13 facts about Fidel Castro

Carlos Eire is a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University. Writing in the Washington Post, Prof. Eire presents 13 facts about Fidel Castro. I will follow Eire’s lead and use bullet points for these facts as “a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.”

●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.

●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.

●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.

●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.

●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.

●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.

●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.

●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.

●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.

●He censored all means of expression and communication.

This is the man who has been eulogized in glowing terms by many on the left and in neutral terms by President Obama. Are the “social justice warriors” who obsess over “micro-aggressions” and politically incorrect turns of phrase being hypocrites when they praise Castro, or is there considerable consistency at a deep level between their version of social justice and Castro’s totalitarianism?

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