“2 Dead, 10 Missing after boat carrying Cuban migrants overturns near key West.” (CBS Miami, 5/27)
“Three Cubans survived for 33 days on deserted island eating coconuts and rats. ... US Coast Guard officials said the trio from Cuba told them their boat had capsized in rough waters and they were able to swim to Anguilla Cay, where they spent 33 days before they were spotted and rescued.” (Daily Telegraph 2/21.)
“Cuban baseball star César Prieto defects to U.S.-- Cuban baseball player César Prieto, a highly touted 22-year-old infielder, ditched the Cuban national team Wednesday and defected to the United States…The player hopped in a car outside the team hotel almost immediately after their bus arrived. (Yahoo Sports, 5/27.)
Any cursory review of recent news will turn up numerous headlines like the ones above. And yet:
“People enjoy life in Cuba like in few other places. They’re safe, literate and healthy!” (Time magazine in their World’s Greatest Places Issue, March, 2015.)
And back in 2011 Newsweek magazine hailed Cuba among “The Best Countries in the World,” in terms of quality of life. “Cuba outdoes its fellow middle-income countries in quality of life,” explained the 1993 “National Magazine Award for General Excellence” winner.
“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democrat Party.)
"A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in... And how many want out," famously quipped Tony Blair. Well, prior to the Castro brothers’ and Che Guevara’s Stalinist coup in 1959, Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than did the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950s, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans lived in Cuba.
You’d never guess this from the Fake News media, Hollywood, or your professors, but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, for pre-Castro Cubans the U.S. was a “tourist playground.”
“What?” you say. But you’ve always heard that it was the other way around? That Cuba was a tourist playground for Americans? Indeed it was—but the tourist traffic went both ways, as befit a nation described by a 1957 UNESCO report thusly: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. So check it out here--and please click links for thorough documentation.
Point is, during the 1950s and based in Florida, Sheriff Joe Arpaio would have been lonelier than the Maytag repairman.
Given their record, a few such statements are probably out there, but I never heard a liberal crowing about the superb quality of life in East Germany, with “its free healthcare, education…blah, blah.” And yet over ten times as many people (and counting) have died attempting to flee Communist Cuba (which liberals routinely praise) than died trying to flee Communist East Germany.
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!
Between two and three hundred people died trying to breach the Berlin Wall. Between twenty five and forty thousand people (men, women, and children, entire families at a time) have died trying to escape Castro and Che Guevara’s Cuba, a nation that prior to Castroism was inundated with more immigrants (mostly from Europe) per-capita than was the U.S., including the Ellis Island years.
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 many machine-gun blasts from their Frontier “Guards,” (the Berlin Wall itself was 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 1th 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 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 original Alien. Same for the middle of the Florida straits -- except, of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rushing in and water frothing in white -- then red -- 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.