Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother, by Carlos Eire.
One of the most brutal dictators in modern history has just died. Oddly enough, some will mourn his passing, and many an obituary will praise him. Millions of Cubans who have been waiting impatiently for this moment for more than half a century will simply ponder his crimes and recall the pain and suffering he caused.
If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.
- He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
- He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
- He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
- He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
- He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
- He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
- He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state. - He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
- He censored all means of expression and communication.
- He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
- He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
- He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.
PC exemplar! And don’t the left leaning politicians love him and sanitize his image.
Why the crisis in media credibility? The gulf between the real Fidel Castro and the man lionized by US media could be a case study.
Donald Trump: Fidel Castro is dead!
This is actually the best world-leader reaction I’ve seen so far.
Finally Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the EU Commission:
With the death of Fidel Castro the world has lost a man who was a hero for many.
Hence Brexit.
