Fidel Castro, RIP

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.