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.
Six 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."
Six 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.
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 sixth anniversary of the dictator's death it is a good time to remember some of his more memorable statements.
Relationship with the truth
"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."
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."
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.
Ended Black Cuban agency
Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960) |
"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.”
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."
No doubt this inspired the Cuban tyrant to turn the Florida Straits, and the border of the Guantanamo Naval Base into barriers to kill fleeing Cuban refugees.
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."
Ramiro Valdez, Raul Castro and Fidel Castro with Mengistu Haile Mariam |
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.
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 that would have started a thermonuclear war.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.
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 14th 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.
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.
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