Fidel Castro (Havana, 11.07.2014) Source: www.kremlin.ru

Fidel Castro Is Still Dead — And His Crimes Live On

Communist militants are celebrating the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth on August 13th and the tenth anniversary of his death on November 25, 2016. The Cuban dictator who accumulated nearly every title of power—First Secretary of the Communist Party, President of the Council of State, President of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister, and Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement—died at 90 without ever answering for his crimes against humanity.

Too many still ignore those crimes when they reflect on his legacy. This includes 73,000 Cubans killed under Fidel Castro’s decades long rule.

Castro transferred power to his brother Raúl and left behind a dictatorship that continues to terrorize Cubans and export repression. From Nicaragua to Ethiopia to Venezuela, he helped other tyrants seize and hold power while murdering and silencing dissenters. Predictably, the regime staged nine days of official mourning and forced spectacles of grief, while its secret police rounded up dissidents, issued threats, and committed violence—exactly as totalitarian regimes have done from Stalin’s Soviet Union to the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

Apologists still defend his “legacy” and recycle lies, remaining silent about how the U.S. government and The New York Times helped undermine Fulgencio Batista and clear Castro’s path to power. The inconvenient facts about pre-1959 Cuba—with all its flaws—and the far worse totalitarian system that replaced it are well documented for anyone willing to look.

Castro treated truth as a tool. In the 1950s he repeatedly denied being a communist, knowing the admission would cost him support. On Dec. 2, 1961, he confessed: “If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains.” By March 26, 1964, he redefined truth itself: “I conceive the truth in terms of a just and noble end… If it does not serve a just, noble and positive end, truth, as an abstract entity… does not exist.” Those who knew him, such as José Ignacio Rasco, understood he had been a committed communist since at least 1950.

He explicitly rejected the universality of human rights. In his 1961 “Words to the Intellectuals,” Castro declared: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” Dissenters were branded counterrevolutionaries and stripped of rights. The formulation was not original—it echoed Mussolini’s “Everything is in the State, and nothing… exists… outside the State.” The consequences included the international scandal of the Padilla Affair in 1971 and decades of censorship, imprisonment, and exile for writers, artists, and ordinary citizens.

Castro’s regime was openly homophobic. In 1965 he stated that a homosexual could never be a “true revolutionary” or “true communist militant.” In a March 13, 1963 speech he attacked “long-haired layabouts,” those in tight trousers who imitated Elvis Presley, and organizers of “effeminate shows,” warning that society “cannot accept these degenerates.” Gays and rock-and-rollers were sent to forced-labor camps known as UMAP.

He also dismantled Black Cuban agency. While claiming racial discrimination had “disappeared,” the regime closed the 256 independent Negro societies that had existed. Black nationalist Juan René Betancourt wrote in the NAACP’s The Crisis in 1961 that “the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” Autonomous Black civil society was replaced by a system demanding obedience to the white revolutionary elite, complete with racist tropes in official propaganda. Independent-minded Black Cubans were punished.

Even abroad, Castro cheered repression. Visiting East Berlin in 1972, he praised the “courageous and self-denying border guards” who shot East Germans fleeing across the Berlin Wall.

Fidel Castro died without facing justice. His system of lies, repression, and exported dictatorship endures. Cubans continue to suffer under the apparatus he built. He is still dead. The damage he inflicted is not.

Below is fact check of some of the main defenses made by Castro apologists to justify the Cuban dictatorship, and the beginning of an article published today in the Brussels Signal exposing Fidel Castro’s hypocrisy on income inequality and questions of equity.

Daniel Raisbeck and John Osterhoudt at Reason on Monday April 18, 2022 premiered a documentary on “The Myth of Cuban Health Care” that is required viewing. Not mentioned in the report is that other Latin American countries ( Costa Rica, and Chile ) rate higher than the U.S. on international indices with regards to their healthcare systems, but are rarely mentioned as models to emulate. Despite Cuba’s unreliable and inflated statistics, its health care system still rates lower than the United States.

Anything that does not fit the narrative is memory holed.

Three of 26 patients who died of exposure in 2010 in Cuba

For example, in January 2010 pictures smuggled out of the Cuban psychiatric hospital Mazorra revealed that patients were dying of exposure to the elements, and had suffered greatly through their time there. Claudia Cadelo, now exiled out of Cuba, wrote in 2010 her reaction to seeing this photos:

When I opened the little folder called “Mazorra” a series of monstrosities hit me in the face and I couldn’t stop looking at the cruel graphic testimony. A friend who is a doctor visited and while he analyzed images I didn’t have the courage to look at, expressions like, “Holy Virgin Mary, Blessed God, What in God’s name is this?” issued from his outraged throat, mixed with obscure pathologies and the names of diseases both treatable and curable. Enormous livers, tubercular lungs, and wormy intestines are the proof, Senora Arlin, of the sacredness of life in Cuba. Meanwhile The Roundtable throws a fit because the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo has unmasked a crumbling public health system, and they try to cover up the disgrace of seeing soldiers dragging and beating a group of women dressed in white with flowers in their hands. I ask myself, Gentlemen Journalists, when will they explain to Cubans the reasons why twenty-six mentally incapacitated people died in inhumane conditions during their confinement in Mazorra?

Havana was forced to acknowledge what had happened thanks to the still unknown whistleblower and courageous independent journalists who made the images public. The New York Times reported on January 15, 2020 that “26 patients at a mental hospital died during a cold snap this week, the government said Friday. A Health Ministry communiqué blamed “prolonged low temperatures that fell to 38 degrees.”

Katherine Hirschfeld, is a medical anthropologist who spent time in Cuba examining the healthcare system and author of the book Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 published in 2009. In 2018 Professor Hirschfeld in the journal Health Policy and Planning made the case for democratic norms generating better results in public health in “Response to ‘Cuban infant mortality and longevity: health care or repression?’” and analyzed the shortcomings found in Havana’s governing style.

”The regime governs from the top down, as a dynastic military dictatorship that does not permit anyone outside the government—no independent associations of health professionals or journalists—to objectively assess policy outcomes. The role of public media in an autocracy is instead to praise the regime and explain away its failures as the work of real or imagined political enemies. Public information about health trends is correspondingly configured to fit these predetermined narratives.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, mentioned in the documentary above, again demonstrated Havana’s mastery in setting the narrative of “great successes in healthcare by the Cuban Revolution” in contrast with the stark reality on the ground in Cuba.

Education in Cuba is a politicized, underfunded mess

Ethiopia

Castro witth Mengistu in Addis Ababa celebrating the 4th anniversary of the Ethiopian monarch’s regicide on September 15, 1978.

Human Rights Watch in their 2008 report on Ethiopia titled outlined “Collective Punishment War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region” some of the practices carried out by Cuban troops sent there by Fidel and Raul Castro excerpted below:

In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”

Charles Lane of The Washington Post in the December 1, 2016 article “Castro was no liberator” raises the following question that touches heavily on Ethiopia:

Mengistu participated in a successful military coup against the U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, eventually seizing power on Feb. 3, 1977,by massacring his rivals in the officer corps. Castro admired this bloody deed as a preemptive strike against “rightists” that showed “wisdom” and cleared the way for Cuba to support Mengistu “without any constraints,” as he explained to East German dictator Erich Honecker in an April 1977 meeting whose minutes became public after the fall of European communism. […] With the Cuban forces watching his back, Mengistu wrapped up his bloody campaign of domestic repression, known as “the Red Terror,” and sent his own Soviet-equipped, Cuban-trained troops to crush a rebellion in Eritrea. The last Cuban troops did not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.