Trump calls Fidel Castro 'Brutal Dictator'

[Peer Haman Shah]

Trump is trying to destroy Obama policies with Cuba.

 

[mike2000 is back]

What a babbling stuttering moron. As soon as Sean Hannity brings up his millions of $$ worth of property he starts stuttering and tries to divert the subject.

That's the issue with these "socialists"/"Communists" (in reality even commies don't believe in their own theories), they merely use the misery of the masses to ride high and live the good life.

Just look at the founding fathers of Communism Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, both wealthy men who never worked a day in their life in a factory or on the farm , or even Trotsky who owned a expensive apartment in Manhattan and a large home of his own in Mexico (where he was assassinated by Stalin's agent). Even Stalin himself lived in a large, well guarded villa.

Communism is a scam to rip off the idiot masses. This fat Commie (what an oxymoron) should be deported to Cuba or North Korea and his private property should be confiscated and converted into affordable homes for the under privileged.

Lool. Funny but true. Agree 100%
Only the illiterate masses often believe in this communist Bullshit . lol just look at fat Kim North Korea, he studied in the 'evil' West, lives luxury life full of excesses while his people starve, but keep claiming socialism and communism ,same with Venezuela. LMAO. Socialism and communism applies Only to the people not the leaders

 

[Suff Shikan]

Who cares what he said, After 600+ assassination attempts Castro survived, he ruled his country the way he like, while america watched.

 

[Desert Fox]

Lool. Funny but true. Agree 100%
Only the illiterate masses often believe in this communist Bullshit . lol just look at fat Kim North Korea, he studied in the 'evil' West, lives luxury life full of excesses while his people starve, but keep claiming socialism and communism ,same with Venezuela. LMAO. Socialism and communism applies Only to the people not the leaders

Yeah, even Bernie Sanders, the "Socialist" who kept making promise after promise to all of the gullible college students of free stuff himself just recently bought a $600,000 lake front vacation home in Vermont after raking a good $200,000,000 during his primaries campaign .

 

[mike2000 is back]

Yeah, even Bernie Sanders, the "Socialist" who kept making promise after promise to all of the gullible college students of free stuff himself just recently bought a $600,000 lake front vacation home in Vermont after raking a good $200,000,000 during his primaries campaign .

They are all hypocrites these "socialists/communists". can't blame them. Money doesn't have colour. Lol

 

[Desert Fox]

They are all hypocrites these "socialists/communists". can't blame them. Money doesn't have colour. Lol

True, which is why i plan on running as a "Socialist" in 2020 (with the intention of not winning of course , who want's to be a President with all that headache anyway?). Plenty of purple haired feminists and and pot smoking college students to throw their money my way for a few promises of "free" tuition and "free" government jobs (basically anything with the word "free" next to it ). Before you know it i'll have a nice lake front summer home of my own right next to Comrade Bernie's.

Introducing the Hunger Games! But serious, mediocrity is being promoted over knowing how to be a productive member of society.

We got entire cities living off of welfare funds, disability, and social funds because they refuse to get a job or do have a job under the table and not claiming it for the endless money from the funds meant to help those in tough times.

I agree. But with the amount of leftist indoctrination that has already infected more than half of US population we're gonna need more than just a Trump presidency to make any progress in this regard.

 

[Solomon2]

But was he good or bad for Cuba?

The Castros' rule has been referred to by at least one observer as "tyrannical imbecility": " old men who fear change more than old men almost anywhere else in the world, with the possible exceptions of North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia".

 

[Solomon2]

History Will Not Absolve Fidel Castro
BY HENRY GOMEZ NOVEMBER 26, 2016

Fidel Castro Ruz, Cuban dictator of almost five decades, has been proclaimed dead by official Cuban sources. No cause of death has been officially given though Castro had been ill since July of 2006 when it was suddenly announced that he underwent emergency intestinal surgery and was “temporarily” handing over power to his younger brother Raul. Castro is survived by his longtime companion Dalia Soto del Valle and several children from various relationships. There has probably been no modern leader with as much disinformation surrounding his biography as Fidel Castro.

Castro was born in Birán in eastern Cuba on August 13, 1926. He was born out of wedlock, the third of seven children of Angel Castro Argiz and his then teenaged servant Lina Ruz Gonzalez. Castro’s father, a Spaniard who fought as a loyalist in the losing cause against Cuban independence, emerged as a wealthy landowner with a reputation for stealing land and property. The elder Castro is said to have harbored anti-American sentiments because of the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War. Apparently those sentiments were passed on to Fidel, as they were a hallmark of Castro’s rule in addition to deception, capricious micromanagement, and egomania.

Fidel Castro’s childhood was indelibly marked by his illegitimate status. His academic career was plagued by discipline problems. Fidel’s father Angel eventually divorced his first wife and in 1943 he finally married Lina and recognized her children, including Fidel and Raul, who bears no resemblance to his brothers and has long been suspected to be the product of an affair Lina had with a corporal in Cuba’s rural guard.

A little-known episode from Fidel Castro’s childhood years took place in 1940 when he wrote a letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in which he lied about his age, saying he was two years younger than he really was and asking Roosevelt for a $10 bill. History professor Antonio de la Cova characterizes this as the first documented lie told by Fidel Castro and a sign of a child who was highly deceitful and manipulative. It also shows an early awareness of American power. In the letter, Castro offers to show Roosevelt where Cuba’s mineral wealth is hidden in exchange for the money.

In Havana’s exclusive Belen Jesuit school for boys, where his teachers were mainly Spanish Jesuits who themselves rejected American political and cultural values, Castro earned various nicknames such as el loco, the madman. Upon graduation, he enrolled in the University of Havana to study law. While there, Castro acquired a reputation as a violent agitator and gangster who often carried a gun. In 1947, Castro participated, with other Cuban recruits, in an ill-fated attempt to invade the Dominican Republic and depose the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, marking the first in a series of foreign interventions Castro would pursue throughout his life. During his university days Castro was implicated in the murder of a rival student leader, Manolo de Castro (no relation). He also participated in the attempted murder of Congressman Rolando Masferrer in September 1948.

Notably, Castro participated in a deadly riot that broke out in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1948 after a presidential candidate in that country was assassinated. It seemed that wherever Fidel Castro went violence followed. Later that same year Castro married Mirta Diaz-Balart, received a 1000-peso gift from Fulgencio Batista, and honeymooned in the United States. Castro’s oldest son, Fidelito, was born to Fidel and Mirta in 1949. The following year, Fidel obtained a law degree from the University of Havana.

Fidel Castro never distinguished himself as an attorney. Instead, he focused his attention toward politics and became involved with Cuba’s Ortodoxo Party. On March 10, 1952, Fulgencio Batista, who had served as Cuba’s first president under the country’s new Constitution of 1940, ousted incumbent President Carlos Prio Socarras in a coup d’état and set a chain of events in motion that would bring Castro to power before the end of the decade.

On July 26, 1953, in an attempt to oust Batista, Castro led a force of 160 men, including his brother Raul, in a poorly planned attack on the Moncada Cuban army garrison in the city of Santiago and a rural guard barracks in the city of Bayamo, killing nineteen Cuban soldiers and policemen and nine civilians. In turn, sixty-one of the attackers were killed, 50 of those having been summarily executed after surrendering. Castro escaped unharmed and the Catholic Church negotiated his surrender. Castro was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for his bloody version of the "Beer Hall Putsch."

While in prison Castro wrote a manifesto titled “History will absolve me,” which is reminiscent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Castro claimed that the title came from the speech he gave in his own defense at trial. However, Professor de la Cova has cited contemporary published accounts citing the speech to prove that the true phrase he uttered was “history definitely will say it all.”

Fidel Castro and thirty-one of his followers were released in May 1955 after just twenty-two months in prison thanks to a general amnesty passed by the Cuban Congress and signed by Batista. Once freed from prison, Castro divorced Mirta and went into exile in Mexico where he met Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The Castro brothers, along with Guevara, trained a group of Cuban rebels with the idea of landing an expedition that would spark a general uprising throughout the island. They bought a yacht named “Granma” and set out for Cuba. The landing was a disaster and most of the invaders perished or disbanded, but the Castros, Guevara, and a dozen others survived and made it to Cuba’s Sierra Maestra Mountains. Once there they began their guerrilla campaign to little effect.

In February 1957, New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews wrote a series of articles about Castro in which he painted the bearded revolutionary as a modern-day Robin Hood. After the failed Moncada attack Castro had become renowned in Cuba, and due to Herbert Matthews, he became a celebrity in the United States. The American media’s love affair with him has never waned.

Castro’s 26th of July movement was only one of the rebel groups fighting for the ouster of Fulgencio Batista, but perhaps the most famous. The group used propaganda to great effect to disseminate its proposed program, which included agrarian reform, a return to the constitution of 1940, and free elections within one year. While fighting in the mountains, Fidel Castro penned a letter to his confidant Celia Sanchez in which he stated: "Once this war is over I will start what for me is a much longer and bigger war, the war I am going to wage against the Americans. I realize this will be my true destiny."

U.S. support for Batista began to erode and in what was perceived as a vote of no confidence by the Cuban people, the U.S. canceled a shipment of arms to Batista in March of 1958. Unable to regain control of the country, Batista finally fled Cuba in the early morning hours of January 1, 1959, paving the way for Fidel Castro’s seizure of power.

Once arriving triumphantly in Havana, Castro and Guevara led a reign of terror, which included televised show trials for alleged war crimes and hundreds of firing squad executions. In some cases those who were found innocent were retried until the desired verdict was reached. In one case, Commandant Camilo Cienfuegos publicly threatened to commit suicide if accused Batista Major Pedro Morejon was acquitted.

Manuel Urrutia, Fidel Castro’s hand-chosen president, resigned in July 1959, officially turning over power to Castro himself. Before the end of his first year Castro again turned to the Dominican Republic, where he sent a force to attempt to replicate the Cuban insurgency, this time against Trujillo.

Despite his consistent denial of being a communist, Castro appointed old-guard Cuban communists to key positions, a move that raised suspicions among many of his followers. Castro began consolidating power and jailed many of his former comrades turned critics. He also began to systematically shut down Cuba’s press and media.

In 1960, Soviet Vice Premiere Anastas Mikoyan visited Castro in Havana and signed an agreement to exchange Soviet oil for Cuban sugar. The American oil companies in Cuba refused to refine the Soviet crude and Castro in turn expropriated their assets. Within a year, the regime confiscated all U.S. assets in Cuba and the U.S. responded by ending diplomatic relations and imposing a commercial embargo on the island nation.

After a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles attempted to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Castro declared that the Cuban Revolution was socialist in nature and steered the country into the Soviet orbit. In a speech in December 1961, Castro declared that he had been a Marxist-Leninist all his life.

In October of 1962, U.S. reconnaissance flights detected the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis was resolved through a series of letters between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Known as the “Kennedy-Khrushchev Understandings,” the letters outline the conditions under which the missiles would be removed, which included removal of 104 U.S. missiles from Turkey, Italy, and Great Britain under Operation Pot Pie in April 1964, a pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba, and the permanent stationing of a Soviet combat brigade that remained on the island until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The secret agreement has never been abrogated. According to Khrushchev’s diary, Castro was irate about the removal of the missiles.

Castro’s half-century rule of Cuba was characterized by foreign interventions, terrorism, and espionage in Africa (the Congo, Angola), the Americas (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, and Grenada to name a few), and even Asia (it has been reported that Cuban torturers were used by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War).

Despite five decades of propaganda to the contrary, Cuba has deteriorated in almost every imaginable measure of quality of life under Castro’s rule. Food rationing, which was introduced as a “temporary” measure in 1962, persists to this day. Infrastructure is crumbling and even literacy gains are not so impressive considering the gains of other Latin American countries that have not been subjected to decades of totalitarian rule. The Cuban economy is in shambles, as Castro was always reluctant to introduce reforms that might lead to greater freedoms for the Cuban people. Instead, Castro has tinkered and micromanaged projects that have always led to failure, particularly in the arena of agriculture where Fidel spawned projects to genetically engineer mini-cows, super cows, and even grow coffee at sea level.

Continual antagonism toward the U.S. was also characteristic of Fidel Castro’s rule. Everything from spying on and within the U.S. military and intelligence services to academic espionage to the shooting down of American civilian aircraft resulting in the deaths of American citizens. Notably, Castro also foisted a number of hardened criminals and mentally ill persons among legitimate immigrants on the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift, which was a mass exodus of more than 125,000 Cubans. His staunch anti-Americanism made him a hero of the international left and afforded him support of countries around the world.

But Fidel Castro’s true crimes are the one he’s committed against those he should regard as his “own people.” In fact, it’s easy to believe that he inherited his father’s contempt for Cubans. It’s estimated that two million people have fled Cuba, which is quite an accomplishment considering that the country’s population when Fidel Castro took power was 6 million. The exact number of Cubans who have died at the hands of the Castro regime is unknown, though historians and others are actively working on it and then there are the tens of thousands who are estimated to have died in the Florida straits trying to escape Castro’s “workers' paradise.” Over the years thousands have been imprisoned for merely disagreeing with Fidel Castro, his henchmen, or his policies. Today international human rights organizations recognize 200-300 political prisoners in Cuba. Censorship persists and Cuba trails only China for the jailing of journalists (and leads on a per capita basis).

Fidel Castro will be known most of all for his broken promises. The popular revolution he led was a promise of a better life. Instead what Cubans received were the worst examples of oppression and repression in the history of the western hemisphere. History will not absolve Fidel Castro. On the contrary, it will condemn him. Millions of eyewitnesses will see to that.

 

[gambit]

http://www.therealcuba.com/?page_id=74

While Cubans in Cuba have an average salary of $20 a month and cannot buy enough food to feed their families, Antonio Castro, one of the sons of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, spent several weeks in June of 2015 cruising the Aegean Sea on his 160 foot yacht with a group of friends and several bodyguards.

A few years ago, Forbes magazine estimated Castro’s fortune in at least 900 million dollars. Many of those who are familiar with the dictator’s business believe that Forbes was too conservative.

The Cuban dictator runs Cuba as if it was his own farm and the 11 million poor Cubans as his slaves. Castro’s businesses include the Convention Palace (Palacio de Convenciones); CIMEX; MEDICUBA; resort hotels and much more.

 

[Dungeness]

If people here use 'commie' in speaking about China or Russia or Cuba, it is because it is nothing more than a convenient label whose origin came from the Cold War, not because people on this forum, notably the Americans, genuinely believes your China is communist.

You want to see brainwashed ? Go look at your own people in China or look at your own crew here.

Americans on PDF are fine, even those cold war old guards like you. They have some basic understanding of today's world, and they would not consider China today as a communist country. What I was referring to was those people in the states. Til now, some TV personalities still cannot say the word "China" without adding "Communist" in front of it, and I don't think they mean to flatter China.

In contrast to what many in the states believe, people in China know that their media is controlled by the govt, so they tend to be more suspicious (or you can call it "Critical Thinking") about what they are told, and try to "seek truth through facts" by searching other source of information, therefore, they are less likely to be "brainwashed". In the other hand, people with blind faith on "free media" are actually much more vulnerable to "brainwashing", because they tend to believe their "free media" is all about truth, nothing but truth. You maybe surprised, people in China know much more about US than American general public know about China. The same can be said about Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese. @TaiShang

As for Chinese members here, almost all of them have the experience of living in the "Free World", or have been exposed to "Free Media". If they hold a particular point of view, it is the result of their own "critical thinking". This is my humble opinion on the issue of "brainwashing".

 

[gambit]

In contrast to what many in the states believe, people in China know that their media is controlled by the govt, so they tend to be more suspicious (or you can call it "Critical Thinking") about what they are told, and try to "seek truth through facts" by searching other source of information, therefore, they are less likely to be "brainwashed".

It is hilarious that you could say that considering only recently the Chinese are using an invention that Americans have been using for decades in seeking out alternative sources of news. It is the Chinese who learned that it has been THEM who have been brainwashed all these decades.

 

[Dungeness]

It is hilarious that you could say that considering only recently the Chinese are using an invention that Americans have been using for decades in seeking out alternative sources of news. It is the Chinese who learned that it has been THEM who have been brainwashed all these decades.

We may have a generation gap.

Are you talking about the cold war era now？ I thought we had been discussing about today's reality.

 

[LA se Karachi]

Yeah, even Bernie Sanders, the "Socialist" who kept making promise after promise to all of the gullible college students of free stuff himself just recently bought a $600,000 lake front vacation home in Vermont after raking a good $200,000,000 during his primaries campaign .

The average Bernie voter was in his or her 40s, not in their 20s, you idiot. College loans had little to do with it. People didn't vote for him because of "free stuff". They supported his policies, and wanted to reverse the decline of the middle and working class in this country.

And so what if he bought a house? Is that something only rich people are supposed to do? He did it with clean money, unlike Trump. He's by no means rich. But even if he was, that wouldn't be an issue. There are plenty of rich people in Norway, Austria, and Canada. But they're "socialist" too.

Democratic-socialism isn't like communism. Learn the difference. They're quite far apart. It's a mixed economy with strong free market principles and a sizable welfare state. Where ideally there is a healthy amount of equality, people earn a fair wage, and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.

 

[gambit]

We may have a generation gap.

Are you talking about the cold war era now？ I thought we had been discussing about today's reality.

It is absurd to call Americans 'brainwashed'. That charge usually mean: If you do not agree with me you are brainwashed.

To actually brainwash someone, in the absolute way, you must have total control of that person's life, especially his access to alternative sources of information. Writ large: Mao-ist China and North Korea.

Your China under Mao exercised absolute control of her citizenry, everything from their jobs to whether husbands could live with their wives. Mao's Little Red Book was mandatory and was proclaimed that every wisdom a person need for life is within. Show me where and when in the US did Americans ever lived like Chinese.

Today, I have Chinese friends who told me that living in America, they felt like they were treated like adults whereas your Party treat the Chinese people like children. I have not verified, but is it true that on Chinese TV, censors do not allow topless men ? If I am wrong about that, my apologies.

How can Americans be 'brainwashed' when we have multi-party politics ? Whereas you PDF Chinese stated their support for the dictatorship of the (fake) Communist Party in China as the best and only guiding force for China. How sad is it that you PDF Chinese support a fraud ? So who is really brainwashed here ?

As for the Cold War, it has never really gone away. It has only changed players and during the transition, things will quiet down. One hundred yrs of inter-states relations that gave the world two hot World Wars and one Cold War is enough to convince wiser peoples than you PDF Chinese that as long as there are contestant ideologies, there will always be a cold war.

 

[niaz]

I have been to Cuba a few times during the 90’s when Fidel Castro was very much in power. Because of the US sanctions, the Cuban visa was on a separate slip of paper which was inserted in the passport and handed back on exit so that there was no Cuban stamp on the passport itself.

Cuba was indeed in a bad shape. One had to pay for the all the purchases in US dollars, especially the taxis, or else wait for hours for the bus. We were supplying Mexican crude to their refineries in exchange for the sugar. I was too lowly to meet the great man himself but I visited all the Cuban refineries. Ex-Esso refinery near Havana had the same Fluidised Cracker (FCCU) as the one I had worked in the New Jersey Refinery in USA for a short while during the 1970. I was impressed by the calibre of the Cuban Engineers. Additionally, Cuban Medicine was also of very high standard.

Whatever one may say about Fidel Castro, he ensured good education and health for the Cubans and reduced the petty crime. I am not fond of Marxist philosophy and in my judgement the hardship that the generations suffered during his very long regime was probably not worth the benefits. However I admit that to defy the USA for such a long period must also exhibit extra ordinary courage &leadership qualities. Here is an article by Ayaz Amir.

The passing of a great man leaves Pakistan cold
Home / Today's Paper / Opinion / The passing of a great man leaves Pakistan cold
By Ayaz Amir
November 29, 2016

Islamabad diary

What an amazing life and what a titanic personality – one of the greats of the 20thcentury, on a par with the likes of Mao and Ho Chi Minh, the vital distinction being that he strode a smaller stage – and it is not surprising at all that his death has scarcely drawn any mention in our great republic.

There’s been no official condolence on the death of Fidel Castro and it is entirely fitting that from the shining capitalist-roaders who lead our country there should have been no message of sympathy for the Cuban people. The loss is not Cuba’s, it is ours, because this lack of sympathy and knowledge, this vast ignorance of what the Cuban revolution has meant to countless millions across the globe is a commentary like no other on the poverty of our imagination and the absence among our ruling elites of even a halting sense of history.

Cuba has gone into mourning for nine days. If ours had been a slightly more enlightened country, slightly more aware of the currents of world history, our flag too should have flown at half-mast, as a mark of tribute to a truly singular and monumental figure who coming from a small island off the coast of the imperial United States left his mark and the imprint of his personality on his times.

Revolution and communism have both gone out of fashion but for those of us, those of my generation, whose hearts used to beat a little faster when the slogan was sounded ‘The East is Red’, or for whom Che Guevara, the tragic revolutionary, was an inspiring figure, the allure of the Cuban revolution has not entirely disappeared.

The saga of the Cuban revolution reads like something out of the strangest, the most unbelievable fiction. First the attack on the Moncada barracks led by Fidel in person, bullets whizzing past his head, and its utter failure and Fidel’s imprisonment and at his trial the famous speech “History will absolve me”. Then after 22 months in prison his release under an amnesty passed by the Cuban Congress and signed by the Cuban strongman, Fulgencio Batista, great friend of the United States.

Fidel tried his hand at constitutional politics but the experience didn’t work out because the system was rigged, as it usually is in Third World countries, with Batista controlling and subverting the political process. And repression was on the increase. Six weeks after his release Castro boarded a flight for Mexico, his sister Lidia selling her refrigerator so that he should have some money with him. In a proclamation to the Cuban people Castro declared, “From journeys such as this, a man either does not return or else returns with the tyranny dismembered at his feet.”

In Mexico he tracked down a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Alberto Bayo, and asked him to train his men in guerrilla warfare. Bayo was amused. Here was this young man gesticulating wildly and vowing to carry out a landing in Cuba with men “when I have them” and with vessels “when I have the money to buy them”. At that moment, as Bayo was to recall later, “he had not a single man nor a single dollar”.

“Fidel’s first home in Mexico City,” writes Tad Szulc in his 1986 biography of Fidel, “was a tiny room overlooking the courtyard of a cheap downtown hotel. He did all his reading and writing there.” For lunch and dinner he walked to the house of a Cuban friend. And it was in Mexico City that Fidel came across Che Guevara. Writing to his father Che had this to say, “Some time ago…a young Cuban leader invited me to join his movement of armed liberation of his people and I, naturally, accepted.” Thus was born a legendary friendship.

They made preparations and they trained hard. Life was Spartan and rigorous. The Mexican police got wind of what they were doing and Fidel and Che were arrested by the Mexican police but released later on the intercession of ex-president Lazaro Cardenas because, as Szulc writes, “nobody in Mexico, president or not, could ever refuse any request from the legendary Cardenas.”

Then after many privations and more training they were ready to embark for Cuba. Fidel wrote out his will and with 81 companions boarded the yacht, Granma, which was built to carry 25 passengers. It was a stormy crossing, taking longer than what they had planned for. Here is Che’s account of the journey: “The entire boat had a ridiculously tragic aspect: men with anguished faces grabbing their stomachs; some with their heads inside buckets, others collapsed in the strangest positions, motionless, their clothes filthy with vomit…”

Close to shore they got stuck on a mud bank, the landing looking more like a shipwreck. And regime troops got wind of the rebels. The straggling column was ambushed, the marchers taking heavy losses. Of the 82 men who landed from the Granma, only 16 survived to carry on the war. The peasants of the Sierra Maestra mountains where they set up their base gave them crucial help. Within three years Castro had marched on Havana and proclaimed the success of the Cuban revolution.

You read about these events and it is as if your blood is charged. Castro went on to consolidate the revolution by mobilising the common people and smashing the power of the old elites. There was a mass exodus of the privileged from the island. The big farms were broken up and industry nationalised. The US was naturally upset. American business interests were hurt. For all practical purposes Cuba was an American colony and the bars and brothels of Havana were a favoured destination for well-heeled American visitors. Not only was the Cuban revolution changing all that. It was setting a bad example for the rest of Latin America.

The US used everything in its power to strangle the revolution, subjecting Cuba to international isolation and economic sanctions, devising various schemes for Castro’s assassination, and even carrying out an actual invasion, the Bay of Pigs adventure. The Cuban revolution lived through it all and survived. Not just that…Castro supported revolutionary causes throughout the world, supporting the PLO and Nelson Mandela’s movement in South Africa, sending a Cuban expeditionary force to defend the leftist MPLA against American-backed interventions by South Africa and Zaire.

The kind of traffic jams we have in Pakistan you won’t find in Cuba. In the streets of Havana they still make do with ancient American cars. The shops are not full of the kind of consumer goods we take for granted here. But Cuba has one of the best healthcare and education systems in the world. And it is a proud country, confident in its own strength and afraid of none.

Look at us and our pretensions. We are a nuclear power and we have a powerful military but we feel threatened all the time and can’t live without American goodwill and support. And we certainly don’t have Cuba’s revolutionary fervour and commitment.

Our historic misfortune is that we have produced no leader in the mould of Castro and Che Guevara, selfless individuals sacrificing everything for their beliefs. Look at the way our leaders live. Look at their talk, look at their hypocrisy and then wonder at our destiny which has given us nothing better.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/168417-The-passing-of-a-great-man-leaves-Pakistan-cold