Hanukkah 2019 in Cuba: Educational authorities bar Jewish children from wearing yarmulkes at school.

Is the Castro regime antisemitic?

We are still in the midst of Hanukkah, and in Cuba today, Jewish children are being assaulted for displaying their Jewishness, and ordered by regime authorities to conceal their identity or be punished.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) on December 23, 2019 reported that Liusdan Martínez Lescaille, a twelve year-old Jewish boy has been forbidden by Cuban educational authorities from entering his school while wearing a kippah ( also known as a yarmulke) since December 11, 2019 with the result that he has been prevented from continuing his education. His younger brother, Daniel Moises, has also been subjected to the ban and government authorities threatened to open legal proceedings against his parents, jailing them and taking their children away for "threatening the children’s normal development."

Cuban Jewish family targeted by the Castro regime for being Jewish.

CSW documented that Liusdan was regularly beaten up at school since the family moved to the Nuevitas municipality in 2016, and that the situation worsened in September 2019.

"According to his parents, Olainis Tejada Beltrán and Yeliney Lescaille Prebal, members of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim community, their son was singled out for ridicule soon after he started classes in September 2019 at the Latin America Urban Basic Secondary School in Nuevitas. Since then he has been subjected to four severe beatings instigated by a classmate who is the son of a military captain, along with other students. Despite multiple complaints by the parents to Martínez Lescaille’s teacher, who is head of the grade and the school director, no action was taken to protect the child.

After Tejada Beltrán publicly denounced the treatment of his son in the independent media, the Cuban educational authorities created a commission to review his son’s situation. However, during this period, he was pressured by school administrators on multiple occasions to retract his complaints. At one point there was an attempt by the school director to expel his son for supposed acts of violence, however, five teachers stepped in to defend Martínez Lescaille and the expulsion did not take place. On 11 December the commission announced its findings, holding a school guard responsible for failing to stop the attacks on Martínez Lescaille. However, rather than sanctioning the guard, a kippah ban was put in place instead. Tejada Beltrán has called for the ban to be revoked, pointing out that it effectively prohibits his son from entering the school grounds and that there are no other educational alternatives.

The Castro regime has a long history of anti-semitism. Seth J. Frantzman, a Jewish academic based in Jerusalem, following the death of Fidel Castro in November 2016 wrote an analysis of the tyrant's antisemitism.

"Most Jews fled Cuba when Castro came to power, dwindling from 15,000 to around 1,500 by 2014. One Castro entered the Soviet orbit the official anti-Zionist and anti-Israel line became common in Cuba, but most writers argue it did not flow over into anti-semitism. Only one anti-semitic incident, stone throwing at a synagogue during the 1973 war, was recorded in decades."

Religious repression was widespread in Cuba, beginning in the 1960s, and that also included Judaism. The 1973 attack on the synagogue coincided with Fidel Castro breaking diplomatic relations with Israel on September 10, 1973.

Seth J. Frantzman

The lack of reported anti-semitic incidents had more to do with the end of independent civil society, shuttering of the free press, and the outlawing of human rights groups under Castro. Frantzman exposes the duplicity of Fidel Castro, highlighting how he prevented the importation of kosher meat.

The reality is revealed in an interesting report was revealed regarding an episode in 1994 in which Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau attempted to get Castro to allow kosher meat into Cuba. An Israeli diplomat named Joel Barromi told Haaaretz writer Adi Schwartz in a 2006 interview surprising details.  The Cuban leader had initially rejected Lau’s request to bring in kosher meat. “I told you that I am fighting against the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in my country…do you want to make my people anti-Semitic,” Castro asked. “We have the practice of allocating 150 grams of bread a day, but the Jews in Cuba would have meat? [The people] will have a horrible hatred for them, envy them tremendously and loot their homes if under such conditions you see to import kosher meat for the Jews, you yourself create the anti-Semitism that I have been stopping.” 

This is the example of supposedly stopping anti-semitism, to threaten Jews that if they should want to eat kosher meat that they would “create” anti-semitism. Castro was at first admitting that he had starved his country by putting it on bread rations, but surely Cubans eat some meat. So why would some meat for Jewish people “make” them anti-Semitic?  One wonders whether “envy” for Muslims eating Halal would create the same excuse for Islamophobia just because Muslims celebrate Eid by eating a sheep?  According to articles the same Cuba that feared meat would force people to be anti-semitic, was welcoming to Halal food.

Digging deeper one finds disturbing patterns in the actions carried out by the Castro regime over the past six decades.
Otto-Ernst Remer was a German Wehrmacht officer who played a major role in stopping the July 20 plot in 1944 against Adolf Hitler, and established a Neo-Nazi political party in post-war Germany, before fleeing to the Middle East where he served as an advisor to Arab nationalists. In the early 1960s Otto-Ernst Remer had contacts with and assisted Fidel Castro in Cuba with the purchase of weapons. Ernst-Remer along with Ernst Wilhelm Springer sold the Cuban dictator 4,000 pistols. Castro also contracted former Nazi SS officers to train Cuban troops. German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) reported: "Evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives." Until the end of his life Remer remained an unrepentant Nazi who engaged in holocaust denial.
The Castro regime aided, trained, and armed terrorist groups that targeted Israel for destruction. Cuban troops were sent by Castro to the Middle East to fight against Israel, with the Yom Kippur war being a high profile example. Focus on Cuba,  an information service of the Cuba Transition Project of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami in their Issue 57 published  staff report on July 29, 2004 titled "Castro and Terrorism: A Chronology" that summarized this hostility to Israel.

Cuban military and intelligence personnel aided Middle Eastern groups and regimes in their struggle against Israel, and Cuban troops fought on the side of Arab States, particularly Syria, during the Yom Kippur war. Castro sent military instructors and advisors into Palestinian bases; cooperated with Libya in the founding of World Mathaba, a terrorist movement; and established close military cooperation and exchanges with Iraq, Libya, Southern Yemen, the Polisario Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara, the PLO and others in the Middle East.

Nan Robertson in a special to The New York Times on July 11, 1975 published the article "FRANCE EXPELLING 3 CUBAN OFFICIALS" that reports on the link between Cuban diplomats and Carlos the Jackal.

"France expelled three high‐ranking Cuban diplomats today in connection with the worldwide search for a man called Carlos, who is believed to be an important link in an international terrorist network." [...] "The French Interior Ministry said that investigators were convinced that the terrorist network had been helped significantly by the intelligence services of “certain nations.” The Cubans, according to the ministry, had been “constant visitors” to the Paris hideout of Carlos. André Mousset, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, added that the Carlos affair was looking more and more like an “international terrorist plot.” [...] French authorities have also said that Carlos may have been directly involved with a siege at the French Embassy in The Hague last September and a grenade attack the same month on Le Drugstore on the Left Bank here, in which three persons were killed and 22 wounded. The Cuban diplomats on whom expulsion orders were served today were Raul Rodriguez Sainz, 32 years old, first secretary for cultural affairs; Pedro Lara Zamora, 33, deputy cultural attache, and Ernesto Reyes Herrera, 32, the chief of protocol.

In January 1966 the Castro regime hosted the first Tricontinental Conference in Havana. This was the first major forum where both Cuba and the PLO participate. Author Claire Sterling wrote in 1981 that "the roots of the terrorist network can be traced directly to the Tricontinental Congress held in Havana in January 1966."

Castro regime met and planned with PLO in 1966

Less than a year later, in 1967, according to David J. Kopilow, more than a dozen training camps for guerrillas are established in  Cuba, under the direction of KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine. Palestinians were among the terrorist groups trained.


Carlos the Jackal received training in Cuba, and obtained assistance from Cuban diplomats in Europe. He had detailed knowledge of the operation to assassinate an Israeli diplomat in Chevy Chase, Maryland and contacts with the terrorists who carried out the political killing in July 1973. Carlos was also credited with being the man behind the seizure of 70 hostages at the OPEC oil ministers' meeting in Vienna in 1975 and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat met in Havana in 1974

In the 1970s the Cubans started arriving in the Middle East in large numbers to train guerrillas, but they would go beyond terrorism into full military action against the Jewish people.

In the August 1988 issue of The Atlantic in the article "Cuba: Havana's Military Machine" by John Hoyt Williams provided more detail on Cuban involvement in the Yom Kippur War against Israel.

In 1973, probably at Moscow's behest, Castro dispatched 500 Cuban tank commanders to Syria. These men performed well and died well in the Yom Kippur War with Israel. Not long after their debut in Syria, Cuban military personnel were training, arming, and advising Polisario guerrillas who were fighting for the independence of the Western Sahara.

The Castro regime closely followed the example of their Arab counterparts in referring to Israel in terms previously reserved for Nazis. For example, Bruno Rodriguez, now Cuba's Foreign Minister, but in 1978, when he was a leader of Cuba's Union of Young Communists, he told a gathering at the University of Havana "that the attitude of the Zionist authorities was similar to Hitler's hordes who massacred millions of European Jews during World War II." The occasion of Rodriguez's speech was the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding, an event referred to by him as the"usurpation of Palestinian territory by Zionism to convert it into the state of Israel."

Israeli athletes were tortured and murdered by terrorists linked to the Castro regime in 1972

Myles Kantor's November 12, 2003 article in National Review, "Who’s Afraid of 'Uncle Fidel'?" exposed the underreporting of anti-semitism by the Anti-Defamation League with regards to Cuba and detailed some of the Castro regime's anti-Israel and anti-Jewish history.

“I am assaulted by the anti-Israel propaganda,” Cuban Jew Ricardo Behar remarks. “It is a constant nightmare over our minds.” Cuban Jew Tony Fune refers to the regime’s “persistent Judeophobia” that manifests itself in the media’s “endless hours of hatred against Israel.”Foxman writes of the U.N.’s 1975 resolution that equated Zionism with racism:Thankfully, the “Zionism is racism” resolution was revoked in 1991 by a U.N. vote of 87 to 25–although this vote of course indicates that, as of 1991, at least twenty-five states were still willing to openly maintain the position that Zionism is a form of racism, thereby seeking to delegitimize Israel and threaten the Jewish right of self-determination.Cuba cosponsored the resolution and was one of the 25 countries that opposed its revocation.

Scholar Irving Louis Horowitz in his 2007 paper, “Cuba, Castro and Anti-Semitism” observed that “the remnants of the Jewish community in Havana, not-withstanding, Cuba is one more nation where anti-Semitism without Jews is a core belief.”  

This is underscored by the actions of the dictatorship in Cuba over the past six decades.

Castro regime officials in 2019 barred Jewish children from wearing the kippah to school, decades earlier barred the importation of kosher meat into Cuba, while importing Halal food, broke relations with Israel in 1973, trained terrorists who murdered Israelis, sent Cuban troops to Syria to fight against Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and backed the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. This accumulation of facts should lead reasonable people to conclude that the Castro regime is antisemitic.

Poster for the PLO in 1972 denies existence of Israel

This blog is based on a December 27, 2091 CubaBrief by the Center for a Free Cuba.

Paris court upholds ‘Carlos the Jackal’ life sentence

“I have fought all my life against terrorists. We are not terrorists, we are freedom fighters!”  - Carlos the Jackal

Illich Ramirez Sanchez a.k. Carlos the Jackal
1970s and after his capture in 1997

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez,better known as Carlos the Jackal, lost his appeal today in a French Court for his 2011 conviction for masterminding a string of bombings in France in the 1980s that killed 11 and wounded many more. His life sentence has been reaffirmed.

Back in 2011,  Carlos the Jackal, at the same time that his trial was underway in France , boasted in an interview with the daily El Nacional of committing more than 100 attacks that claimed up to 2,000 lives explaining that:

With the means that I have in jail I began to make a rough account and the dead do not reach 2,000. Less than 10% of innocents suffered for it.

Later in the same interview when questioned about the attacks and asked if mistakes were made Ramírez Sánchez gave a candidly brutal answer:

Reporter - But then you, personally, believe that you were not mistaken in anything?
Ramírez Sánchez- Errors one commits all the time. President Chavez makes mistakes and thats normal, it is not a serious problem. Fidel Castro made ​​terrible mistakes.

Reporter- But people were killed in your attacks.
Ramírez Sánchez - Yes, but Fidel killed more people than me.

This was not his first life sentence. On December 24, 1997 he was also convicted of murder by a French Court and sentenced to life in prison stated at his sentencing: "I am satisfied and I am proud I chose my cause when I was 14 and I have never strayed." According to the New York Times, "His real cause was anti-Americanism, adopted when he was a student in the 1960s looking for a way of defying U.S. domination and capitalist values the way Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had done for Cuba before him."

Ramírez Sánchez, Venezuelan by birth, described by the late Venezuelan "president" Hugo Chavez as a "revolutionary fighter" in November of 2009 is an ideological soul mate of Chavez, the heir apparent to Castroism-Guevarism ideology. According to French intelligence services Carlos the Jackal is responsible for more than 80 murders.


Carlos the Jackal's life story spawned a 2010 film that was five and a half hours long that glorified the acts of terrorism he carried out in the service of Marxism-Leninism.

Regime apologists downplay the significance of the Tricontinental meeting and its relationship to the upsurge of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s but there are artifiacts from that time that still remain in circulation: in 1970 the Cuban government published the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) publication Tricontinental, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and translated into numerous languages which were distributed worldwide by the Cuban regime. 

According to Major David E. Smith USMC in his 1995 paper "The Training of Terrorist Organizations" the Cuban role in the explosion of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s was systematic:

Although terrorism originated centuries ago, modern international terrorism orchestrated by the Soviet Union arguably began at the Tricontinental Conference conceived by Moscow and conducted in Havana, Cuba during January l966. The purpose of the conference was to devise a "global revolutionary strategy to counter the global strategy of American imperialism."[14] It resulted in the creation of an African, Asian, and Latin American Solidarity Organization based in Havana. ... Castro's terrorism schools were under the supervision of the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI). Students were flown into the country from connecting airports, or arrived in Cuban harbors by boat. Upon debarkation in Havana, they were segregated by nationality and moved to their individual training locations. The guerrilla courses lasted from three to six months. Subject material included "tactics, weapons training, bomb making- particularly how to blow up oil pipelines, map reading, cryptography, photography, falsification of documents, and disguise."

The glorification of mass killers such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Carlos the Jackal, downplaying the carnage carried out, while at the same time celebrating it is a recipe for more unnecessary violence and terror.

International communist terrorist says Fidel Castro killed more people than me

"I'm a professional revolutionary." - Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a Carlos the Jackal, on trial in Paris for murders and terror bombings, November 7, 2011

Warfare is a tool of revolutionaries. The important thing is the revolution! The important thing is the revolutionary cause ... Fidel Castro, Memorial service for Che Guevara, October 8, 1967

Carlos the Jackal inspired by Fidel Castro

International terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, who went on trial in France on Monday, boasted in an interview with the daily El Nacional of committing more than 100 attacks that claimed up to 2,000 lives explaining that:

With the means that I have in jail I began to make a rough account and the dead do not reach 2,000. Less than 10% of innocents suffered for it.

Later in the same interview when questioned about the attacks and asked if mistakes were made Ramírez Sánchez gave a candidly brutal answer:

Reporter - But then you, personally, believe that you were not mistaken in anything?
Ramírez Sánchez- Errors one commits all the time. President Chavez makes mistakes and thats normal, it is not a serious problem. Fidel Castro made ​​terrible mistakes.

Reporter- But people were killed in your attacks.
Ramírez Sánchez - Yes, but Fidel killed more people than me.

An interesting side note the Venezuelan terrorist claims that aide sent by both Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the former despot of Libya Moammar Qaddafi did not reach him stolen by their respective underlings.

On December 24, 1997 Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was convicted of murder by a French Court and sentenced to life in prison. He responded to the sentence stating:

"I am satisfied and I am proud I chose my cause when I was 14 and I have never strayed."

According to the New York Times, "his real cause was anti-Americanism, adopted when he was a student in the 1960s looking for a way of defying U.S. domination and capitalist values the way Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had done for Cuba before him."



In France, a life sentence apparently means at least 22 years and now the international terrorist is on trial for the first time for acts of terrorism that took the lives of 12 people in order that he spend another 22 years in prison including "complicity in killings and destruction of property using explosive substances".

The tactics for which Carlos the Jackal is on trial facing a life sentence were and are glorified by the regime in Cuba. In addition, as early as the 1960s the Castro regime recruited, organized and trained terrorists from around the world to make them more effective. Carlos the Jackal is just one terrible consequence of the Castro regime's belief in revolutionary violence.

Carlos the Jackal

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Ideological Offspring

Illich Ramirez Sanchez a.k. Carlos the Jackal
1970s and after his capture in 1997

“There is a discipline in the Venezuelan Communist Youth to which I belonged at the time. I don’t have the right to speak in its name. And you should ask the Venezuelan Communist Party which still exists whether I went to Cuba at that time. And the Cuban authorities too.” - Carlos the Jackal



Bill Cosford Cinema at the University of Miami will be showing CARLOS a 2010 French/German production directed by Lixin Fan, screenplay by Olivier Assayas and starring Edgar Ramirez in the title role of Carlos the Jackal between December 17-23, 2010. It was screened at Sundance and on the Sundance channel. The film demonstrates the evolution of international terrorism in the 1970s, but leaves out its origins in the 1960s.

According to Major David E. Smith USMC in his 1995 paper "The Training of Terrorist Organizations":

Although terrorism originated centuries ago, modern international terrorism orchestrated by the Soviet Union arguably began at the Tricontinental Conference conceived by Moscow and conducted in Havana, Cuba during January l966.[13] The purpose of the conference was to devise a "global revolutionary strategy to counter the global strategy of American imperialism."[14] It resulted in the creation of an African, Asian, and Latin American Solidarity Organization based in Havana. The Conference also passed resolutions advocating outside aid for groups fighting for "liberation". During late l966, the Cubans opened a number of training camps for guerrilla fighters in Cuba that were under Soviet supervision. Palestinian groups began sending students to these facilities on the "Isle of Pines" during l966, and upon graduation, those students spawned the terrorist groups that exploded in the Middle East during the l97O's. Castro's terrorism schools were under the supervision of the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI). Students were flown into the country from connecting airports, or arrived in Cuban harbors by boat. Upon debarkation in Havana, they were segregated by nationality and moved to their individual training locations. The guerrilla courses lasted from three to six months. Subject material included "tactics, weapons training, bomb making- particularly how to blow up oil pipelines, map reading, cryptography, photography, falsification of documents, and disguise."

There is much more on Cuban involvement in international terrorism and there are numerous sources alleging that a 17-year old Illich Ramirez Sanchez who would later become known as Carlos the Jackal attended the 1966 Tricontinental Meeting and received training in Cuba.

Chavez an admirer of terrorist Carlos the Jackal

It matters little whether he did or not because he was the ideological offspring of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Ramírez Sánchez, Venezuelan by birth, described by Venezuelan "president" Hugo Chavez as a "revolutionary fighter" in November of 2009 is an ideological soul mate of Chavez, the heir apparent to Castroism-Guevarism ideology. According to French intelligence services Ramírez Sánchez is responsible for more than 80 murders.

On December 24, 1997 he was convicted of murder by a French Court and sentenced to life in prison stated at his sentencing: "I am satisfied and I am proud I chose my cause when I was 14 and I have never strayed." According to the New York Times, "His real cause was anti-Americanism, adopted when he was a student in the 1960s looking for a way of defying U.S. domination and capitalist values the way Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had done for Cuba before him."

Regime apologists downplay the significance of the Tricontinental meeting and its relationship to the upsurge of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s but there are artifiacts from that time that still remain in circulation: in 1970 the Cuban government published the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) publication Tricontinental, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and translated into numerous languages which were distributed worldwide by the Cuban regime. There is a chapter advocating terrorism:

Terrorism is an action, usually involving the placement of an explosive or firebomb of great destructive power, which is capable of effecting irreparable loss against the enemy. Terrorism requires that the urban guerrilla should have adequate theoretical and practical knowledge of how to make explosives. The terrorist act, apart from the apparent ease with which it can be carried out, is no different from other guerrilla acts and actions whose success depends on planning and determination. It is an action which the urban guerrilla must execute with the greatest calmness and determination. Although terrorism generally involves an explosion, there are cases in which it may be carried out through executions or the systematic burning of installations, properties, plantations, etc. It is essential to point out the importance of fires and the construction of incendiary devices such as gasoline bombs in the technique of guerrilla terrorism. Another thing is the importance of the material the urban guerrilla can persuade the people to expropriate in the moments of hunger and scarcity brought about by the greed of the big commercial interests. Terrorism is a weapon the revolutionary can never relinquish.

Incidentally an online copy of the above mentioned text is displayed on the website of fugitive Assata Shakur who fled to Cuba in 1984 for the murder of a police officer.

While serving a life sentence in France Ramirez Sanchez has written a book praising Osama Bin Laden's "shining" example arguing that "revolutionary Islam" - which is the title of his book - is the post-Communist answer to what he calls US "totalitarianism". A sentiment shared by Hugo Chavez in his embrace of the Islamic Republic of Iran and close working relationship with its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The film Carlos is recommended viewing for those who do not see the connection between revolutionary Marxist ideals and terrorism. It should open their eyes.