“The story of the Berlin Wall is one of division and repression, but also of the yearning for freedom.” (Time Magazine, Nov. 7 2019.)
“People enjoy life in Cuba as in few other places.” (Time Magazine, March 26, 2015.)
“November 9, 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Celebrate the triumph of freedom…” (Newsweek, Nov. 14, 2019.)
“In quality of life Cuba outdoes its fellow middle-income countries.” (Newsweek, 2011, in an article titled “The World’s Luckiest People.”)
“I (New York Times editorial board member Serge Schememann) intended my article (about the fall of the Berlin Wall) as no more than an allegory for the unrealistic expectations raised by the dramatic and unexpected fall of a barrier that had come to symbolize the division of Europe, and the world, into zones of freedom and captivity. (The New York Times, Nov. 8 2019)
“Why Infants May Be More Likely to Die in America Than Cuba…There’s no doubt that a major strength of the Cuban system is that it assures universal access. Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about.” (Nicholas Kristoff, New York Times, Jan. 18, 2019.)
“New York Times Recognizes Cuba's Health Achievements.” (Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored media organ Prensa Latina, hailing their propaganda subsidiary on Jan. 18, 2019.)
For the record: 239 people died while trying to escape East Germany over the Berlin Wall. An estimated 23,000 (and counting) have died trying to escape Stalinist Cuba (a formerly developed nation formerly deluged with immigrants, many from the First World. In 1958 more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S.)
And guess what? East Germany also had that typically communist “free and fabulous healthcare.”
Think about it:
Almost a HUNDRED TIMES as many people have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba-- a place The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Bernie Sanders among many, MANY Democrats and Fake News Media apparatchiks hails for its education and healthcare--as died trying to escape East Germany over the Berlin Wall. (Thorough documentation for this horrifying datum here.)
But what sane person would gladly suffer some fool of a professor, pundit or Democrat politician singing the praises of East Germany for its “social advances?” Even (sincere) liberals would cringe or scoff at such a jackass or scoundrel. The Berlin Wall and the Butcher’s Bill of Germans who died trying to escape by crossing it is all the evidence most people (of good faith) need as proof that communist East Germany was a terrible place. Yet singing the praises of Castroite Cuba is pretty much a ritual among Democrats and liberals in general.
In fact, when liberals hail the Castros and Che Guevara’s communism as somehow “different” from typical Iron Curtain communism, they have a point: it’s worse!
In 1992 former East German dictator Erich Honecker was tried (to no avail) for the deaths of 192 Germans killed while attempting to cross the Berlin wall. Some human rights groups estimate that actually three hundred people (out of an average East German population over the decades of 18 million) died trying to breach the Berlin Wall or otherwise escape East Germany.
After the thousands of machine-gun blasts from their Frontier “Guards” (the Berlin Wall, officially titled the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart") kept disturbing Castro and Che’s coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having the Soviet helicopters flown by their “Guards” hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, often consisting of entire families—but to hold-off on shooting.
Instead of machine-gunning the families to death as years of tradition called for, they switched to dropping sandbags onto the rickety rafts and tiny boats to demolish and sink them. Then the Tiger Sharks and Hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work. Screams, groans and gurgles, after all, don’t carry nearly as far as machine-gun blasts.
"The best revolutionary German man I've ever known was Erich Honecker,” tweeted Fidel Castro on June 1, 2012 commemorating the 18th anniversary of the East German Stalinist’s death. “I maintain feelings of profound solidarity with Honecker."
“What a chump!” Castro was probably thinking. “A measly 192?”
“In one week during 1962 we counted over 400 firing squad blasts from the execution yard below our cells," recalled former Cuban political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin Perez to this writer.
"This is the most savage kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton administration. "This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!" Gelbard had watched desperate Cubans trying to swim to what is now our Guantanamo Base when machine-guns opened up and the water around them frothed in white, then red.
The corpses were retrieved by gallant Cuban Frontier “Guards” in a boat using the same type of gaffing hooks the lucky contestants in the Castro-regime-sponsored “Hemingway Fishing Festival” were using in nearby waters to yank thrashing tuna and marlin aboard their Cuba-registered yachts.
In September 2011 Spanish medical examiners found that an airline stowaway from Cuba named Adonis G.B. had his throat crushed. He probably died upon takeoff, meaning he probably died more quickly and painlessly than the tens of thousands of others who perished escaping Cuba’s free and fabulous healthcare.
It was a different story for the tens of thousands of dead Cuban rafters. Most of these desperate rafters probably died like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Others perished gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally gave out and they gulped that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect Storm. Still others were eaten alive -- drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks much like Captain Quint in Jaws. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we've all seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.
"In space no one can hear you scream," says the ad for the movie Alien. Same for the middle of the Florida straits -- except, of course, for your raftmates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rushing in and water changing color-- they hear the screams all too clearly.
All during the decades coinciding with Castro’s rule, the Coast Guard has documented hundreds of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct we'd have no end of books, movies, documentaries, TV interviews, survival-story specials, etc. We'd never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this Caribbean holocaust consist of the Left's premier pin-up boys.