Dictator Fidel Castro

Posted: 8/16/2015

Trigger

Just watched American Experience Fidel Castro Part 1 PBS Documentary and  American Experience Fidel Castro Part 2. I can highly recommend these two videos. I am sure President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry did not watch it.

A Few Takeaways

Here are a few takeaways as I remember them from the above documentary:

1. Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union apparently abandoned Ernesto (Che) Guevara in Bolivia while he was struggling for his life pursued in the Jungle by Bolivian and U.S. forces. Fidel Castro would not contact Che Guevara anymore in the weeks or months before his demise. I certainly had forgotten about this fact or never heard about it before. This is certainly a fact that the leftists of the world do not want to be known, I bet
2. The documentary is quite mum about the brutality and violence committed by Che Guevara
3. The first wife of Fidel Castro was told before the marriage that Fidel Castro was a psychopath, but she said she loved him anyway. Fidel Castro had apparently from early childhood displayed strange behavior like showing little empathy etc.
4. Young Fidel Castro is reported to have threatened his parents to burn his family home if he was not allowed to go to a certain school.
5. Fidel Castro is reported that he expropriated his mother’s farm first. What a character!
6. What struck me seeing all the footage of Fidel Castro’s public oratory to mass audiences that he resembles Adolf Hitler in the way he talks and gesticulates (or is it Benito Mussolini …)
7. Fidel Castro has been a very incompetent manager of the Cuban economy until the Soviet Union stepped in in the 1970s or so. Most of his many socialist experiments were a disaster
8. We learn that Cuba has had over 10,000 to 50,000 political prisoners of which many were tortured or killed. That is about 0.1-0.5% of the entire population.
9. Cuba exported guerilla warfare to overthrow regimes in Latin America (e.g. Nicaragua) and Africa (e.g. Namibia) to install socialist dictatorships
10. Fidel Castro has been a cunning liar for decades. His interviews in english Language often did not match his rhetoric and actions at home. Worse his english Interviews in this documentary show a deceptive, naive talking, smiling guy as if he could not do harm to anyone. In the beginning after the so called revolution, he lied about his socialist intentions.
11. This documentary features a good summary on how the Cuban missile crisis came about when Fidel Castro became a close ally of the Soviet Union.

It is absolutely unfathomable why so many people have admired and still admire Fidel Castro for such a long time! People who fail to recognize a hardcore, murderous, professional criminal for what he is are dubious at best.