Fidel Castro is dead

[BoSoxGal]

I'd like to see a comparison in numbers of citizens killed by police in the USA during the Castro regime v. killings attributable to Castro.

Oh and should we count the hundreds of thousands killed world wide by our interventionist policies? Preemptive war, I believe it's called?

I don't understand enough about the Castro regime to have a fully informed opinion, but I'm not sure that the lie of the American dream sold to our citizenry is so much better than the reality of the excellent health and education systems in Cuba. I'd say both systems have evils.

[Jarlaxle]

One of Castro's body count is my mother in law.

[BoSoxGal]

Your family has my sympathies.

I've lost family & friends to illegal American wars and various oppressive policies of my own government; I simply don't see them as less evil.

Again, I'm not declaring myself a Castro enthusiast, although I believe some of his original aspirations had great merit he became corrupt as many leaders (unchecked) tend to become.

We will very likely see some of that ourselves in the next 4 years.

[RayThom]

And built upon Castro's fifty year reign of murder and terror came another builder -- a man called Trump.
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/14/dona ... 04059.html

[Lord Jim]

What did I say that is patently incorrect?

Well, there's this...

carried out by people exercising their right to bear arms under the 2nd Amendment

That is completely incorrect; I'm unaware of any court decision that has interpreted the 2nd Amendment to give one the right to run around carrying out drive-by shootings...

Frankly, comparing political executions carried out by a dictatorial regime to gang violence killings fails on numerous levels...

illegal American wars

This is a phrase one frequently sees used, (usually by lefties, but also sometimes by Libertarians...though they generally favor the companion concept, "Unconstitutional war") but it's nothing but POV hyperbole...

I am unaware of the United States having conducted any "illegal wars" at least if you interpret the word "illegal" in the same way that it would be interpreted in any other context...

ie, where the waging of the war was found to be "illegal" by the competent legal authority charged with deciding whether or not the waging of the war was "illegal" (or "Unconstitutional")

There are some folks who like to claim that any military action that is carried without Congress issuing a formal declaration of war is "illegal" (or "Unconstitutional") but that's just simply not so. An enormous body of case law says otherwise.

[dales]

don t leave it on me to rebut all the dishonest bullshit.

someone else should grow a set and call Bargain Bill on his crap.

He is in a period of "deep mourning" over the death of his "beloved Fidel".

He is obviously overcome with deep grief and is walking about in sackcloth and ashes.

wes. try to show some compassion.

[wesw]

thank you.

[liberty]

The Cuba Archive which documents deaths and disappearances resulting from Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution has documented 3,615 firing squad executions conducted by the Cuban state since Castro took over on January 1, 1959.

Meanwhile, in Chiraq alone, there have been 610 people killed by gun violence as of today — "firing squad executions", if you will, carried out by people exercising their right to bear arms under the 2nd Amendment — and last year there were over 500.  Imagine, over 1100 dead in less than two years in just one American city alone!

Compare that to 3615 'executions' in Castro's Cuba, over a FIFTY-FIVE YEAR PERIOD!!, and we see that el Supremo was a piker when it comes to extra-judicial murder.

And the beat goes on.

-"BB"-

Sorry Bill you can’t say that, that racist. Repeat after me there is no problem in the inner-city black community. I know you didn’t say city or black, but you can’t infer it either. That is racist code.

[Scooter]

[Scooter]

[Sue U]

Whatever you think of him, there is no question that Fidel Castro was a giant figure on the world stage, and gave Cuba an outsized influence in international affairs.

I think his embrace of Leninism was an enormous mistake, although to a significant extent it was forced on him by the counter-revolutionary pressures of the kleptocracy battling to regain control of the country and the fractured nature of the revolution itself. His legacy is complicated, to say the least, but cannot be measured without also considering the tremendous hostility and obstruction presented by the United States. I don't know whether history in the long run will judge him harshly or kindly, but I think it's fair to say that any leader who achieves such fundamental transformation of a society is going to be seen as a hero by some and a monster by others, and neither is an accurate depiction.

[liberty]

Former U. S. POWs detail torture by Cubans in Vietnam. Torturers' aim was `total surrender' Savage beatings bent captives to will of man dubbed `Fidel'

By JUAN O. TAMAYO, Herald Staff Writer


Published Sunday, August 22, 1999, in the Miami Herald

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. -- Retired Air Force Col. Ed Hubbard says he holds no hate for "Fidel, the Cuban government agent who viciously tortured him and 17 other US prisoners of war in North Vietnam three decades ago.

Almost daily for one year, the man the POWs nicknamed Fidel whipped them with strips cut from rubber tires until their buttocks "hung in shreds, and trussed them in ropes and wires to tear at limbs and cut into flesh. Fidel was one of three Cubans sent to North Vietnam by Havana to deal with American POWs, in what became known as the Cuba Program.

He whipped and kicked one POW so fiercely in 1968 that the American went into a catatonic state and later died, in what a new book on US POWs in Vietnam calls "one of the most heinous and tragic atrocity cases.

Hubbard himself was beaten so brutally by "Fidel" during one 1967 interrogation session that fellow POW Jack Bomar recalled finding him afterward unconscious on a cell floor, "a bleeding, broken, bruised mass.

Concealed for decades by official U.S. secrecy and the shadows of a war that many simply wanted to forget, the full story of Fidel and the so- called Cuba Program is finally becoming public.

Honor Bound, a book published in April with Department of Defense assistance, devotes 13 pages to the "unusually intensive and prolonged operation that monopolized the [prison's] torture machinery for much of the year."

A two-inch-thick stack of documents declassified by the Defense Department's Prisoner of War, Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) for a string of congressional hearings in 1996 provide extensive and gruesome details on the Cuba Program.

And a DPMO official has now reported that two North Vietnamese army colonels confirmed to him in 1992 that "Fidel" was indeed Cuban and had tortured American POWs -- but without Hanoi's official approval.

DIFFICULT TO FORGET - Some former POWs consider suing Cuba

"I've moved on with my life, said Hubbard, a motivational speaker living in Fort Walton Beach who uses his POW experiences to celebrate the human spirit. Then he smiles and adds: "But if I see `Fidel' again, maybe I'd turn him over to Bomar.

He knows that Bomar has not forgotten the broken nose, broken cheek and busted eardrum he suffered in one particularly brutal beating by "Fidel" after he insulted Cuban-Argentine guerrilla Ernesto "Che Guevara.

"I would kill him, said Bomar, another former Air Force colonel who, like his fellow POWs, was handpicked by "Fidel and two Cuban "good guy interrogators, "Chico and "Garcia, for what they dubbed the Cuba Program.

Some former POWs angry with the DPMO's handling of the Cuba case say they may even file suit against Havana, following the example set in Miami by relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by Cuban MiGs in 1996.

"I don't mind admitting it -- I want to harass the Vietnamese, said Mike Benge, a former POW who was not part of the Cuba Program but has long accused the DPMO of failing to properly investigate allegations that Chinese and Soviet officers interrogated US POWs.

DPMO officials in Washington declined to comment to The Herald on "Fidel," the Cuba Program or the many controversies surrounding the agency's handling of the case.

Sketchy versions of the story of "Fidel" appeared in a handful of US publications from 1973, soon after Hanoi began freeing American POWs, until mid-1977, but the tale drew little attention. Perhaps that was because most POWs obeyed Pentagon orders to keep quiet, to protect POWs who might remain in Vietnam, and perhaps because Fidel's identification as a Cuban was then only an unconfirmed allegation by the POWs.

But now the newly released DPMO documents, the book Honor Bound by Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley, and Herald interviews with Hubbard, Bomar and three other Fidel victims provide the fullest account yet of a significant chapter in the history of Vietnam-era POWs.

"This marked the first and only time that non-Vietnamese were overtly involved in the exploitation of American prisoners, said a 1975 US Air Force analysis of the Cuba Program declassified in 1996.

When Fidel and Chico showed up around August 1967 at the POW camp known as "The Zoo," a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of Hanoi, it was clear to the 50 prisoners there that they were no ordinary visitors.

While the camp's North Vietnamese commandant rode a bicycle to work, Fidel arrived in a car chauffeured by a Hanoi army officer and always sat to the commandant's right, a position of honor, Bomar said.

Debriefed after they returned home, POWs held at The Zoo described Fidel as about six feet one inch tall, in his early 30s, muscular, ramrod-straight, swarthy and handsome enough to be compared to movie star Fernando Lamas.

They described Chico as more light-skinned, almost blond and in his 40s. He liked to play Spanish-sounding songs on the camp's organ, and often wore a beret with a visor, the type then popular in Cuba.

Both spoke good if accented English, but while Fidel had full command of American slang and even obscenities, Chico struggled with words like Piper Cub, pronouncing it "peeper koob," according to excerpts from the debriefings.

Fidel interviewed POWs and soon selected Hubbard, Bomar and eight other Air Force and Navy pilots or navigators shot down over North Vietnam, segregating them in a block of four cells that the POWs nicknamed "Stable."

That, the POWs said, is when the torture began, after a few cursory questions -- such as whether they liked Mexican food -- apparently designed less to elicit intelligence information than to provide an excuse for beatings.


BEATEN SENSELESS: Navy pilot Earl Cobeil died a captive.

While Chico always played the "good guy, Fidel was a savage torturer one day and a friend the next, a man who would "hammer one POW, then play Frank Sinatra tapes and offer chewing gum to the next.

"Under different circumstances, Fidel might have been an interesting guy to talk to, former Zoo POW Allan Carpenter told The Herald. "But I can't have anything but loathing for him.

[MajGenl.Meade]

"I was exactly the kind of enemy the Fidelistas were describing: bourgeois, individualistic, a self-indulgent poet.”

"A little later it hit the newspapers in North America that the airport had been bombed. I’m in this little seedy hotel in Havana and somebody knocks on my door and says, ‘You have to go down to the Canadian consulate right away.’ They don’t like the look of me there because I really do look like a Cuban revolutionary – I had a beard and wore khakis. Finally I’m brought in to one of the secretaries of the consulate – I’m pretending to be pretty tough. And he says to me, ‘Mr. Cohen. Your mother is very worried about you.’ "

The Only Tourist In Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward
By Leonard Cohen

Come, my brothers,
let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the White House,
let us make the French talk English,

not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually
until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,
let us encourage the dark races
so they’ll be lenient
when they take over,
let us make the CBC talk English,
let us all lean in one direction
and float down
to the coast of Florida,
let us have tourism,
let us flirt with the enemy,
let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards,
let us sell snow
to under-developed nations,
(It is true one of our national leaders
was a Roman Catholic?)
let us terrorize Alaska,
let us unite
Church and State,
let us not take it lying down,
let us have two Governor Generals
at the same time,
let us have another official language,
let us determine what it will be,
let us give a Canada Council Fellowship
to the most original suggestion,
let us teach sex in the home
to parents,
let us threaten to join the U.S.A.
and pull out at the last moment,
my brothers, come,
our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere
like Gladstone bags abandoned
after a coup d’état,
let us put them on very quickly,
let us maintain a stony silence
on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Havana
April 1961

[Lord Jim]

Any American who has fond thoughts about Castro should probably remember that if he'd had his way, they'd be dead...(or never born):

Fidel Castro once asked the leader of the Soviet Union to annihilate the US with nuclear weapons

Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader who died Friday night at the age of 90, once requested that the leader of the Soviet Union consider launching a nuclear strike against the US in the event the country attacked Cuba.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Castro wrote Nikita Khrushchev a letter detailing his concerns that an attack on Cuba was "imminent."

He suggested two possible variants — the first being an air attack meant to destroy specific targets, and the second a "full invasion," though he acknowledged that was less likely.

"This would require a large force and is the most repugnant form of aggression, which might restrain them," he wrote.

Castro went on to explain that should the US attempt to invade and occupy Cuba, the country and the policies that would ensue would pose such a threat that the Soviet Union could not risk the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike by the US.

He continued:

"I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists' aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba — a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law — then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other."

The crisis was ultimately averted after weeks of negotiations between the Soviet Union and the US, which resulted in the removal of the Soviets' missiles from Cuba.

In a 2010 interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, Castro appeared to concede that such an attack on the US would have been a mistake.

When asked by Goldberg whether his recommendation to Khrushchev still seemed logical to him, Castro responded, "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all." [Oh, well that's ok then...]

http://www.businessinsider.com/fidel-ca ... th-2016-11

Here are some excerpts from a NY Times article from 2012, that provides more context (the whole article is well worth reading)

How Castro Held the World Hostage

ON Oct. 26-27, 1962, human civilization came close to being destroyed. Schoolchildren were ordered into shelters; supermarket shelves were emptied of soup cans and bottled water. It was the most perilous moment of the Cuban missile crisis, and of the cold war. But the danger of Armageddon did not begin, as legend has it, when the United States learned that Soviet missiles had reached Cuba’s shores earlier that month.

Rather, it was driven by Fidel Castro’s fears and insecurities after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and by the failures of President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to take him seriously. With Soviet missiles stationed on the island and America poised to attack, Cuba 50 years ago was far more dangerous than Iran or North Korea is today. But the 1962 crisis shows that a small, determined revolutionary state, backed into a corner and convinced of its inevitable demise, can bring the world to the brink of catastrophe...

Twenty years ago, we spent four days in Havana discussing the missile crisis with Mr. Castro, former Soviet officials and American decision makers from the Kennedy administration, including the former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.

Mr. Castro’s interest had been piqued by the declassification and release of Soviet and American documents in 1991 and 1992, which both surprised and angered him. These included long-suppressed passages from memoirs, released 20 years after Khrushchev’s death, in which he wrote that Mr. Castro had become irrational and possibly suicidal and that the crisis had to end before Cuba ignited a nuclear war.

In addition, declassified letters between Khrushchev and Kennedy revealed the extent to which Washington and Moscow cut Cuba out of negotiations, refused to consider Cuban demands and eventually resolved the crisis in spite of Mr. Castro’s objections. So to truly understand how the world came close to Armageddon, one must look not to Washington and Moscow but to Havana.

...Around noon on Oct. 26, Mr. Castro summoned the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Alekseev, to his command post. Mr. Castro couldn’t understand why Soviet troops in Cuba were sitting on their hands while American planes were flying over the island with impunity. He urged them to start shooting at U-2 spy planes with surface-to-air missiles and suggested that Cuban troops should begin firing on low-flying planes with antiaircraft guns, contrary to Soviet wishes.

...While Cuba was preparing for nuclear war, Khrushchev and Kennedy were, unbeknown to Mr. Castro, moving toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Terrified that a catastrophic war might break out, Khrushchev took the initiative even as Kennedy was preparing an offer of his own. He wrote to Kennedy on Oct. 26:

“Let us then display statesmenlike wisdom. I propose: we, for our part, will declare that our ships bound for Cuba are not carrying any armaments. You will declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its troops and will not support any other forces which might intend to invade Cuba. Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba will be obviated.” It would take another three agonizing weeks to work out the details, but Kennedy and Khrushchev had finally locked onto a common wavelength.

Unaware of Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s progress toward a deal, at 2 a.m. on Oct. 27, Mr. Castro decided to write to Khrushchev, encouraging him to use his nuclear weapons to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. At 3 a.m., he arrived at the Soviet Embassy and told Alekseev that they should go into the bunker beneath the embassy because an attack was imminent. According to declassified Soviet cables, a groggy but sympathetic Alekseev agreed, and soon they were set up underground with Castro dictating and aides transcribing and translating a letter.

Mr. Castro became frustrated, uncertain about what to say. After nine drafts, with the sun rising, Alekseev finally confronted Mr. Castro: are you asking Comrade Khrushchev to deliver a nuclear strike on the United States? Mr. Castro told him, “If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth!” Alekseev was shocked, but he dutifully assisted Mr. Castro in fine-tuning the 10th and final draft of the letter.

From his bunker, Mr. Castro wrote that, in the event of an American invasion, “the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

An invasion, he added, “would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate defense however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.” Mr. Castro was calm as he composed this last will and testament for the 6.5 million citizens of Cuba, and the 43,000 Russians on the island who would be incinerated alongside them.

According to his son and biographer, Sergei Khrushchev, the Soviet premier received that letter in the midst of a tense leadership meeting and shouted, “This is insane; Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him!” Khrushchev hadn’t understood that Mr. Castro believed that Cuba was doomed, that war was inevitable, and that the Soviets should transform Cuba from a mere victim into a martyr.

By ignoring Mr. Castro’s messianic martyrdom, both Kennedy and Khrushchev inadvertently pushed the world close to Armageddon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/opini ... stage.html

[rubato]

Fidel Castro once asked the leader of the Soviet Union to annihilate the US with nuclear weapons

Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader who died Friday night at the age of 90, once requested that the leader of the Soviet Union consider launching a nuclear strike against the US in the event the country attacked Cuba.... "

Headline does not match the text. It is a lie.

Cheap propaganda for the stupid.

It is like:

"South Korea asks US to annihilate North Korea with nuclear weapons."

vs

"South Korea asks US to consider using nuclear weapons if attacked by North Korea."


The statements are not even remotely alike.


yrs,
rubato

[dales]

WGAS?

JFK forced Castro's hand and the nukes were removed.

End of story.

[rubato]

WGAS?

JFK forced Castro's hand and the nukes were removed.

End of story.

WGAS?

People who care about the truth and are cogent.


yrs,
rubato

[dales]

Richard....

You're a fool and a liar.

Margaret has my sympathies.

[liberty]

As a matter of a refresher I will say this because some probably need it: Any system where one person or a few have total power over all others is a bad idea. And I see no exception for Castro; he was a murdering thug who tortured American POWs in Vietnam .

Of course the military has to be an exception.

[liberty]

don t leave it on me to rebut all the dishonest bullshit.

someone else should grow a set and call Bargain Bill on his crap.

Well, I suppose comparing a few deaths over the weekend in Murderland Chicago to a 'firing squad execution' was a little over the top in that there was no one standing off to the side shouting "Listo ... Objetivo ... FUEGO!"   I'm sure that made all the difference to the victims.  However ....
● FACT:  There were over 500 murders by gun violence in Chicago, IL in calendar year 2015.
● FACT:  So far this year there have been another 610 ... with one month to go.
● FACT:  500 + 610 is more than 1100.
So if I accept the Cuba Archive's figures, as cited by liberty, as correct and compare my FACTUAL numbers to theirs, then tell me ...
What did I say that is patently incorrect?



That's the problem with being a Trump supporter. You can't handle the facts.

-"BB"-

Well Bill are you willing to face the charges of racist and join me in saying what is happening in black inner-city communities of this country is a NATIONAL DISCRACE.

A word of caution here, if you are in a position where you could lose your job and you need your job to support your family it may be wise to say nothing. After all, there is a difference between courage and stupidity.