Cuba – A Land Suffering From Too Much Stalinism

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

I have sometimes envied my Ukrainian Canadian friends for the opportunity they have to visit Cuba in the winter.  As Walter Kish recently described it in his New Pathway column, they “can laze on some of the finest beaches in the tropics for as low as $600 a head which includes flight, accommodations, as well as all meals and drinks included.”

Such a deal!  Too bad those forced to live in this tropical paradise, will never enjoy these pleasures.

Frank Norton, Jr., the son of a Cuban mother, recently visited Cuba with his wife Nancy.  His impressions, appeared in an internet version of the Gainsville Times dated December 10. “Today, the Cuban people have lost all personal freedom, lost all personal property, and now occupy government-owned, rotting, worn-out buildings that are crumbling around them”, he wrote.  “There is no pride of ownership, little pride of country...”

Soon after he marched into Havana in 1959, Fidel Castro promised free and open elections within three months.  More than fifty years later, Fidel and his thugs have refined the old Stalinist formula for political control and transformed Cuba into a totalitarian dictatorship. “Cuban leadership used starvation, deprivation and indoctrination, to forge an alliance with its citizens”, writes Norton.  “Today the people of Cuba are living under a form of the Stockholm Syndrome: Smiling contentedly, living day to day on the government babble and the food dole.”  La revolucion has become Animal Farm.

Mr. Kish writes that Fidel Castro was originally of “socialist bent” but “not a Communist, though many Americans who had a limited understanding of Cuba and its history had branded him so. In fact, for several years after his victory he made numerous attempts to find a political understanding with the US only to be rebuffed.”  Really?

The New York Times had been praising Castro since February 1957.  TV host Ed Sullivan called Castro “Cuba’s George Washington.” Former US President Harry Truman believed Castro to be “a good young man trying to do what’s best for Cuba. We should extend him a hand.”  The United States accorded diplomatic recognition to Castro Cuba almost immediately.  Within weeks, however, Castro’s firing squads had murdered some 600-1,000 men and boys.  I learned the meaning of “Fuego” as I watched these horrors on TV.  Che Guevara, a mass murderer, was the chief executioner. He is now the darling of Hollywood. Johnny Depp wears a “Che” medallion around his neck.  Angelina Jolie has a “Che” tattoo. 

A few months later, Castro’s jails held ten times the number of political prisoners than under Batista his predecessor.  Calling the United States “a vulture preying on humanity”, Castro quickly confiscated all US properties on the island (worth some $2 billion) as well as many Cuban businesses.  Finally, on January 3, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, declaring:  “there’s a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure.”  In December 1961, Fidel declared that he was “a life-long Marxist-Leninist.”

The Castro government was soon “nationalizing” landholdings, which the New York Times described as “a promise of social justice” and “a foretaste of human dignity for millions who had little knowledge of it in Cuba’s former near-feudal society.”  According to the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, the average daily farm-wage in Cuba at the time was $3.00, higher than in France ($2.73), Belgium ($2.70), Denmark ($2.74), and West Germany ($2.73). Advisors from Soviet Ukraine were soon in Cuba to assist in a collectivization process.  As in Ukraine, there was fierce resistance.  Unlike in Ukraine, where the peasants had no guns, Cubans had stored their guns and the riots which resulted were bloody. 

By the 1970s, Cuba was a totally Sovietised state with concentration camps, labour camps, and re-education camps. By 1978, write the authors of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, there were between 15,000 and 20,000 prisoners of conscience in Cuba... From 1959 through the 1990s, more than 100,000 Cubans experienced life in one of the camps, prisons, or open-regime sites. Between 15,000 and 17,000 people had been shot... In the summer of 1994, 7,000 people lost their lives while attempting to flee...”

Cuba’s human rights abuses continue.  Just this month, the “Ladies in White”, mothers and wives of dissidents jailed in 2003 who have led silent protests in Havana, were jailed again, and released. 

As long as the Castros are in charge, Cuba is not ready for reform, nor is the United States guilty of an “inflexible, petty and irrational persecution of Cuba”, as Mr. Kish would have us believe. The only people persecuting Cuba are the Castro Brothers and their henchmеn.

I pray for the day Lesia and I can go to Cuba, a Cuba without the Castros!