First Secretary, President, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General, Comandante Fidel Castro is still dead.

Breaking news. Fidel Castro is still dead.

Fidel Castro: Cuba's absolute dictator turned power over to his brother

First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, President of the Council of State of Cuba, President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, Comandante Fidel Castro is still dead.   

Five years ago, on a Black Friday that fell on November 25, 2016, Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro died at the age of 90 never having had to answer for his many crimes against humanity both in and out of Cuba. From Nicaragua, to Ethiopia, to Venezuela, and in many other places Fidel Castro assisted tyrants and dictators to take power, hold on to it, and consolidate their rule.  One day later in a blog post I predicted what would come next.

"Predictably over the next few weeks inside Cuba the world will see spectacles organized by the totalitarian dictatorship to "mourn the great leader." The regime has already started with nine days set aside for official mourning. This will not be the first time that monsters are mourned by an oppressed people through different methods of command, control and manipulation. The world has witnessed it before in the Soviet Union in 1953 and more recently in North Korea with the Kim dynasty. The death of Stalin as dramatized in the film "The Inner Circle" is recommended viewing for those about to follow the circus in Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro's death.  Meanwhile in Cuba as the regime prepares its state funeral the Castro dictatorship's secret police begin to make threats, round up and take dissidents to undisclosed locations and commit acts of violence." 

Five years later the fans of the late Cuban dictator are out trying to defend his legacy and repeating the lies to put him in a positive light. These apologists of the dictator are silent on the role played by the United States government and The New York Times in undermining Fulgencio Batista's rule and bringing Fidel Castro to power. 

IN TODAY’S MIAMI HERALD: When Cuban leader Fidel Castro died, exiles flooded Miami’s streets, unloading complicated emotions at the news that the man responsible for the upheaval of their lives was gone. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/cMls3NPcUP

— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) November 24, 2021

There are other inconvenient truths that are well documented and available for those seeking facts about the Cuba that existed prior to 1959 with warts and all, and what came after.

On this fifth anniversary of the dictator's death it is a good time to remember some of his more memorable statements.

Relationship with the truth

Fidel Castro in the 1950s repeatedly claimed that he was not a communist because he knew that advocating a communist revolution would lead Cubans to abandon him. On December 2, 1961 he explained his reasoning.

"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."

 

On March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist, 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.

 

Denied universality of human rights

 

 

 

Fidel Castro in the above interview in Havana in 1986 divided freedoms i.e. rights as one set being revolutionary liberties and another being bourgeois liberties and claiming that there are two different concepts of liberty he is rejecting the Latin American tradition which was best expounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that there are basic human rights that are universal and not separated by political/ideological or as in the Islamic claim by religious differences but are the same for everyone.

 

In 1961 in a speech that became known as "Words to intellectuals" Fidel Castro labeled dissenters "counterrevolutionaries" and explicitly stripped them of their rights. 

What are the rights of writers and artists, revolutionary or non-revolutionary? Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, no right (applause). And this is not some special law or guideline for artists and writers. It is a general principle for all citizens. It is a fundamental principle of the Revolution. Counterrevolutionaries, that is, the enemies of the revolution, have no rights against the revolution, because the revolution has one right: the right to exist, the right to develop, and the right to be victorious." ... "In other words: Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing."

 

This is not an original statement, but an echo of speeches and writings made by other tyrants. A close parallel is found in Benito Mussolini's 1935 speech: "Everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State."   

 

Consequences of this policy in Cuba were seen internationally in the Padilla Affair in 1971. 

 

Homophobic

We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” - Fidel Castro, 1965

On March 13, 1963 Fidel Castro gave a speech were he openly attacked “long-haired layabouts, the children of bourgeois families,” roaming the streets wearing “trousers that are too tight,” carrying guitars to look like Elvis Presley, who took “their licentious behavior to the extreme” of organizing “effeminate shows” in public places. The Cuban dictator warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degenerates.”

Both Gays, and rock n rollers were sent to forced labor camps. 

Claimed he ended racism, but it was Black Cuban agency that was outlawed

"In Cuba, the exploitation of man by man has disappeared, and racial discrimination has disappeared, too." - Fidel Castro, quoted in Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel By Lee Lockwood, 1967

Castro’s communist revolution ended Black Cuban's agency in Cuba. Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay "Castro and the Cuban Negro" published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961 detailed how it was done.

“Of the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”

Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian rule. It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while criticizing racism in the United States. 

Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960)

For decades, the Castro regime expected Black Cubans to be obedient, submissive, and grateful to the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist tropes. Black Cubans who think for themselves are punished.

 On Walls and border controls

Castro encouraged East German border guards in their deadly work

Fidel Castro visited Berlin in 1972 and encouraged the border guards to continue shooting Germans trying to flee to freedom by crossing the Berlin Wall. At Brandenburg gate on June 14, 1972 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." 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."

Helping a genocidal war criminal create a man made famine in Ethiopia

Fidel Castro with ally and war criminal Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia 1977

Fidel Castro on April 3, 1977 met in East Berlin with Erich Honecker about the need to help the revolution in Ethiopia and talked up Mengistu Haile Mariam, a then emerging new Marxist-Leninist leader. Fidel Castro celebrated the initiation of the Red Terror on February 3, 1977 in Ethiopia: 

"Mengistu strikes me as a quiet, serious, and sincere leader who is aware of the power of the masses. He is an intellectual personality who showed his wisdom on February 3. […] The prelude to this was an exuberant speech by the Ethiopian president in favor of nationalism. Mengistu preempted this coup. He called the meeting of the Revolutionary Council one hour early and had the rightist leaders arrested and shot. A very consequential decision was taken on February 3 in Ethiopia. […]Before it was only possible to support the leftist forces indirectly, now we can do so without any constraints."

Fidel Castro took part in mass murder in Eastern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1977-78, a conservative estimate of over 30,000 Africans perished as a result of a Red Terror unleashed in Ethiopia by Mengistu and his Cuban allies.

 

Ramiro Valdez, Raul Castro and Fidel Castro with Mengistu Haile Mariam

Amnesty International concluded that "this campaign resulted in several thousand to perhaps tens of thousands of men, women, and children killed, tortured, and imprisoned." Sweden's Save the Children Fund lodged a formal protest in early 1978 denouncing the execution of 1,000 children, many below the age of thirteen, whom the communist government had labeled "liaison agents of the counter revolutionaries."

 

 Advocating for and actively trying to start a nuclear holocaust

On October 27, 1962, the same day that Fidel Castro ordered artillery to fire on American reconnaissance aircraft, successfully knocking one down ,Khrushchev received a letter from the Cuban dictator, that historians call the Armageddon letter, in which he called for a Soviet first strike on the United States, in the event of a US invasion of Cuba.

If an aggression of the second variant occurs, and the imperialists attack Cuba with the aim of occupying it, then the danger posed by such an aggressive measure will be so immense for all humanity that the Soviet Union will in circumstances be able to allow it, or to permit the creation of conditions in which the imperialists might initiate a nuclear strike against the USSR as well.

Thankfully, Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a peaceful outcome, but the Castro regime continued to protest and was unhappy with their Soviet allies for not launching the intercontinental ballistic missiles and starting a thermonuclear war. 

 

Castro freaked out Khrushchev with his call for a first strike

 

Comandante Castro ordered students to the streets to chant "Nikita, mariquita, lo que se da no se quita" ("Nikita, little queer, what you give you don't take away").

The Brothers to the Rescue shoot down.

 

Dan Rather:-The incident of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft…But you gave the order.  It was not your brother Rául or a general.

Fidel Castro:-I gave the order to communicate to the Air Force that what happened on the ninth and thirteenth could not be permitted again.  But these operations are very quick.  They enter in a matter of minutes and leave.  It is very difficult to establish a mechanism of communication and consultation.  They had the general order of not permitting them…They acted with full awareness that they were following the order.  At that moment there was not…The air force had the responsibility.  As a rule they can communicate with each other, but everyone is not always there.  In fact, they had the authority to do it, and I assume the responsibility.  I am not trying to elude the responsibility in the least, because they were instructions given in a moment of really great irritation.  They were given to the pilots, I believe, if I remember correctly, on the 14^th of January. 

Source: FIDEL CASTRO INTERVIEW BY DAN RATHER -  MADE PUBLIC SEPT 3, 1996

Detailed investigation into the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown available here.

Alliances with Fascists and Nazis

In the early 1960s the Nazi who saved Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in 1944, Otto-Ernst Remer, 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. The German foreign intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), reported that "evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives."  

Fidel Castro in 1962 when Otto-Ernst Remer was selling him weapons

The Cuban autocrat was friendly with his Spanish counterpart Francisco Franco, and declared days of mourning when the Generalissimo, Prime Minister, Head of State, and Caudillo died on November 20, 1975. 

In the picture below is Fidel Castro with Argentine foreign minister Nicanor Costa Mendez, one of the planners of the Falkland's invasion, of the Argentine military junta that extra-judicially executed and disappeared as many as 30,000 Argentinians between 1976 and 1983 in the Dirty War meeting in Havana at the Non-Aligned Movement gathering. He died of lung cancer on August 3, 1992.

Argentine foreign minister Nicanor Costa Mendez and Fidel Castro 

That is not the only member of the junta that Castro commiserated with because he was also photographed with "President" Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón who, like Fidel Castro then and Raul Castro today , was"President" in name only, but in reality a brutal military dictator between 1982 and 1983. On April 20, 2010, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of 56 people in a concentration camp.

Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón with Fidel Castro

Whereas groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International sought to expose the Dirty War and stop it and to later document the crimes committed and along with the victims demand justice the Cuban government did everything at the time to block efforts to investigate the disappearances from their perch at the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Fidel Castro was a consistent enemy of democracy and human rights until his death in 2016. 

First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, President of the Council of State of Cuba, President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement, Comandante Fidel Castro is still dead, and good riddance.   

Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Cui Bono?

“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”  - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 58 years ago. Cui bono?

 58 years ago on November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

On the 58th anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April of 1961 the Kennedy brothers initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro. 

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy addressed Brigade 2506 at the Orange Bowl in Miami on December 29, 1962 where he was given a flag of the Brigade and President Kennedy pledged that their flag would be returned to them in a free Havana.

The Kennedy Administration was committed to regime change in Cuba by whatever means necessary. 

 

Ten days prior to President Kennedy's assassination on November 12, 1963, in a White House memorandum, the continued commitment of the Kennedy Administration to pursue an aggressive policy to overthrow the Castro regime is clear:

(f) Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. Fitzgerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. Fitzgerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. Fitzgerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.

Following the President's assassination within a year these operations were mothballed and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba today as head of the Cuban Communist Party.

German journalist and documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann described the circumstances surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover up by the Johnson White House with the tacit approval of Robert Kennedy in his 2006 documentary Rendezvous with Death. At the time of the film's release Huismann gave an interview in Deutsche Welle on January 5, 2006 titled "Castro ordered Kennedy's Assassination." Below is an excerpt:

DW-WORLD: We know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. But who ordered his assassination and why? 

Wilfried Huismann: We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

Declassified records in recent years corroborate Huismann's argument.

CIA documents, released in October of 2017, speculate that Oswald's motive for killing Kennedy was that he was "enraged after reading a detailed article in his hometown newspaper in New Orleans in September suggesting that his hero Castro had been targeted for assassination by the Kennedy administration." Oswald sought vengeance on Castro's behalf.  This was an embarrassment for the CIA and the White House that had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro, and that President Kennedy's murder was blow back.

Another declassified CIA document, released in October 17, 2017 cites Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and later U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas C. Mann who said "he had a 'feeling in his guts' that Castro paid Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the 35th president on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas." 

Pedro Roig, of the Cuban Studies Institute has outlined the information available on Lee Harvey Oswald and his links to the Castro regime from documented sources.

Cui bono?  Operation Mongoose operations were phased out after the assassination of President Kennedy and the departure of Robert Kennedy from his position as Attorney General in September of 1964. Regime change operations in Cuba came to an end and the Castro regime would remain in power to the present day.

Below is the 2006 German documentary Rendezvous with Death by Wilfried Huismann.

Brian Latell, PhD, author of Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine, gave a presentation to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers at their June 1, 2012 luncheon in McLean, Virginia in which he addressed the information known then on the Castro regime and the Kennedy Assassination.

On September 15, 2015 the international media reported on a newly declassified memo from the CIA concerning presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that reported the following:

Three days after the shooting in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, Lyndon B Johnson was informed that Oswald had visited the Cuban and former Soviet Union embassies in Mexico City on 28 September 1963 to arrange visas.

The Daily Mail reported that the memo had "remained a secret until January 21, 2016, when the CIA released 19,000 confidential documents from the 1960s."

Testimony by John Suarez at the Transatlantic Parliamentary Forum on November 20, 2021

Transatlantic Parliamentary Forum testimony: November 20, 2021 

Miami City Hall

July 11, 2021 national nonviolent protests in Cuba marked a before and after in the history of the island. Tens of thousands of Cubans across the island demanded an end to the dictatorship, rejected the official slogan Patria o Muerte (Homeland or Death) and chanted Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life). The reaction of the dictatorship was swift and brutal. Boinas Negras (black berets) formally known as the National Special Brigade of the Ministry of the Interior, fired on unarmed protesters, and were captured on video. The dictatorship handed out clubs to regime agents to attack protesters. Thousands were detained, and hundreds remain jailed and face summary trials with prison sentences in excess of 25 years.

The lack of transparency in Cuba took on a new urgency in the current context. The International Committee of the Red Cross has not been allowed in Cuban prisons since 1989, and that was a brief period between 1988-1989. In comparison, the prison for Al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base had over 100 visits between 2002 and 2014, and have continued to the present date.

Cuba is the only country in the Americas where Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international and regional human rights organizations are unable to visit. 

We are deeply concerned with the plight of political prisoners such as Virgilio Mantilla Arango, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Maykel Castillo Pérez (Osorbo), and their health status. It is also no coincidence that all are black Cubans. 

These and other cases raise questions on the racist nature of the Castro regime.

Based on the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, according to the January 13, 2020 article by EuropaPress, Cuba today has the largest per capita prison population in the world. Although official data is unavailable, it is known that a disproportionate number are Black Cubans.

On March 22, 1959 Fidel Castro declared that racism no longer existed in Cuba, to question that was to be a counter-revolutionary. The regime claimed over the next six decades that there is no racism in Cuba while poverty disproportionately impacts black Cubans with 95% having the lowest incomes compared to 58% of white Cubans, after six decades of communism, and independent black voices continue to be silenced. 

Decades imprisoned for defying Castro regime

 Eusebio Peñalver opposed the Batista regime and fought with the rebel army to restore Cuba's constitutional democracy."But when Castro hijacked the revolution for himself, Peñalver broke ranks rather than 'sell my soul to the same devil that here on earth is Castro and communism,’”wrote Mary O'Grady in 2013 and quoted him. He took up arms against Castro's military in the Escambray Mountains, he was captured in October 1960. He spent 28 years in Cuban prisons and was banished from the island upon his release in 1988. "From exile in Los Angeles he wrote about the 'naked brutality' and round-the-clock beating and harassment that he had endured: 'They made the men eat grass, they submerged them in sewage, they beat them hard with bayonets and they hit them with fence posts until their bones rattled.’" Eusebio passed away in 2006 still banished from Cuba. 

Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" served 17 years and 38 days in prison for calling for democratic reforms in a public space in Cuba in 1990. 

 

In August 1999 Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was beaten and burned with a cigarette when police detained him at a provincial station in Matanzas. In November 1999 he was imprisoned for three years after holding a press conference where he was accused of displaying the Cuban flag upside down. 

Oscar was freed for 36 days on October 31, 2002 after serving a three year sentence and then arbitrarily imprisoned again on December 6, 2002, only to be subjected during the 2003 Black Spring crackdown, to a show trial and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Oscar Elías was released on March 11, 2011 after a total of more than 12 years in prison.On both occasions he was considered a prisoner of conscience.

Died or executed by Castro regime

Three black men executed by firing squad for trying to leave Cuba

Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac, were shot by firing squad following a speedy "trial" on April 11, 2003 for trying to leave 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.” They were captured, tried and executed in nine days.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a human rights activist and black Cuban prisoner of conscience was subjected to systematic physical and psychological torture between 2003 and 2010, and following his death on February 23, 2010 was subjected to a campaign of vilification by Cuba's Communist authorities. 

Reina Luisa Tamayo, with her son's bloody shirt

Orlando's mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, denounced her son's mistreatment and held up a blood stained shirt that belonged to her son, who had been beaten up by prison guards, for rejecting communist re-education and continuing to denounce human rights violations in the prisons. 

On June 24, 2020 in Guanabacoa, Cuba 27 year old unarmed black Cuban, Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano was shot in the back and killed by the police. The official version claims that he was stealing pieces and accessories from a bus stop when he was spotted by two Revolutionary National Police (PNR in Spanish). Upon seeing the police Hansel ran away and the officers pursued him nearly two kilometers. PNR claimed that during the pursuit Hansel threw rocks at the officers. Police fired two warning shots and a third in his back killing him. Hansel's body was quickly cremated.

This prevented an independent autopsy to verify official claims, or a proper funeral. When activists attempted to organize to protest the death of Hansel, secret police preemptively shut them down surrounding homes, and detaining scores of activists. The Castro regime launched a Heroes of the Blue ( #HeroesDeAzul ) campaign at the national level and social media in Cuba to portray their police positively to counter negative feelings after the killing. 

Yosvany Arostegui died on hunger strike on August 7, 2020

Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike. He had been jailed on false charges in the Kilo 8 prison of Camagüey. His body was quickly cremated by the dictatorship. 

Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, (age 36) shot in the back by regime officials on July 12, 2021.

Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, (age 36) was shot in the back by regime officials on July 12, 2021 during nationwide protests in Cuba. Video emerged on July 15th of the aftermath of Diubis being shot in the back and posted over Twitter. 

Pablo Moya Delá: Before Oct 23, 2020 jailing and after being "probation" Aug 2021.

Pablo Moya Delá died on August 26, 2021 at the Clinical Surgical Hospital in Santiago de Cuba. He was jailed on October 23, 2020 for protesting socioeconomic conditions and overall repression. He was beaten, mistreated for months, weakened following a hunger strike and after destroying his health released on probation earlier this month near death. His plight had drawn international attention.

The Castro regime has sought to create a negative narrative of the Cuban Republic on all fronts, including race, but as in other matters, the record of the regime is worse than what preceded it.

Cuban statesman and founder of Directory of Colored Societies

The Spanish Congress of Deputies on January 19, 1880 voted to abolish slavery in Cuba. The last vestiges of slavery ended in Cuba by royal decree on October 7, 1886. Juan Gualberto Gómez Ferrer, a free Cuban black, and leader of the independence struggle defended the rights of Black Cubans for his entire career. 

Between 1886 and 1892 in Cuba, free black people were able to organize into a network of societies formally founded by Gómez Ferrer in 1892 in the “Directory of Colored Societies” to press for black social, economic and political advancement in Cuba. Gómez Ferrer represented Havana in the Cuban House of Representatives (1914–1917) and Senate (1917–1925). The Central Directory of Societies of Color would spend the next seventy six years pushing for Black advancement in Cuba. 

L to R: Gobardo Pérez Oliva, Marta Sarduy Vargas; Conrado Pérez Oliva, Antonia Armenteros at Bella Unión Society, Santa Clara, Las Villas.

Cuba during the later colonial period, and during the Republic wrestled with the legacy of slavery, and racism, but it was part of the public discussion – with its high and low points. Ugly periods in the early Cuban Republic, such as the 1912 race war, and private discrimination persisted, but so did black agency to advocate for each other.

Political leaders had to answer to these black societies, and provide patronage to them, and in a vibrant free press, and in publishing houses debates on race, and racism, and the need for redress took place. 

Some of the more prominent clubs that are still remembered are the Sociedad Buena Vista ( Buena Vista Social Club), Amantes del Progreso, Unión Fraternal, Progreso, Nueva Era, and El Club Atenas.

The Central Directory of Societies of Color succeeded in lobbying for the 1940 Constitution to address racism in Articles 10, 20, 74, and 102, and in labor legislation to provide greater inclusion for black Cubans over the next 20 years. 

Juan René Betancourt

All of this came crashing down with Castro’s communist revolution. Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay "Castro and the Cuban Negro" published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961.

“Of the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”

Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian rule.

It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while criticizing racism in the United States. This ended black agency in Cuba for decades, replaced with a policy based in obedience, submission, and gratitude to the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist tropes. 

Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960)

The elimination of Afro-Cubans from this dynamic by the new communist revolutionary elite turned racism into a political tool outside of Cuba to advance the Castro regime's communist agenda, but turned it into a taboo topic by ungrateful blacks, labeled counter-revolutionaries by the dictatorship.

Cuban blacks today that would have been political leaders in the 1940s and 1950s are dissidents persecuted, hunted and killed by the secret police.

What are we requesting of the international community?

• Issue joint statements on the current situation in Cuba and denounce the crackdown on pro-democracy activists perpetrated by the Castro regime, and advise Cuban officials of further sanctions due to November 15th repression.
• Call on the UN Security Council to respond to the situation by sending a delegation to Cuba, and by establishing a humanitarian corridor for direct emergency assistance to needy Cubans, and a referral of the situation in Cuba to the International Criminal Court.
• Establish a global arms embargo on Cuba.
• Suspend economic and military cooperation agreements with the Cuban dictatorship, such as the EU-Cuba cooperation agreement.
• Support civil society in Cuba and the implementation of reforms that respect international human rights norms.
• Apply Magnitsky Sanctions to regime repressors such as Miguel Diaz Canel.
• Carry out a public diplomacy campaign on the internal blockade officials impose on Cubans.

Thank you very much.