Correcting some of Chuck Offenburger's errors about the Cuban revolution and the dictatorship in Havana - Part 2

 Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Three wise men replaced with images of Fidel Castro,other revolutionaries

Chuck Offenburger has written a blog entry "Banning Christmas in Cuba was an ‘error’ that Fidel Castro fixed: It’s time for the U.S. to correct our own errors there" that regurgitates Cuban communist propaganda. I do not believe that was his intent.

Totalitarian regimes have a track record of effectively using tourism, athletic events, and academic exchanges to present their regimes in a manner that legitimizes them and covers up their hostile objectives. 

An excellent accounting of these practices and their impacts on national and international politics is found in Paul Hollander's book Political Pilgrims that should be required reading for anyone traveling to Cuba, China, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela, or Vietnam.

There is much to address, and it will be broken up into a series of blog entries. 

These blog entries will review a number of the claims Mr. Offenburger makes in chronological order, and provide documented sources to test them.

 This blog entry will explore two claims made by Offenburger that Fidel Castro banned organized religion in 1959, and that Eisenhower's "blockade" led Cuba to the Soviet Union for help. 

First, the Catholic Church was not clinging to the Batista regime in the 1950s, as some communists claim. It was a Catholic priest who saved Fidel Castro's life following the disastrous July 26, 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks. Castro portrayed himself as a Jeffersonian democrat who would restore the preexisting democratic order.

Restrictions on religion began slowly in 1960 and continued to increase.

Fidel Castro canceled Christmas in 1969 under the pretext to prevent work shortages for the 1970 ten million ton sugar harvest but continued the ban until 1997, and sent mobs to intimidate Cubans who attended religious services. Three Kings Day and Easter were also abolished. Priests who stayed behind often paid a terrible price.

In 1976 the Castro dictatorship adopted a constitution which turned Cuba into an atheist state. 

Today, the Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), an arm of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, still oversees religious affairs in Cuba, and exists to monitor, hinder and restrict religious activities. 

Richard Nixon met with Fidel Castro in April 1959.

 

Mr. Offenburger got it backwards. Castro's alliance with the Soviet Union and Beijing to overthrow governments in Latin America led to sanctions on Havana.

Fidel Castro visits Caracas on January 23, 1959 and meets with Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt "to enlist cooperation and financial backing for 'the master plan against the gringos.'"

 

On March 3, 1959 the Castro regime expropriates properties belonging to the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, and took over its affiliate, the Cuban Telephone Company.

 

Fidel Castro visited the United States for eleven days in April 1959, culminating in a three-hour meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon on April 19, 1959. 

 

Havana beginning in 1959 sent armed expeditions to Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic to overthrow their governments. 

 

On February 6, 1960 talks began publicly between the U.S.S.R and Fidel Castro. The Soviet Union agreed to buy five million tons of sugar over five years. They also agreed to support Cuba with oil, grain, and credit. 

 

 

On July 6, 1960 the Castro regime passed a nationalization law authorizing nationalization of U.S.- owned property through expropriation. Texaco, Esso, and Shell oil refineries were taken.

 

In September 1960 the Cuban government diplomatically recognized the People's Republic of China.

 

The Eisenhower State Department in response to the above actions imposed the first trade embargo on Cuba on October 19, 1960, and it "covered all U.S. exports to Cuba except for medicine and some foods." It was not a blockade.

 

On November 19, 1960 Ernesto "Che" Guevara heading a Cuban delegation in Beijing met with Mao Zedong between 4:20pm and 6:30pm and discussed revolutionary objectives in Latin America.

 

 

Offenburger's trips to Cuba filled him with disinformation, and it should not be a surprise. The Castro regime came to power using lies, and continues power through systematic misinformation. 

 

Communist morality

Fidel Castro at the time was repeatedly claiming that he was not a communist because he knew that speaking the truth 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."

Years later on March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist, Fidel 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.

Castro is copying Lenin. The first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin on October 2, 1920 in a speech to Russian communist youth stated:  "The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society." He also addressed the necessity of the lie observing: "'To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim."