"Amazing how everything the left accuses the U.S. of wanting to do in
Venezuela —siphon off oil wealth, install a puppet dictator, run
hundreds of spies, crush democratic institutions— is stuff Cuba is
*actually* doing.
And has been. For years." - Caracas Chronicles
Today the news was focused on
Elliott Abrams and the Reagan Administration's policy of promoting democracy (in
El Salvador) and backing anti-communist regimes in Central America. Nor was any mention made today
of the role Elliott Abrams
played in easing General Augusto Pinochet out of power in Chile.
It is also important to recall that "University of Hawaii historian
R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of
studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own
government,
reported in 1987 that
credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll at the time ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."
Also missing from the conversation was that this was at a time when the Soviet Union and Cuba had been backing communist insurgencies to overthrow governments across the region, or that Fidel Castro has a far higher body count to account for, not only in the Americas but also Africa.
The conversation today at the Congressional hearing was supposed to be about Venezuela.
According to
Amnesty International
there have been more than 8,200 extrajudicial executions between 2015
and June 2017 in Venezuela. Wonder what the full tally is during the 20
years of the Chavez-Maduro regime?
But the record of
extrajudicial killings goes back to the early 1960s.
Fidel Castro,
beginning in 1959, had strategic designs on taking over Venezuela to exploit its natural resources in order to
magnify its regional impact.
A cache of three tons of weapons was found on a Venezuelan beach in November
1963 that was to be used to disrupt the democratic elections there. The Castro regime repeatedly tried to violently overthrow the social democratic government in Venezuela.
On May 8, 1967
"
two small boats carrying a dozen heavily armed fighters made landfall
near Machurucuto, a tiny fishing village 100 miles east of the
Venezuelan capital, Caracas. Their plan was to march inland and recruit
Venezuelan peasants to the cause of socialist revolution." An all night
gun battle with the Venezuelan military
led to nine guerrillas dead, two
captured, and one who had escaped.
What the Cubans were not able to do in Venezuela with force of arms they were able to accomplish through subversion via the ballot box first with Hugo Chavez in 1999 and later with his successor Nicolas Maduro. Tens of thousands of Cuban intelligence officers and soldiers are in Venezuela and have played a role in the political violence and extrajudicial executions there.
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| Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet |
The communist regime in Cuba was
also involved in training and arming insurgencies in
Guatemala,
El Salvador,
Nicaragua,
Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, and many other places. Many of these initiatives directly on the orders of Fidel and Raul Castro. These actions on more than one occasion sparked violent civil wars that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Efforts
to subvert the Colombian government through a combination of training
and arming communist guerilla groups while funding them through drug
trafficking did not lead to the overthrow of the Colombian government
but it led to the Castro regime being placed on the U.S. State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism on March 1, 1982
The Castro regime achieved one "success" in Latin America with its myriad of armed interventions: the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua and the installation of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista regime. Robert A. Pastor,
of The Carter Center in July 1992 in the report "The Carter
Administration and Latin America: A Test of Principle" explained that in Nicaragua "by
May 1979, with Cuban President Fidel Castro's help, the three
Sandinista factions had united and established a secure and ample arms
flow from Cuba through Panama and Costa Rica." The Sandinistas drove out the Somoza regime on July 19, 1979 and would remain a force there to the present day committing extrajudicial killings.
Will Congresswoman Ilhan Omar mention the role Cubans played in the civil wars in Latin America? What about Africa?
In Ethiopia the Castro brothers backed a genocidal war criminal who murdered over a million of his own people. Fidel and Raul Castro sent 17,000 Cuban
troops to East Africa to assist Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam in consolidating his rule
and eliminating actual and potential opposition in Ethiopia. Charles Lane of The Washington Post in the December 1, 2016 article "Castro was no liberator" raised the following facts about events in Ethiopia:
Mengistu participated in a
successful military coup against the U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie
in 1974, eventually seizing power on Feb. 3, 1977,by massacring his
rivals in the officer corps. Castro admired this bloody deed as a
preemptive strike against “rightists” that showed “wisdom” and cleared
the way for Cuba to support Mengistu “without any constraints,” as he
explained to East German dictator Erich Honecker in an April 1977
meeting whose minutes became public after the fall of European
communism. [...] With the Cuban forces watching his back, Mengistu wrapped up
his bloody campaign of domestic repression, known as “the Red Terror,”
and sent his own Soviet-equipped, Cuban-trained troops to crush a
rebellion in Eritrea. The last Cuban troops did
not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as
hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by
Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.
Human Rights Watch in their 2008 report on Ethiopia titled outlined "
Collective Punishment War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia’s Somali Region" some of the practices carried out by Cuban troops sent there by Fidel and Raul Castro
excerpted below:
In December 1979, a new Ethiopian military offensive, this time
including Soviet advisors and Cuban troops, “was more specifically
directed against the population’s means of survival, including poisoning
and bombing waterholes and machine gunning herds of cattle.”
The last Cuban troops
did not leave Ethiopia until 1989 and were present and complicit in the
engineered famine that took place there. Will Congresswoman
Ilhan Omar raise the issue of the
genocide aided and abetted by the Castro brothers in Africa? A genocide that
killed over a million Ethiopians.
If black lives matter then the role two white Cuban dictators played to facilitate genocide in Ethiopia should not be ignored. Hopefully, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar will call a hearing to explore this matter and the role played by the Castro regime both in Africa and Latin America.
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| Raul Castro and Fidel Castro with ally Mengistu Haile Mariam |
