Many viewed the Tiananmen Square massacre as a crime, but the Cuban dictatorship saw it as an opportunity.

How the events of June 4, 1989 in China allowed Havana to rekindle relations with Beijing

 

A crime against the Chinese people by the Chinese Communist Party

Thirty six years ago the non-violent Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement was subjected to a military crackdown in which at least 10,000 Chinese people were killed.

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.

Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen’s visit to Latin America took place in the midst of the crackdown, and he described the contrast between Havana’s warm welcome and the disapproval of many other countries in the region.

“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.

Journalist Chieu Luu, in his CNN article “Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China: Communist regimes that never saw eye to eye” published on November 26, 2016 recalled the late Cuban dictator’s critique of Mao Zedong in 1977.

“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.

By 2004 Cuba had joint ventures in China that included both biotech, and genetic engineering. Douglass Starr in Wired Magazine on December 1, 2004 reported on this phenomenon in the article “ The Cuban Biotech Revolution“.

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.”

In 2015, then vice-president Miguel Diaz-Canel visited Beijing and praised Havana’s collaboration with Communist China in the sphere of biotechnology. Granma, Cuba’s official national communist newspaper, reported on the Cuban vice-president’s visit to a biotech facility in China.

“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.

Remembering Dr. Li Wenliang: the hero who warned about the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China and paid a terrible price

How the Chinese Communist Party prioritized power, punishing whistleblowers such as Dr. Li Wenliang, and plunged the world into a pandemic.

Dr. Li Wenliang warned about Covid-19

 

Today remembering Dr. Li Wenliang, the hero who warned about the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. He was grabbed by secret police in the middle of the night and threatened with prosecution for making "untrue statements." 

He died two years ago today on February 7, 2020. The police state had silenced him and COVID-19 took his life, but the whistleblower is not forgotten despite the efforts of Beijing to erase him. 

On March 15, 2020 this blog warned about Communist regimes, such as the ones operating in China and Cuba, to engage in the "denial of objective reality, truth and an ability to systematically lie to achieve is sometimes effective in taking over a country and imposing a totalitarian dictatorship, but is a disaster when dealing with infectious diseases, and an outbreak such as the coronavirus."

Dr. Li Wenliang warned about intitial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan

Others in China, who questioned the Chinese Communist dictatorship's response to COVID-19 went missing. A high profile case was Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang who "wrote in a scathing essay that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was a power-hungry 'clown.' He said the ruling Communist Party’s strict limits on free speech had exacerbated the coronavirus epidemic," reported  Javier C. Hernández in The New York Times on March 14, 2020. 

Mr. Zhiqiang went missing at the time, and reappeared in September 2020 when he was found "guilty of corruption, bribery and embezzlement of public funds" in a Beijing court fined $620,000 and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The message to the Chinese populace is clear: criticize the Chinese Communist leadership at your own peril. Transparency and the free exchange of ideas and data are non-existent in such an environment. 

This is not good in the midst of a pandemic.

Rewarding this behavior that has led to the loss of millions of lives with a Winter Olympics is an outrage. This is part of the reason why I am boycotting the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year, and encourage others to do so.

Please watch and share "The Story Of Coronavirus Whistleblower: Dr Li Wenliang" made by Brut India.

Will democracies recognize that Communist China is a menace, not a trusted partner?

“In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn 

Xi Jinping or Mao Ze Dong: Who will end up being the greatest mass murderer?

Original Source: Freedom Synergy

There is a willful blindness when dealing with China’s dictatorship that is now costing the world much in the way of lives and treasure.

This Communist regime took power in 1949 and to reorganize the Chinese populace, its agricultural and industrial production along communist ideological lines created a mass famine and a death toll of 30 million Chinese between 1959 and 1961that it called the Great Leap Forward. 

In the midst of it communist China exported 9.6 million tons of grain, that accounted for 20% of famine deaths. Seven million more were killed between 1966 and 1976 in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. 

During “liberalization”, another half million people were killed, including students and workers massacred in June 1989. A British diplomatic cable, declassified in 2017, revealed that at least 10,000 were killed in the Chinese army's 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

Despite this history, Democracies pursued a policy of empowering this regime, providing foreign direct investment, turning it into an economic powerhouse. 

They believed the monstrous regime would change for the better, they were wrong.

China covered up a November 2002 outbreak of an "atypical pneumonia called severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)."  Officials became aware of the illness in December 2002 and in January 2003, reports were marked top secret, and anyone who broke the silence on the outbreak would risk punishment for leaking state secrets. Because of the delay in making it public, the SARS outbreak spread to 8,096 people in 26 countries, killing 774 before it was contained.

This pattern was repeated in the November 2019 SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Wuhan, identified by physicians in December 2019, and covered up by the communist hierarchy, who ordered test results destroyed. On December 30, 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang “who sounded the first alarms and released initial evidence online” was punished by the Chinese government for releasing the information. He allegedly perished from the Wuhan virus.” 

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on March 26, 2020 that in January 2020 and continuing through February the "Chinese government-backed global property giant Greenland Group were instructed to put their normal work on hold and source bulk supplies of essential medical items to ship back to China."  This was a worldwide effort "sourcing bulk supplies of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitizers, gloves and [acetaminophen] for shipping." ... "According to a company newsletter, the Greenland Group sourced 3 million protective masks, 700,000 hazmat suits and 500,000 pairs of protective gloves from "Australia, Canada, Turkey and other countries"  

On January 11, 2020 the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission resumed updating infection cases of the new virus after suspending reports for several days. But the Chinese dictatorship repeated its claim that there had been no medical worker infections and that there was no evidence of human transmission, and reported that the number of confirmed cases had dropped to 41. On January 22, 2020 official Chinese TV finally recognizes that the disease was spreading from person-to-person. Two days later, Wuhan, a city of 11 million, was placed on lock down.

Antonio Regalado writing in Technology Review on March 4, 2020 reported that genetic sequencing research showed that the first cases of Coronavirus entered Europe and the United States from China as early as mid-January when both Beijing and the World Health Organization were denying the severity of the outbreak. SARS-CoV-2 has spread to over 721,903 individuals in 186 countries with 33,996 dead and climbing. 

Nevertheless on January 23rd the World Health Organization (WHO), that based its response on reports provided by Beijing, said “novel coronavirus is not a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).” Seven days later, WHO finally declared the Wuhan Virus a PHEIC, but continued to defend the Chinese response as exemplary.

On February 1, 2020 the United States  announced that it would "deny entry to all foreign visitors who had recently been in China."  The head of WHO criticized the measure stating it, "can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies."  On February 3, 2020, China accused the United States of creating and spreading fear because it had closed entry to recent foreign visitors to China.

On February 3, 2020 news appears in Mother Jones that the Russians were engaged in a disinformation campaign charging that the United States was to blame for the Coronavirus outbreak in Cuba.

Beijing began an effort to sell aide, it had stockpiled, around the world in a highly visible manner in an effort to present itself as humanitarian. However, between 70 to 80% of  the COVID-19 test kits that China firms sold to Spain, the Czech Republic, and Turkey were defective and sparked outrage in these countries.     

The New York Times reported on February 28, 2020 that China was spinning that it was the leader in responding to the Coronavirus outbreak, and accused the United States and South Korea of responding too slowly.  Foreign Policy reported on March 2nd that in the prior week the Chinese had also been peddling that the United States was responsible for starting the pandemic, echoing earlier Russian disinformation.  

China claims it has the outbreak under control, but in Wuhan there are still hours long lines to collect the ashes of their dead loved ones.

The consequences in lives lost and wealth destroyed by this pandemic will take some time to calculate, but at this early date point to large numbers on both counts.

Will democracies learn their lesson that empowering China, a regime that has murdered tens of millions of its own people, and systematically lies about dangerous epidemics should not be legitimized or economically empowered or will short term greed triumph again?