Castro Was Not A Great Leader, and Communism/Socialism is Not Great Either.

a reply to: daskakik

My story is not anecdotal when the majority of Cubans who have escaped, almost 2 million Cubans in the U.S. alone, have similar stories, and in the island is the same thing happening to the majority of Cubans. According to wikipedia 1.4 million Cubans in Florida alone as of 2015 " followed by California (92,022), New Jersey (89,997), New York (73,439) and Texas (59,115)." (the majority of Cubans in Florida voted for Trump because democrats like Clinton border on being socialists.)

Your friend, if he is Cuban, must be part of the "communist party", his parents are probably rich communists who have everything they ever want.

My uncle, the doctor (he specializes on cardiology) married a woman whose parents are part of the communist regime. My parents and i visited their house once in the year 2000. Never before in my life, either in Cuba, Spain, or in the U.S. did i set foot on a house that big and in excellent condition on the street "Paseo" in Vedado. There are other parts in Cuba where other rich, some richer than others, communists live. Like "reparto Coli" or " Nuevo Vedado".

Yes, there are Cubans who live well, but those people are part of the regime, and they are the "top 0.1%" Lower rank loyalist communists also get incentives, but the higher your rank in the communist party the more and better things you can have. But the majority of the Cuban people don't get to live that life.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

Who is being dismissive know?

What you describe, social strata, is no different than any other place. Most people in the US will never live like the .01%

Fidel protected Cuban children from Western pedophiles. Good job Fidel

originally posted by: crazyewok
I dont think many thought did think he was a good leader.

Just that most of us thought it was not the USA place or business to interfere.

There is a difference between "interfering" and boycotting/placing an embargo on a known communist regime/dictatorship so it wouldn't get richer and have more money to subjugate the people.

What President Obama has done with "opening the doors to businesses" is only giving the communist regime more money to stay longer in power and being able to subjugate people better.

Fidel castro has claimed in the past that the U.S. has tried to kill him 600 times... Which is a lie. If you watch the interviews of former bodyguards of castro, such as Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, they would tell you that's a lie that fidel, and other communists liked/like to claim. What Sanchez has said is that "no attempts to kill fidel castro occurred in the 17 years he worked as his bodyguard. What occurred were planned attacks (not attempted attacks like fidel has claimed and much less the 600 figure he likes to proclaim), but the plans that "could have occurred" didn't reach 100..." What's more, in the interview below, one of the most extremes of those situations Sanchez went through was "when he had to try all the food that neighbors of Fidel were offering him in his visit to Spain"... I don't call that a "planned attempt on castro's life...

...
Se dice que en hasta 600 ocasiones intentaron atentar contra el Comandante. ¿Qué hay de verdad y de leyenda en este aspecto?

-Esa cifra es exagerada. Nunca han cometido un atentado contra Fidel, tan sólo han planificado algún ataque, pero los que realmente tuvieron posibilidades de llegar a producirse no llegan a 100. Yo fuí durante muchos años el encargado de prevenir estos atentados y velar por su seguridad. Precisamente fue aquí, en Galicia, donde viví una de las situaciones más extremas. Fraga llevó a Fidel por lugares muy peligrosos a nivel de seguridad. Los vecinos salían de las casas con comida y querían dársela al líder. Tuve que probar todos los productos para comprobar que no estaban envenenados.
...

www.larazon.es...< br />

...
“My family was a revolutionary family,” Sanchez told me during a recent interview. As a young student, he was selected to join Castro’s personal guard. “It was one of the best security detachments in the world,” he told me. No threat to Castro ever “penetrated our [security] ring,” Sanchez said.
...

fusion.net...



For some reason the translation into English is different to what Sanchez has said in Spanish. Also, the BBC translator falsely claims that "Sanchez did not suggest that castro benefited from drug trafficking". This is a lie, because that's not what Sanchez has said in Spanish interviews. In this particual BBC interview, at least what they show, Sanchez NEVER says what the BBC translator claims he said. The narrative was changed. in fact, Sanchez has stated in Spanish that fidel castro has benefited from dug trafficking, from weapons trafficking and other illegal activity and had exported terrorism, under the guise of communism, to other countries.

It is interesting to note, that the BBC lowers the voice of Sanchez when he speaks to the point that you can't corroborate what they claim he says, which in other interviews he does not say. Also notice how BBC disabled comments on that video... BBC, changed many of the things Sanchez has stated, and I am 100% certain of this.

Here is an interview in Spanish where Sanchez states Fidel did benefit from drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and other illegal activities, including allowing terrorists, and drug lords to escape to the island for a fee. (Others do different favors for fidel such as giving him contacts in other countries, including for example within the Black panthers in the U.S., who are also communists.)



Newsflash, communists like castro like to tell "tall-tales" which are a myth to surround themselves in an aura of "mysticism and legend"... It's mostly BS. A lot of the claims of "victorious battles against incredible odds" are fantasies made to give this aura of "heroism, and mysticism to figures like fidel castro, and even Che Guevara".

Fidel made millions, almost a billion by himself without counting others within the communist regime who also made millions, from drug trafficking, weapons trafficking and other illegal activities meanwhile he exported communism around the world and regular people were murdered and suffered in those countries, and in Cuba. These communist elites have lived, and live like royalty meanwhile the rest of the Cuban people are in poverty.

originally posted by: suvorov
Fidel protected Cuban children from Western pedophiles. Good job Fidel

Are you kidding me?... Obviously you didn't hear from the reporter from Spain who uncovered the sex trafficking in Cuban schools as professors and entire schools get tourists in contact with children to sexually abuse them...

It's in Spanish but subtitles can be turned to English, even though the translation is bad.



Castro, and the communists LOVE to claim they ended prostitution and corruption, which is a lie. The castros and communism brought more prostitution and human trafficking to Cuba than ever before.

Other journalists have uncovered the same thing. Human trafficking is alive and well, and the communist regime knows it exist... They only make it "look like they do something about it when some journalist uncovers this" but then it goes back to allowing it to happen because it benefits the Cuban regime.

March 16, 2013 2:43 PM
How Cuba became the newest hotbed for tourists craving sex with minors

Read more here: www.miamiherald.com...=cpy

These stories are the result of a joint investigation by Toronto Star reporters Robert Cribb, Jennifer Quinn and Julian Sher, and El Nuevo Herald reporter Juan O. Tamayo.

The 50-something Canadian steps inside a downtown bar, his left arm wound tightly around the waist of a young prostitute as he flashes a sly grin. A winking bartender welcomes him like an old friend.

“It’s hard not to be inspired by this,” Michael says, looking over his companion for the night. “And that,” he adds, his eyes pointing to one of the other young women in the bar. “This is the promised land.”

Michael, a retiree from Vancouver Island, spends up to six months a year in Havana, where he says he has discovered easy access to young women willing to ignore age differences — in exchange for as little as $30 for the night.

Foreign tourists, especially Canadians and Spaniards, are travelling to Cuba in surprising numbers for sex — and not just with adult prostitutes. They are finding underage girls and boys, a joint investigation by The Toronto Star and El Nuevo Herald has found.

Havana’s conspicuous scenes of street-level prostitution are the outward face of a hidden prostitution trade in minors, some as young as four, some with families complicit in their exploitation, the newspapers found.

Cuba holds unique allure for Western sex tourists. It is closer and cheaper than other sex destinations, such as Thailand. And HIV rates are lower than in other Caribbean sex tourism hotspots, such as the Dominican Republic or Haiti.

While the size of the island’s underage sex market remains a mystery — the communist government denies it is a problem and fosters the image of an island free of the social ills that plague other nations — it clearly goes on.
• A confidential Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report in 2011 showed Cuba was one of the main destinations in the Americas for Canadian sex predators, along with the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil and Mexico. More than one million Canadian tourists visited Cuba last year.
• Cuba’s government “made no known efforts to reduce the demand for commercial sex,” noted the 2012 version of the U.S. State Department’s annual report on global Trafficking in Persons (TIP).
• The 2003 version noted that some officials of Cuban state enterprises such as restaurants and hotels “turn a blind eye to this (child) exploitation because such activity helps to win hard currency.”
• A dispatch by U.S. diplomats in Havana in 2009 noted that “some Cuban children are reportedly pushed into prostitution by their families, exchanging sex for money, food or gifts,” but gave no overall numbers.

Pimps, cabbies and tourist hotel staffers can procure discreet meetings with underage prostitutes, according to the RCMP report.

“That’s prohibited here in the hotel,” a security chief at a Havana hotel told a journalist posing as a tourist in search of underage girls. But, he added helpfully, they can be found “in houses waiting for the call from pimps.”
...

Today, prostitution may well be the most profitable job in an island where the average monthly salary officially stands at less than $20 and a bottle of cooking oil costs $3.

But Garcia argues that there’s more to prostitution on the island than poverty — that most Cubans dream of meeting a foreigner who will take them away from the island’s grinding isolation.

“They see that this girl married some Italian and now she’s dressing nice, fixing up her mother’s house – it’s the illusion that you can get ahead if you prostitute yourself … the illusion of leaving the country, the illusion of a visa,” he said.

Garcia said he knows two 12-year-old girls currently working the streets and has heard of 11-year-olds. Havana lawyer Laritza Diversent said she knew of one nine-year-old girl who “was groped lasciviously” for cash.

Age of consent
The State Department’s TIP report has classified Cuba as a “Tier 3” country — the worst of its rankings — when it comes to combating sex trafficking every year since 2003.
...

Read more here: www.miamiherald.com...=cpy

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

The embargo was never working though.

The leaders where never effected. Why would they be? The Castro family was still filthy rich and able to buy what ever it wanted from non Embargo countrys or through the black market?

Russia and China would happily sell it weapons?

And the UK EU and rest of the world did not have embarged (rightfully so for the UK as it is not our problem) so there was still trade.

The US embargo was pointless and just gave the communist reguime a excuse to blam the countrys ills on the USA.


And that is the thing you see. Most these dictators rely on a external threat to justify the opression or poverty the people experiance.

Also if USA tourists and culture start seeping in now that is likley to have far more of a bigger impact that the embargo ever did.


The other factor is consistancy.
The USA does buisness with those equaly if not worse.

China is the USA number one trading partner but are just as bad.

Saudi Arabia is far far worse than Cuba. It is practicaly a state version of ISIS yet the USA does not just trade with them but actively props that reguime up but selling it the best weapons!

So why a diffrent standard with Cuba?

Back when I was a member of the RMT union in the UK we had an annual fundraiser, a garden party at the London HQ to raise money for Cuban trade unionists who were affected by the US trade embargo.

Probably never made too much difference but it was a good excuse for cigars, rum and dancing.

It always struck me as anachronistic that the US took such a hard line with Cuba when the usual rhetoric regarding the defeat of communism centred on trade as a way of opening the door.

I guess it's just a reaction to the bay of pigs thing and subsequent administrations inability to just let it go.

a reply to: crazyewok

But opening business with a communist dictatorship only enriches the dictatorship and immoral foreigners who don't care about Cuban suffering and only care for money, and for prostitution, including that of minors.

originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
a reply to: crazyewok

But opening business with a communist dictatorship only enriches the dictatorship and immoral foreigners who don't care about Cuban suffering and only care for money, and for prostitution, including that of minors.

But it comes down to double standards.

Cuba is bad but We do buisness nations far worse.

Why should it be one rule for Cuba and say another for saudi arabia or China?


Plus the Cuban elite was already rich. Castro and his clan didnt live in poverty. All opening buisness means is they have $2 billion in there slush fund rather than $1 billion. That is really no diffrence.

Plus Embargo was never working.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a diffrent result.

Opening Cuba up to trade and tourism opens the people up to US influence.
That could do more damage to the communist reguime than the Embargo ever achieved.

I once worked with a man(Jorge) who floated to Florida from Cuba on an inner tube.
All by himself this man got on an inflatable ring and floated out to see with no means of navigation and only hope to make it 90 miles to the US.
At that job I also worked with a man from South Vietnam. He was an ARVN paratrooper. He had a bloodshot right eye. I asked him about it. After the war he was captured, put into a communist "re-education" camp. For some minor infraction the camp guards tried to gouge his eye out with a stick. He was lucky they were stopped by an officer. When he was released from the camp he fled the country as soon as he could.
I worked with many people from former and current communist/ socialist countries.
They all had FLED them.
You dont flee from a country that is a joyous utopia. You flee from tyranny.
Communism/ and Socialism in ALL its forms are tyranny.
Period, end of lesson.

True-Dumb up here in Cuba North praised the old dick-tator. He does not speak for all Canadians, he's like his father. An idiot.