[Mb-civic] Re: 9,240 victims, and counting
EAN at sbcglobal.net
EAN at sbcglobal.net
Wed Jan 4 14:21:22 PST 2006
To compare Cuba to the Pinochet regime is
disgusting. Fidel is no angel, but much of what the
Cuban revolution has done is truly remarkable and
laudable. Human rights violations and jailing of
innocent people is despicable. But under right wing
military dictatorships sponsored by the US, FAR worse
has been done, with NO redeeming social benefits to
the people as in Cuba. Let's count up the MILLIONS
who have died because of US policies around the world
since Fidel took power, and it WILL make him look
like an angel!
--Mha Atma S Khalsa
>Boston Globe Op-Ed
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9,240 victims, and counting
By Jeff Jacoby | January 4, 2006 | The Boston Globe
THE LONGEST-RULING despot in the world is Fidel
Castro, who seized power
in Cuba 47 years ago this week. Like most dictators,
Castro is a brazen
liar, especially about his own regime. This, for
example, is what he
told an international conference in Havana in April
2001:
''There have never been death squads in our country,
nor a single
missing person, nor a single political assassination,
nor a single
victim of torture. . . . You may travel around the
country, ask the
people, look for a single piece of evidence, try to
find a single case
where the Revolutionary government has ordered or
tolerated such an
action. And if you find them, then I will never speak
in public again."
One would have to be willfully blind -- a useful
idiot, in Lenin's
phrase -- to believe such a reeking falsehood. But
when it comes to
Castro, useful idiots have never been in short
supply. From Norman
Mailer to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Jesse Jackson to Ted
Turner, a long
line of admirers has swooned over the bearded tyrant,
lavishly praising
his wisdom and charm -- and never showing the
slightest interest in his
real record: cruelty, repression, and a death toll in
the tens of thousands.
But Castro's mocking challenge -- ''try to find a
single case" -- is not
going unanswered. The Cuba Archive project
(www.CubaArchive.org) is
working to document the cost, in human life, of more
than five decades
of Cuban dictatorship. The New Jersey-based archive's
tiny staff has set
itself the monumental task of identifying every man,
woman, and child
killed by Cuba's rulers since March 10, 1952, the day
Batista ousted the
island's last democratically elected president.
Meticulously,
impartially, the archive's researchers are assembling
the evidence that
Castro claims doesn't exist -- victim by victim, one
death at a time.
It is heartbreaking work. The revolution's victims
have died in front of
firing squads and been beaten to death by government
goons; they have
been sunk while at sea and shot down while flying;
they have been killed
for resisting communism at home and killed when sent
to fight for
communism abroad. In the hands of Castro's jailers,
some have been
driven to suicide; many more have disappeared.
It is also slow and painstaking work. Each death
entered into the
archive must be confirmed by at least two independent
sources and
documented, to the extent possible, with photographs,
eyewitness
testimony, and the recollections of survivors. ''We
don't want to just
record names and numbers," says Maria Werlau, the
president of the Cuba
Archive. ''We want to tell each story. We want the
world to know the
magnitude of the Cuban tragedy."
So far the archive has catalogued the deaths of 9,240
victims of the
Castro regime. Who were they? Sister Aida Rosa Perez,
who was sent to
prison as an ''enemy of the revolution" and died of
heart failure
brought on by torture and hard labor. Estanislao
Gonzalez Quintana, who
died in police custody four days after being detained
for ''unlawful
economic activity"; his corpse was visibly bruised
and had a deep gash
in the forehead. The three Garcia-Marin Thompson
brothers, who sought
asylum at the Vatican embassy in Havana, only to be
seized by Interior
Ministry troops and executed after a summary hearing.
Mrs. Alberto Lazo
Pastrana, who died with her three children when the
boat on which they
were trying to leave Cuba was sunk by the Cuban navy;
the mother was
eaten by sharks and the children were never seen
again. Carlos Alberto
Costa, a 29-year-old American, who was shot down by a
Cuban jet fighter
as he flew an unarmed plane on a search-and-rescue
mission over
international waters in 1996.
Plus 9,230 others.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Werlau and
the archive's
research director, Armando Lago, an economist who has
spent years
analyzing the costs of the Cuban revolution, expect
the total number of
deaths to be far higher. As many as 77,000 Cubans may
have lost their
lives trying to escape the island; their deaths, too,
will eventually be
added to the archive.
Werlau, who lived in Chile during the Pinochet
dictatorship, saw
firsthand how international awareness of human rights
atrocities helped
Chile reinstate its democracy. ''The Castro regime
executed more people
in just its first three years than the Pinochet
regime killed or
'disappeared' in its entire 17 years in power," she
says. ''Yet Castro's
victims, who number so many times more -- and who
include not just
political opponents but entire families assassinated
for trying to flee
-- remain unknown, ignored, or forgotten.
''We just had to do something about it."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/ope
d/articles/2006/01/04/9240_victims_and_counting/
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