The genocidal Assad regime in Syria was ideologically inspired by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

A reflection on the 54 year alliance between the Assad and Castro regimes.

Hafez al-Assad seized power in November 1970 in a bloodless coup, and remained in power through brutal means until his death on June 10, 2000. The Syrian dictator ruled his country for over 30 years, and when he died in power, was succeeded by his equally brutal son Bashar al-Assad who ruled Syria for another 24 years.  Throughout these 54 years, the Castro brothers maintained a close relationship with the Assad regime.

Hafez al-Assad visit to Iran, 1 August 1997

 

Fidel Castro broke relations with Israel on the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. This was required for all Soviet-aligned regimes, as the international communist line defined Israel as a colonial state and an arm of U.S. imperialism. However, the Cuban dictatorship went above and beyond in their hostility to the Jewish state.  Noticias de Israel (News of Israel) provided a more in-depth description of what took place next.

From the highest levels of power in Havana, a secret operation was orchestrated to send military support to Syria. A tank brigade, helicopter pilots, communications agents, and intelligence and counterintelligence officers were meticulously selected for this mission. It was imperative that these men did not arouse suspicion and that they were perfectly prepared for the task entrusted to them.

The Military Brigade of Senén Casas Regueiro was mobilized, and under the command of General Leopoldo Cintra Frías, a recognized name in military circles, this surreptitious plan was put into action. In a carefully planned diversionary maneuver, the soldiers left Cuba dressed in civilian clothes, with forged passports that identified them as university students. They traveled on separate flights to East Germany, where they made a technical stopover, before reaching their final destination: Syria.  

Once on Syrian territory, Soviet military equipment, including modern T-62 tanks and SAM rocket artillery, was ready for operation. Figures vary, but it is estimated that between 1,800 and 4,000 Cubans were present in Syria during the 1973 confrontation.

The surprise of this operation resulted in a series of significant losses for Israel, both in human lives and military equipment. Some civilian areas were also hit during the clash. 

On March 31, 1974, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan announced on US television that 3,000 Cuban troops had been dispatched to support Syria during the Yom Kippur War. The Economist published two articles in its Foreign Report in 1978 that highlighted Cuba's role in Syria beginning shortly after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Cuban tank crews fought with Syrian troops. According to Foreign Report, 180 Cubans were killed and 250 were injured.  

Cuban combat troops remained in Syria until 1975. 

Havana remained quiet when Assad invaded Lebanon in 1976, and occupied the country for the next 30 years. In 1979, Hafez Al Assad traveled to Cuba and met Fidel Castro. Castro, and other Cuban officials made no mention of the then ongoing Syrian occupation.

The bodies of hundreds of victims of the 1982 massacre that Hafez al-Assad ordered against Palestinians and Lebanese in the Tel al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, northeast of Beirut, Lebanon are still interred in unidentified graves. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people, primarily civilians, are thought to have been killed, although some estimate that the total number of victims during the siege may exceed 4,000.

No criticism was made by Havana regarding the massacre of these Palestinians by Assad. On the contrary the relationship between Havana and Damascus remained strong.

Since 1975, 17,000 Lebanese have been disappeared by the Assad regime, according to Romy Haber, of the Catholic News Agency.

In the July 1986 issue of Commentary magazine, professor and commentator Daniel Pipes wrote an article with a title that asked a provocative question: "Syria: The Cuba of the Middle East?" and offered the following data point on relations between the two regimes.

"An August 1985 cable from Assad to Fidel Castro on the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Syria and Cuba praised the two countries' friendship as beneficial 'for the two peoples in their joint struggle against world imperialism and its allies.' A telegram from the Syrian foreign minister on the same occasion expressed 'Syria's admiration for the fraternal Cuban people's great achievements and their firm stands against imperialist aggression on the Latin American people.'”

Syria continued its dominance over Lebanon after 1990 with the assistance of Iran and their terrorist proxy Hezbollah. Bashar al-Assad's succession to power in July 2000 was met, less than a year later, by a visit by Fidel Castro to Damascus in May 2001 where the Cuban dictator met with his Syrian counterpart.

Lebanese nationalists rose up nonviolently against the Syrian occupation beginning in 2000, and by 2005 had forced the withdrawal of the Syrian army in what became known as the Cedar Revolution, but it was not conclusive.

On June 28, 2010 Bashar al-Assad visited Cuba for two days, and met with Raul Castro.

In 2011, a nonviolent movement against the Assad regime emerged, which was met with extreme brutality, and resulted in a civil war. When the international community, belatedly, demanded an accounting for the rights violations committed by the Assad regime in Syria, the regime in Havana was one of a handful of governments that voted against investigating the crimes of the dynastic dictatorship in Damascus.

On August 23, 2011 the Cuban government along with China, Russia and Ecuador voted against investigating gross and systematic human rights violations in Syria.

On February 5, 2012 ALBA Countries reiterated rejection of "foreign interference" in Syria's internal affairs, expressing support for President Bashar al-Assad and confidence that he would resolve the Syrian crisis. ALBA Countries include Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Meanwhile in Syria President al-Assad  engaged in massacres throughout the country

On June 1, 2012 at a Special Session on the deteriorating human rights situation in Syria with a special focus on the massacre in El-Houleh the Cuban regime and its allies took a stand against holding the Assad regime accountable for its gross and systematic human rights abuses.

  

Bashar al-Assad

The Associated Press reported that the U.N. Human Rights Council voted overwhelmingly on September 25, 2014, to share its evidence of Syrian atrocities in hopes it will be forwarded to the world's war crimes tribunal. By a vote of 32-5, with 10 abstentions, the 47-nation council adopted the resolution condemning the lack of cooperation by President Bashar Assad's government with a U.N. commission investigating rights violations since March 2011 in Syria.  Cuba was one of five nations—the other four being Algeria, China, Russia, and Venezuela—that voted against sharing evidence of  gross and systematic human rights violations in Syria.

Ten years of civil war and bloodshed with tens of thousands disappeared, millions displaced, and over 500,000 killed, yet the Syrian regime was being normalized in 2023 by too many in the international community.

 

Bashar al-Assad on December 8, 2024 fled to Moscow, and his dictatorship crumbled. Now the mass graves are being discovered, and the full scale of the horror is beginning to be understood.

 

It is also important to remember that Fidel Castro "was a source of ideological inspiration" for the Assad regime.

On December 8, 2024 I made the following observation in a thread of four Tweets on X:

It appears that the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria over two generations of incredible levels of brutality and terror has come to an end. Let us pray that what comes next after so many decades of depravity and repression is an improvement. Assad's decision to engage in the mass murder of the Syrian nonviolent opposition in 2011 sparked a civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.  Now is the time to make an assessment of the governments who backed the Assad regime, and call them out as we learn of the crimes of this dynastic dictatorship. This includes the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. All supported Assad, and legitimized his rule.

"It appears that the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria over two generations of incredible levels of brutality and terror has come to an end. Let us pray that what comes next after so many decades of depravity and repression is an improvement." https://t.co/5dO3DpvHFn
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— John Suarez ن (@johnjsuarez) December 8, 2024

A Christmas Miracle: The End of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991

"My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him. " - Mohandas Gandhi

 

Christmas returned to the Kremlin

Thirty three years ago, on December 25, 1991, a regime born in 1917 and formerly named in 1922 came to an end. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or as it was also known, the Soviet Union, was formerly brought to an end on Christmas day and replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States. The last day of the Soviet Union was Christmas day. Let that sink in.

 Now there are those who claim that the world is a less stable place without the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev claims that it could have been reformed. 

Academic Stephen F. Cohen goes further and quotes approvingly both Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky with the adage: "Anyone who does not regret the breakup of the Soviet Union has no heart. And anyone who thinks it can be reconstructed has no head." 

Vaclav Havel, a man who had both head and heart, understood why this kind of regime was so profoundly inhuman: "As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it."

The optimism expressed by Gorbachev and the nostalgia of Cohen fail to take into account the human cost of the USSR. The Soviet Union took the lives of an estimated 61 million human beings. It was a brutal and evil system that allied with Nazi Germany to start WW2 in 1939, and afterwards spawned other brutal regimes around the globe that claimed over 100 million lives. Their lives mattered. Vaclav Havel, in his 1990 New Years Speech, called on his countrymen to remember. 

"The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today's freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom." 

The number of lives lost is only the material accounting and does not take into account the spiritual ruin visited upon billions and its aftermath to the present day. The late Czech president  explained it in the  same address.

"The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships."

The destruction, both material and spiritual, generated by the Soviet Union over seventy years will take centuries to repair and transcend. That hard truth may not be cause for celebration, but the end of the system that wreaked so much damage is cause for celebration, not regret. To do otherwise is to be heartless. The fact that it happened without violence on Christmas Day in 1991 is also cause for joy. 

Criminally, Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022 expanded his war into Ukraine in what some view as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet empire and the rivers of blood are flowing again, and we do not know how it will end. Gorbachev passed away on August 30, 2022 a respected figure abroad, but reviled in Russia. He was in many ways the polar opposite of Vladimir Putin.

Secondly, the largest remaining communist regime, the Peoples Republic of China, remains in power and  with the aid of smaller communist powers (Cuba, Laos, Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela, Vietnam, and their networks) is backing Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The Chinese Communist Party celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2021. It is a tragedy that they did not go the same way as the Soviet Union in 1991.

Over seven million people have died due to a pandemic unleashed by the communist dictatorship in Beijing. However, this is a small number for the Communist Chinese Party that has killed more than ten times as many Chinese people to advance communist policies in China alone. 

People of goodwill must continue to work for and pray for the day that a second miracle can be celebrated with the the end of communism in China, and a third miracle with the defeat of the Russian invaders in Ukraine.