First Secretary, President, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General, Comandante Fidel Castro is still dead 1,461 days later

“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.” - Ronald Reagan

Fidel Castro: 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. 

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.  

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. 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 fourth 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.

 

Social and cultural questions

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

Not only did he not like Gays, but he also did not like rock n rollers and questioned their sexual orientations.

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.”

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 the 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").

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.