Fidel Castro, RIP

Decent beard, otherwise way over-rated, except as a hypocrite.

're-education camps' for homosexuals - what a guy!

Admire a murderous dictator?

Unbelievable.

Reality -1959 infant mortality rate in Cube before Fidel 3rd highest in the world, illiteracy rate among the lowest in the world. By 1969 Cube had & still has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world & one of the highest literacy rates.

The Harvard-trained scholar Armando Lago, in his book The Black Book of Communism, first published in French, (1997) then in English 1999, made an attempt to list Castro’s deaths since 1959. So far the deaths of 97,000 persons have been named, each confirmed by at least two sources. Some 30,000 executed by firing squad, 2,000 extra-judicial assassinations, 5,000 deaths in prison due to beating by guards and denial of medical care and 60,000 deaths while trying to escape Cuba by sea. According to Dr. Lago's and his ongoing-research partner, Cuba Archive President Maria Werlau, 78,000 innocents may have died trying to flee the dictatorship. Another 5,300 are known to have lost their lives fighting communism in the Escambray Mountains (mostly peasant farmers and their children) and at the Bay of Pigs. Another estimated 14,000 Cubans were killed in Fidel's revolutionary adventures abroad, most notably his dispatch of 50,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1980s to help the Soviet-backed regime fight off the Unita insurgency. Their 2005 total ranges between 90,827 and 102,722 deaths. The estimates of Cubans killed range from 35,000 to 141,000 (1959-1987) according to and available on the site of R. J. Rummel-University of Hawaii, “Power Kills.”

Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.

While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.

Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.

Donald J. Trump

At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands—almost all the cattle ranches—90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions—80 percent of the utilities—practically all the oil industry—and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports.

Kingtut
esco is too busy nuzzling up to the warm bossom of a desired trumpian utopia, he's drunk on the thought that the mothers milk of tax cuts for the 1% will somehow make his lot better.

Fidel Castro Predicts Nuclear War

by Humberto Fontova


The dictator who came the closest in history to igniting a nuclear war made several public appearances this week to predict imminent nuclear war. The cataclysm he craved in Oct. 1962 will erupt, he warned on Cuban TV this week, when the Israelis and their Yankee vassals, provoke Iran in the straits of Hormuz.

That’s not a typo above. Castro, who co-sponsored the famous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism, says the Israeli tail wags the Yankee dog. Those Yankees are certainly powerful, Castro explained, but also a bit naïve and docile. The main instigators, the ones carefully setting the trap to ignite nuclear war are those crafty Israelis. "The control that Israel has over the United States is enormous," he revealed last week.

Fidel Castro, that sentimental old fool, has excellent reason to bask in the fond memory of imminent nuclear war. “Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely WHY I urged Khrushchev to launch them. And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”

"If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara, November 1962.)

“My dream is to drop three Atomic Bombs on New York City (Raul –not Fidel—Castro, Nov. 1960.)

But “Hay Caramba!” the Stalinist trio fumed and raged for years afterwards. “Nikita Khruzchev, that sniveling maricon, snatched that magic button-pushing moment from our eager fingers!”

“We should deliver a nuclear first strike,” read the telegram from Castro to Khrushchev on Oct. 28 1962.

“What!” Khrushchev gasped, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?”

“Apparently.”

“Yesterday the Cubans shot down a plane (U-2 with) without (Soviet) permission.

Today they’re preparing a nuclear attack.”

“But that is insane!...Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” instructed the Soviet premier.

So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot standing up to the Russians and forcing their retreat during the Cuban missile crisis!” In fact, it was the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lusts that prompted the Butcher of Budapest to get those missiles out of their reach.

“We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," later snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs, "security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."

"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” Nixon wrote about the Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis.

“Then (he) gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard."

"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," observed Barry Goldwater in 1964. "I would help Cuban exiles OPENLY. I’d give them the guns and ammunition to blast Castro out of his island stronghold now defended with Soviet arms."

In his memoirs the Butcher of Budapest further twisted the knife and snickered yet again: "it would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba--for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable.

So the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and cinematographers, were pure hooey. The threat came, not from the Soviets, but from the Stalinist regime hailed to the high heavens by the Congressional Black Caucus, befriended by Democratic Presidential candidates (“Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, a man I regard as a friend," George Mc Govern) and preparing for a windfall of U.S. dollars, courtesy of the U.S. Congress. (More on that shortly)

Considering the U.S. Nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it's hard to imagine a president Nixon—much less Reagan—quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la JFK.

The Crisis “resolution” bestowed upon Castro a new status. Let's call it MAP, or “mutually-assured-protection,” assured by the two most powerful countries on earth, including the one whose president had recently declared freedom “indivisible,” and more: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,"

JFK's Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba's in-house freedom fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

Kennedy's deal with Khrushchev cut this lifeline. The Cuban freedom-fighters working from South Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro and his Soviet patrons remained utterly unmolested as they consolidated Stalinism 90 miles from U.S. shores. Think about it: here's the U.S. Coast Guard and Border patrol working 'round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who are desperate to return to their native country.

This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the MSM and all you'll learn about it from those illustrious Ivy-League Academics. To get an idea of the odds faced by those betrayed rural rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface."

Most of these thousands of fighters died as Tony Montana died. Surrender wasn't an option. When their bullets ran out, their lives ran out.


(Every item above is fully documented in the books, Fidel Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant and in Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him)

You have to have a Cuban cigar once in your life. A night of good company, strong liquor, fine food and a Cohiba, will never be forgotten.

You have to give credit to somebody who can oppress and execute so many people for so long.

It really is incredible that any of you are respectful of Fidel Castro.

What is the point of good education when there are very few jobs and opportunities? Where a person with a PHD in Physics has to drive a cab?

As the first decade of climbing in Cuba draws to a close, the future of climbing for Cubans is in doubt.

Since 2003, Cuban climbers have been harassed by an officialdom that can’t decide whether it will “authorize” climbing, and pretends that until it does “authorize”, it isn’t an appropriate activity for Cubans. Foreigners, however, have been free to climb. The era of the scrappy first generation of Havana climbers, such as Vity Echazábal and Jorge Mederos, drew to a close with the departure of their torchbearer, Aníbal Fernández. Aníbal had been run from Viñales and jailed for days. He felt forced to leave Cuba.

The remarkable next generation of Cubans, particularly the Viñales home-grown climbers, ended with the escape into exile of Josué Millo and Alberto Leivas. For years their leader, Josué, seemed to take his treatment by officials in stride. Josué’s entire family was persecuted. Each was a member of Cuba’s most oppressed splinter groups. His father had been jailed as a dissident (for failing to inform on the activities of a Cuban-American relative); his mother and sister were Jehovah’s Witnesses; and his brother was a homosexual.

In 2005, Cuban Security authorities banned Armando Menocal from Cuba. Menocal had been one of the first foreigners to climb in Cuba, published the Cuba Climbing guidebook and website, and, importantly, operated the program of sending donated gear that sustained the Cuban climbers and helped the Cubans to become an independent climbing community, free of government control or dependence, and the primary developers of climbing in Cuba. He remains permanently exiled by the government.

Finally, in 2009, Yarobys Garcia, the Cuban who took over as the leader in Viñales and has become the strongest climber, was arrested when climbing at the Cuba Libre Wall, taken to the police station, and then given an official notice by the police: climb again and face imprisonment. In Cuba’s legal parlance, this was the formal first step leading to the criminal charge of “peligrosidad” (dangerousness). Cuba’s criminal code permits anyone to be sentenced for up to four years in prison on the ground that the authorities believe that the individual has a “special proclivity” to commit crimes, even though he or she has not have actually committed a crime. The code broadly defines “dangerous” people as those who act in a manner that contradicts “socialist morality” or engage in “anti-social behavior.” According to human rights reports, the charge of “dangerousness” has targeted so-called ”anti-social” youths, most of them black, and 400 remain imprisoned. In Viñales the charge has been used in the last few years against gays, such as Josué’s brother.

For most, the addiction to climbing does not risk blacklist or prison. Nor does climbing force them into exile, separated not just from their crags, but families and country, and even forced to assume a new identity, that of an “exile”. But as those who climb in Cuba have learned, in some places, “commitment” must be redefined in those terms.

We found genuine affection for him even among people who thought that a lot of his policies were ruinous.

CIA, the mob and killing Castro

The Church Committee stated that it substantiated eight attempts by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1960-1965. Fabian Escalante, a retired chief of Cuba's counterintelligence, who had been tasked with protecting Castro, estimated the number of assassination schemes or actual attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency to be 638. Some of them were a part of the covert CIA program dubbed Operation Mongoose aimed at toppling the Cuban government. The assassination attempts reportedly included cigars poisoned with botulinum toxin, a tubercle bacilli-infected scuba-diving suit along with a booby-trapped conch placed on the sea bottom, an exploding cigar, a ballpoint pen containing a hypodermic syringe preloaded with the lethal concoction "Blackleaf 40", and plain, mafia-style execution endeavors, among others. There were plans to blow up Castro during his visit to Ernest Hemingway's museum in Cuba.

Some of the plots were depicted in a documentary film entitled 638 Ways to Kill Castro (2006) aired on Channel 4 of the British public-service television. One of these attempts was by his ex-lover Marita Lorenz, whom he met in 1959. She allegedly agreed to aid the CIA and attempted to smuggle a jar of cold cream containing poison pills into his room. When Castro learned about her intentions, he reportedly gave her a gun and told her to kill him but her nerve failed. Some plots aimed not at murder but at character assassination; they, for example, involved using thallium salts to destroy Castro's famous beard, or lacing his radio studio with LSD to cause him disorientation during the broadcast and damage his public image.

According to the CIA documents, the so-called Family Jewels that were declassified in 2007, one assassination attempt on Fidel Castro prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion involved noted American mobsters Johnny Roselli, Salvatore Giancana and Santo Trafficante.

In September 1960, Momo Salvatore Giancana, a successor of Al Capone's in the Chicago Outfit, and Miami Syndicate leader Santo Trafficante, who were both on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list at that time, were indirectly contacted by the CIA about the possibility of Fidel Castro assassination.

Johnny Roselli, a member of the Las Vegas Syndicate, was used to get access to Mafia bosses. The go-between from the CIA was Robert Maheu, who introduced himself as a representative of several international businesses in Cuba that were expropriated by Castro. On September 14, 1960, Maheu met with Roselli in a New York City hotel and offered him US$150,000 for the "removal" of Castro. James O'Connell, who identified himself as Maheu's associate but who actually was the chief of the CIA's operational support division, was present during the meeting. The declassified documents did not reveal if Roselli, Giancana or Trafficante accepted a down payment for the job. According to the CIA files, it was Giancana who suggested poison pills as a means to doctor Castro's food or drinks. Such pills, manufactured by the CIA's Technical Services Division, were given to Giancana's nominee named Juan Orta. Giancana recommended Orta as being an official in the Cuban government, who had access to Castro.

Allegedly, after several unsuccessful attempts to introduce the poison into Castro's food, Orta abruptly demanded to be let out of the mission, handing over the job to another unnamed participant. Later, a second attempt was mounted through Giancana and Trafficante using Dr. Anthony Verona, the leader of the Cuban Exile Junta, who had, according to Trafficante, become "disaffected with the apparent ineffectual progress of the Junta". Verona requested US$10,000 in expenses and US$1,000 worth of communications equipment. However, it is unknown how far the second attempt went, as the assassination attempt was canceled due to the launching of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Wikipedia

Where's the love? A guy with obvious talents dies and get's trashed....when a vastly overrated Regan passed he got eulogized.

Where's the love? A guy with obvious talents dies and get's trashed....when a vastly overrated Regan passed he got eulogized.

Well, at least when Regan died, being a Federal worker at the time, I got the day off.

Best thing he ever did for the country...

When I see the Alt-liberals on Supertopo decrying what an evil man Trump is....I haven't seen that in the man yet and hope I don't, but it makes me think they know what evil is. 10 min with Mike's dad listening to what he knew of Che and Fidel would correct that view.

"Cuba does have a very low infant mortality rate, but pregnant women are treated with very authoritarian tactics to maintain these favorable statistics," said Tassie Katherine Hirschfeld, the chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma who spent nine months living in Cuba to study the nation's health system. "They are pressured to undergo abortions that they may not want if prenatal screening detects fetal abnormalities. If pregnant women develop complications, they are placed in ‘Casas de Maternidad’ for monitoring, even if they would prefer to be at home. Individual doctors are pressured by their superiors to reach certain statistical targets. If there is a spike in infant mortality in a certain district, doctors may be fired. There is pressure to falsify statistics."

They all rave about Cuba when they return to the USA.

It's not clear to me that the Cuban health care systems owes all that much to Castro. In any case, the brutality, repression and poverty that ensued overwhelms anything good he may have done.

Does anybody know where the worst violations of human rights take place on Cuba right now?