“High infant mortality” — (in fact, Cuba’s infant mortality in 1958 was the 13th lowest — not in Latin America, not in the Hemisphere — but in the WORLD — lower than Ireland’s.)
“Subhuman housing” — (in fact, Mr. English, Cuba’s per capita income in 1958 was higher than half of Europe’s, including Ireland’s.)
“Dispossession of small farmers” — (in fact, Cuba’s agricultural wages in 1958 were higher than half of Europe’s, including Ireland’s. And — far from huge latifundia hogging the Cuban countryside — the average Cuban farm in 1958 was SMALLER than the average in the U.S.)
"Illiteracy” — (In fact, Mr. English, in a mere 50 years since a war of independence that cost Cuba almost a fifth of her population, Cuba managed 80 per cent literacy and budgeted the most (23% of national expenses) for public education of any Latin American country (more than Ireland, by the way). Better still, Cubans were not just literate but also educated, allowed to read George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara.
You will be shocked to hear that English’s sources (like Jon Lee Anderson’s sources for Che, A Revolutionary Life) are primarily officials of Cuba’s Stalinist regime which English visited often. Indeed, English dedicates his book to one such official, Enrique Cirules, who he calls a “Cuban author.” Fine, I’ll call Julius Streicher “a German author.” and Ilya Ehrenburg “a Russian author. “
The Willion & Morrow published book continues the "Idiot’s Guide" manual in Cuban history by rationalizing Castro’s Stalinist regime from the get-go. "U.S. business owned much of the prime land."
In fact, of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills 1958, only 40 were U.S. owned. And United Fruit — the outfit generally cast as the Boss Hog/Luigi Barzini/J.R. Ewing/Snidely Whiplash/Hannibal Lecter in this episode — owned only a third of these. And according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in 1958 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 13 per cent of Cuba’s GNP.
"44 per cent of Cubans — a higher percentage than Americans — are covered by social legislation," starts a report on Cuba dated 1957. “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker was also among the highest in the world, higher than in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent.”
Prior to Castro, Cuban industrial workers had the 8th highest wages — not in Latin America, not in the hemisphere — but in the world. Cuba had established an 8-hour work-day in 1933 — five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. The much-lauded (by liberals) Social-Democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this till 30 years later.
These aren’t the ravings of a "Cuban exile right-wing crackpot!" (me) this right-wing crackpot is only regurgitating a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba from 1957.
When no New York Times reporters, CNN correspondents, and eminent American Ivy League and Think-Tank scholars are within hearing range, Commies can be extremely frank with each other.
Early in the Cuban revolution, for instance, Czech economist Radoslav Selucky visited Cuba and was rudely awakened: "We thought Cuba was underdeveloped except for a few sugar refineries?!" he wrote when he got home to Prague. "This is false. Almost a quarter of Cuba’s labor force was employed in industry where the salaries were equal to those in the U.S.!"
Now here’s Che Guevara himself in 1961 after he returned to Cuba with his Cuban underlings from a lengthy tour of Eastern Europe: "We’re not going to say we only saw marvels in those countries, " admitted Che who (given their national propensity for sarcasm had undoubtedly heard much scoffing and snickering from his Cuban subalterns about the — to them — pathetic socio-economic conditions in the major capitols of Eastern Europe — that Cuba was supposed to emulate!!)
"Naturally for a 20 th Century Cuban with all the luxuries which Imperialism has accustomed him,” Wrote Che Guevara, “much of what he saw (in eastern Europe) struck him as belonging to undeveloped countries.”
But fear not! As Cuba’s Economics minister, Che Guevara was already plotting on how to wipe those snickers from those Cubans faces!
He (Che Guevara) as Cuba’s Economic Czar, converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland, a huge influx of immigrants and whose workers enjoyed the 8th-highest industrial wages in the world into one that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (again, into a nation of 6.4 million) — an economic feat that defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics. One place where Cuban exiles agree wholeheartedly with Castro and Che is regarding their exalted posts as Third World icons. He and Che certainly converted Cuba into a Third World nation.
We turn now to a United Nations (no less!) study of Cuba circa 1958. "Cuba has a tremendous advantage in national integration over other Latin American countries because of a largely homogeneous white Spanish immigrant base. Cuba’s smaller Negro population is also culturally integrated. Those feudal modes of labor that exist in the rest of Latin America, don’t exist in Cuba. The Cuban campesino does not resemble the one in the rest of Latin America who is tied to the land, and is profoundly tradition-bound and opposed to innovations which would link him to a market economy. The Cuban campesino, in all respects, is a modern man. They have an educational level and a familiarity with modern methods unseen in the rest of Latin America."Here’s a Handy List of Atrocities for Everyone Glorifying Fidel Castro Today
Fidel Castro jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six.
Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value.
Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.
In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.
Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.
Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.
Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media recently?
In fact, from their reactions, all that dancing in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana this week-end seems to strike some talking heads as odd, if not downright unseemly.
Cuban-Americans are dancing in the streets of Little Havana after hearing of Fidel Castro’s death. twitter.com/i/moments/8024…
But prior to the big news this week-end many of those same celebrants could be found with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst long rows of white crosses in Miami’s Cuban Memorial. It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts, in honor of Fidel Castro’s murder victims.
The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Obama just consoled with an official note of condolence.
Some of those future celebrants were often found kneeling at the Cuban Memorial, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You might remember a similar scene from the opening frames of “Saving Private Ryan.” Many clutched rosaries. Many of the ladies would be pressing their faces into the breast of a young relative who drove them there, a relative who wrapped his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.
Try as he might not to cry himself, this relative usually found that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt were contagious. Yet he was often too young to remember the young face of his martyred father, grandfather, uncle, cousin -or even aunt, mother grandmother– the name they just recognized on the white cross.
“Fusilado” (firing squad execution) it says below the name– one word, but for most visitors to the Cuban Memorial a word loaded with traumatizing flashbacks.
On Christmas Eve 1961, Juana Diaz Figueroa spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits.” (Castro and Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight their theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns–at first anyway. Then the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact left them defenseless against Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers. When the blast from Castro’s firing squad demolished Juana Diaz’ face and torso, she was six months pregnant.
Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Castro’s prison guards dragged him from his jail cell, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”
“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. “We executive from Revolutionary conviction!” sneered the man whose peaceful death in bed President Obama seems to mourn.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.
According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll–from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.–approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.
It’s not enough that liberals refuse to acknowledge any justification for these Miami celebrations. No, on top of that here’s the type of thing the celebrants are accustomed to hearing from the media and famous Democrats:
“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)
“Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend.” (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)
“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official “Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)
“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)
“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)
“Castro’s personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country.” (Barbara Walters.)
“Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)
Whatever else you might say about Fidel Castro, nobody ever accused him of misreading the U.S. mainstream media.
“Much more valuable to us than military recruits for our guerrilla army were recruiting American reporters to export our propaganda.” (Fidel Castro’s sidekick Che Guevara, 1959.)
“Without the help of the New York Times, the Revolution in Cuba would never have been.” (Fidel Castro while pinning a medal on NYTimes reporter Herbert Matthews, April, 1959.)
As seen from the quotes above, the propaganda services by much of the mainstream media for the Castro regime continues apace—despite half a century of terror-sponsorship, mass-murder, and mass-torture by the object of their adulation.
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