John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam The BWWJohn Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam The BWW SJohn Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam John Pellam The BWW Society The Bibliotheque World Wide Society The Institute for Positive Global Solutions Pellam Journal of Science Journal of Global Issues and Solutions
by Dr. Julio A. Gonzalo
Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad San Pablo CEU, Montepríncipe, Bohadilla del Monte, 28668 Madrid, Spain. Departamento de Física de Materiales, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain, e-mail: julio.gonzalo@uam.es
Barack Obama, Pope Francis and others have tried to make Fidel Castro’s totalitarian dictatorship appear as palatable as possible to world public opinion. Now Castro is dead and his brother Raul, eighty five years old, should not last in power much longer. It is very important for the US, Europe and the World to face this situation intelligently in order to counter as indirectly as possible the Marxist poison in America, the only continent which is still relatively healthy in the world in this respect. Venezuela and Bolivia are at particular risk, but other nations are also at risk elsewhere in North, Central and South America.
Fidel Castro was, of course, much more intelligent, competent and ruthless than are Maduro and Evo Morales. Prior to 1990 Castro counted on the support of one of the world’s superpowers, the Soviet Union, but the poisonous effects of totalitarian Marxism-Leninism have extended themselves substantially over American territories during the last decade, due, among others things, to the deleterious influence of Spanish Extreme Left Government of Jose L. Zapatero (2004-2011) and Obama´s anti-Christian, anti-family and socialist policies.
Let us summarize the origin of the totalitarian dictatorship of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the subsequent international developments leading to Cuba becoming a focal point of Marxism-Leninism in the Americas for more than half a century.
In 2016, upon the death of Fidel Castro, 60 years have passed by after a revolutionary armed group headed by Fidel came down from Sierra Maestra (with many men showing rosaries and small crosses on their chests instead of hammers and sickles) to face the corrupt government of President Batista. The New York Times, no less, called Fidel “the Robin Hood of the Americas”, a man ready to take away the money from the rich to distribute it to the poor. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos and their men succeeded in defeating Batista’s men in 1960 without openly declaring themselves at the time communist despite being ideologically and monetarily supported from the beginning by the Soviet Union[1].
Batista’s government was certainly corrupt but it was very far from the totalitarian dictatorship which Fidel would impose upon Cuba two years later. More than twenty percent of the Cuban population voted with their feet, escaping from Cuba. Franco’s Spain in 1939, with a population of 22 million, had nothing to do with Castro’s Cuba in 1960, with a population of 6.2 million, but the large number of Spaniards (400,000) who left the country at the end of the Civil War comprised less than two percent of the total population, three quarters of which returned to Spain one year later. Moreover, the people were free to come in and out of Spain, while that was not the case for Fidel Castro’s Cubans.
After the failure of the anti-Castro attempt supported by President Kennedy at Bahia de Cochinos, a commercial blockade was declared, but noting that the blockade would cause more suffering by the people than by the government, Spain’s government kept commercial relationships with Cuba.
Spain sent goods to Cuba in exchange for sugar cane and other agricultural products. Today almost no one remembers that Fidel Castro declared three days of official condolence in Cuba when Francisco Franco died in 1975. Fidel was, without doubt, a totalitarian dictator, but, it must be accepted, a dictator with a strong personality. Stalin lasted thirty years. Hitler lasted only twelve (he expected the National Socialist Order to last for one thousand). Mussolini lasted twenty. But Fidel was lasted in power for fifty-six years, despite of the fall of the Russian Soviet Union in 1990, something which would have not been possible in Cuba without a ferocious totalitarian regime based upon a very effective apparatus of police control and a generalized fear among the population of being denounced. In spite of all this, the prestige of Castro outside Cuba was due to his defiant challenge to the US acclaimed by the leftist press around the world. In the countries oppressed by Communism, poverty is shared equitatively among the population as a whole, while the “new class” -- the dominant oligarchy -- lives very well. As is very often done in the leftist press and the leftist TV, there is no way of comparing Fidel’s dictatorship with Franco’s dictatorship. In Spain Franco’s dictatorship was a just and natural reaction against the open Marxist-Leninists and anarchists of the Popular Front taking power, as denounced in 1936 by Marañon, Ortega and Perez de Ayala.
Upon his death Fidel Castro received posthumous praise from the main leaders of the West, including Pope Francis and the King of Spain, It would have been for them much better to remain silent than to praise something indefensible.
In times of peace, after the Second World War, it was possible in any Western European country (including Portugal and Spain) to criticize or disagree openly with the government policies, even in authoritarian regimes. Nothing like the situation existed in Castro’s Cuba where denouncements and repression were always common currency, as for many years was the case in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary under Soviet Communism.
It is enough to take a look to “The Black Book on Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression”[2] to realize the totalitarian character of the Cuban government from the 1960`s to today. In that book (p. 29) Pius XI is quoted (“Quadragesimo Anno”):
Communism teaches and seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare and the complete eradication of private ownership. Not secretly by hidden methods does it to do this, but publicly, openly and by employing any means possible, even the most violent. To achieve these objectives there is nothing it is afraid to do, nothing for which it has respect or reverence. When it comes to power, it is ferocious in its cruelty and inhumanity. The horrible slaughter and destruction to which it has laid waste to vast regions of Eastern Europe and Asia give evidence of this.
(Let us ask respectfully: What does Pope Francis think of these words so applicable to Fidel Castro’s Cuba?)
The comment which follows that quote (out of context) on p. 29 against the Catholic Church should have been avoided. According to the book’s coauthors the victims of Communism around the world as of 1990 numbered 100,000,000, while, for comparison, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition in the times of Torquemada totaled, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 2,000, much fewer than the victims of religious persecution in the same epoque in Protestant territories within Germany, Switzerland or England.
In Chapter 25 (p. 664 of the same book) on “Communism in Latin America”, it is registered that between 15,000 and 17,000 persons were shot in Cuba from 1959 to 2000. Additionally, 1,000 women died as political prisoners and about 7,000 more died while trying to escape Cuba (as of 1994), for a total of approximately 24,000. For a population of about 10,000,000 people this is a substantial 0.224 percent, however far fewer than the 13.8 percent of the Russian population killed by Stalin in the purges of the 1930’s.
Now, it is very important to be realistic at confronting Communism in Cuba in the post-Castro era in order to recover respect for freedom within law and order in the societies of Latin America.
With Fidel Castro dead, the days of the Marxist-Leninist system in Cuba are numbered. The future government of the US should act with generosity and rigor to recover as much respect and friendship as possible in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America that had been lost during the Castro era. It is important to note that Central and South American governments leaning to the left and declared admirers of Fidel Castro’s Cuba have been gaining positions in the last decade and a half.
In particular it is very important that the US helps Mexico, a basically Catholic country in which pro-abortion and anti-family policies (same sex coupling legalization) have been pushed forth by the UN, Europe and the US in recent years. Now drug consumption and criminal sequestering of people in Mexico have been on the rise during the last decade and a half. Christian values are under attack there; however, in the same way as evangelicals and the most consequent majority of Catholics in the US have recently defeated the anti-family and socialist trends of Hillary Clinton, there is a good potential in Mexico to do something similar if the middle working classes -- the silent majority -- become united and are allowed to speak out.
Within continental Central America, the nations of Guatemala, Salvador and Nicaragua have suffered in their own flesh in the recent past under the deleterious influence of Marxist terrorism, while in Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama effective anti-communist groups have been able to counter dangerous situations in which the Marxist left was trying to gain power.
In the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, a Free-Associated State of the US with 3.5 million people living on the island and another 4 million living in the continental US, Communist influences have been low except in the University; during the 1960s the Dominican Republic (with US help) avoided a Marxist attempt at power; Dominicans in the US and in Spain form large communities which have remained relatively uncontaminated by Marxism; Cuban refugees in Miami, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans have much in common. They could join forces to reconstruct a Christian society in Cuba and the Caribbean and around La Habana in this new post-Fidel Castro era.
The US should consider contributing to create a Central American and Caribbean Common Market capable of bringing continuity and progress to all these Spanish=speaking countries under more favorable circumstances.
Then we have Colombia (population 48 million) and Venezuela (population about 30 million), two great and potentially rich countries. If Colombians become free of the terrorist FARC and Venezuelans can dispatch Maduro’s dictatorship, both countries have a great potential to become free of the leftist terrorism and the anti-family policies which have been pushed upon them by the UN, with the blind support of the US and Europe in during the first decades of the 21st Century.
Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, former territories of the Incan Empire, have been evolving relatively well during the last decade. Peru in particular has presented a brave example of protesting in the streets of Lima the pro-abortion legislation pushed upon them by the UN.
Chile, Argentina, Brazil (especially Sao Paulo state) are territories in which active pro-family groups should be able to overcome the leftist anti-Christian mentality of the media, newspapers and television. Smaller countries like Uruguay and Paraguay would benefit, no doubt, from improvements in their neighbors.
The US and Iberoamerica must collaborate as much as possible with the authoritarian government of Russia under Vladimir Putin, which after repudiating the anti-family and anti-Christian policies of the Soviets, seems to be willing to cooperate against extreme left totalitarianism, Islamic totalitarianism, and even Chinese aggressive policies.
And all of this in a world in which population implosions in Japan and Europe are underway, and the Southern Christian half of Africa also needs international help, done in a non-exploitive manner, respectful of life and human dignity.
In Book III of the “Memories” of Nikita Khrushchev, according to Radoslav Todorov, Khrushchev asserts than on October 27, 1962, just when he was ready to send a message to President Kennedy saying that he was ready to withdraw the missiles from Cuba, he received another telegram from Castro requesting a preventive nuclear attack on major US cities. Fidel later denied this, but Khrushchev had good proof.
[1] It is appropriate to point out that according to Vernon Walters, whose integrity and competence is beyond question, a very young Fidel Castro could have participated in 1948 in the violent riots which took place in Bogota during the meeting of American States attended by General Marshall, at the time the liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was assassinated. See “Silent Missions” (Doubleday & Co. Inc., Garden City, New York, 1978) p. 168.
[2] S. Courtois, N. Werth, J.L. Panné, A. Paczkowski, K. Bartorek, J.L. Margolin, “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression” (Harvard U. Press/Cambridge, Mass. /London, England, 1999) p. 664.
© 2017 The Bibliotheque: World Wide Society