according to the British Guardian (6/6/1989), blaming the bloodshed on counter-revolutionary elements. All these factors increased the challenge posed to the opposition, but by the late 1990s and early 2000s they have met the challenge in an increasingly difficult geopolitical climate.Freedom is not something one waits for but something one practices and in the process serves as an example to others as well as an existing pocket of freedom. At moments of crisis these pockets can be the difference between freedom and continued repression.A lesson that the world saw in action on November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall dividing Germany came to an end.

Berlin Wall's end in 1989: It was not inevitable

The Berlin wall's fall was not inevitable

When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it--always. - Mahatma Gandhi

The non-violent implosion of the East Bloc was not inevitable. Although Gandhi is correct in his observation that tyrants and murderers always depart the timing and means of their end are determined by human action guided by free will.
There was never a guarantee that the Soviet empire would end peacefully, and predictions taken through the prism of the history of the 20th century promised apocalypse. Adolph Hitler's departure from power was amid ruins and tens of millions of victims and a suicide in 1945. Josef Stalin departed power dying of a stroke and delayed treatment with tens of millions of victims and a totalitarian state intact eight years later. Uprisings in Poland, Hungary in 1956 following Stalin's death and Czechloslovakia in 1968 met with military invasion, mass repression, and death. The world would first witness the building of the Berlin Wall in August of1961 and then come to the brink of nuclear holocaust in October of 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis.The Soviet Union would continue on until 1991 with Kruschev, Breshnev, Andropov, Chernenkov, and the last Gorbachev maintaining the totalitarian state.

Many experts and academics among them Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, John Kenneth Galbraith, noted sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University, and the Nobel laureate in economics Paul Samuelson in the 1980s believed that the Soviet empire was there to stay and competitive with the West. The press on the ground in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was also reporting that the system was here to stay. For example, New York Times journalist Ferdinand Protzman in the May 15, 1989 Business Day section reported that “East Germany is the Communist world’s vaunted economic success story, hailed as proof that hard work, discipline and thrift can translate Karl Marx’s theories into reality.”

What happened? Why were so many bright people so wrong? Perhaps it was the lack of understanding about the basis of power. Gandhi rightly observed that "Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love." In addition to punishment and love there is also self-interest which although inferior to love is superior to punishment or the threat of force. In other words Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were both right that free market systems were superior to communist centralized planning in generating a stronger economy which also meant the basis for a more powerful military that the Soviet Union could not compete with, but that was true of the previous seventy years. What changed?

A reawakening of conscience

Today activists speak of blogs, twitter, and skype but back then it was Samizdat underground publications challenging the official version of events. There had been an armed resistance in many of these countries and it had been brutally crushed, but then when political violence was no longer an option and individuals had to look elsewhere and found the power of the powerless. In October of 1978 Czech playwrite Vaclav Havel wrote an essay titled The Power of the Powerless which I think explains what happened in 1989, and in which no small part he ended up playing an important role. This essay had a profound impact throughout Eastern Europe. The English translator of this essay describes in an introduction to The Power of the Powerless what Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, told him:

"This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road. Inspired by KOR [the Polish Workers' Defense Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways? Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later-in August 198o-it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel's essay."

Pope John Paul II in 1995 addressing the United Nations spoke of what achieved this change: taking the risk of freedom. In Havel's 1978 essay he concludes with a question: "[W]hether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?" In 1989 the peoples of Eastern Europe answered the question and risked everything and in the process won their freedom.