While the MSM reports on Fidel Castro’s 84th birthday, Townhall will report on some of the tens of thousands of his countrymen who cannot celebrate birthdays. Seems only fitting.
Upon arriving in Havana, Jan. of 1959, after an utterly BOGUS guerrilla war, (The New York Times had breathlessly reported of “thousands dead in single battles!" The official tally compiled by the U.S embassy after two years of “ferocious civil war!" was 184 dead on BOTH sides, half New Orleans' annual murder tally)--at any rate, upon entering the Cuban capitol, the gallant Che Guevara (beaming and strutting over his appointment –Hot Damn!--as Castro’s chief hangman!) immediately recognized the moat around Havana's La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar, Hitler's SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had one ready-made and so they put their firing squads to work in triple-shifts.
"Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!" Before the bullets ripped their bodies apart “the defiant yells of the bound and staked martyrs would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble," wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares.
So by mid 1961 the mere binding and blindfolding of Castro and Che's enemies wasn't enough. The Left’s premier poster-boys began ordering their gagging too. The shaken firing-squads demanded it. The defiant yells by the hundreds of men and boys they were murdering had badly spooked the trigger-pullers, you see.
So now, as the Castroite henchmen yanked the martyrs and heroes from the cells, bent their arms back, and bound their hands, two more Communist guards came into play. One grabbed the struggling victim's hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut.
Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che Guevara’s henchmen dragged him from his cell in Havana’s La Cabana prison and execution-pit, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little "Rigo" pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his "prosecutors" that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn't possibly have been "a CIA agent planting bombs."
"FUEGO!" and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo's little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. Remember the gallant Che Guevara's instructions to his revolutionary courts: "judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail." And remember Harvard Law School's invitation and rollicking ovation to Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath.
Alas, in the Cuban countryside Castro and Che’s directives regarding their murder-preparations arrived rather haphazardly. So some freedom-fighters often faced the Communist firing-squads un-bound and un-gagged, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. “Aim right HERE!" was a favorite among some of these as they reached below the belt. This was a favorite, they say, of the rednecks Castro and Che's firing squads murdered during the Escambray rebellion. "'Cause y'all ain't got any!" yelled these courageous Cuban rednecks right before the Soviet bullets shattered their bodies.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro's theft of their humble family farm. All refused blindfolds and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen.
Not that the victims of this Stalinist bloodbath were exclusively men and boys. In fact, the Castroites were well ahead of the Taliban. On Christmas Eve 1961 a young Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. They'd found her guilty of feeding and hiding "bandits" (Che's term for Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight his theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant.
In Aug. 7, 1961, Lydia Perez was eight months pregnant and a Cuban political prisoner. She somehow annoyed a guard who bashed her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach, and walked off. Both Lydia and her baby were left to bleed to death
The Cuban Archive project headed by Mrs. Maria Werlau and Dr. Amando Lago has fully documented the murder of 219 women from various brutalities and tortures while in Castro and Che’s prisons. Indeed, the Taliban has nothing on the regime co-founded by Che Guevara. Ten years into Stalinism’s imposition on Cuba, Cuban women had tripled their suicide rate. They became the most suicidal women on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar, Maida Donate-Armada, that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.
During the 1960’s, Castro’s Stalinist regime jailed 35,150 Cuban women, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba—but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime whose de-facto first lady was hailed by the New York Times in 2006 as, "a prominent advocate of women's rights!"
The Washington Post quickly seconded by hailing Raul Castro’s wife as, “A champion of women's rights!"
According to the Cuba Archive Project, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1960. Put your calculator to it and you’ll see that—per-capita wise--Castro and Che were close on the heels of their heroes and mentors Stain and Mao.
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