MASONRY

Cuban strongman Fidel "Odd Fellow" Castro, an Illuminati. One of the two agents sent by
Illuminati agent Fidel Castro to help the CIA eliminate Che Guevara, was Ciro Bustos (the other
was Regis Debray).
The Cuban flag is a MASONIC construct, expressed in the red, Masonic (''communist'') triangle
placed over three Blue and two White (Masonic Light) bands. Remember the Masonic Blue Lodges ?
BABYLONIANS clothed their Pagan idols in blue. EGYPTIANS also believed that the color blue
was a sacred color. Their god, Amun, was painted light blue. Blue was a sacred color to the
JUDAIC priests in biblical times.
When the revolutionaries landed on Cuba in 1956 the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and the rest,
all 82 of them squeezed onto a 12-berth yacht named Granma the island was under the tyrannical
rule of Fulgencio Batista. Fidel and his brother were hidden from Batistas forces by a
MASONIC lodge in the Sierra Maestras.
It was from this lodge that Castro laid the foundations for his 26th of July Movement, which
in 1959 would ultimately lead to a socialist revolution in Cuba. Castro himself was raised to the
level of Master mason prior to his appointment as President of Cuba. Ral Castro also joined,
as well as some of the other revolutionary fighters.
The former colonies of the Caribbean have long been a hotbed of Masonic activity.
Freemasonry first appeared in Cuba in 1763, travelling by way of English and Irish military lodges.
Numbers further increased with the influx of French Masons fleeing the Haitian Revolution of 1791.
Trinidad and Tobago wouldnt embrace freemasonry openly UNTIL the islands passed from
Spanish to British rule in 1797. In the Spanish (and later, Haitian) controlled Dominican Republic,
freemasonry was not permitted to spread UNTIL after the 1844 Dominican War of Independence.
The Grand Lodge of the Dominican Republic was founded shortly after, in 1858. In Cuba, likewise,
freemasonry would not begin to flourish UNTIL 1898, when the islands battle for independence
would earn sympathy from the US, and escalate into the brief-yet-bloody Spanish-American War.
In the French and Dutch colonies, a religious climate would slow the early progress of the Craft
Lodge Les Freres Unis would eventually be warranted by the Grand Lodge of France, in St. Lucia,
1795. As colonial grip loosened however, religious doctrine would relax and the societies took more
of a hold, with new lodges popping up in Guyana, in the Dutch colony of Demerara, in Trinidad and
Tobago, and in Martinique, so that the early 19th century was characterized by rapid acceleration of
freemasonrys popularity in the Caribbean.
In Haiti, too, the Craft arrived by way of the Grand Lodge of France. In 1697, the Spanish had
ceded the Western portion of Hispaniola to the French, and by the 18th century, the colony (then
known as Saint-Domingue) enjoyed a booming trade in coffee, sugar, and cocoa. With the
increased movement of merchants, colonial officers, and slavers, the ideas and practice of
freemasonry also became well established. When Haiti won its independence, and utterly abolished
slavery at the end of the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, masonry was so ingrained into local culture
that the all-black revolutionary government inherited the Craft amongst their other spoils of war.
Franois-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the former slave who led the revolutionary forces
against the French, is himself reputed to have been a devout freemason. His own signature
seems to attest to the fact, with its combination of two lines and three dots that mimic a popular
masonic shorthand symbol of the time. In fact, some sources claim that masonry was so integral to
Haitian culture and leadership, than any president of the country who was not a mason prior to
office was ordained on the occasion of their election.
Meanwhile another of Haitis founding fathers, Jean-Jacques Dessalines the self-styled
Emperor Jacques I of Haiti was similarly invested in the Craft. The National Museum of
History, in the center of Port-au-Prince, houses artifacts such as the slave-turned-emperors own
sword and scabbard, clearly engraved with square and compass motifs.
When the Haitian Revolution kicked off in 1791, thousands of French colonists fled the uprising,
escaping a widespread massacre of white slavers to land at ports such as Trinidad in the south of
Cuba. Joseph Cerneau was one such French-Haitian freemason. He founded Cubas first
lodge in 1804, the Cuban Theological Virtue Temple in Havana.
The first independence plot in Cuba was hatched at a MASONIC lodge. The first attempt at
drafting a political constitution for a future Cuban nation was also made by freemasons in 1810. Its
author was Joaquin Infante. Many of Cubas leading revolutionaries were Masons, such lofty
figures as Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, Ignacio Agramonte, Perucho Figueredo, Calixto Garcia,
Antonio Maceo and Jose Marti.
The uprising of 1810, known as the Great Masonic Conspiracy, was organized at a lodge in
Havana. A white criollo and the son of a colonel, Bassave Cardenas worked closely with the free
black man Jose Antonio Aponte. On April 9, 1812, they died at the gallows. The head of the leader,
the criollo and free black man Jose Antonio Aponte, was exhibited in an iron cage at the current
intersection of Belascoain and Carlos III, where, more than a century later, Cubas Great Masonic
Lodge would be built.
The Grand Lodge of Cuba is recognised as regular and correct by the majority of mainstream
lodges around the world, and continues to thrive under a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. More
than a third of Cubas Freemasons are based in Havana, where the impressive Grand Lodge
building dominates an entire city block with its plaster facade daubed in esoteric symbols.
Opened in 1955, Havanas Masonic headquarters contain the office of the grand secretary, a
museum, a home for elderly Masons and an extensive library. The towering eleven-storey
building that was once claimed as the second tallest building on the island is located at No.508
Avenida Salvador Allende, an avenue named after the 30th president of Chile - a Marxist, a
Freemason, and a good friend of Fidel Castro.
Cuba is home to a flourishing Masonic community. In 2010 it was reported that the island had 316
Masonic lodges, and more than 30,000 active members. Membership numbers rose after the fall
of the Soviet Union, and Castros government further eased restrictions on the Craft: opening new
lodges, and even permitting Masons to participate in public ceremonies dressed in full regalia. In
2011, Jos Manuel Collera Vento, grand master of the Grand Lodge of Cuba's Freemasons,
received the highest distinction of the Popular Assembly of Cuba: the Escudo Pinareo.
The Grand Orient Lodge in Haiti claims 48 provincial lodges and around 6,000 practising
masons. The Dominican Republic has 1,200 masons. In the English-speaking Caribbean
nations, meanwhile, the Craft continues to move from strength to strength, with 45 lodges in
Jamaica, 23 in Barbados, 21 in Guyana, 20 in Trinidad and Tobago, 14 in Bahamas and
Turks, and another 14 in Bermuda.

THE CUBAN MODEL

The US is not known for shyness about invading any country. It is pretty obvious that Cuba was
preserved from any kind of US intervention by design. Cuba was picked to be a model of
communist propaganda with the role of small David facing the Goliath. Note the absurdity:
the U.S. spent billions and sent 500,000 troops around the world to Vietnam to "fight communism,"
yet it wouldn't lift one finger to fight communism in its own backyard.
The point is that Castro was on the payroll of Citibank and the CIA from the beginning. CIA
and Communism are both instruments of the central bankers. If Castro was indeed CIA, we will
look at modern history in a new light. The Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, was meant to fail,
in order to discredit JFK and make Castro look good. A real US invasion of Cuba would have
been justified. Now we know why it didn't happen.
Communism is a total sham. Its role is to prevent genuine reform and impose tyranny in a feel-
good disguise. Fulgencio Batista, President of Cuba between 1953-59, was the Gaddafi of his day,
creating a dangerous example of economic independence from the bankers. The "revolutionary"
Fidel Castro was nothing more than a banker shill, tasked with removing him from power and
reducing Cuba to poverty and servitude, no different from any other US-installed fascist dictator.
In the 1950's, Illuminati bankers David Rockefeller and Eugene Meyer organized a Cuban
partnership, called the Moa Bay Mining Co. As his appartchiks, Rockefeller hired the three
stooges of the Caribbean, namely Fidel Castro, E. Howard Hunt and George H.W.
Bush. Rockefeller's Citi-Bank provided the financial support that Fidel Castro needed for his ouster
of Batista, and Rockefeller profited immensely from Castro's fictitious "expropriation" of Moa Bay
mining fields. Castro received his training in the arts of economic terrorism and guerrilla
warfare from US Army Special Forces Col. William A. Morgan of Ohio. Rockefeller
maintained actual physical control of all of "Castro's" oil and mining operations. Meanwhile he
collected extravagant profits from endless "Pentagon bailouts" by the U.S. taxpayer.
Castro was a Meyer-Rockefeller-Dulles lackey. With Zapata Oil as cover, he soon became Bush's
favorite candyman. Castro was doubtlessly pre-briefed on the impending April 1961 invasion, by
a clutch of clueless Miami Cubanos, who were led straight to their slaughter in a perfect
military gauntlet, a crossfire in a long and narrow bay of water at the "heel" of a unique Cuban
landmass, in fact a marine swampland drenched in oil, known as the Zapata.
Air cover would have made no difference at all. The successful humiliation of JFK in the Bay of
Pigs operation led straight to myths of Castro's absolute invincibility. Castro the Maximum was
trained and armed by the Pentagon and financed by the CIA and Citibank.
The person who delivered his paychecks was a Ukrainian country girl, who lived in a small cottage
in Greenwich Connecticut. As cover, she sold homemade soaps. The CIA even put out rumors
that hundreds of assassination attempts on Castro had all failed. If they were real at all, they
were coordinated through Castro's business partners at Moa Bay Mining and Zapata Oil. With
rumors like that, the comic-book status of Castro as "The Invincible One" was assured. The
assassination of an American President soon followed.
Castro claimed to have survived 634 assassination attempts, largely credited to the CIA; and before
any of that he had successfully overthrown the previous Cuban regime after arriving on the island
with a force of just 82 men. In 1961, the US attempted something similar with a force of 1,400
paramilitaries. They failed. On 25th November this year, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz passed away
at the age of 90.

BATISTA

Castro replaced Gen. Fulgencio Batista, (1901-1973). In Castro's propaganda,

Batista was characterized as a "racially impure" Cuban nationalist. Following
the collapse in the Cuban economy in the 1930's, Batista crushed Marxist
agitators, and established a constitution in 1940 based on the sovereignty
of the Cuban people.
Cuba's new constitution was therefore contrary to Teddy Roosevelt's intrusive
Platt Amendment of 1901, which attempted to ensconce an army of Zionist
know-it-alls and Marine smarty-pants in "Gitmo," with the authority "to take any action necessary
to protect Wall Street-Zionist interests in the Caribbean." (See Gen. Smedley Butler.)
Batista's 1940 Constitution asserted Cuban sovereignty over national currency for circulation.
Batista chartered a Cuban National Bank and an Agricultural and Industrial Development
Bank, to finance internal economic development, intending to build up a stable middle class of
inventors, intellectuals and professionals. Under Batista, Cuba's natural agricultural productivity
and machine tool inventiveness finally had support of a local government. Had Batista's nationalist
policies been applied without Marxist-Zionist banker intervention, it would have revived the
Cuban economy.
Batista also made provisions to dissolve the extreme concentration of economic power in the
hands of a few Zionist-owned sugar companies - who by use of fancy lawyers, including Fidel
Castro, and by compromised judges, had accumulated ownership of 70% of Cuba's arable land,
thereby unleashing unstable (i.e. "Marxist-ready") populations of wandering tenant farmers,
penniless wage-workers and peasants living by subsistence.
To prevent a Marxist-Zionist takeover of Cuba, by an internal insurgency using a "liquefied" and
"Marxist-ready" population, Batista proposed educational reforms for the formation of a
creative middle class, and for redistribution of the vast barren and unused lands of the "U.S.-
owned" sugar plantations to Cuban family farmers.
In short, if the Batista model of Cuba were to succeed, it would have set a dangerous example
for the economic potential of constitutional sovereignty, in Cuba, in the United States, and
throughout the Caribbean and South and Central America. Batista's concept of Cuban national
sovereignty had to be destroyed.
The Marxist-Zionist pirate-bankers always work through their monopolistic control of foreign trade.
Castro's endless Cuban "trade deficits" were orchestrated to prevent any emergence of
internal economic sovereignty, especially for agriculture (for food and health, not sugar and
money) and for development of Cuba's immense mineral wealth.

CASTRO
Castro was a rebel long before Batista's second period of power. As president of the Law School
student body, he became involved in campus politics, which many times reached violent
proportions at the University of Havana. He was also one of the founders of Unin Insurreccional
Revolucionaria (UIR), a terroristic organization [later to emerge as model for Al Qaeda], which
allegedly dealt in political assassination. Castro was arrested several times in connection with
murder, but was never convicted. In 1947 he took part in an abortive plot to overthrow Rafael
Trujillo, then dictator of the Dominican Republic. The Cayo Confites expedition, as it is called,
was stopped before it got underway.
Many researchers propose that Castro was involved in the 1948 assassination of a popular
Columbian politician, Jorge Elicer Gaitn (1903-1948). It is widely speculated that Gaitn
would likely have been elected President had he not been assassinated on April 9, 1948. Castro had
attempted to recruit Gaitn earlier to his cause, but Gaitn had repeatedly declined and was
assassinated because he was too politically influential and would have countered the Cold War
objectives of the USSR in the Caribbean.
Gaitn was a Bogot attorney who gained national popularity by successfully defending striking
workers at the United Fruit Company. UFC was represented by Sullivan & Cromwell, a N.Y. City
law firm of which John Foster Dulles was partner. Dulles was also Sec. of State; his brother Allen
was Director of the CIA; and John Moors Cabot, past president of UFC, was Asst. Sec. of State for
Inter-American Affairs. In his speeches, Gaitn distinguished between the "political country,"
which was controlled by an oligarchy through use of fictitious internal struggles, orchestrated
between "Liberal" and "Conservative" factions, and the "national country," which responds to the
real political and economic needs of a nation of people.
In the 60s, the Cubans were very active in sabotage and financing with KGB money all kinds
of Marxist activities in Latin America. The plan (Antonio Gramsci's strategy) worked extremely
well, planting marxist thought in universities, the judiciary, the press and the artistic intelligentsia.
In 1990, Castro and Lula from Brazil created the Forum of Sao Paulo, a multinational marxist
organization that congregated leftist parties and even terrorist groups such as the Colombian FARC
drug dealers. Through perfect application of modern strategies of propaganda and election fraud,
they were able to take over the whole of Latin America, with the exception of a few countries such
as Paraguay.
The New World Order now has a united region (one of the ten global ones) under marxism
and a single purpose, informally called the UNASUR. Complete political corruption, dumbing
down of the population, enslaved and alienated docile citizens in the hands of bloody marxist
dictators such as Maduro or Morales.
Marxism must be embraced by New World Order perfect regimes, such as the one in China,
because it destroys traditional values, individual freedoms and any kind of possible middle class
resistance to total Illuminati control. Cuba was the key for the total domination of Latin
America. No wonder Castro received praises from Obama, Ban Ki Moon, Mark Zuckerberg, the
Pope and this week, even Francois Hollande from France.

Communism is a very useful tool to big money and Fidel was one of those tools. For example,
in Angola, in 1974, the Portuguese authoritarian regime was deposed by a military coup. As a
consequence, the Communist Party - infiltrated in the military - started a campaign to abandon
Portugal's colonies in Africa: Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.
With the independence, almost 1 million of white Portuguese that lived there had to abandon their
houses, cars, businesses, farms, etc. Marxist governments (MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in
Mozambique, PAIGC in Guinea) were imposed to the african populations, devastating their
countries.
But... surprise! The American oil interests in Cabinda (Angola) didnt suffer at all! Gulf Oil
Corporation (now Chevron) maintained its oil exploration in Cabinda with the Marxist
government. Try to guess who had thousand of soldiers fighting next to the Communists during the
ensuing Angolan civil war, at the time when the marxist government protected Chevron? Yes...
Fidel Castro's Cuba! Prof. Antony Sutton, in his work "The Best Enemy Money Can Buy", is quoted
as saying: As succinctly stated by Congressman William L. Dickinson (July 1985), "These Cuban
troops are protecting American oil interests and they are preventing UNITA from overrunning the
MPLA.
So, simultaneously, one million of Portuguese citizens are deprived of everything by communists,
Chevron is protected by the same communists, and Fidel Castro's troops help the communists that
help Chevron.
https://www.henrymakow.com/2015/05/Fidel-Castro-Worked-for-David-Rockefeller%20.html

The third of six children, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926 (although some
sources claim that he was born a year later), in Cuba's eastern province of Oriente. His father,
Angel, was a wealthy sugar plantation owner originally from Spain. Raised in affluence while
surrounded by poverty, Fidel Castro was educated in private Jesuit boarding schools. He
attended El Colegio de Belen and pitched for the school's baseball team. After graduating in 1945,
Castro entered law school at the University of Havana and immersed himself in the political climate
of Cuban nationalism, anti-imperialism, and socialism.
In 1947 Castro participated in a (failed) effort to overthrow the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the
Dominican Republic. He then returned to the University of Havana and joined the Partido Ortodoxo,
an anti-communist political party whose stated priorities were nationalism, economic
independence, and social reforms. Its founder, Cuban presidential candidate Eduardo Chibas, lost
the 1948 election but became a hero of sorts to Castro.
In 1948 Castro married Mirta Diaz Balart, who hailed from a wealthy Cuban family. The
couple had one child, Fidelito, before the marriage was dissolved in 1955.
In 1952 Castro ran as a candidate for a seat in the Cuban parliament, but a coup led by the country's
former president, General Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the existing government and cancelled the
election. Solidifying his power with Cuba's military and economic elite, Batista established
himself as a dictator. Castro collaborated with fellow members of the Partido Ortodoxo to
organize an insurrection which they launched on July 26, 1953. The attack failed and Castro was
captured and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After being set free in 1955 under an amnesty deal with the Batista government, Castro traveled
to Mexico, where he met Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Guevara became an important confidante and
advisor to Castro, and the pair conspired to overthrow the Batista regime by means of guerrilla
warfare.
On December 2, 1956, Castro and 81 fellow insurgents returned to Cuba, near the eastern city of
Manzanillo, to begin their protracted guerrilla campaign. Castro organized resistance groups in
cities and towns across the country. By January 1959, he had forced the Batista government to
collapse. Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, and a 32-year-old Fidel Castro seized control of
Cuba.
Fidel Castro entered Havana on January 8, 1959, to wild acclaim from all quarters. Most Cubans
were jubilant; Castro was promising an end to the corrupt governments that had plagued Cuba
since independence. Far from any Communism, Castro was promising a revolution "as green as
Cuba's palm trees!" with national elections in three months. Private property would be secure, a free
press guaranteed, friendly relations with the U.S. were essential.
"Fidel esta es tu casa!" read impromptu signs that were springing up across the front of thousands of
Cuban homes, including mansions, humble country shacks and everything in between.
The New York Times had been singing Castro's praises since the first interview with him as a
rebel in February 1957. By now most of the international press had joined the cheerleading.
Jack Paar never treated a guest on his Tonight Show as deferentially as he treated honored guest
Fidel Castro. Ed Sullivan hailed Castro as "Cuba's George Washington." Retired president
Harry Truman called Castro a "good young man trying to do what's best for Cuba. We should
extend him a hand." The U.S. actually accorded diplomatic recognition to Castro's government
more quickly than it had recognized Batista's in 1952. In fact, the promptness of this U.S.
recognition set a record for recognition of a Latin American government. Usually the process
took weeks; for Castro, it took mere days.
Yet within three months of his entry into Havana, Castro's firing squads had murdered an
estimated 600 to 1,100 men and boys, and Cuba's jails held ten times the number of political
prisoners as under Fulgencio Batista, whom Castro overthrew with claims to "liberating" Cuba.
Barely a year in power, Castro was referring to the U.S. as "a vulture preying on humanity!" And
most of Cuba's newspapers and TV stations (Cuba had more TVs per capita at the time than
Germany, Canada or France) were under government control, to better serve "the people." Six
months later he confiscated all U.S. properties on the island; 5,911 businesses worth $2 billion,
along with most property and businesses owned by Cubans.
On January 3, 1961, outgoing President Eisenhower finally declared, "there's a limit to what the
United States in self-respect can endure. That limit has been reached." He broke diplomatic
relations with Cuba. During the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Castro finally declared his
revolution "Socialist," and in December of that year he pronounced himself "a lifelong Marxist-
Leninist!" Cuba was now officially Communist.
They say you can boil a live frog in a pot by gradually turning up the heat. He will not jump out,
because he can't tell the temperature's changing. Something like this happened to Cuba. Castro's
Revolution was a stealth revolution, done in stages, dividing and conquering till he had the
whole prize. "First they came for the Batistianos and I didn't protest because I had no connections
with Batista's government. Then they came for the big landowners and I didn't protest because I
didn't have a Sugar mill; I had a small tobacco farm. Then they came for the big businessmen and I
didn't protest because I was a small shopkeeper not a factory owner. Finally they came for me..."
and, well, we've heard this song before.
Large landholdings were initially "nationalized" on the pretext of "land reform" where the massive
latifundia would be parceled out to landless peasants. A New York Times editorial hailed the
confiscations: "This promise of social justice brought a foretaste of human dignity for millions who
had little knowledge of it in Cuba's former near-feudal economy."
As with so much else regarding pre-Castro Cuba, major misconceptions abound in this editorial. To
wit: in the 1950s the average farm-wage in "near-feudal" Cuba was higher than in France,
Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor
Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba in 1958 was $3. The
average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73; in Belgium $2.70; in Denmark $2.74; in West
Germany $2.73; and in the U.S. $4.06. Also, far from huge latifundia dominating the agricultural
landscape, the average Cuban farm in 1958 was actually smaller than the average farm in the
U.S.: 140 acres in Cuba vs. 195 acres in the U.S. In 1958, Cuba, a nation of 6.2 million people, had
159,958 farms - 11,000 of which were tobacco farms. Only 34 percent of the Cuban population
was rural.
Confiscated farms remained in Cuban government hands as state farms on the Soviet model.
By early 1959, Soviet advisers from the Ukraine were already directing Castro's Institute of
Agrarian Reform. As the pattern became clear, a major rebellion broke out in the Cuban countryside.
According to Raul Castro (Castro's brother and the head of Cuba's military), the rebellion involved
179 different "counterrevolutionary bands." This guerrilla war lasted from 1960 to 1966. It took
the Castroites 6 years, tens of thousands of troops, scores of Russian advisors, squadrons of
Soviet tanks, helicopters, flame throwers, and a massive and brutal "re-location" campaign
where thousands of rural families were uprooted at gunpoint and relocated to concentration
camps at the very western tip of Cuba, to finally crush the rebellion.
"Cuban military units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn hundreds
of rural palm-thatched cottages," reads one account of the rebellion. One individual who was
fortunate enough to escape to Miami recalls that "we fought with the fury of cornered beasts"
against the occupation of Cuba that the Soviet Union carried out through its proxies, Castro and
Guevara. The Kennedy-Khrushchev pact that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis completely
starved the rebels of even the meager supplies they had received by airdrop in 1961.
Two years into his revolution, Castro managed to turn Cuba's traditional immigration pattern on its
head. Prior to 1959 Cuba experienced net immigration. In fact - as a percentage of population -
Cuba took in more immigrants in the 20th century than the U.S. took in - and this includes the
Ellis Island years. In 1958 the Cuban embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications for
immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. From 1903-1950 Cuba took in
over one million Spanish immigrants. Also, before Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba,
than Cubans in the U.S. Back then, people were as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to
escape. Come Castro and half-starved Haitians (a short 60 miles away) turn up their nose at Cuba.
By 1992 two million Cubans had fled Cuba, most against staggering odds and with only the
clothes on their back. By most estimates this is a tiny fraction of those who desired to leave. A
causeway from Havana to Key West in 1961 with the same free travel as existed in Cuba (indeed, in
all civilized countries) in 1958 would have emptied the island in two months. According to
Cuban-American scholar Dr. Armando Lago, 83,000 Cubans have died at sea while attempting
to leave Cuba.
Also revealing of the misery and desperation created by the Castro regime is Cuba's suicide rate,
which reached 24 per thousand in 1986 - making it double Latin America's average, making it
triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and
making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point the
Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state
secrets. The implications seem to horrify even the government.
In 1958 Cuba had a higher standard of living than any Latin American country and half of
Europe. A UNESCO report from 1957 said: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large
middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S.
workers... the average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium,
Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the
U.S. the figure is 68 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans were covered by Social legislation, that's a
higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time."
In 1958 Cubans had the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere. But in 1962 Castro's
government introduced ration cards that persist to this day. While comparing a Cubans' daily
rations as mandated by Castro's government to the daily rations of Cuban slaves as mandated by
the Spanish King in 1842, an intrepid Cuban exile uncovered this fascinating information:
Food Ration in 1842 Castro Gov.
for slaves in Cuba: Ration since 1962:

Meat, chicken, fish -- 8 oz 2 oz.

Rice -- 4 oz. 3 oz

Starches -- 16 oz. 6.5 oz

Beans -- 4 oz. 1 oz.

The half-starved slaves on the ship Amistad ate better than the average Cuban eats today. Yet
Eleanor Clift once reported in her column and again on the McLaughlin Group that: "To be a poor
child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S."
The Soviets ended up pumping some $130 billion into Cuba. That is the equivalent of ten
Marshall Plans being pumped not into a war-ravaged continent of 300 million, but into an
island of 7 to 9 million.
Promptly upon entering Havana on January 8, 1959, Fidel Castro abolished habeas corpus and
appointed the Argentine Ernesto "Che" Guevara his main executioner. "To send men to the
firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," Guevara declared. "These procedures are an archaic
bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine
motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (the execution wall)."
Given the rate of firing squad executions in Cuba in the early 1960s, thousands of gallons of
perfectly good, perfectly valuable blood gushed from the bodies of young men only to soak
uselessly into the mud, wash into gutters, or get sopped up by buckets of sawdust. By 1961 Cuba's
government was already desperately short on foreign exchange. In two short years Castro had
rendered a nation with a living standard higher than half of Europe and with a peso always
on par with the U.S. dollar, utterly destitute, utterly bereft of foreign exchange. The massive
Soviet subsidies could never compensate for the destruction of Cuba's vibrant pre-Castro economy.
In 1961 an ocean of fresh, plasma-rich Cuban blood was being freed from its confines by bullets
and spilling in torrents daily. The Castroites hit upon the scheme of collecting it and selling it.
Dozens of those murdered after sham trials were U.S. citizens. Here are official court records --
from the suit that Howard Anderson's family filed against Castro's regime: "Anderson vs Republic
of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Cir. April 13, 2003): 'In one final session of torture, Castro's
agents drained Howard Anderson's body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing
squad.'
Eighteen thousand bodies would eventually join Howard Anderson's in mass graves. This tally
comes - not from some Cuban-exile scandal sheet in Miami - but from The Black Book of
Communism, written by French scholars and translated into English by the Harvard University press,
not exactly an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. But this cold statistic doesn't tell the whole
story.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets shattered his bound body. His twin
brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro's theft of
their humble family farm.
On Christmas eve 1961, Juana Diaz spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding
and gagging her. They'd found her guilty of feeding and hiding "counterrevolutionaries." When the
blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.
Traditionally, firing squads have only two of its members with loaded guns. The rest shoot blanks.
Not Castro's. In his, all ten members shot live ammunition -- all ten bullets ripped into the staked
hero or heroine. This incorporated more members into Castro's criminal organization, more
members to resist desperately any overthrow of the system with the consequent settling of
accounts.
Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.2 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House,
500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) passed through Castro's prison camps. At one
time during 1961-62, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses islandwide. This
made Castro's political incarceration rate higher than Stalin's and Hitler's.
Also, the longest serving political prisoners of the century spent their hell in Castro's Gulag.
Senores Mario Chanes de Armas, Angel de Fana, and Eusebio Penalver all served thirty years in
Castro's dungeons. Consider that Alexander Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in Stalin's Gulag as
did Natan Scharansky. Many Cubans served over three times as long.
"For months I was naked in a 6x4 foot cell," recalls one prisoner, Eusebio Penalver (the longest
serving black political prisoner of the century - jailed longer than Nelson Mandela). "That's 4 feet
high, so you couldn't stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual
suicide."
Credit for finally exposing the horrors of Castro's Gulag to a mass international audience must go to
former political prisoner Armando Valladares and especially to his prison memoirs titled Against
All Hope, released in 1984. Castro's extensive and murderous Gulag had been in operation for over
two decades by then and had been exposed and denounced by many, as had Stalin's (Malcolm
Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, Arthur Koestler, etc.) in the 1930s and '40s.
But just as it took the novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn to finally shake the world awake about the
Gulag thirty years after its murderous height, it took the poet Armando Valladares to expose
Castroism to the mainstream, however late in the game. In 1960 Valladares had been arrested in
his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. He was summarily
sentenced to 30 years of prison for the offense.
In prison, Valladares, like Eusebio Penalver, Chanes De Armas, Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez, Huber
Matos and so many others, refused "to commit spiritual suicide." Which is to say, they rejected any
"rehabilitation," or "re-education" by their jailers. They balked at any "confession" of their political
sins. They knew all this applied only to their jailers. For this, Armando Valladares paid dearly. To
this day he remains crippled from the beatings and starvings he endured in Castro's Gulag.
Valladares managed to get his writings smuggled out of prison and into Europe. In December 1977,
forty-seven U.S. Senators signed an appeal for his release, and Amnesty International took up
his cause. In 1979 a book of Valladares's poems was published. Titled Prisonnier de Castro, it
appeared in Paris, translated by Pierre Golendorf, a former member of the French Communist Party.
The book was dedicated to Valladares' fellow prisoners and described their plight in harrowing
detail, including the plight of women prisoners like "Berta, Ann Lazara, Maria Amalia, Esther,
Miriam, roses amidst barbed wire, beaten mercilessly by the guards."
International pressure, including personal appeals to Castro by his friend Francois Mitterand,
finally won Valladares' release in 1982. In 1984 he released his prison memoirs, titled Against all
Hope, and in 1986, immediately after having read them, Ronald Reagan appointed Valladares U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Here Valladares had his work cut
out for him.
"Unbelievably, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many
intellectuals with Fidel Castro," he recalls. "While I was on book tours in the mid-1980s I
encountered many individuals who argued fiercely on behalf of the Castro regime. The thousands of
accusations of violations of human rights in Cuba conflicted with the double standard then current
at the U.N. The posture of many countries was governed by their hostility against the United States,
and they excused Castro out of a reflexive anti-Americanism."
By 1965, counterrevolutionary activity was winding down in Cuba. The Kennedy-Khrushchev deal,
with its subsequent roundup and jailing of anti-Castro fighters in the U.S. (men who'd been trained
by the CIA for the very purpose a month before), pulled the plug on much of the anti-Castro
resistance. Now the Castro regime, needing new pretext for mass jailings and the cowing of the
population, turned its police loose on "anti-social elements," on "deviants" and on "delinquents."
Youths were the target here, with special emphasis on long-hairs, rock & roll listeners and --
especially -- homosexuals.
In fact any youth who didn't display a gung-ho "revolutionary" attitude was fair game. Jehovah's
Witnesses, active Catholics and Protestants, along with children of political prisoners, were swept
up in the dragnet. "My charge read: 'active in Catholic Associations,'" recalls Emilio Izquierdo, who
was rounded up at the age of 17 in 1965, and who later became president in Miami of the UMAP
Political Prisoners Association. The initials stood for Unidades Militares del Ayuda de Produccion,"
or Military Units to Help Production, which were a special set of forced labor camps set up for
young prisoners. The official title did little to hide the pretext for the camps -- forced labor. These
camps were completely enclosed by high barbed wire, had machine guns in each watchtower and
ferocious dogs keeping watch below. The one enclosing the homosexuals had a sign that read
"Work Will Make Men Out of You" above the entrance gate, eerily reminiscent of Auschwitz's
"Work Will Set You Free."

"There seems to be an unusually strong emotional aversion to homosexuals in Cuba which Castro
shares," wrote Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, Castro's original and foremost champion
in the U.S. media. Not even he could deny it. Yet prior to Castro, homosexuals in Cuba lived
perfectly normal lives. In fact the Cuban people had elected one President in 1945, Ramon Grau
San Martin. Actually, Castroite persecution of Cuba's homosexuals began two years before UMAP
in 1963 with a government campaign called "Operation P" for (prostitutes, pimps and pederasts). In
this campaign homosexuals were identified, rounded up and thrown in prison where their uniforms
sported a big P. In the early and mid 1960s in Cuba, outing a homosexual to the police became a
common practice for those seeking special favors or hoping to ingratiate themselves with the
authorities.

The UMAP camps featured brutal labor in the tropical sun, and summary beatings and executions
for any laggards. Word about this savagery soon got out amongst the general population and
discontent was rife. After all, none of these prisoners had been convicted, even in the sham
Castroite courts, of any counterrevolutionary crimes. Military and police trucks would simply
surround an area of Havana known as, say, a homosexual hang-out, and every person in sight
would be herded into the military trucks at gunpoint.

In 1968, according to official government notice, the UMAPs were disbanded. Their reputation had
become too notorious. Technically the notice of this disbanding was accurate. After 1968 those
"deviants" and other "anti-social elements" started being herded into "Battalions of Decisive
Effort," the "Young People's Column of the Centennial," and the "Young People's Work Army."
Different names, same forced labor camps.

In a film titled Cursed Be Your Name, Liberty, Cuban exile Vladimir Ceballos documents how in
the mid 1980s over one hundred Cuban youths deliberately injected themselves with the AIDS virus.
At the time, Castro's Cuba had developed a very efficient method of dealing with the malady. The
patients were banished to "sanatoriums" in the middle of the countryside and were basically left
alone till they died. "Left alone" is the key phrase here.

Apparently to some tortured souls, banishment in those AIDS sanitoriums smacked of freedom, as
compared to life on the outside. Dr. Jorge Prez, an exiled Cuban physician and AIDS specialist,
now living in Spain, reports that in the mid '80s the Cuban government ran ads on national
television showing that these AIDS sanitoria featured air-conditioning, color TVs, swimming pools,
and three meals of excellent food daily. Cuba's population, of course, savored these things only in
their dreams.

The ad was actually an attempt to snare volunteers for government experiments with AIDS vaccines.
Any successful vaccines discovered as a result would translate into a deluge of foreign currency for
Castro. As expected, the response to the ads was overwhelming, and the volunteers were interned in
a sanitorium near Santiago de las Vegas in Havana province where they were injected with the
AIDS virus. Dr. Prez reports that the strain used was particularly strong, and ninety percent of the
volunteers died the typically agonizing and prolonged AIDS death within two
years.
*****

JFK's "dreary account of mismanagement, timidity and indecision," as Eisenhower described his
handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, emboldened the Soviets to install nuclear missiles in Cuba the
following year.[13] Khrushchev documents in his memoirs how Castro pleaded with him to launch
a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the U.S. in October of 1962. The telegram making the plea sits in
the Kennedy Library today. Some think Khrushchev's fear of Castro's officers somehow getting
hold of the nuclear buttons was a bigger factor in his decision to remove the missiles than the
"blockade" (in fact, 55 ships breached it) imposed by the Kennedy administration around Cuba at
the time.

The prudence of Khrushchev's decision was revealed the following month by Castro's second-in-
command, Che Guevara. "If the missiles had remained," he told The London Daily Worker in
November 1962, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York.
We must never establish peaceful co-existence. In this struggle to the death between 2 systems we
must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of
atomic victims."

He didn't get his hands on the missiles but Castro emerged the big winner of the Missile Crisis.
"Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said....perhaps
one day they'll be made public," said Fidel Castro in a speech in 1966.[14]

"We can't say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political
embarrassment for us," said Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in October
of 1962.

In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev himself clarified the matter: "It would have been ridiculous for
us to go to war over Cuba -- for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. We
ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along, security for Fidel Castro's regime, and
American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not
to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death,
his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."

With these factors in mind, the Castro regime's longevity (so puzzling to many) becomes much
easier to understand.
*****

The Cuban Revolution started devouring its own children very early. Revolutionary Cuba's first
figurehead president, Manuel Urrutia, fled into exile for his very life exactly 6 months after his
appointment by Castro, who went on TV to brand Urrutia a "traitor" and threatened him with the
paredon. President Urrutia's offense had been some mild criticism of Communism. The badly
rattled Urrutia watched Castro's TV tirade from his very Presidential office that night in July of
1959 while convulsed in sobs. Within minutes he noticed mobs forming in front of his office
shrieking. "paredon!-paredon!" Quickly gathering his wits, he scrambled out the back door of the
building and later that night slunk into the Venezuelan embassy disguised as a milkman.

Commander Huber Matos was credited by Castro himself with "saving the revolution" when he
flew a planeload of arms into the Sierra Maestra from Costa Rica in March of 1958. The arms were
donated by leftist Costa Rican President Jose "Pepe" Figueres and may have originated with the
CIA, who in keeping with its support of the "Democratic Left" at the time, was very friendly with
both Figueres and Castro's July 26th Movement. "Me and my staff were all Fidelistas!" proclaimed
Robert Reynolds, the CIA's Caribbean desk chief from 1957-60. Reynolds made his pronouncement
during a friendly chat with Fidel Castro himself at a "Bay of Pigs, 40 Years After" Conference held
in Havana, in April 2001.[15]

After arriving with the arms, Matos, a July 26th underground operative till then, was quickly named
a "comandante" in the Rebel army as well. In December of that year he led a rebel column into the
city of Santiago, then entered Havana on January 8th atop the same Sherman tank with Fidel Castro.

Upon the Revolutionary triumph, Castro appointed Matos military commander of Camaguey
province where Matos signed off on the prompt firing-squad executions of over 60 Batista soldiers,
including a wounded one who was carried to the stake on a stretcher. Nine months later Matos was
facing a firing squad himself, accused by Castro of "treason."

"Fidel, you are destroying your own work," Matos, alarmed at what he saw as the Communist
usurpation of the Revolution, had written to Castro. "You are burying the revolution. Perhaps there
is still time. I plead with you, comrade. Help us save the revolution....Fidel, we fought in the name
of Truth, for all the sound principles that bind civilization and mankind together. Please, in the
names of our fallen comrades, Fidel, do not bury the revolution."[16]

That letter sealed Matos' doom. Raul Castro and Che Guevara wanted him immediately lined up at
the paredon and executed. Castro thought it over and countered that he didn't want to make Matos
"a martyr." With Matos' trial most of the "moderates" (democratic socialists) still in Castro's
government had to finally face the music. Most resigned, went underground, and then went into
exile -- in that order.

Matos ended up suffering 20 years in Castro's dungeons. He refused any and all "rehabilitation" by
his jailers and suffered horribly for it. He was finally released in 1979 and lived in Miami until his
death in February 2014. There, he headed the political group Cuba Democratica y Independente
(CID).

Among other Revolutionary "Comandantes" who fought alongside Castro against Batista and
served early in Castro's regime, but weren't quite as fortunate as Matos, were Humberto Sori Marin
and William "El Americano" Morgan. Both fell out with La Revolucion over Communism. And the
way Castro saw it, they were the traitors, not him.

Humberto Sori Marin was arrested in April of 1961 as a counterrevolutionary and his brother
Mariano went to visit Castro, pleading clemency for his brother. If for no other reason than "for old
times sake," pleaded Mariano, recalling when Fidel and Humberto had been Revolutionary
comrades.

"Don't worry Mariano," a smiling Castro said while slapping him affectionately on the back. "In the
Sierra I learned to love your brother. Yes, he's in our custody, but completely safe from harm.
Absolutely nothing will happen to him. Please give your mom and dad a big hug and big kiss from
me and tell them to please calm down."[17]

The next day Mariano collapsed at the sight of his brother Humberto's mangled corpse in a mass
grave. Castro's firing squad had pumped over 20 shots into his brother's body that very dawn.
Humberto Sori Marin's head was almost completely obliterated, his face unrecognizable.

"Kneel and beg for your life!" Castro's executioners taunted the bound and helpless William
Morgan as he glowered at Castro's firing squad in April 1961.

"I kneel for no man!" former Rebel Comandante Morgan snarled back, according to eye witness
John Martino in his book, I Was Castro's Prisoner.

"Very well, Meester Weel-yam Morgan," replied his executioners, who were aiming low, on
purpose -- "FUEGO!"

The first volley shattered Morgan's knees. He collapsed snarling and writhing. "See, Meester
Morgan?" giggled a voice from above. "We made you kneel, didn't we?" Over the next few minutes
as he lay writhing, four more bullets slammed into Morgan, all very carefully aimed to miss vitals.
Finally an executioner walked up and emptied a Tommy gun clip into Morgan's back.[18]

Castro had saddled Rebel army Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos with the unhappy task of arresting
his friend Huber Matos after the latter's "treason." Cienfuegos was right up there with the Castro
brothers and Che in the Revolutionary hierarchy. He'd landed on the Granma expedition from
Mexico, then fought in the Sierra from day one, climaxing the rebellion by commanding rebel
forces in the decisive "battle" (skirmish, actually, like all the others) of Santa Clara that finally
forced Batista to lose hope and flee the island. Camilo actually entered Havana before Castro,
where he promptly took command of the military headquarters at Camp Colombia.

Camilo Cienfuegos was handsome, charismatic, and in the eyes of many, actually outshone Fidel at
early Revolutionary rallies, often stealing the limelight with his ready smile and humor.
"Simpatico," is the term Cubans use for Camilo Cienfuegos' personality. Castro seemed to
recognize this and actually turned to Camilo one day on the podium during a rally, "Voy bien,
Camilo?" Fidel asked (am I doing OK, Camilo?) Such deference was -- to say the least -- not a
Castro trademark.

Camilo had flown to Camaguey from Havana for the hateful task of arresting his friend and ally
Matos. The two had often discussed, with growing alarm, what they saw as the Communist
usurpation of the Cuban Revolution. Once in Camaguey, Camilo had a violent row with Raul
Castro, whom he'd always loathed. They were on the verge of fisticuffs and drawn pistols when
finally separated.

On the flight back to Havana after he dutifully arrested Matos, Camilo Cienfuegos disappeared
without a trace. His plane crashed and vanished, said the authorities, though the evening had
excellent weather according to all records. The Castro brothers made a big show of a search and
rescue but nothing turned up. To many, including Huber Matos, Camilo's death seemed much too
convenient. To this day, most Cuban-exiles blame Fidel and Raul for Camilo's death.

Cienfuegos was too obviously their competitor for leadership. Interestingly, two of Camilo's loyal
lieutenants died in "accidents" within days of their commander's disappearance. The head of
Camaguey's small airport, from where Camilo had taken off, was also suspicious and was starting to
ask questions about the rescue effort. Two weeks after Camilo's disappearance, he was found with a
bullet through his head. His death was ruled a "suicide."[19] Camilo Cienfuegos was far from the
last Fidelista Comandante to run afoul of Fidel's megalomania.

Arnaldo Ochoa was the Cuban General widely credited with Cuba's victories in both The Angolan
Civil War and in Ethiopia's early crushing of the Eritrean rebellion. "Every officer in the Cuban
armed forces admired Ochoa," according to Cuban defector General Rafael Del Pino, who was
close to Ochoa both personally and professionally. "General Ochoa always fulfilled his duty. He
was an austere individual devoted to military life and his hands are not stained with blood."

They say he was a soldiers' general, who always showed genuine interest in the welfare of his men
and so had the respect and admiration of the lowliest troops. Ochoa was also close and on very
friendly terms with both Fidel and Raul Castro, the latter being Ochoa's immediate superior, whom
the General always affectionately called "jefe." Besides his African ventures, Arnaldo Ochoa had
fought in the Sierra as a Rebel and helped crush the Escambray peasant rebellion in 1961. In 1963
he infiltrated Venezuela to train and lead guerrillas trying to overthrow Romulo Betancourt. Later
he transferred to Nicaragua where he led the fight against the Contras. In 1980 Fidel himself
personally awarded General Ochoa with the medal officially naming him a "Hero of the
Revolution."

In the dawn hours of July 13, 1989, General Arnaldo T. Ochoa was executed by a firing squad
outside of Havana.

In brief, he'd grown to big for his britches. Even Stalin could tolerate (or perhaps never quite
figured out how to eliminate, or perhaps even feared) a Zhukov. Nothing of the sort occurred with
Fidel Castro and his generals, no matter how battle-hardened or loyal.

A court martial had found Ochoa guilty of "corruption and dishonest use of economic resources," of
"departing from the principles of the Revolution," and of "committing grave moral and legal
violations of socialist law." The official charge was drug smuggling, and Ochoa was almost
certainly guilty. In Africa, Ochoa had used black marketing of everything from elephant tusks to
diamonds to liquor, to help finance his military operations. He obviously had approval for these
ventures from on high.[20]

By 1989, U.S. Federal prosecutors had uncovered the Cuban military's role in cocaine smuggling
into the U.S. Fidel and Raul watched the case building against them with growing alarm. So they
served up Ochoa (and Comandante Tony De la Guardia who was executed alongside him) as
scapegoats. In fact, some of the evidence used against Ochoa at his trial is rumored to have
originated with the FBI.

Rafael Del Pino mentions another reason for Ochoa's elimination. In the defecting Air Force
General's very well-informed opinion, Castro executed Ochoa "to rid himself of an independent-
minded man while diverting public attention from the island's mounting problems. Castro used the
excuse of corruption to destroy Ochoa because he often chose his own course in making decisions.
Ochoa was a pragmatic, non-ideological man, who was flexible enough to recognize the sense
behind Gorbachev's reforms of the time. Even worse, Ochoa, like many other Cuban military
officers, was trained in the Soviet Union and had close ties to the Soviet leaders then involved in the
reforms."

That Glasnost and Perestroika stuff could be contagious, in other words.

Ochoa's and De la Guardia's deaths did nothing to curb Cuba's role in drug smuggling. On
December 3, 1998, Colombian police seized seven tons of cocaine in Cartagena, Colombia. They
found that the shipment was consigned to a Cuban state-owned venture and was destined for the
U.S. In 1996 a federal prosecutor in south Florida told the Miami Herald, "The case we have
against Fidel and Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel
Noriega in 1988." Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba's role in drug smuggling into the
U.S. The Clinton administration, hellbent on cozying up to Castro at the time, refused to press
ahead with the case against the Castro brothers' dope trafficking.[21]

*****

Castro's career in terrorism started while he was a student at the University of Havana. He was
credited with the murder of fellow student Manolo Castro, and the attempted murder of Leonel
Gomez, whom he shot through the throat but who survived. Both were Castro's rivals for leadership
in a University student group. Both were shot from behind in ambushes. University policeman
Fernandez Caral had witnessed the shootings, was prepared to testify, and was himself murdered by
Fidel Castro on July 7th 1948. The off-duty Caral sat on his doorstep with his 5 year old son on his
knee when Fidel Castro approached and shot him point-blank in the chest. Raphael Diaz-Balart,
Castro's brother-in-law at the time, recalls an agitated Fidel bursting into his apartment that day.
"You gotta hide me!" Castro blurted. "I just killed Caral!"[22]

That same year Castro traveled to Bogota, Colombia, where he was among the ringleaders in the
famous Bogotazo, a Communist-inspired riot that ended up killing 5,000 people. Castro's July 26th
Movement -- his anti-Batista revolutionary group (named after the failed attack on Cuba's Moncada
military barracks on July 26, 1953 that touched off his rebellion against Batista) -- was actually a
pioneer in 20th century terrorism. They carried off among the first airplane hijackings in history. In
the last months of 1958, members of Castro's movement hijacked three different Cubana airliners at
gunpoint. The last one was a flight from Miami to Varadero that was diverted at gunpoint to rebel-
held territory in Cuba's eastern Oriente province. Despite the pilot's frantic pleas, the plane was
forced to attempt a landing on a tiny airstrip near Raul Castro's rebel camp, where it crashed in a
huge fireball. Seventeen of the twenty passengers died in the explosion.[23]

A few months earlier, Castro's rebels had kidnapped 50 U.S. citizens near Guantanamo. Most were
Marines and Navy men on leave. A few were civilian workers from a U.S. mining company
headquartered nearby. Though the term was not in vogue at the time, Castro's guerrillas used these
American hostages as "human shields" against the Batista air force's sporadic bombings of rebel-
held areas. And it worked. The last thing Batista wanted was more raging by the U.S. media against
him -- not that it could have gotten much worse.

Castro had only been in power for two months when he started sending armed guerrillas to attempt
the overthrow of neighboring nations. The Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and
Venezuela were the early targets. In fact Castro's very first trip abroad as head of state was to
Caracas, where on January 25, 1959, he implored then-Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt to
join his "master plan against the gringos!" Basically this involved massive loans, financial aid and
shipments of free oil to Castro from Venezuela. Betancourt balked, and no sooner had Castro
returned home empty-handed, than he was planning subversion in Venezuela, including
assassination attempts against Betancourt.[24]

It took Hugo Chavez to finally enlist with Castro's plan. In 2004 Cuba got $1.3 billion in essentially
free oil from Venezuela. By mid-2005, some 160,000 barrels of oil were flowing from Venezuela to
Cuba daily. This was much more oil than Cuba's refineries could process, because most of this oil
was resold to Central American nations by Cuba, who pocketed the handsome profit. Here was the
second half of the "master plan against the gringos," that Castro had originally proposed to Romulo
Betancourt.[25]

Castro's subversion -- not just of his neighbors, but throughout Latin America, the Middle East and
Africa -- reached a point where the U.S. Defense Department estimated that 42,000 foreign
guerrillas and terrorists had received their training in Cuba. Not that Castro's own home-grown
terrorists had been exactly idle.

On November 17, 1962, the FBI uncovered a terrorist plot that targeted Manhattan's Grand Central
Terminal and the Statue of Liberty, along with the Macy's, Gimbels and Bloomindales department
stores. The plotters had 12 detonators and 500 kilos of TNT. The explosions were planned for
November 27, 1962, the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. The chief
plotter was Roberto Santiesteban, chief aide to Cuba's U.N. ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Under
him were Elsa and Jose Gomez, also employed by Cuba's diplomatic mission at the U.N. The rest of
the conspirators belonged to The Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Had those detonators gone off,
thousands of people would have died in a matter of seconds. In 2003 alone, the U.S. was forced to
expel 14 Cuban "diplomats." All worked at the United Nations.[26]

On March 19, 1976, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline "Cuban Link to Death Plot Probed."
The plan was for both Republican presidential candidates of the day -- incumbent President Gerald
Ford and former California governor Ronald Reagan -- to be assassinated during the Republican
National Convention in San Francisco. The Emiliano Zapata Unit, a Bay Area radical-
terrorist group, was slated to make the hits. When arrested, one of the would-be assassins named
Gregg Daniel Adornetto, revealed the Cuban connection. The Zapata Unit's Cuban intelligence
officer was named Andres Gomez. Adornetto had met him years earlier when he'd traveled to Cuba
for training and funding as a member of the Weather Underground.

Much evidence points to an earlier assassination plot by Castro against a U.S. President
succeeding. "U.S. leaders who plan on eliminating Cuban leaders should not think that they are
themselves safe!" warned Castro on September 7, 1963. "We are prepared to answer in kind!"[27]

Many of those closest to the early evidence (prior to the Warren Commission's) are convinced that
Castro made good on his boast. "I'll tell you something that will rock you," Lyndon Johnson told
Howard K. Smith in 1966. "Kennedy tried to get Castro -- but Castro got Kennedy first."

General Alexander Haig agreed with LBJ. Haig served as a military aide under both the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations. "As I read the secret report I felt a sense of physical shock, a rising of
the hair on the back of my neck," he writes about an incident one month after the Kennedy
assassination when a classified report crossed his desk. "I walked the report over to my
superiors and watched their faces go ashen. "From this moment, Al," said his superiors, "you will
forget you ever read this piece of paper, or that it ever existed."

The classified intelligence report that so rattled Haig and caused so many faces to go ashen,
described how a few days before the Dallas assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, accompanied by
Castro intelligence agents, had been spotted in Havana, where he'd traveled from Mexico City.[28]

Amidst a stack of declassified Soviet correspondence that Boris Yeltsin made available to
President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s was a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Nikita
Khrushchev dated just ten days after the assassination. In it Mrs. Kennedy assures the Soviet leader
that she doesn't suspect Soviet involvement in her husband's assassination. She wrote that she was
convinced the culprit was Castro.

For 34 years Markus Wolf was the chief of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, a branch of
the STASI with many contacts and operations in Castro's Cuba. It was the STASI rather than the
KGB that undertook the training of Castro's police and intelligence services. Wolf's autobiography
is titled Man Without a Face, and subtitled The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster.
Most intelligence experts agree that the subtitle fits. Wolf was once asked about the Kennedy
assassination and quickly replied. "Don't ask me -- ask Fidel Castro."[29]
*****

In 1966 Havana hosted the Tri-Continental Conference, a worldwide convention for guerrillas and
terrorists. It was the first gathering of its kind, where Castro vowed to aid any group, anywhere, that
was fighting "colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism."

Among other initiatives at the Conference, Cuba formed the OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity
with the People from Africa, Asia and Latin America) and the DLN (National Liberation
Directorate). The latter was under the direction of KGB Col. Vadim Kotchergine and set up massive
terrorist training camps in western Cuba. These camps were soon filled with guerrillas and terrorists
from groups like Al Fatah, the Sandinistas, El Salvador's FMLF, the Tupamaros, the Weather
Underground, the IRA, and Spain's ETA. In 1968 Castro sent military instructors into Palestinian
bases in Jordan to train Palestinian Fedayeen. In November 1974 Castro personally decorated his
brother-in-arms, Yasir Arafat, with Cuba's highest honor, the Bay of Pigs Medal. The Egyptian
newspaper Ahar Sa'ah reported on September 13, 1978, that 500 Palestinian fighters were training
in Cuba.[30]

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the infamous "Carlos The Jackal" known as the world's most notorious
terrorist throughout the 1970's, received his training in Cuba and lived there for years. Everyone
from America's Black Liberation Army to Puerto Rico's Macheteros, to South Yemen's NLF, to
Argentina's Monteneros, to Colombia's ELN , to Namibia's SWAPO, to the Black Panther Party, to
the Western Sahara's Polisaro, to the IRA, received training and funding from Castro. "Thanks to
Castro," boasted Colombia's FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) commander
Tiro-Fijo in a 2001 interview, "we are now a powerful army, not a hit-and-run band."[31]

Scholar Walter Laquer sums it up in his work, The Age of Terrorism: "Multinational terrorism
reached a first climax in the early 1970s. It involved close co-operation between small terrorist
groups in many countries with the Libyans, Algerians, Syrians, North Koreans and Cubans acting as
the paymasters and suppliers of weapons and equipment."

The U.S. State Department listed Cuba prominently among its "State Sponsors of Terrorism" from
1982-2015.

*****

As of mid-2005 Cuba provided haven for 77 fugitives from U.S. law, including several on the FBI's
most wanted listed. Among these were cop-killers Michael Finney, Charlie Hill, and Joanne
Chesimard, along with Victor Gerena, who was responsible for a $7 million heist of a Wells Fargo
truck in Connecticut in 1983 as a member of the Puerto Rican terrorist group Los Macheteros. All
requests for their extradition had been repeatedly ignored or rebuffed.

By 1976 Castro's intervention abroad became more blatant when he sent tens of thousands of troops
to Africa. Most -- 50,000 of them -- went to fight Jonas Savimbi's UNITA forces in Angola.
Thousands more went to prop up the Marxist Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. And others were
scattered throughout the continent from Guinea Bissau to Bourkina Fasso to Sierra Leone to
Mozambique to Zimbabwe. All told, by 1983, Cuban troops were stationed in 20 sub-Saharan
African nations. In 1988 Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx, the senior United Nations consultant on chemical
warfare, documented that, "There is no doubt anymore that the Cubans are using nerve gases (Sarin)
against the troops of Mr. Jonas Savimbi."[32]

"War against the United States is my true destiny," Fidel Castro had confided to a friend in 1958
while still a rebel in the hills. "When this war's over I'll start that much bigger war."[33](Note:
Castro said this before any of the alleged "bullying" by the U.S. that leftists claim as the reason he
turned to Communism and the Soviet Union.)

After defecting in 1964, Castro's own sister brought the unmistakable message to Congress. "Fidel's
feeling of hatred for this country cannot even be imagined by you Americans," she testified to the
House Committee on Un-American Activities. "His intention -- his OBSESSION -- is to destroy the
U.S.!"

According to General Rafael del Pino -- onetime head of Castro's Air Force, who defected in 1987
during the U.S. invasion of Grenada -- Castro ordered military plans for the destruction of the
Turkey Point Nuclear Plant south of Miami. With his nuclear weapons having been snatched back
by Khrushchev in October of 1962, Castro here was opting for the next-best thing. "I want to do
something that the Yankees will remember for the rest of their lives!" Del Pino recalls Castro raving.
"And when we're gone, history will remind the Yankees that we were the only ones who made them
pay dearly for their imperialistic arrogance around the world!"

In pursuit of his obsession to harm America, Castro also made alliance with Iran. "Together Iran
and Cuba can bring America to her knees!" raved Castro to a thunderous ovation at Tehran
University in August 2001.[34] Four years later -- in a January 16, 2005 meeting with the visiting
Cuban Vice President, Jose Ramon Fernandez -- Iranian Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel
said: "Iran is strengthening her economic and political relations with Cuba, and there exist other
areas for cooperation."[35]

In late July 2006, Castro handed the reins of Cuba's government temporarily to his brother (Raul
Castro) and a few cabinet ministers, after undergoing emergency abdominal surgery. Fidel Castro
remained in poor health even following the surgery, though he continued to play an active role
in running government affairs from behind the scenes over the ensuing year-and-a-half.

On February 19, 2008 -- just five days before the Cuban National Assembly was scheduled to meet
to select a new head of state -- Fidel Castro announced his permanent resignation in a letter to his
countrymen which was read on Cuban radio and television. Wrote Castro: "I will not aspire to
neither will I accept I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept the position of president
of the Council of State and commander in chief.... It would betray my conscience to occupy a
responsibility that requires mobility and the total commitment that I am not in the physical
condition to offer.

Castro died on November 25, 2016.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=912

When Forbes magazine named him among the world's richest heads of state in 2005 a furious Fidel Castro
denounced it as "infamy!" "Do they think I'm some kind of Mobutu!" he raged. At the time Forbes estimated his
fortune at $550 million

This year Forbes raised his ranking to the world's 7th richest head of state, with an estimated fortune of $900
million. "Repugnant slander!" Castro thundered on Cuban television sets (all twelve of them) this week. The
"President" of Cuba's National Bank, Francisco Soberon, also chimed in: "The Cuban revolution and its
Maximum Leader are an example of honesty and ethical conduct in this chaotic and corrupt world into which the
empire has cast humanity," he added.

Actually, Castro has a point. He has no business being lumped in with measely millionaire chumps like Mobutu
Sese Seko and Queen Elizabeth. Forbes admits that its estimate of Castro's wealth is "more art than science," and
is based on his partial ownership of state enterprises, among them the Havana Convention Center, the Cimex retail
conglomerate and Medicuba. But as Cuban-American scholar Eugenio Yanez asks: why not include many other,
and much larger, Cuban state enterprises like Cubatabaco, Artex, Cubacatricos, Cubatecnica, Gaviota, Acemex,
Cubatur, Antex, Caribat, Cubatur, and many more? The list is much longer than those singled out by Forbes.

Another method used by Forbes was calculating that Castro owns roughly ten per cent of the Cuban GDP. Why
only ten percent?

All enterprises in Cuba are state enterprises, including so-called "joint-ventures" with foreign investors, as shown
by a Miami Herald headline from June of 2005: "Many Foreign Investors Being Booted Out of Cuba" it read.

"It's outrageous!" the Herald quoted a Spanish businessmen leaving Cuba. ''I've gone through endless meetings for
more than a year with no result in terms of recovering our investment!"' he whimpered.

"What I can't accept," wailed another European businessman, " is simply being booted out of here with no solid
guarantee I will ever get my money back!''

Our hearts bleed for these unfortunate gentlemen. Also notice: the investors were being booted out of Cuba. But
the investments remained, as did those of the 5,911 businesses valued at close to $2 billion stolen at gunpoint
from U.S. owners and investors in 1960. A few owners who resisted like Howard Anderson, who had his Jeep
dealership stolen, and Tom Fuller, whose family farm was stolen, were promptly murdered by Castro and Che's
firing squads.

Interestingly, new Bolivian president Evo Morales had a lengthy meeting with Fidel Castro just last week.
Immediately upon returning to Bolivia, Morales announced the "nationalization" (looting) of all the foreign-
owned (primarily Brazilian) natural gas companies in Bolivia. Rafael Dausa, Cuba's brand new ambassador to
Bolivia, is among Cuba's highest ranking intelligence officers.

Fidel Castro is officially Cuba's Chief of State, Head of Government, Prime Minister, First Secretary of the Cuban
Communist Party, and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Bank President Francisco Soberon didn't refer to
him as the "Maximum Leader" for nothing. So why does Forbes only estimate his control of Cuba's GDP at ten-
per-cent ? "The right to enjoy and to dispose of things in the most absolute manner as he pleases," is how a legal
dictionary defines property. To "dispose" is the key phrase in the legal definition of property. In brief: something
is genuinely yours only if you have the right to sell it. As such, Castro owns 100 per cent of Cuban enterprises
along with the full fruits of the labor of his 11 million subjects.

Article 33.1. of the Cuban "Constitution" states: "The workers in joint ventures who are Cuban shall be contracted
by an employing entity proposed by the (Cuban) Ministry of Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation, and
authorized by the (Cuban)Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

Article 33.4. states: "Payments to Cuban workers in Cuba shall be made in national currency, which must be
obtained beforehand from convertible foreign currency.

In other words, say the Cuban Ministry of Labor decides that the salary for your Cuban laborers (who are
forbidden under penalty of prison or firing squad from striking) is 100 pesos a week. Then you would pay 100
dollars or Euros per laborer to the Cuban government (of which Castro is Maximum Leader.) The government
stashes this currency and pays the hapless Cuban worker 100 worthless Cuban pesos, which varies in value from
15-20 per U.S. dollar. In in the Dark and Fascistic Batista Age the Cuban peso was always interchangeable one to
one with the U.S. dollar. Elsewhere they call this chattel slavery. Neither Red China nor Red Viet-nam have such
mandates for foreign investors.

A Cuban resident is most valuable to Castro when he wants to escape Cuba. This writer's family paid $15,000 to
get a cousin out of Cuba in the early 60's. This was not an easy amount for destitute refugees to round up at the
time, but the firing squads were working triple shifts and Cuba's prisons were filled to suffocation. You weren't
only paying for a loved ones' freedom, you might also be paying for his (or her) life. Armando Valladares, who
somehow escaped the firing squad but spent 22 torture-filled years in Cuba's Gulag, described his trial very
succinctly: "not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me."
Valladares had been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk.

One day in early 1959 one of Che's Revolutionary Courts actually found a Cuban army captain named Pedro
Morejon innocent of the charge of " war-criminal". This brought Che's fellow comandante, Camilo Cienfuegos to
his feet. "If Morejon is not executed," He yelled. "I'll put a bullet through his head myself!" The court
reassembled frantically and quickly arrived at a new verdict. Morejon crumpled in front of of a firing squad the
following day. As Castro's chief executioner, Che Guevara, explained it: "Judicial evidence is an archaic
bourgeois detail." So you can see the sense of urgency of getting a relative out, especially if the authorities had set
their sights on him as a counter-revolutionary. Elsewhere they call such a judiciary process at the hands of
dictators, "death squads."

Most Cuban-exile families can relate similar cases of ransoming relatives. Elsewhere they call this "kidnapping
and extortion."

Cuba's campesinos (country folk) were among the first to learn the bitter lesson of ownership in Castro's Cuba
and consequently rise in arms against Castroism. In 1959 with cameras rolling, flashbulbs popping and reporters
scribbling, Castro's much-lauded "Institute of Agrarian Reform" made a big show of handing out land "titles" to
thousands of beaming campesinos.

Soon these new "owners" learned they were prohibited from selling "their" land. More interestingly, the produce
grown on "their" land could only be sold to the government. More interesting still, the price paid for "their"
produce was the government's whim. Elsewhere they called this "serfdom."

Castro quickly ended the charade and all agricultural laborers were herded into granjas, i.e. collective
farms identical to Soviet kolkhozes. Indeed, Soviet agricultural "advisors," still flush from their success in the
Ukraine, had been advising Cuba's INRA (Institute of Agrarian Reform) from day one. The Cuban campesino's
desperate, bloody and lonely rebellion against their enslavement spread to the towns and cities and lasted from
late 1959 to 1966. Castro himself admitted that his troops, militia and Soviet advisors were up against 179
different "bands of bandits" as they labelled these freedom-fighting rednecks. Tens of thousands of troops, scores
of Soviet advisors, and squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers finally extinguished the lonely
Cuban freedom-fight. Elsewhere they call this "an insurgency."

This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto
for all you'll read about it in the MSM and all you'll learn about it from those illustrious Ivy-League Academics.
To get an idea of the odds faced by those rural rebels, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought,
you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface." Enrique Encinosa documents this heroic
rebellion in his superb book, Unvanquished. "We fought with the fury of cornered beasts," was a how one of the
few surviving rebels described their insurgency.

In 1962 the Kennedy-Khrushchev swindle that "solved" the Missile Crisis-- not only starved these freedom-
fighters of the measly aid they'd been getting from Cuban-exile freebooters (who were rounded up for violating
U.S. neutrality laws) -- it also sanctioned the 44,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. Elsewhere they call this "foreign
occupation."

Leftists wail about the U.S. "occupation" of Iraq, where 125,000 U.S troops are stationed in a nation of 25
million. Leftists also applaud how Castro "liberated" Cuba from "foreign imperialism." Cuba was a nation of 6.5
million in 1962, with 44,000 Soviet troops amongst them. Put your calculator to those figures and calculate the
ratio vs the current one for Iraq. If we're occupying Iraq, what where the Soviets -- at Castro and Che's behest --
doing to Cuba?

A few years earlier, with Castro's rebels skirmishing against (mostly bribing, actually) Batista's army, U.S.
reporters had swarmed into Cuba's hills lugging cameras and tape recorders for fawning interviews with the
gallant Fidel and his strutting rebel comandantes. Print reporters from Herbert Matthews of the New York Times to
Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, TV figures from Robert Taber of CBS to Ed Sullivan, all interviewed (soft-
soaped) the Cuban Robin Hood for the folks back home. Even a reporter for Boy's Lifemagazine made the scene.
All this coming and going by foreign press agencies was somehow managed while Cuba suffered under "a stifling
and murderous dictatorship!" or so these reporters and commentators constantly reminded their gaping audience.
To accommodate the media mob, Castro's people camp finally assembled a separate building at his campsite
with a sign "Press Hut."

Came a genuine rebellion against a genuine dictatorship--and one involving ten times the number of rebels (and
casualties) as the one against Batista as well as lasting twice as long-- and nary an intrepid reporter was to be
found anywhere near Cuba's hills. Not that these "valiant crusaders for the truth," as Columbia School of
Journalism hails their noble profession, weren't in Cuba. From Laura Berquist of Look Magazine to Jean Daniel
of The New Republic to Lee Lockwood of Life they were all in Havana lining up for fawning "interviews"--not
with the rebels this time--but with their jailers and assassins, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

If the Britain in V for Vendetta bordered Castro's Cuba she'd be mobbed with grateful political refugees who'd
scale walls to bask in her relative freedom. At one point in 1961 one of every 18 Cubans was a poltical prisoner, a
higher ratio than in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Castro can dispose of every business on his captive island in any manner he chooses. He can do the same with his
every Cuban captive. He can just as easily rent them out as slave labor, as sell them for ransom, as jail them, as
shoot them. Forbes lists only the tiny-tip of the Castro-wealth iceberg.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=4379

Things You Cannot Do in Cuba (Or End Up In Prison

For)
at 6:09 AM Thursday, June 18, 2009
by Jorge Moragas Sanchez

1. Travel abroad without permission from the government. Even if you

have an approved visa and an airline ticket, you may only leave Cuba with a
government issued "White Card," which may take years to obtain and is usually
denied. Workers linked to health services, government agencies, the armed
forces, or high profile athletes, among others, must wait at least five years, but in
most cases never get permission to leave.

2. Travel abroad with spouse and/or children. With the exception of some
senior government officials.

3. Switch jobs without prior government permission.

4. Switch homes. Home exchanges are subject to endless regulations and is

practically impossible.

5. Publish anything without permission from the government.

6. Own a personal computer, a fax machine, or a satellite antenna.

7. Access the Internet. The Internet is strictly controlled and monitored by

state security. Only 1.7% of the population has access to the web.

8. Send your children to a private or religious school. All schools belong to

the communist party.

9. Belong to any religious denomination without penalty. Adults may be

terminated from their jobs and the children can be expelled from school.

10. Belong to any organization regardless of its national or international

presence with the exception of government organizations. The exceptions
are the Communist Party, Union of Communist Youth, Committee for the Defense
of the Revolution, etc.

11. Listen to or watch any radio or television station that is independent

or privately owned. All of the media is state property and controlled by the
state. Cubans illegally listen to or watch BBC, Voice of the Americas, Radio Marti,
TV Marti, etc.

12. Read books, magazines, or newspapers, with the exception of those

approved/published by the government. All books, magazines, and
newspapers in Cuba are published by the government. There is no authorized
independent press.

13. Receive publications from abroad or from visitors. This is punishable by

jail pursuant to Law 88.

14. Freely communicate with foreign journalists.

15. Visit or stay in hotels, restaurants, beaches, or resorts for tourists.

16. Accept gifts or donations from foreign visitors.

17. Search for employment with foreign companies established on the

island without prior approval from the government.

18. Own your own home or business.

19. Earn more than the wages established by the government for all
employees: $7-12 monthly for most jobs, $15-20 monthly for professionals,
such as doctors and government officials.

20. Sell any personal belongings, services, homemade foods or crafts

without the approval of the government.

21. Fish along the coastline or board a boat without permission from the
government.

22. Belong to any independent trade union. The government controls all
unions and no individual or collective bargaining is permitted; neither are strikes
or protests.

23. Organize any sporting team, sporting activity, or artistic performance

without permission from the government.

24. Claim any monetary prize or recognition from abroad.

25. Select a doctor or hospital. The government assigns them all.

26. Seek medical help outside of Cuba.

27. Hire an attorney, unless he or she is approved by the government.

28. Refuse to participate in an event or mass demonstration organized by

the Communist Party. Refusal to participate in demonstrations results in being
categorized as an opponent of the state and leaves you exposed to serious
consequences.

29. Refuse to participate in "voluntary" work for adults and children.

30. Refuse to vote in a single party election with candidates nominated by

the government.

31. Aspire to hold a public office unless the Communist Party nominates
you.

32. Criticize or simply question the oppressive laws of the regime or any
comment/decision made by the officials or the "Maximum Leader."

33. Transport any food products for either personal or family consumption
between provinces. The police regularly inspect bags and/or luggage in trains,
buses, cars, bicycles, and any other mode of transportation, in search of
vegetables, sugar, coffee, and meats. All food products are confiscated and its
carriers undergo judicial proceedings.

34. Slaughter a cow. Farmers who tend livestock cannot sacrifice their animals
for consumption and much less to sell the beef. This "felony" is sanctioned by five
years imprisonment.

35. Purchase or sell real estate or land.

36. Import into the country the following electronic products: refrigerators,
air conditioning units, stoves, ovens, microwaves, water heaters, showers, fryers,
irons, and toasters.

37. Return to visit Cuba after emigrating. Those who decide to visit their
families in Cuba need a visa-permission to return to the land where they were
born and must obtain a Cuban passport, even if they already have another
recognized nationality. This process alone costs more than $450 excluding airline
tickets and other fees. If permission to enter the country is denied, the Cuban
government keeps the money.

38. Visit a "quitting" member of the family outside of Cuba. When a Cuban
"quits" (defects) while abroad on duty, which the government considers an
"official mission" (sports, science, arts, etc.), their family members must wait at
least five years for the government to decide whether or not they may travel to
visit.

39. Keep belongings when a family member emigrates or is caught trying

to do so. When a Cuban receives permission to leave, their raft is intercepted at
sea, or is repatriated; their belongings (home, television, furniture, clothing, etc.)
are confiscated. If repatriated or intercepted at sea, it will also be impossible for
them to return to work, they lose their rationing book (the means by which they
obtain the right to pay for a portion of the nutrients they need), they are
repudiated and/or receive criminal penalties.

40. Freely select a career to study. A 12th grade graduate, regardless of their
academic record and placement availability, cannot select the career they wish to
pursue. In the selection process for universities (all of which belong to the state),
they factor ideological considerations associated to the unconditional support of
the applicant and the "needs of the revolution" at the present time.

41. Invite a foreigner to spend the night at your home. If the neighborhood
CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution) finds an unauthorized
foreigner spending the night in the home of a Cuban, investigations begin which
generally result in fines for the residents and removal from their home.

42. Refuse to participate in the Militia of Territorial Troops, CDR, Brigades

of Rapid Response or any of the regime's oppressive organizations. The
refusal is interpreted as a clear manifestation of dissatisfaction with the revolution
and is subject to penalties.

43. Buy milk in a regulated establishment for any child older than seven
years. Only Cuban children up to seven years of age have the right to pay a
quota for milk, from that age on, the purchase of milk is forbidden and parents
can only obtain milk in the black market, which implies a clear violation of the
law.

44. Live in liberty and with human rights. Survive like a human being.

45. Say "Down with Fidel!"

http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2009/06/things-you-cannot-do-in-cuba-or-end-up.html

It was on New Year's Day in 1959 that Fidel Castro's guerrillas toppled Fulgencio Batista,
and a week later that Castro entered Havana and launched what has become the world's
longest-lived dictatorship. This week thus marks the 48th anniversary of Castro's
revolution and the last one he will celebrate, if the persistent rumors that he is dying
prove to be true. Which makes this a good time to ask: What will be said about Castro
after his death?

For decades, journalists and celebrities have showered Cuba's despot with praise,
extolling his virtues so extravagantly at times that if sycophancy were an Olympic sport,
they would have walked off with the gold. Norman Mailer, for example, proclaimed him "the
first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War." Oliver Stone
has called him "one of the earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult."

The cheerleaders have been just as enthusiastic in describing Castro's record in Cuba. "A
beacon of success for much of Latin America and the Third World," gushed Giselle
Fernandez of CBS. "For Castro," Barbara Walters declared, "freedom starts with education.
And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on
earth." Covering Cuba's one-party election in 1998, CNN's Lucia Newman grandly
described "a system President Castro boasts is the most democratic and cleanest in the
world."

During a 1995 visit to New York, writes Humberto Fontova in Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite
Tyrant, a blistering 2005 expose of Castro and his regime, Cuba's maximum leader
"plunged into Manhattan's social swirl, hobnobbing with dozens of glitterati, pundits, and
power brokers." From the invitation to dine at the Rockefeller family's Westchester County
estate to being literally kissed and hugged by Diane Sawyer, Castro was drenched with
flattery and adoration at every turn.
When Castro dies, some of his obituarists will no doubt continue this pattern of fawning
hero-worship. But others, more concerned with accuracy than with apologetics, will
squarely face the facts of Castro's reign. Facts such as these:

Castro came to power with American support.

The United States welcomed Castro's ouster of Batista and was one of the first
nations to recognize the new government in 1959. Many Americans supported
Castro, including former president Harry Truman. "He seems to want to do the right
thing for the Cuban people," Truman said, "and we ought to extend our sympathy
and help him to do what is right for them." It was not until January 1961 that
President Eisenhower reacting to what he called "a long series of harassments,
baseless accusations, and vilification" broke diplomatic ties with Havana. By that
point Castro had nationalized all US businesses in Cuba and confiscated American
properties worth nearly $2 billion.

Well before he came to power, Castro regarded the United States as an enemy. In
a 1957 letter displayed in Havana's Museo de la Revolucion, Fontova
observes the future ruler wrote to a friend: "War against the United States is my
true destiny. When this war's over, I'll start that much bigger and wider war."

Castro transformed Cuba into a totalitarian hellhole.

Freedom House gives Cuba its lowest possible rating for civil liberties and political
rights, placing it with Burma, North Korea, and Sudan as one of the world's most
repressive regimes. Hundreds of political prisoners are behind bars in Cuba today.
Among them, writes Carlos Alberto Montaner in the current issue of Foreign Policy,
are "48 young people [imprisoned] for collecting signatures for a referendum, 23
journalists for writing articles about the regime, and 18 librarians for loaning
forbidden books." Political prisoners can be beaten, starved, denied medical care,
locked in solitary confinement, and forced into slave labor. Castro long ago
eliminated freedom of religion, due process of law, and the right to leave the country.

He also wiped out Cuba's once-flourishing free press. According to the Committee
to Protect Journalists, Cuba is one of the world's leading jailers of journalists,
second only to China in the number of reporters behind bars.

Castro stole Cuba's wealth.

While Cubans grew progressively poorer under communism, Castro exploited them
to become one of the world's richest people. Foreign companies doing business in
Cuba must pay a significant sum for each worker they hire but most of the
money goes to Castro's regime, while the workers receive only a pittance. Castro
also controls Cuba's state-owned companies, whose profits account for much of his
wealth. Castro insists that his personal net worth is zero, but in 2006 Forbes
magazine estimates the amount to be $900 million.

Castro shed far more blood than the dictator he replaced.

According to the Cuba Archive, which is meticulously documenting the deaths of

each person killed by Cuba's rulers since 1952, Batista was responsible for killing
approximately 3,000 people. Castro's toll has been far higher. So far the archive
has documented more than 8,000 specific victims of the Castro regime including
5,775 firing squad executions, 1,231 extrajudicial assassinations, and 984 deaths in
 prison. When fully documented, the body count is expected to reach 17,000 not
counting the tens of thousands of Cubans who lost their lives at sea while fleeing
Castro's Caribbean nightmare.

"Condemn me, it doesn't matter," Castro said long ago. "History will absolve me."
But Castro's ultimate day of judgment draws near, and history is not likely to be so
kind.
http://jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby010207.php3

Communism is a ruse which allowed Fidel Castro to force ten million Cubans to work for $20-30 a
month in the name of socialism while he amassed $900 million from drug trafficking and corruption.
Cuba was the Spain of the New World. But after the revolution, it was frozen in time; Havana a city
in decay. Why do US liberals idolize this evil and ruthless dictator?
A private luxury island estate with yacht, palatial home and top-of-the-line amenities. A royal
lifestyle. Mistresses and illegitimate children. A drug empire. Murder of loyal subordinates for
political expediency. These are some of the revelations in a new book, The Double Life of Fidel
Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo by Juan Reinaldo Sanchez.
Published in France last year, it is being released in English on May 12 by St. Martin's Press.
For the better part of six decades, communist dictator Fidel Castro (shown) has been the darling of
the Hollywood glitter set, the tenured radicals of academia, and the establishment media gallery.
Even when forced by unavoidable facts to acknowledge his despotic tendencies and the oppressive
nature of his regime, Castro's apologists have always sought to soften all criticism by claims that
"El Jefe" (The Chief) is a "man of the people," a "beloved leader," a "tireless worker," a true son of
the revolution. A central part of that scripted myth is that the selfless "Lider Maximo" (Maximum
Leader), now 88 years old, lives an austere lifestyle, in solidarity with the economic hardships
endured by the Cuban people in their Castro-imposed socialist sinkhole.
Now, as the Obama administration prepares to normalize relations with Cuba, the book by Sanchez
is shedding new light on the dark shadows and hidden corners of the totalitarian regime run by Fidel
and Raul Castro, including the typical double standard that has been the hallmark of all Communist
Party-led "People's" regimes: luxury and privilege for the Party leaders -- privation and squalor for
the people.
The book by Sanchez appeared first in French last year and is appearing in a English edition to be
released by St. Martin's Press (an imprint of publishing giant Macmillan) on May 12. The New
York Post published pre-release excerpts from the book on May 3.
In the chapter on Castro's drug trafficking, Sanchez relates the cold-blooded manner in which Fidel
sacrificed two of his most trusted lieutenants, Generals Arnaldo Ochoa and Jos Abrantes, in order
to cover up his own role in the narcotics trade.
"In 1986, when economic aid from Moscow was starting to dry up," Sanchez reported, "Castro
founded the MC Department (for moneda covertible, or 'covertible currency'), which traded in
goods -- illegal and legal -- for hard currency from third parties, principally Panama. The MC
Department soon acquired another nickname: the 'Marijuana and Cocaine Department.'"
"But the Americans became suspicious of Cuba's drug dealing, and scandal loomed," Sanchez noted.
According to Castro's former bodyguard, Fidel decided to take action to nip any possible suspicion
about him in the bud. He used the official daily paper, Granma, to inform its readers that an inquiry
had been opened. Among the arrested were the respected revolutionary general Arnaldo Ochoa and
the minister I had overheard talking to Castro, Jos Abrantes.
The Machiavellian Fidel, while declaring himself "appalled" by what he pretended to have
discovered, claimed that "the most honest imaginable political and judicial process" was under way.
Obviously, the reality was completely different. Comfortably installed in his brother Ral's office,
Fidel Castro and Ral followed the live proceedings of Causa No.1 and Causa No. 2 on the closed-
circuit TV screens. Both trials were filmed -- which is why one can today see large sections of it on
YouTube -- and broadcast to every Cuban home, though not live: The government wanted to be
able to censor anything that might prove embarrassing.
"Fidel even had the means to alert the president of the court discreetly," says Sanchez, "via a
warning light, whenever he thought a session should be interrupted. And during breaks, the
president of the court, the public prosecutor and the jury members would swarm out onto the fourth
floor of the ministry to take their instructions from Fidel, who, as usual, organized and ordered
everything, absolutely everything."
General Ochoa, who had served Castro faithfully, was executed. The execution was recorded on
videotape.
"Castro made us watch it," Sanchez records. "That's what the Comandante was capable of to keep
his power: not just of killing but also of humiliating and reducing to nothing men who had served
him devotedly."
Gen. Abrantes was sentenced to prison, where he died under suspicious circumstances two years
later. According to Sanchez, the trial and execution of Gen. Ochoa caused Raul Castro to plunge
into "the worst bout of alcoholism of his life. He had taken part in the assassination of his friend."
But, according to Sanchez there was an additional factor responsible for Raul's descent into
alcoholism: fear. "Having watched the elimination of his counterpart, Abrantes, Ral could
logically fear that he, too, would be hounded from his position of defense minister."
Sanchez says he witnessed Fidel admonishing his younger brother to stop the drunkenness and
assured him that if he pulled himself together he would not suffer the same fate as Ochoa or
Abrantes. The aged tyrant stepped down as "president" in 2006, citing health reasons, and formally
handed over power to Raul (age 83) in 2008. Fidel had not appeared in public for more than a year,
when he emerged on March 30 of this year to meet a delegation of fellow Marxists from Venezuela.
"Contrary to what he has always said, Fidel has never renounced capitalist comforts or chosen to
live in austerity. Au contraire, his mode de vie is that of a capitalist without any kind of limit,"
Sanchez writes. "He has never considered that he is obliged by his speech to follow the austere
lifestyle of a good revolutionary."
Snchez, now 66 and living in America, says Castro enjoyed a private island -- Cayo Piedra --
which he describes as a "garden of Eden" where Fidel entertains foreign celebrities and political
dignitaries.
Castro's other choice properties, he notes, include a huge estate in Havana boasting a medical center,
rooftop bowling alley, basketball court, and luxury bungalow with private marina on the coast.
In an extended interview on French television, Sanchez provided much additional information about
Castro and his regime that clashes sharply with the rose-colored propaganda dispensed by the Fidel-
friendly U.S. media choir.
But Snchez, now 65 and living in America, claims Castro enjoyed a private island - Cayo Piedra,
south of the Bay of Pigs, scene of the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of 1961 - describing it as a
"garden of Eden" where he entertained selected guests including the writer Gabrel Garcia Mrquez,
and enjoyed spear-fishing.
The former bodyguard says Castro sailed to the island on his luxury yacht, the Aquarama II, fitted
out with rare Angolan wood and powered by four motors sent by the Soviet president Leonid
Brezhnev.
"Castro would sit in his large black leather director's armchair ... a glass of Chivas Regal on the
rocks (his favourite drink) in his hand," writes Snchez.
Other presidential properties, he writes, included an "immense" estate in Havana complete with
rooftop bowling alley, basketball court and fully equipped medical centre, and a luxury bungalow
with private marina on the coast...
Snchez says Castro's dolce vita was a "crazy privilege" while Cubans suffered serious hardship in
the 1990s as the economy "collapsed like a house of cards" after the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and eastern bloc with which Havana had done almost 80% of its foreign business.
His compatriots, he says, were also unaware of their leader's complicated love life, his womanising
and subsequent tribe of at least nine children, not least because Cuban media was forbidden to
mention them.
The Cuban leader kept a gun at his feet when travelling in his Mercedes and never went anywhere
without at least 10 bodyguards, including two "blood donors". At home he would get up late, and
start work around midday "after a frugal breakast".
He recalls how Castro bugged everyone, including Hugo Chvez, and insisted his bodyguard jot
down everything he did in a notebook "for history".
Snchez says for nearly two decades he saw more of Castro than his own family. "He was a god. I
drank all his words, believed all he said, followed him everywhere and would have died for him,"
he writes. He claims he finally realised that Castro considered Cuba "belonged" to him.
"He was its master in the manner of a 19th century landowner. For him wealth was above all an
instrument of power, of political survival, of personal protection."
Recalling how Castro kept Angolan diamonds in a Cohiba cigar box, he writes: "Sometimes, Fidel
had a little of the mentality of a pirate of the Caribbean."
https://www.henrymakow.com/2015/05/castro-exposed-by-former-bodyguard.html

Fidel Castro Net Worth: Fidel Castro was a Cuban communist revolutionary and politician
who had a net worth of $900 million. Fidel Castro served as The First Secretary of the
Communist Party of Cuba for 45 years, as Prime Minister of Cuba for 17 years, and as the
President of the Council of State of Cuba and the President of Council of Ministers of Cuba
for 32 years. Born Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz on August 13, 1926, in Birn, Oriente
Province, Cuba, he is best known for leading the country, first as Prime Minister of Cuba
(1959-1976), and then as President (1976 2008). He served as the Commander in Chief
of the country's armed forces (1959 2008), as the First Secretary of the Communist Party
of Cuba (1961 2011), and on international level, as Secretary-General of the Non-
Aligned Movement (1979 -1983; and 2006-2008). An illegitimate son of a wealthy farmer,
Castro first took leftist anti-imperialist politics while studying law at the University of
Havana. Initially, he was an active participant in rebellions against right-wing governments
in the Dominican Republic and Colombia, and then he tried to overthrow the United
States-backed military junta of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. But his unsuccessful
attempt on the Moncada Barracks resulted in a year's imprisonment in 1953. Following his
release, he went to Mexico to form a revolutionary group with his brother Ral and friend
Che Guevara known as the 26th of July Movement. Once he got back to Cuba, Castro
staged and led the Cuban Revolution which ousted Batista in 1959 and also brought his
own assumption of military and political power. Alarmed by his friendly relation with the
Soviet Union, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and their respective
governments failed to remove Castro. As a precaution, Castro forged an economic and
military alliance with the Soviets, allowing them to place nuclear weapons on the island.
1961 saw Castro proclaim the socialist nature of his administration, with Cuba becoming a
one-party state under Communist Party rule. This means Cuba's industry and businesses
were nationalized and socialist reforms implemented in all areas of society. After the
Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Castro led Cuba into its economic "Special Period", before
forging alliances in the Latin American Pink Tide and joining the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Americas in 2006. In poor health, he transferred his responsibilities to Vice-President Ral
Castro in 2006, who assumed full presidency two years later. Even though lauded as a
champion of anti-imperialism, Fidel Castro remained a controversial and divisive world
figure until his death on November 25, 2016.
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-politicians/presidents/fidel-castro-net-worth/

The people work for peanuts in the name of "equality" and "social justice" while leaders like Castro
are billionaires and live high on the hog. Sure, the people get free health care and indoctrination
(education) but so what if you live in poverty in a police state?

According to Nathaniel Weyl, Ernesto Guevera and Fidel Castro were trained as Soviet agents. The
"revolution" was largely funded and supplied by the Soviet Union. But they couldn't have
succeeded without the complicity of the US, proof that the Cold War was an Illuminati charade. The
Left's infatuation with Castro Communism is a symptom of mental retardation

Yes, the people are all equal -- dirt poor.

Related - Castro was a CIA Agent

----------- Castro Drug Trafficking Exposed by Former Bodyguard
--------------Life of Luxury while Country Starved

Updated from Feb 27,2009

by Henry Makow Ph.D.

I've been to Cuba on vacation. It's a country with a rich heritage and thriving economy that was
murdered and left to decay when Castro took power in 1959 . At the time, Cuba had the second
highest standard of living in Latin America, higher than Ireland or Austria, and twice the per capita
income of Japan or Spain. (Fidel, Fontova p. 82)

Communism is so dysfunctional that even food is in limited supply. Generally, the food is what
you'd expect in a submarine a month from port. Citizens also have no political rights.
Yes, the people are all equal -- dirt poor. Yes, they get free education and health care but education
is indoctrination and people cannot toil for nothing if they are sick. Their MD's get $20 a month.
The people are paid in platitudes.

Essentially, you have a prosperous island (oil, sugar, nickel, tobacco, coffee) with a large labor
force that works for a pittance. All the wealth seems to flow to the Communist nomenklatura and
their sponsors. Secret police are everywhere and no one can say a word against the regime.

When I asked a cab driver about the revolution, he immediately clammed up. Anyone who doesn't
accept the Communist version of reality is subject to imprisonment.

Herberto Padillo, a poet who was tortured for "deviationism" said after his escape to the US: "I have
lived in frightening laboratories for social experimentation, spaces walled by test tubes, where the
same experiment always ended with the same result: tyranny. I have learned something of the value
of freedom." ("And the Russians Stayed" Carbonell, p. 295)

JFK dropped the ball when he failed to invade Cuba during the Bay of Pigs. It's absurd that the US
was "defending freedom" in Vietnam but did nothing to help an enslaved population of seven
million people 90 miles from its shore. I doubt if the CIA seriously intended the Bay of Pigs
invasion to succeed. While I find Communism repugnant, I support Obama's lifting of sanctions
because this should help the average Cuban.

GUEVARA, CASTRO AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba because of the covert help of New World orderlies in the US
State Dept. and mass media. They cut off arm sales to Batista while at the same time supplying
Castro, partly by Russian submarines. This told the Cuban military which way the wind was
blowing and they quietly defected.

weyl.jpgThis is the conclusion of Nataniel Weyl in "Red Star Over Cuba" (1962, p.152.) Weyl was
a Communist in the 1930's and knew the top leaders of the Cuban Communist Party. He actually
worked for the central bankers at one time, as Latin American research chief for the Federal
Reserve System. He is one of many Jews who recognized Communism as a dangerous satanic ruse
and devoted his life to exposing Comintern subversion in Latin America.

Weyl says that both Ernesto Guevera and Fidel Castro were trained as Soviet agents as teenagers.
Guevara, an Argentine, was liaison between the Soviet espionage network and the Castro forces
who masqueraded as an indigenous force. In fact, they were largely bankrolled and supplied by the
Soviet Union.

"Fidel's secret weapon was money---incredible millions of dollars, with which he bought
"victories." He bought entire regiments from Batista's officers and, on one occasion, purchased for
$650,000 cash an entire armoured train, with tanks, guns, ammunition, jeeps and 500 men." (p.141)
"The Cuban forces themselves never won a military victory," US Ambassador Earl Smith later
testified. The basic reason for the defeat of Batista's army was that covert US intervention shattered
their morale.(152)

GLdC2.jpg(Left, Freemason HQ in Havana)

Rothschild-dominated Freemasonry was probably also a factor. Communism is a Masonic order;

both Castro and Guevara were Masons. Other Freemasons include Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and most
Presidents incl. Barack Obama. Obviously Castro was installed by the Masons. Freemasonry is big
in Cuba: there is a 15- story Grand Lodge of Cuba HQ in Havana. A compass and square is on top
of the globe.

According to Humberto Fantova's "Che! Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant", Guevara was complicit in
the execution of 10,000 Cubans after the revolution: He was "a bloodthirsty executioner, a military
bumbler, a coward, and a hypocrite...it's no exaggeration to state that Che... was the godfather of
modern terrorism. And yet Che's followers naively swallow Castro's historical revisionism. They
are classic "useful idiots." the name Stalin gave to foolish Westerners who parroted his lies..."

Nat Hentoff met Che at the United Nations and asked "this idealist" -- "Can you conceive --
however far into the future -- a time when there will be free elections in Cuba?"

"Not waiting for his interpreter, Guevara broke into laughter at my naively ignorant question. He
made it clear that I had no understanding of a true people's revolution, firmly guided by Maximum
Leader Castro."

How do we account for the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion? This failure was probably designed to
enhance Castro's image and reinforce the Hegelian dialectic. If the US could go to Vietnam "for the
sake of democracy," it certainty could have invaded Cuba officially. The debacle opened the door
for the missile crisis and the assassination of Kennedy, both part of the agenda.

How do we account for the CIA's killing of Guevara? He had served his purpose and was worth
more dead than alive.

WHY THE MEDIA (AND EDUCATION) SOFT-PEDAL COMMUNISM (For New Readers)

Communists always portray their demented drive for world domination in terms of serving the
people. Not surprisingly, many suckers swallow this bait. (I did.) But, why do these dupes include
the US State Dept. and media establishment? The US government, media and most corporations are
controlled by the central banking cartel, i.e. the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Rockefellers etc. These are
the same people who sponsored Communism.
The guiding principle behind world events is their plan to translate their monopoly over government
credit into a world monopoly of power, business, culture and religion.

potkettle.jpgThese bankers use a Hegelian dialectic to achieve their end. They created both
Capitalism and Communism as thesis and antithesis. Their aim is a synthesis, combining the
political and cultural tyranny of Communism with the appearance of Capitalist free markets. China
or even Cuba may be the end model for the New World Order.

In 1953, Ford Foundation President, H. Rowan Gaither told Congressional Investigator Norman
Dodd that his instructions were to use "our grant-making power so to alter our life in the United
States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union."

This is why the Communist Party term "political correctness" has become part of our lexicon. Why
the elite media and foundations promote feminism, homosexuality, pornography and promiscuity to
destabilize society. Why they sponsor "diversity" to undermine American identity. Why the
education system is devoted to Leftist indoctrination; and conservatives have been driven out. Why
the culture industries are dedicated to sex, violence, alienation, deviance and the occult. We'll never
know what we have missed in terms of cultural works that boost our sense of who we are and where
we should be going.

Eustace Mullins relates this story: Early in his career, a NY publisher (who are all banker controlled)
told his agent that it's too bad Mullins had decided to go against them. Look at the success they
arranged for such "high school" talents as Hemingway, Steinbeck and
Faulkner. Unfortunately, Mullins would be consigned to the wilderness.

Rupert Murdoch, whose media operations are subsidized by the Rothschilds, said last week, "We
are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures
fundamentally altered."

----

Related - Servando Gonzalez- Cuba will Change US, Not Vice Versa
-----------Humberto Fantova "The Media Lies Continue"
----------- Castro a multimillionaire drug trafficker Exposed by former bodyguard
----------- Castro Warns Not to Expect Political Change

First Comment from Marcos:

Excellent article.
The celebration of Cuba as a fashionable place with visits from Obama, the Pope and the Rolling
Stones in a short period of time is too much of a coincidence to be by chance. It is proof that Cuba's
usefulness as a boogeyman is over.

Cuba has been and still is the center of marxist revolution in Latin America, through the Forum of
Sao Paulo organization. They have 60,000 agents in Venezuela only, and trained Maduro and many
leftist politicians in the continent in terrorism, propaganda and ideology subjects. Marxism took
over Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile, Colombia to an extent and
Paraguay for a short time (they fought back). Cuba trained and supported bloody terrorist
organizations such as the FARC and Sendero Luminoso.

It is laughable that naive Americans still blame the US for imperialism...America has had no say at
all in the continent for the last 20 years.

It doesn't matter that Cuba had arrested 250 people for political reasons one week before Obama's
visit, or that it is a hellhole of misery and corruption. Cuba is hip. It has old cars and is great for a
fashion photo shoot.

Marxism's role is to destroy traditional values and individual freedoms. Now that the work has been
done in Latin America, it is time to transcend over to a "benevolent" new world order semi-
dictatorship, with capitalism for the elite and social marxism for the poor, much like China. Move
over Castro, here comes a Cuban Trudeau.
https://www.henrymakow.com/the_death_wish_of_western_civi.html

With his shaggy beard and rumpled, olive-drab fatigues, Fidel Castro presented himself to the world
as a modest man of the people.

At times, he claimed he made just 900 pesos ($43) a month and lived in a fishermans hut
somewhere on the beach.

But Castros public image was a carefully crafted myth, more fiction than fact.

While his people suffered, Fidel Castro lived in comfort keeping everything, including his eight
children, his many mistresses, even his wife, a secret, wrote Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Castros
longtime bodyguard.

Sanchezs book, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lder
Maximo, describes his former bosss hidden life of political ruthlessness, mistresses and greed.

Castro, who died Friday night at 90, made a personal fortune offering safe haven to drug traffickers,
bedded a bevy of women over the decades, and once threatened his own brother, Raul, with
execution when the brother lapsed into alcoholism in the 90s, Sanchezs book reveals.
Modal Trigger

Amazingly, most Cubans had no idea how, or even where, their secretive strongman actually lived.

Even his first and second wives were kept out of the public eye as was their leaders two-timing.

Castro cheated on his first wife, the upper-middle-class Mirta Diaz-Balart, with Natalia Revuelta.

With her green eyes, her perfect face and her natural charm, Revuelta was one of Havanas most
beautiful women, Sanchez wrote no matter that she, too, was married at the start of their mid-
50s affair.

Diaz-Balart would bear Castro his first official son, Fidel Jr. or Fidelito, and Revuelta would
bear Castro his only daughter, Alina.

Castro cheated, too, on his second wife, seducing comrade Celia Sanchez, his private secretary,
confidante and guard dog for 30 or so years, Sanchez wrote.

Castro also bedded his English interpreter, his French interpreter, and a Cuban airline stewardess
who attended him on foreign trips, Sanchez wrote.

He doubtless had other relationships that I did not know about, Sanchez wrote.

Castro kept 20 luxurious properties throughout the Caribbean nation, including his own island,
accessed via a yacht decorated entirely in exotic wood imported from Angola, Sanchez wrote.

Taking control of Cuba on New Years Day 1959, after his guerrilla army routed the quarter-
century-long dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Castro vowed that unlike his hated predecessor, hed
share the nations wealth with its poorest citizens.

Modal Trigger
Alina Fernandez RevueltaBolivar Arellano
But while he made good on some of his promises to educate and care for his people building free
schools and hospitals with the help of his Soviet sponsors Castros legacy was also one of
repression and hypocrisy.

Deep poverty persisted teen prostitution, crumbling houses, food rations. Political opponents
were executed by the thousands by firing squad, or sentenced to decades of hard labor.
Castro had as many as 11 children with four women only two of whom he was married to and
numerous other mistresses, Sanchez wrote.

Only those closest to him knew of these affairs.

The only woman who dared to cause him any public scandal was his rebellious daughter, Alina
Fernandez Revuelta.

I remember her in the 1980s, a pretty young woman who had become a model, Sanchez wrote.

One day, when I was in Fidels anteroom, Pepn Naranjo, his aide-de-camp, showed up with a
copy of the magazine Cuba.

Spread across its second page, Alina could be admired posing on a sailboat in a bikini, in an
advertisement for Havana Club rum.

What on earth is this? Fidel exclaimed, according to Sanchez.

Call Alina, at once!

What followed was an epic father-daughter blowout.

SEE ALSO
How Fidel Castro's leadership tore apart his own family
How Fidel Castro's leadership tore apart his own family
Two hours later, Alina strode into his office, not in the least intimidated, Sanchez recalled.

The ensuing argument was the most memorable of them all: Shouting reverberated all over the
room, shaking the walls of the presidential office.

Everybody knows you are my daughter! Posing in a bikini like that is unseemly! Castro raged.

Several years later, in 1993, Fidel learned through his secret service that Alina was plotting to flee
to the United States.

I am warning you: Alina must not leave Cuba under any pretext or in any way, Castro told his
head bodyguard, Col. Jose Delgado Castro, according to Sanchez.
Youve been warned.

Two months later, Alina put on a wig, packed a false Spanish passport, and, with the help of a
network of international accomplices, sneaked out of Cuba.
Two months later, Alina put on a wig, packed a false Spanish passport, and, with the help of a
network of international accomplices, sneaked out of Cuba.

This, too, ignited the dictators temper.

One rarely sees the Comandante allowing his anger to explode, Sanchez wrote.

In 17 years, I saw it only twice. But when Pepn broke the unpleasant news to him that day, Fidel
went mad with rage.

Standing up, he stamped his feet on the ground while pointing his two index fingers down to his
toes and waving them around.

What a band of incompetent fools! he cried. I want those responsible! I demand a report! I want
to know how all this could have happened!

SEE ALSO
Fidel Castro over the years with foreign leaders
10
Fidel Castro over the years with foreign leaders
Alina remains one of her fathers most outspoken opponents.

When people tell me hes a dictator, I tell them thats not the right word, she told the Miami
Herald.

Strictly speaking, Fidel is a tyrant.

Castros second wife and widow, Dalia Soto del Valle, is the least known of Castros women,
Sanchez noted.

They met in 1961. Castro noticed her in the audience as he gave an open-air speech, Sanchez
remembered.

Fidel spotted in the first row a gorgeous girl with whom he rapidly started exchanging furtive and
meaningful glances, Sanchez wrote.
After being vetted by his aide-de-camp, del Valle was installed in a discreet house just outside
Havana.

Eventually, they married and had five sons, who grew up in hidden luxury on an estate outside
Havana.

With its orange, lemon, mandarin, grapefruit and banana trees, the estate resembled a veritable
garden of Eden especially if one compared it with the notorious ration book that all Cubans had
to use to buy food, Sanchez wrote.

Modal Trigger
Castro and Dalia Soto del Valle in 2010Getty Images
Each member of the family possessed his or her own cow, so as to satisfy each ones individual
taste, since the acidity and creaminess of fresh milk varies from one cow to another.

Disloyalty exacted a heavy price. Dissidents were jailed for as little as handing out books on
democracy.

Castro himself displayed little loyalty, either professionally or personally.

Even his closest aides faced execution if it suited his agenda.

In the late 80s, when an international scandal brewed over Castros exchanges of safe haven for
cash with Colombian cocaine traffickers, Castro had no problem throwing those closest to him
under the bus.

Very simply, a huge drug-trafficking transaction was being carried out at the highest echelons of
the state, Sanchez wrote.

Modal Trigger
Juan Reinaldo SanchezAlex Quesada for Michel Lafon
Castro was directing illegal operations like a real godfather, Sanchez wrote.

Revolutionary Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, who had fought alongside Fidel and Raul Castro, was at the
center of the drug dealings, Sanchez said.

But when the US caught wind, Castro vowed an official inquiry.

Raul was forced to watch on closed-circuit TV as a kangaroo court tried and convicted Ochoa
and then to watch the generals execution by firing squad.

Castro made us watch it, Sanchez recalled.

Thats what the Comandante was capable of to keep his power: not just of killing but also of
humiliating and reducing to nothing men who had served him devotedly.

After Ochoas death, Raul plunged into alcoholism, drowning his grief and humiliation with vodka.

Listen, Im talking to you as a brother, Castro warned him.

Swear to me that you will come out of this lamentable state and I promise you nothing will happen
to you.

Raul, who perhaps knew best what his brother was capable of, complied.
http://nypost.com/2016/11/27/inside-fidel-castros-life-of-luxury-and-ladies-while-country-starved/