March 10th: Cuba and Tibet's shared day of tragedy

We remember

Tibetan national uprising crushed, Cuban democracy destroyed.

Notwithstanding our dissimilar histories and religious practices, Cubans and Tibetans have two things in common which unite us in our misery. For both countries, March 10th is a somber day. March 10th is a day for sad reflection despite being seven years apart.

Since the early 1950s, both peoples have endured oppression, and more than 70 years later, they are still fighting for the restoration of freedom. In 1949, China adopted a communist government and soon started claiming Tibet as its own. In 1950, Communist China invaded and occupied Tibet. 

Up until March 10, 1952, when Fulgencio Batista ousted the democracy in a coup d'état against the last democratically elected president, Carlos Prio Socarras, within days of free elections, Cuba was a free and independent nation with a constitutional democracy. Hence, the last free election in Cuba was held in 1950.

The irony is that Fulgencio Batista's destruction of Cuba's democracy set the stage for Fidel Castro to seize power seven years later, despite Batista's claims that he staged the coup to avert a severe dictatorship.  

Both Cubans and Tibetans saw 1959 as a chance to restore democracy and achieve freedom. Instead, despotism consolidated its power.

 

The Cuban nightmare began amidst the hope on January 1, 1959 that the departure of Fulgencio Batista into exile would mean a democratic restoration and an end to authoritarian tyranny instead it was the beginning of a new totalitarian communist tyranny headed by Fidel Castro. 

Cloaking itself in the legitimacy of nationalism and anti-Americanism it justified the systematic denial of human rights in the rhetoric of anti-imperialism and the “Yankee threat.”

Tibetan hopes that a national uprising that erupted in Lhasa on March 10, 1959 would drive the Chinese occupiers out of their homeland. Instead His Holiness the Dalai Lama had to flee to India to avoid imprisonment or assassination as the Chinese communists crushed the uprising.

 

 

The Castro regime claim of "anti-imperialism" proved hollow and history demonstrated that it was conditioned upon ideology. This was witnessed with the Castro regime’s support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and later its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. 

The same holds true for Tibet. Fidel Castro in his March 31, 2008 “reflection” titled “The Chinese Victory” denies that Tibet was ever independent justifying and defending the Chinese occupation of that small country. It is a shameful rewriting of history.
 

With Russia's ongoing aggressions against its neighbors, the Castro dictatorship has carried on this tradition to the present day.

Vladimir Putin's attacks against Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 and the eight years long low intensity war in the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine, and the February 24, 2022, multipronged Russian invasion of Ukraine were all acts of aggression in violation of international law.

The Russian dictator's repeated aggressions were backed by Cuba in 2008, 2014 and now in 2022. The Castro regime's foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez on Putin's latest invasion of Ukraine said that Russia “has the right to defend itself.

Both the Castro regime and the Chinese communists must be held accountable for their many crimes, their hypocrisy on the issue of imperialism, and the historical facts they have sought to disappear must be shared widely. 

Tibetans, today, March 10th, reflect on the 64th anniversary of their national uprising against the occupation of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China, and recommit to their struggle for freedom.

At the same time, today, March 10, is a significant day for Cubans to recall the ways in which Fulgencio Batista destroyed their democracy and the ways in which those effects continue to impact Cuba today.

#TheyAreContinuity #TheyAreDictators ( #SomosContinuidad #SonDictadores)