Some Inconvenient Truths: Fidel Castro's legacy in Cuba over six decades

 Setting part of the record straight.

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

Four 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 the Castro regime assisted tyrants and dictators to hold on to and consolidate their power.  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 location and commit acts of violence." 

Four 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 need to hide and misrepresent 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.

Inconvenient Truth #1: Castro, not Batista, was backed by the United States in 1958.

On March 17, 1958 Fidel Castro's candidate for provisional president Manuel Urrutia, along with a delegation of other supporters in exile of the future Cuban dictator's July 26th movement, met with officials at the State Department. They lobbied the U.S. government and argued that arms shipments to Cuba were for hemispheric defense, and they claimed that Batista using them against Cuban nationals was in violation of the conditions agreed to between the two countries. 

News of the arms embargo on the Batista regime broke in The New York Times on April 3, 1958, the psychological blow was delivered, but the United States went further.

Earl E. T. Smith,  the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, on December 17, 1958 delivered a message from the State Department to Fulgencio Batista that the United States viewed "with skepticism any plan on his part, or any intention on his part, to remain in Cuba indefinitely."  The U.S. government had dealt Batista a mortal blow, and fourteen days later the Cuban government fell. President John Kennedy shared this view according to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in a 1964 interview:

“We knew Earl Smith then, who’d been Eisenhower’s ambassador at the time,” said Jackie in the tapes featured in the book Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. “When we were in Florida—that’s all Earl could talk about. Yeah, then Jack was really sort of sick that the Eisenhower administration had let him [Castro] come in and then The New York Times—what was his name, Herbert Matthews?” 

Beginning in 1957 Herbert Matthews built up Fidel Castro's image both inside and outside of Cuba with a series of misleading articles in The New York Times. In July of 1959 Matthews reported: "[t]his is not a Communist Revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist." Anthony De Palma has written a book on Herbert Matthews titled, "The Man Who Invented Fidel" and describes how his heroic portrayal of Fidel Castro influenced the fall of the Batista dictatorship and the consolidation of the future dictator as a national figure.

Inconvenient Truth #2: Castro, and the regime he left behind is a white male minority and racist regime.

Inner circle of power in Cuba 2020 is all white and male.

The Cuban government in September 2018 denied there was a race problem in Cuba before the United Nations in what was supposed to have been an examination on how it was combating racism in Cuba. This should not have surprised anyone when one considers that the inner leadership circle is uniformly white, and outer circles have black representation well below what is found in the general population. This white minority regime barred black Cubans from testifying before the meeting to examine racism in Cuba.

French journalist and essayist Jean François Fogel on January 25, 2020 in The New York Times reported that under the Castro dictatorship Cuba is "a segregated society: 70 percent of black and mixed-race Cubans said they didn’t have access to the internet, compared with 25 percent of white Cubans. The racial wealth gap was also vast: While 50 percent of white Cubans had a banking account, only 11 percent of black Cubans said they had one. Moreover, white Cubans received 78 percent of remittances to Cuba, and they controlled 98 percent of private companies." The Castro regime has tried to justify this dismal record by rewriting the pre-revolutionary past, but the real record does not help their claims.

Black Cuban dissidents dying in police custody.

Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros

Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on Friday, 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 without his family being able to view their loved one.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was both a brick layer and a human rights activist. He gathered signatures for the Varela Project, a citizen initiative to amend the Cuban constitution with the objective of bringing Cuba in line with international human rights standards. He was repeatedly arrested in 2002 for his human rights activism on July 3rd, October 28th and in November. 

Orlando Zapata Tamayo

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

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

On May 18, 2004 Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Virgilio Marante Güelmes, and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo were each sentenced to three years in prison for contempt for authority, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in a one-day trial. This did not silence him. When prison officials chose to attack his human dignity, and engaged in acts of physical and psychological torture, Orlando Zapata would respond with nonviolent defiance. The regime's response to his nonviolent defiance was to pile on prison years to his sentence. Between May 2004 and December 2009 they carried out nine trials without due process guarantees for a total sentence of 25 years and six months. 

Tamayo's last hunger strike ended with his death on February 23, 2010.  Efforts by the Castro dictatorship to slander the martyred prisoner of conscience following his death failed.

Last public executions were black men who tried to flee Cuba

Executed by Fidel Castro in 2003 for hijacking a ferry to flee Cuba.

Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac, were shot by firing squad following a speedy "trial" in 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.”

 
The hijackers were tried by the "Court for Crimes against State Security of the People’s Court of Havana. The Court had applied the specially expedited summary proceeding contemplated in Articles 479 and 480 of the Criminal Procedure Act, and found guilty. They appealed their sentence, and it was quickly denied.  Unlike in the United States the Judiciary in Cuba is not independent of the Executive.

In the early morning of April 11, 2003, following the decision handed down by the Council of State, the sentences were carried out and Lorenzo Enrique Copello Castillo, Bárbaro Leodán Sevilla García, and Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac were executed by firing squad. Nine days after the hijacking and three days after the trial. Family members were informed of their loved ones' summary executions after they had already been buried.

Police shot and killed unarmed 27 year old in June 2020

Hansel E. Hernández (age 27) killed on June 24, 2020.

 On June 24, 2020 in Havana, Cuba Hansel E. Hernández (age 27) was shot in the back and killed by the police while allegedly trying to flee.  It took three days for the authorities to report the killing, despite repeated requests for clarity on what had happened.

Hours later, the authorities released a statement indicating that the 27-year-old had been caught by a National Revolutionary Police patrol when, according to the Cuban Ministry of the Interior (MININT), "he was stealing pieces and accessories from a bus stop", then fleeing.  During the chase "on the run for almost two kilometers, over uneven terrain", the young man, to avoid being arrested, "attacked one of the policemen throwing several stones, one of which hit the policeman in the crotch, another in the side of the torso and a third dislocated his shoulder and threw him to the floor," indicates the statement posted on social networks on June 27th. In response to Hansel Hernández's throwing stones, “the soldier fired two warning shots. Immediately afterwards and due to the danger to his life due to the magnitude of the aggression, the policeman riposted from the ground, firing a shot with his regulation weapon that impacts the individual and causes him to die," continues the official version. 

Inconvenient Truth #3: Castro sought the violent overthrow of Venezuela's social democracy

Venezuelan President-elect Rómulo Betancourt meets Fidel Castro in 1959

Fidel Castro visited President Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela on January 23, 1959 assuming that he would find an ally. President Betancourt, was a man of the left, the first democratically elected president of Venezuela following the fall of the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. He had met Castro in 1948, and at the time both agreed that Latin America had to change.

But in 1959 Castro met a Venezuelan leader who, over the years, had become critical of communism, a leader who even in the 1930s had said that he "did not agree with the interference of the Soviet Union in European countries."  During this visit Betancourt recommended that Cuba not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union and that Castro hold free elections. In 1963, the Congressional Quarterly reported how Fidel Castro responded to these recommendations:

"Riots led by Communists and other pro-Castro elements in Caracas [in the autumn of 1960] took the lives of 13 persons and injured 100. Venezuela recalled its ambassador to Cuba, and Betancourt ordered out the army to end the rioting, which he termed an attempt to “install a regime similar to that in Cuba.”

In 1961 Venezuela broke relations with Cuba and became one of the promoters of the exclusion of the island from the OAS, which was achieved in January 1962."

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

Cuban armed aggression in Venezuela

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

Inconvenient Truth #4: Under Castro the standard of living in Cuba collapsed

In 1959 Cuba's per-capita GDP  was second only to Chile and was doing better than Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. In 2015 Cuba lagged well behind the other four countries. It would be fair to say that in economic terms, despite billions in Soviet and Venezuelan subsidies that the past six decades have been a disaster for Cuba.  

Political scientist Jaime Suchlicki wrote an essay for the Cuban Studies Institute on November 14, 2019 titled "Impact of Socialism in Cuba" about how this economic disaster began in Cuba. 

"One of the first economic measures introduced by the Castro revolution after 1959 was the 50% reduction in rents people paid for apartments and single-family residences. This Urban Reform Law was hailed as a victory for the lower and middle classes, and a measure that would stimulate the economy since now renters would have more money to spend. 

The result was very different. The law had a snowballing effect on the economy. Investors in apartments and commercial real estate refused to further invest. The real estate industry was paralyzed. Cement plants, plumbing companies, wood manufacturing, electronic factories and many more related enterprises closed, many went bankrupt. The economy entered a period of stagnation which never to recovered."

Political scientist Samuel Farber, writing in Jacobin in 2018 described the full nationalization campaign by the Castro regime in 1968.

"Castro initiated what he called the Revolutionary Offensive, a project aimed at totally nationalizing the island’s economy. The state had already taken over large and middle-sized businesses in 1960, but family-owned operations remained in private hands.

Within sixteen days of the announcement, the official press reported that 55,636 small businesses had been nationalized, including bodegas, barber shops, and thousands of timbiriches (“hole-in-the-wall” establishments). The Revolutionary Offensive gave Cuba the world’s highest proportion of nationalized property. According to Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, some 31 percent of these small businesses were retail food outlets, and another 26 percent provided consumer services, like shoe and auto repair. Restaurant and snack shops represented another 21 percent; 17 percent sold clothing and shoes. The rest (5 percent) were small handicraft establishments that manufactured leather, wood products, and textiles. Half of these small businesses were exclusively owner- and family-operated and had no employees. Shortly after nationalization, the state closed one-third of the small enterprises. The only private activity left in Cuba was small-farm agriculture, where 150,000 farmers owned 30 percent of the land in holdings of less than 165 acres each.

One of the Revolutionary Offensive’s goals was to shut down the many thousand bars in Cuba, both private- and state-owned. The regime wanted them closed not because of opposition to alcohol but because it believed the bars fostered a prerevolutionary social ambiance, antithetic to the Castro government’s militaristic, ascetic, anti-urban campaigns to forge the “New Man.”

Havana after decades of neglect by the Castro regime.

Fidel Castro's legacy is 61 years of dictatorship, firing squads, extrajudicial killings, racism, the massacres of fleeing refugees, exporting his failed model elsewhere and the propaganda machinery that covers up these crimes and the bankruptcy of Castroism.

Nothing to celebrate. Much to mourn and change.