"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
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.
This is why Ukraine is celebrating the end of the Soviet Union over social media this Christmas.
On this day in 1991, the Soviet Union finally ceased to exist. A moment that went down in history as a triumph of liberty.
Its dissolution ended a regime built on repression, censorship, political terror, genocidal famines, mass deportations, and the systematic erasure of… pic.twitter.com/4xVa7YhpYe
People of goodwill should join them in celebrating the end of this evil regime.
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.
People of goodwill must also 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.
There are over a thousand political prisoners currently in Cuba’s prisons today.
Jose Daniel Ferrer was a member of the Christian Liberation Movement
that sought through the existing legal system to pursue change through the Varela Project.
Brothers to the Rescue was an effort by Cubans and Cuban Americans to
save the lives of Cubans in the Florida Straits. Because they were
nonviolently engaging with the dissidents on the island the regime felt
it was unacceptable and they sent out MiGs that blew two civilian
planes out of the sky in international airspace.
However that is not our focus today but the harm Havana has done to
U.S. national security, and the role the Cuban dictatorship has played
in destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.
This is not true. We now know thanks to the Soviet archives after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the initial contacts with the
KGB and the Castro brothers was in 1953.
Early contacts with the KGB (1953)
Leonov (c). On his right, R. Castro. To his left, Bernardo Lemús
“The KGB’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the
first to make contact with [Raul] Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us
to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had
traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system
of priorities.’- The charismatic appeal of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara
extended far beyond Latin America,” wrote Christopher Andrew and Vasili
Mitrokhin in The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the the Third World – Newly Revealed Secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive published in 2006.
Raul Castro and Nikolai Leonov first met in 1953, and struck up a relationship that would endure for 69 years, until Leonov’s passing in 2022. On March 11, 2016, Leonov was interviewed on official Cuban television in the Mesa Redonda program about his supposed first encounter with Raul Castro on a trans-Atlantic voyage. Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992, offers a different report obtained from classified files.
Leonov and Raul Castro “became ‘firm friends’ in Prague in 1953 and
then worked together with Fidel from 1956 and after he took power in
1959.”
The U.S. Arms Embargo on Batista
At the same time that the United States was placing an arms embargo
on Fulgencio Batista in early 1958, and receiving representatives of
Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement in Washington DC, the Soviet KGB
already had a firmly established relationship with the Castro brothers.
On March 17, 1958 Fidel Castro’s future candidate for provisional president, Manuel Urrutia, along with a delegation of other supporters in exile of the July 26th movement,
met with officials at the State Department. They successfully lobbied
the U.S. government arguing that arms shipments to Cuba were for
hemispheric defense, and they claimed that Batista using them against
Cuban nationals was in violation of the conditions agreed to between the
two countries.
Batista’s regime presented to the U.S. Embassy in Havana a formal note protesting
the delay in the shipment of M-1 rifles to the Cuban Army, and warned
that it would weaken the Cuban government and lead to its possible
downfall.
The United States placed an arms embargo on the Batista dictatorship in March 1958.
On March 26, 1958 in another telegram
from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Havana the view was
expressed how the arms embargo could lead to the fall of Batista’s
regime:
“Department has considered the possibility its actions
could have an adverse psychological effect on GOC and could
unintentionally contribute to or accelerate eventual Batista downfall.
On other hand, shipment US combat arms at this time would probably
invite increased resentment against US and associate it with Batista
strong arm methods, especially following so closely on heels of
following developments:
Government publicly desisted from peace efforts.Government suspended
guarantees again.Batista expressed confidence Government will win
elections with his candidate and insists they will be held despite
suspension guarantees but has made no real effort to satisfy public
opinion on their fairness and effectiveness as possible means achieve
fair and acceptable solution.Batista announced would increase size arms
and informed you he would again undertake mass population shift Oriente,
and otherwise acted in manner to discourage those who supported or
could be brought to support peaceful settlement by constructive
negotiations.”
The United States would continue to pressure Batista to hold free
elections and leave office for the remainder of 1958. Earl E. T. Smith,
the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, on December 17, 1958 delivered a message
from the State Department to Fulgencio Batista that the United States
viewed “with skepticism any plan on his part, or any intention on his
part, to remain in Cuba indefinitely.”
The U.S. government had dealt the Batista regime a mortal blow, and fourteen days later the Cuban dictatorship fell.
Fulgencio Batista fled into exile on January 1, 1959, and the United
States quickly recognized the revolutionary government of the Castro
brothers.
The Castro brothers’ newly established Cuban government was
acknowledged by the U.S. on January 7, 1959. The new regime was
recognized in a mere seven days. Comparatively, after Fulgencio
Batista’s March 10, 1952 coup, it took the US seventeen days to recognize his government.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, representing Fidel Castro’s new regime, visited Gaza in June 1959, and encouraged Palestinian refugees to “continue the struggle to liberate their land” “through resistance to occupation,” according to the publication Palestine Land Society.
He asked, “where are the training camps? Where are the factories to
manufacture arms? Where are people’s mobilization centers?” … According
to the publication Palestine Land Society, “Guevara was accompanied by General Caprera, an expert in Guerilla warfare. Caprera met with community leaders to advise on methods of resistance.”
Soviet Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan visited Havana in February 1960. The Soviet Vice Premier arrived in Cuba on February 4, 1960.
Regime insider Carlos Franqu in his book Family Portrait with Fidel described the visit as follows.
In the early days of February, Anastas Mikoyan,
vice-prime minister of the Soviet Union, came to Cuba. Fidel Castro,
Raúl, Che Guevara, and President Dorticós met him at the Havana airport.
He was given a huge reception and an extended tour of the island-with
Fidel at his side-which lasted for weeks. A major topic was the Soviet
Union’s purchase of Cuban sugar and our purchase of Russian oil.
Castro diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union on May 8, 1960.
To say that the United States pushed the Castro brothers into the
arms of the Soviet Union is absurd. The Castro brothers had already been
conspiring with Moscow for six years in 1959.
"I'd like to confess, at that moment I discovered that I really like
killing." Ernesto "Che" Guevara, in a letter to his father after
executing an unarmed man.
Guevara executed for trying to overthrow Bolivian govt on October 9, 1967
Che Guevara was captured during a guerrilla fight to topple the Bolivian government and create a communist dictatorship, similar to what he did in Cuba, and was executed in Bolivia 58 years ago today.
Unfortunately, his ideas did not die with him.
Ideas have consequences and those ideas are sometimes represented in iconic images.
This is the case of the image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his toxic
philosophy of political action that others seek to emulate. He embraced
hatred and dehumanization of the other as the means to carry out what
he thought necessary actions.
“Blind
hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the
boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an
effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate
cannot triumph against the adversary.”
The Castro brothers executed tens of thousands of Cubans,
locked up hundreds of thousands of Cubans, built a police state, with
the assistance of the KGB, the East German Stasi, former Nazis, and imposed revolutionary terror to consolidate power.
Credible and conservative estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll against Cuban nationals ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000. In the beginning executions were televised in Cuba to terrorize the populace.
Che Guevara, speaking to the United Nations on December 11, 1964,
did not mince words: "We must express here something that is a
well-known truth and that we have constantly asserted before the entire
world: executions? Yes, we have executed individuals; we are currently
executing others, and we will continue to do so as long as required. We
know what the outcome of a losing struggle would be, and the worms must
know what the outcome is today in Cuba."
In addition to
the Hellscape in the Middle East, Ernesto "Che" Guevara laid the
groundwork for much of the additional misery in Latin America today.
Mao Ze Dong caused the deaths of an estimated 45 million Chinese people in his communist project through famine and mass executions. He is the greatest mass murderer
of the 20th century, and someone Guevara stayed allied to, even after
the Castro regime cooled relations with Beijing siding with Moscow.
“Here
is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear
immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new
societies. When an agreement was reached by which the
atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not
relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with
our own voice. We have demonstrated our firm stand, our own position,
our decision to fight, even if alone, against all dangers and against
the atomic menace of Yankee imperialism.”
“We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims.
In the struggle to death between two systems we cannot think of
anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a
consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.”
Guevara explained it more succinctly to London’s Daily Worker in 1962 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he also rejected the possibility of peaceful co-existence.
“If
the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very
heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish a
peaceful coexistence.”
Ernesto Guevara was
executed summarily on October 9, 1967 in La Higuera, Bolivia after he
and his band of guerrillas were captured trying to overthrow the
legitimate government there and install a Castro style dictatorship. His
legacy at the time was already one of blood and terror that should be lamented not celebrated.
Comandante
Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still dead, his ideas are still toxic, and
need to be buried along with him. For example, the barbarism visited
upon the Israeli people by Hamas and Hezbollah, on October 7th and
October 8, 2023 respectively, both receiving support from the Cuban
dictatorship, demonstrates how the idea of resistance Guevara promoted
remain an obstacle to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Che's
so-called "achievement" with the Castro brothers was to replace an
authoritarian dictatorship with a totalitarian communist one, all while
claiming to be restoring democracy and the 1940 Constitution in Cuba.
The motorcycle diaries do not make up for this bloody legacy
that for 66 years and counting continues to rob Cubans of their
freedom, and spread totalitarian dictatorship to Nicaragua, and
Venezuela, negatively impacting tens of millions of lives.
The
history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So
information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a
defense against repetition. - Simon Wiesenthal
Liu Xiaobo was
one of the authors of Charter 08 and signed it along with more than
three hundred Chinese citizens. The Charter is a manifesto that was
released on December 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the adoption of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It calls for more freedom of
expression, human rights, more democratic elections, the privatization
of state enterprises and economic liberalization and would collect over
10,000 signatures.
Charter 08 is reminiscent of the
Varela Project that was initially signed by 11,020 Cubans in May of 2002
calling on the Cuban government to respect international human rights
norms and engage in the same kind of reforms. Both were inspired by Vaclav Havel and Charter 77. Lamentably, the author of the Varela Project,
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, founding leader of the Christian Liberation
Movement and a youth leader of the same movement, Harold Cepero
Escalante were both extrajudicially executed twelve years ago on July 22, 2012 in a crash engineered by the Cuban dictatorship's agents.
The demand for justice remains unfulfilled in all these cases, but we must not despair.
We bear witness embracing truth and memory in defiance of the attempt to whitewash and forget. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explained the importance of doing this in his 1986 Nobel Lecture on why it is important to remember:
"To
forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn't
prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a
second death." ... "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent
injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
In 2017, I was present at a candlelight vigil
in Washington, DC on July 17th organized by the Victims of Communism
Memorial Foundation to pay my respects for Liu Xiaobo and demonstrate my
solidarity with Chinese human rights defenders.
"The era of dictatorships and totalitarian systems has not ended at
all. It may have ended in a traditional form as we know it from the 20th
century, but new, far more sophisticated ways of controlling society
are being born. It requires alertness, carefulness, caution, study and a
detached view." - Václav Havel, "Freedom and Its Enemies" November 14, 2009.
On February 20, 2014 Russian troops invaded Ukraine, and seized Crimea. Eight years later, on February 24, 2022, Moscow began a new offensive to seize all of Ukraine, but unlike in Crimea, Russian troops were unable to achieve their new objective due to armed Ukrainian resistance.
The war continues to rage today, and Moscow has brought in troops and soldiers from around the world..
Equally disturbing are the links between Cuba and Iran, and their decades long hostility against the United States.
In a transmittal letter accompanying the Defense Department’s May 1998 report,The Cuban Threat to U.S. National Security,
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen wrote to the chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee: ‘‘I remain concerned about Cuba’s
potential to develop and produce biological agents, given its
bio-technology infrastructure.
In its public Executive Summary, the report stated,"Cuba’s current
scientific facilities and expertise could support an offensive BW
[bioweapons] program in at least the research and development stage.
Cuba’s biotechnology industry is one of the most advanced in emerging
countries and would be capable of producing BW agents.’’In the October
2001 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, Jose de la Fuente,the
former director of research and development at Cuba’s premier Center for
Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, wrote he was ‘‘profoundly
disturbed’’ that Cuba was selling to Iran technology that could be used
to produce biochemical weapons. He wrote, ‘‘No one believes that Iran is
interested in these technologies for the purpose of protecting all the
children in the Middle East from hepatitis, or treating their people
with cheap streptokinase when they suffer sudden cardiac arrest . . .."
During a May 2001 visit to Tehran, Fidel Castro proclaimed,"Iran and Cuba, in
cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees."
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, during a speech at the Imam Khomeini Mosque in Tehran in 2015, said Israel "will not see (the end) of
these 25 years.” This was just after the nuclear deal between Iran in which they agreed to cut its uranium stockpile.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, an Iranian proxy, invaded Israel killing 1,200, and taking hundreds of hostages. Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, began firing rockets into Israel.
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba are creating an alternative world order hostile to Western democracies and the rule of law.
There are two options. The first is to recognize the challenge, and develop intelligent strategies to counter it within a framework of Western alliances or secondly, ignore it, and pretend there is no threat and surrender to the new configuration of anti-democratic forces. The first is not without risk, but the latter guarantees servitude to tyranny.
However, with the first, there is an alternative to war. Cuban and Venezuelan freedom activists have made the case for it. Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-born human rights activist, actress, and 2023 Sydney Peace Laureate, made the same case in an OpEd published in Time today.
For decades, many of us pleaded with world leaders: reject both appeasement and war with the Islamic Republic. There was another path—to strangle the regime and empower the people. Few chose it. Too many asked the question, “Do the people of Iran really want change?” as if they did not hear waves of Iranian protestorschant, “Death to the dictator” and “Death to Khamenei” on the streets. Perhaps now—as these cries echo from the rooftops of Tehran, even under the specter of war—they will finally listen.
Ronald Reagan in his 1964 speech "A Time for Choosing" made the case plainly between the options of resistance and appeasement. "There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's
only one guaranteed way you can have peace - and you can have it in the
next second - surrender," said the future 40th President of the United States.
"The heroes of the tank picture are two: the unknown
figure who risked his life by standing in front of the juggernaut, and
the driver who rose to the moral challenge by refusing to mow down his
compatriot." - Pico Iyer
A Nonviolent moment: Tank Men face off in Beijing on June 5, 1989
On
June 5, 1989 in Beijing, following the Chinese Communist Party's
massive and bloody crackdown on thousands of Chinese students and
workers on June 3rd and 4th
after six weeks of protests that began in Tiananmen Square and spread
across 400 cities in China something remarkable happened in the midst of
all the horror and terror.
A man risked all to protest what had
taken place. Wearing a white t-shirt, black trousers, and carrying
what appeared to be a shopping bag he walked out on the north edge of Tiananmen Square, along Chang'an Avenue and faced down a column of Type-59 tanks.
Wider perspective of Tank Men protest with full column of tanks
Jianli Yang, a Tiananmen Massacre survivor and former Chinese political prisoner and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China in his important 2022 article in Newsweek provides the full significance and context of what happened.
"I was near Tiananmen Square in the early morning on June 4, just as
gunfire began. At one point, I was so close to the soldiers that I
shouted to them in their trucks and told them not to shoot. We even sang
songs that every Chinese knows, trying to touch their hearts. But when
they received the order, they just opened fire. I saw many killed,
including 11 students who were chased and run over by tanks on that
fateful day."
Photos appeared of what remained after a tank ran over a student, and this is what Tank Man was in danger of becoming.
In the video of the confrontation, the lead tank tried to drive around him, but the lone man repeatedly ran in
front of the tank to prevent its passing. The tank driver turned off his
engine and the rest of the column of tanks followed suit.
The protester
climbed on top of the tank and began to talk with him. Eventually he
climbed back down and the tank driver turned the engines on but the
protester once again blocked the tank column.
Jianli makes a powerful observation about this dynamic between the two men in the same OpEd in Newsweek.
"The Tank Man photo was taken the next day, on June 5, the morning
after, when the massacre was still ongoing. By any measure, this image
is one of heroism. But how many heroes do we see?
Nearly nine years after the picture was taken, the writer Pico Iyer
said: "The heroes of the tank picture are two: the unknown figure who
risked his life by standing in front of the juggernaut, and the driver
who rose to the moral challenge by refusing to mow down his compatriot."
Not
only did the driver refuse to kill, but he undoubtedly disobeyed orders
and risked—and perhaps received—punishment in order to save a
countryman's life."
We do not know the identities of
either Tank Man, or what happened to them, but we do know that for one
moment, in the midst of a blood bath perpetrated by the Chinese
Communist Party, humanity and dignity triumphed over repression in this
particular case.
For more information visit:
Standoff At Tiananmen How
Chinese Students Shocked the World with a Magnificent Movement for
Democracy and Liberty that Ended in the Tragic Tiananmen Massacre in
1989 http://www.standoffattiananmen.com/
The United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Chinese students condemned the crackdown by the “People’s Liberation Army.” Chinese students around the world took to the streets and protested the bloodshed in Beijing.
People of conscience the world over were horrified. Beijing was diplomatically shunned.
Cuba’s dictatorship endorsed the Tiananmen massacre to normalize relations with Beijing
In
contrast, the dictatorship in Cuba saw an opportunity to rekindle and
old friendship. Together with North Korea, and East Germany expressed their support for the actions taken by Beijing.
Cuban foreign minister Isidoro Malmierca commended Chinese authorities for “defeating the counterrevolutionary acts.” Fidel Castro openly supported Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, as a means to both preempt reform elements in the Cuban regime, and improve relations with Beijing.
“The
crackdown in Beijing, Qian says, completely changed the atmosphere
around his tour: many Latin American governments expressed their
disapproval of the suppression and cancelled his visits, and even the
overseas Chinese, who usually greeted visiting Chinese officials with
enthusiasm, had“stern faces” and questioned the reasons for using force.
Qian had planned a visit to Mexico before Cuba. The Mexican government
cancelled his visit but allowed him to go to Cuba via Mexico City.”
[…]
“But
Qian’s reception in Havana exceeded his expectations. He was greeted by
the Cuban foreign minister at the airport and brought to a welcome
dinner the next evening hosted by Fidel Castro himself. Castro had a
long talk with Qian at dinner which continued in his office until
midnight. Understanding Qian’s situation, Castro gave him a detailed
description of what had happened in Beijing since 4 June and the
international response, based on his collection of information and from
his own perspective. Castro said that he “completely supported the
Chinese government” and would offer “whatever occasions and facilities”
Qian might need to make his government’s voice heard.”
Cuba-Sino relations: From a warm embrace in 1960 to a decades long chill in relations
Communist China and Cuba had been close in the first years of the Castro regime. Mao Zedong had already been in power in China for a decade when the Castro regime took power in Cuba in 1959.
On September 28, 1960 the Cuban dictatorship diplomatically recognized the People’s Republic of China.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara led a Cuban delegation’s visit to Mainland China and met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other high ranking Chinese officials in November 1960 to discuss conditions in Cuba and in Latin America, and the prospects for communist revolution in the Americas.
Subsequently, between 1960 and 1964 the two regimes collaborated closely together.
Mao's regime in 1958 had embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a campaign to reorganize the Chinese populace to improve its agricultural and industrial production along communist ideological lines. The campaign was a disaster that led to mass famine and a death toll of at least 45 million which did not end until 1962.
The
visit by the Cuban delegation at the time did not go unnoticed in
Mainland China. Dimon Liu was born in China and immigrated to the United
States in 1965. She wrote about her early experiences growing up in the
midst of the Great Leap Forward in 2017 and her first encounter with Cuba while still in China.
It
was 1960, the height of famine during the years of Great Leap Forward. I
was a child living in the southern city of Guangzhou in China. Meal
time meant a little rice, and whatever we could scrape together. For
nearly two years, we had no meat, fish or even cooking oil. We were
starving.
All of a sudden, there was cane sugar from Cuba, and we
school kids had to learn Cuban songs. We had been on rations even before
the Great Leap Forward which began in 1958. Thirty jin (one jin is
about 1.1 pound) of grains per month for an adult, and fifteen jin for a
child above the age of seven. Two jin of meat and two ounces of cooking
oil, also for a month. [...] People on our streets were dying of many
infectious diseases, though no one dared to say anyone died of
hunger.[...]
Frank Dikotter, the historian at the University of
Hong Kong who wrote "Mao's Great Famine", a book about this period, said
in a social media post that "the first thing the regime did in
September 1960 was to procure an extra 100,000 tons of grain and ship it
to Cuba," in order to help break the economic blockade imposed by
Washington on the island. Dikotter added that "you can feed about 2000
people for a day with a ton of rice... Or over half a million people for
a year."
Properly fed people rarely existed in China at that
time, unless you belonged in the very small and exclusive club of
Chinese Communist elite. For a child like me who received coupons for
under 8 pounds of rice a month, you could have fed more than 2 million
of us for a year; or about half a million Chinese adults for a year on a
standard ration of 30 jin, or 33 pounds of rice per month for the
amount of grain sent to Cuba.
Cuba was not the only place that China exported food to during those harrowing years.
In
the midst of the Great Famine, while tens of millions of Chinese died
of hunger, Beijing exported food to their communist ally in Cuba.
Relations between China and the Castro regime cooled, and completely deteriorated following a February 6, 1966 speech
by Fidel Castro that was heavily critical of the Peoples Republic of
China. Havana finally sided with Moscow in the Sino-Soviet split.
Criticizing Mao
Castro, while receiving Soviet subsidies, would continue to slam the Chinese Communists in the 1970s.
“I
believe that Mao (Zedong) destroyed with his feet what he did with his
head for many years. I’m convinced of that. And some day the Chinese
people, the Communist party of China will have to recognize that,”
Castro told American journalist Barbara Walters in May 1977. He went on
to list what he said were Mao’s grave mistakes: a cult personality and
abuse of great power. “I also acquired that power, but I never abused
it, nor did I retain it in my hands,” Castro said. Although both Cuba
and China were functioning Communist states, Castro told Walters he
viewed China as a “good ally” of the US, which was a bitter enemy of
Cuba.
How Moscow drove Cuba into improving relations with Beijing
Russia’s
democratic spring in the mid to late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev led
to a cooling of relations between Havana and Moscow.
Perestroika
was a policy that recognized economic central planning was a failure,
and pursued reforming and restructuring the Soviet economy, and Glasnost was a policy that sought “more open consultative government and wider dissemination of information.”
These policies both instituted were viewed with great dread, and rejected by the Castro brothers. This was at a time when 75% of Cuba’s commercial exchanges were with the Soviet Union,
but that did not stop Havana from censoring Soviet publications, and
the beginning of the Castro brothers’ outreach to Beijing in 1989.
Havana’s successful engagement with Beijing: Harming U.S. interests and security
Backing
the massacre of thousands of Chinese nationals by the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) on the orders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
resulted in Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s high-level visit to Cuba in
1993. This was followed by Raul Castro’s first visit to China in 1997.
Prior
to this, Beijing quietly began in 1992 jointly operating intelligence
bases targeting the United States from Cuba, according to Chris Simmons,
a former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s Western
Hemisphere counterintelligence research section, revealed to the Miami Herald on July 4, 2024.
He said that U.S. surveillance services were unaware of the arrangement
until 2001, operating undetected for a period of nine years.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a report in December 2024
that identified four places in Cuba it believes are most likely to be
aiding China’s intelligence activities against the United States. One of
the authors of the report Ryan C. Berg,
Director, Americas Program, Center for Strategic and International
Studies, and Andrés Martínez-Fernández, Senior Policy Analyst, Latin
America, Allison Center for National Security, testified before Congress
on May 6, 2025. They point to these spy bases in Cuba being upgraded
with new technology.
This restored “special friendship” between two Communist
dictatorships was founded on the mass killing of Chinese civilians by
the PLA in June 1989, and Havana’s public support for this crime against humanity.
Following
this rapprochement, it is believed Havana began offering their biotech
knowledge, gained from Moscow, to their counterparts in Beijing, and in
2002, China and Cuba signed a formal agreement to produce monoclonal antibodies.
What
Cubans call “the Special Period” produced one notable success:
pharmaceuticals. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Cuba got so good at
making knockoff drugs that a thriving industry took hold. Today the
country is the largest medicine exporter in Latin America and has more
than 50 nations on its client list. Cuban meds cost far less than their
first-world counterparts, and Fidel Castro’s government has helped
China, Malaysia, India, and Iran set up their own factories:
“south-to-south technology transfer.”
“Díaz-Canel
emphasized the notable progress made by Cuba and China in the sphere of
biotechnology over recent years while also highlighting the close
collaboration that the two countries share in the sector; providing
great benefits and knowledge for both peoples.”
Without
Havana’s joint ventures over the past 20 years in Cuba, Beijing may not
have been in a position to have the capability to run a biotech /
genetic engineering lab like the one in Wuhan that caused so much
tragedy during the COVID pandemic.
Modernizing big brother for the 21st century
Raúl Castro met with China’s Minister of Public Security on December 1, 2024,
and Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei are providing Havana censorship
tools that are used to block information, track dissidents, silence
dissent, and shut down the internet during anti-government protests.
Communist China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning on June 4, 2024 described Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla as a “good old friend of China.” Rodríguez’s official visit from June 5 to 9,
2024 as a special envoy of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel
highlighted the two communist regimes’ “special friendship.” Never
forget that this rekindled friendship was forged in the blood spill 36
years ago in Tiananmen Square.
A 2017 declassified British diplomatic cable revealed that
"at least 10,000 people were killed. The Chinese Communist regime still defends committing this massacre, and is punishing those who seek to remember and observe the date.
George Orwell wrote in "As I Please" in the Tribune on February 4, 1944 that "[t]he
really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits
'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it
claims to control the past as well as the future."
We are witnessing this attempt to silence the victims, erase
and rewrite the history of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the
crackdown and massacre that began on June 3, 1989 through social media
and in the real world. People are being arrested for engaging in silent,
nonviolent protests in remembrance of students and workers murdered by
the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on orders of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP).
Making this known is the most effective method to combat
it by amplifying the voices of those impacted, and who continue to demand justice. Below is the 2025 declaration by the Tiananmen Mothers, translated by Human Rights in China.
The Tiananmen Mothers have issued the following statement on the 36th anniversary of the June Fourth (Tiananmen) Massacre. Read the English version here, translated by HRIC: https://t.co/KhwPP02FeJpic.twitter.com/97y1d0ZCEA
— 中国人权-Human Rights in China (@hrichina) May 29, 2025
The Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote that "[t]he struggle of man against
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." This is the
challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party in its effort to
erase the mass protests, months long occupation and crackdown in
Tiananmen Square, and across China. It is also why we must remember and
honor courageous Chinese dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo martyred for his commitment to nonviolence and democracy.
If you are in the Washington DC area then join the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation on June 4 at 8:00pm at the Victims of Communism Memorial located on the corner of New Jersey and Massachusetts Avenues to honor the
legacy of the brave men and women who stood for freedom, and paid the ultimate price, at their annual
Tiananmen Square Massacre candlelight vigil
Please also share over social media documentary information on what happened. For example, the three hour 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, provides an over view of the entire protest, and its context in Chinese history, and it is available online. The BBC in 2019 provided a more concise synopsis of the crackdown which is shared below.
Today is "International Women's Day" and over the internet socialists,
communists, and well meaning persons are celebrating a holiday that was
first celebrated on February 28, 1909 by the Socialist Party of America, but
today's date, March 8th, is owed to a tragic history.
This would lead eight months
later to the October Revolution
and the rise of the Bolsheviks and 74 years of totalitarian communist
rule that led to tens of millions dead. The February Revolution that
took place on March 8th in our Gregorian calendar is the origin of the
reason that International Women's Day is celebrated today, and that is
problematic. However, it is here to stay, the United Nations formally recognized it in 1975.
This year's observance was especially problematic because they were also celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration which I called out in a Twitter thread. No sense of irony that feminists gathered in Communist China in 1995 at a time that not only were Chinese women's bodily autonomy completely under state control, and Chinese baby girls were slowly being killed in dying rooms due to their gender.
22 years later the New York Times was still gender washing the communist misogynist regime in China.
On September 25, 2017 at 8:11pm NYT Opinion tweeted:
"For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to
dream big" and sparked an online conversation with many outraged at what
they rightfully described as a white wash of a mass murdering
dictatorship.
Some necessary context on the Beijing regime and women
Mao Zedong took power
on October 1, 1949 and ruled with an iron fist until his death on
September 9, 1976 and left a record of carnage difficult to equal over
27 years that included horrors inflicted on Chinese women.
China expert Frank Dikotter explained how in "1968, millions were sent to the countryside after they finished school,
some of whom were girls as young as 14. Thousands of young girls were
left at the mercy of villagers and raped.” Xinran in her 2002 The Good Women of China described how young girls suffered the worse of the sexual horrors in the Cultural Revolution: "The perpetrators were their teachers, their
friends, even their fathers and brothers, who lost control of their
animal instincts."
Mao died in 1976 and the decade long blood letting came to an end.
During Mao's Cultural Revolution thousands of young women were raped in camps
But the communist regime continued on, after the founder's departure, and three years later began it's infamous one-child policy. On September 26, 1980 The New York Times ran a UPI story reporting
that "Chinese Reds Limited To a Child Per Family" and euphemistically
wrote "China intensified its population-control drive today by ordering
the 38 million Communist Party members to have only one child per
family" and how the policy would use "painstaking patience and
persuasion." 15 years later Time Magazine reported in 2015 that "patience and persuasion" included "forced abortions and sterilization, and a gender imbalance resulting from female infanticide."
Tom Hilditch in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), reproduced in World
Press Review, in September of 1995 described it as a "A Holocaust of Little Girls" and reported on the plight of a Chinese baby girl in an orphanage:
Mei-ming has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked
blankets, scabs of
dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull,
malnutrition slowly shriveling her two-year old body. The orphanage
staff call her room the "dying
room", and they have abandoned here for the very same reasons her
parents abandoned
her shortly after she was born. She is a girl. When Mei-ming dies four
days later, it will be of sheer neglect. Afterward, the
orphanage will deny she ever existed. She will be just another
invisible victim of the
collision between China's one-child policy and its traditional
preference for male heirs.
She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have disappeared
from China's
demographics since the one-child-per-family policy was introduced in
1979.
Communist China continued the one child policy until 2015.
Amnesty International, not a right wing group, monitored how Beijing's one child policy operated in practice and in 1996 published the report China: No one is safe and presented details and specific cases.
Birth control policy in China
The official line
Family
planning is “voluntary”, although birth control has been compulsory
since 1979. Government demographers recommend stabilization of the
population at 1.3 billion by the year 2000, which they say can only be
achieved through “strict measures”. “Coercion is not permitted”,
according to the State Family Planning Commission.
Some facts
-Women pregnant outside the plan have been abducted and forced to have abortions or undergo sterilization.
-Pregnant women have been detained and threatened until they agree to have abortions.
-People who refuse to comply with the policy have been harassed and some have been ill-treated by officials.
-“Above-quota” new-born babies have reportedly been killed by doctors under pressure from officials.
-The homes of couples who refuse to obey the child quotas have been demolished.
-Relatives
of those who cannot pay fines imposed for having had too many children
have been held hostage until the money was paid.
-Those helping families to have “above quota” children have been severely punished.
-Those committing human rights violations while enforcing the birth control policy often go unpunished.
A victim
An
unmarried woman in Hebei province who had adopted one of her brother’s
children was detained several times in an attempt to force her brother
to pay fines for having had too many children. In November 1994 she was
held for seven days with a dozen other men and women. She was reportedly
blindfolded, stripped naked, tied and beaten with an electric baton.
Quote:
‘It was part of my work to force women...to have abortions. In the
evening, when the couple was likely to be at home, we would go to their
houses and drag the woman out. If the woman was not at home, we would
take her husband or another member along and keep them in custody until
the woman turned herself in.’ - A former family planning official, 1993
Some would attempt to argue that it is the Chinese cultural baggage, and not the communist ideology that is responsible for this mistreatment of women, but other communist dictatorship have different, but equally misogynistic track records that have inspired works of great literature.
One of the specific events that Margaret Atwood found during her
research process was “Decree 770” in Romania. This was a law that passed
in 1967 that made abortions and all forms of contraception illegal.
This had nothing to do with religious beliefs. It was an action that the
government believed was necessary for the future of their country. The
government already taxed married couples a 6% income tax if they did not
have children between the ages of 25 and 50, but they realized that
this was not enough to stop people from using contraception.
During the 1950’s, Romanian women were entering the workforce and having
fewer children. By the 1960’s, abortion became a common practice,
because there were very few birth control options available to women to
prevent pregnancy. This began a sharp dip in the country’s birth rate.
The Communist Party wanted the population to increase from 23 million to
30 million in a single year, so they enacted Decree 770. After the
change of law in 1967, and women no longer had access to birth control,
the number of babies born that year skyrocketed to roughly double what
they had been the year before. Thousands of new preschools and nursery
schools had to be built. Orphanages were overflowing with children whose
parents could not afford them.
Aside from making abortions illegal and
taking contraception off of store shelves, women’s bodies were
literally policed. Decree 770 forced women to visit the gynecologist
once a month to check for pregnancy, and police officers stood in the
halls to make sure women complied. If a woman was pregnant, the doctors
followed her progress very closely. Wealthy women were able to buy birth
control pills and condoms on the black market, but poor women did not
have that option. There were some cases where women caught the pregnancy
before the doctors did, and some women died while attempting to give
themselves an at-home abortion. The policy continued until the fall of
the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.
Hundreds of thousands of women and children were subjected to this in Romania, and millions of women were forced to have children.
Women leaders in communist regimes are few and far between, such as Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, in China, Elena Ceaușescu in Romania, and Vilma Espín
in Cuba who became high profile figures because of their respective
husbands. They owed whatever power they had to their husbands.
Independent women with popular support and their own power base did not
fare well under these regimes.
10,000 Romanian babies infected with HIV via dirty needles
Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1966 that Romania would develop its “human
capital” via a government-enforced mandate to increase the country's
population. Ceauşescu, Romania's leader from 1965 to 1989, banned
contraception and abortions and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families
that had fewer than five children. State doctors—the menstrual
police—conducted gynecologic examinations in the workplace of women of
childbearing age to see whether they were producing sufficient
offspring. The birth rate initially skyrocketed. Yet because families
were too poor to keep their children, they abandoned many of them to
large state-run institutions.
Hundreds of thousands of Romanian children were subjected to this. However, a better world is possible, not a perfect one, but a better one.
Democracies with market economies and the rule of law do not engage in these horrors.
They have seen the rise of women leaders around the world:
Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Indira
Gandhi in India, Angela Merkel in Germany, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in
Iceland, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Kim Campbell in Canada,
Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Erna Solberg in Norway, Simonetta Sommaruga
in Switzerland, and the list goes on for a while.
Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher
International Women's Day should be a day to celebrate democracy and
markets as instruments for the empowerment of women, and observe closely
the dystopian record for women under communist regimes, and resolve to
resist the system that inspired Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, not a day for communist self-promotion.
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