Fidel Castro, the CIA Installed Communist Cuban Puppet Dictator & Drug Smuggler, Dies at age 90

Perhaps the most appropriate obituary for Fidel was written by Carlos Eire, professor of history at Yale.

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.

Why this discrepancy? Because deceit was one of Fidel Castro’s greatest talents, and gullibility is one of the world’s greatest frailties. A genius at myth-making, Castro relied on the human thirst for myths and heroes. His lies were beautiful, and so appealing. According to Castro and to his propagandists, the so-called revolution was not about creating a repressive totalitarian state and securing his rule as an absolute monarch, but rather about eliminating illiteracy, poverty, racism, class differences and every other ill known to humankind. This bold lie became believable, thanks largely to Castro’s incessant boasting about free schools and medical care, which made his myth of the benevolent utopian revolution irresistible to many of the world’s poor.

Many intellectuals, journalists and educated people in the First World fell for this myth, too — though they would have been among the first to be jailed or killed by Castro in his own realm — and their assumptions acquired an intensity similar to that of religious convictions. Pointing out to such believers that Castro imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands more of his own people than any other Latin American dictator was usually futile. His well-documented cruelty made little difference, even when acknowledged, for he was judged according to some aberrant ethical code that defied logic.

This Kafkaesque moral disequilibrium had a touch of magical realism, for sure, as outrageously implausible as anything that Castro’s close friend Gabriel García Márquez could dream up. For instance, in 1998, around the same time that Chile’s ruler Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London for his crimes against humanity, Cuba’s self-anointed “maximum leader” visited Spain with ample fanfare, unmolested, even though his human rights abuses dwarfed those of Pinochet.

Even worse, whenever Castro traveled abroad, many swooned in his presence. In 1995, when he came to New York to speak at the United Nations, many of the leading lights of that city jostled so intently for a chance to meet with him at media mogul Mort Zuckerman’s triplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue that Time magazine declared “Fidel Takes Manhattan!” Not to be outdone, Newsweek called Castro “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan.” None of the American elites who hobnobbed with Castro that day seemed to care that he had put nuclear weapons to their heads in 1962.

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.

In sum, Fidel Castro was the spitting image of Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” So, adiós, Big Brother, king of all Cuban nightmares. And may your successor, Little Brother, soon slide off the bloody throne bequeathed to him.

Joel Skousen of WorldAffairsBrief.com had the above from Yale Professor Carlos Eire along with much of his own analysis of Castro, but Skousen ends with the following:

Perhaps his biggest lie was that he made just 900 pesos ($43) a month and lived in a “fisherman’s hut” somewhere on the beach. In fact, he and his eight children and multiple mistresses lived like kings in 20 luxury properties in Cuba and around the Caribbean. He made millions off of drug trafficking. In a 1994 Havana interview with Jean-Luc Mano, Castro admitted that “I’m going to hell.” It’s perhaps the only time he told the truth.

Recommended Books:

Fidel Castro jailed 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. Alone among world leaders, Castro came to within inches of igniting a global nuclear holocaust.

But you would never guess any of that from reading the mainstream American media. Instead we hear fawning accounts of Castro liberating Cuba from the clutches of U.S. robber-barons and bestowing world-class healthcare and education on his downtrodden citizens. “Propaganda is vital—the heart of our struggle,” Castro wrote in 1955. Today, the concept is as valid to the Cuban regime as ever.

History records few propaganda campaigns as phenomenally successful or enduring as Castro and Che’s. The Longest Romance exposes the full scope of this deception; it documents the complicity of major U.S. media players in spreading Castro’s propaganda and in coloring the world’s view of his totalitarian regime. Castro’s cachet as a celebrity icon of anti-Americanism has always overshadowed his record as a warmonger, racist, sexist, Stalinist, and godfather of modern terrorism. The Longest Romance uncovers this shameful history and names its major accomplices.

In The Double Life of Fidel Castro, one of Castro’s soldiers of seventeen years breaks his silence and shares his memoirs of his years of service, his eventual imprisonment and torture for displeasing the notorious dictator, and his dramatic escape from Cuba.

Antonio Veciana fought on the front lines of the CIA’s decades-long secret war to destroy Fidel Castro, the bearded bogeyman who haunted America’s Cold War dreams. It was a time of swirling intrigue, involving US spies with license to kill, Mafia hit men, ruthless Cuban exiles—and the leaders in the crosshairs of all this dark plotting, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy.

Veciana transformed himself from an asthmatic banker to a bomb-making mastermind who headed terrorist attacks in Havana and assassination attempts against Castro, while building one of the era’s most feared paramilitary groups—all under the direction of the CIA.

In the end, Veciana became a threat—not just to Castro, but also to his CIA handler. Veciana was the man who knew too much. Suddenly he found himself a target—framed and sent to prison, and later shot in the head and left to die on a Miami street. When he was called before a Congressional committee investigating the Kennedy assassination, Veciana held back, fearful of the consequences. He didn’t reveal the identity of the CIA officer who directed him—the same agent Veciana observed meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas before the killing of JFK.

Now, for the first time, Veciana tells all, detailing his role in the intricate game of thrones that aimed to topple world leaders and change the course of history.

With mountains of documentation, mostly from government and corporate sources, Sutton shows that Soviet military technology is heavily dependent on U.S. and allied gifts, “peaceful trade” and exchange programs. We’ve built for, sold or traded, or given outright to the Communists everything from copper wiring and military trucks to tank technology, missile guidance technology, computers – even the Space Shuttle. Peaceful trade is a myth … to the Soviets all trade is strategic. The paradox is that we spend $300 billion a year on a defense against an enemy we created and continue to keep in business. The deaf mute blindmen, as Lenin called them, are the multi-national businessmen who see no further than the next contract, who have their plants defended by Marxist troops (in Angola); who knowingly sell technology that comes back to kill and maim Americans.