Babalu Blog

Cuba's chief executioner

Heralding raul castro as a reformer is not just dishonest, it is an obscenity. raul castro is an assassin, a cold-blooded killer who has shown no remorse for the five decades spent as fidel castro's executioner.

Our friend Humberto Fontova instructs, from Newsmax:

Stalinism Alive and Well in Cuba

By: Humberto Fontova

In 1956 when Fidel Castro's motley band of 82 guerrillas were training in Mexico for their "invasion" and "liberation" of Cuba from Batista, a trainee named Calixto Morales, suffering from a recent injury, was forced to briefly hobble away from one particularly strenuous training session.

He was trussed up, dragged in front of what a guerrilla leader called a "court martial," and quickly sentenced to death by firing squad.

Fortunately the "maximum" guerrilla commander showed up in time and ordered his brother to rescind his hasty death sentence. Morales, after all, had the proper "revolutionary" attitude and had merely suffered an unfortunate accident.

Raul Castro had done the hasty sentencing. His big brother Fidel ordered the pardon.

Two years later the anti-Batista "guerrilla war" (occasional shootouts and skirmishes that the Cripps and Bloods would shrug off as a slow week) was chiefly centered in Cuba's eastern province of Oriente and consisted of two "fronts." One was commanded by Fidel in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the other was commanded by Raul in the Sierra Cristal mountains slightly north of Fidel's group.

One day a teen-aged rebel soldier named Dariel Alarcon overheard Fidel sputtering complaints to his assistant Celia Sanchez about the northern front. Raul's zeal for firing squad executions of "informers," "spies," counter-
revolutionaries" etc., where he often applied the coup 'd grace himself, was hampering progress on what Fidel had always treated as the "war's" primary front.

This primary front, of course, was the media front: the almost effortless bamboozling of the swarms of gaping reporters who queued up to interview him. Thanks to these "gallant crusaders for the truth" (as Columbia school of journalism hails its students) the stirring tale of Cuba's Thomas Jefferson/Robin Hood/Richard the Lion Hearted/Saint Thomas Aquinas — all in one heroic package, sporting a beard and combat fatigues — was thrilling audiences from New York to Paris.

The New York Times ignited the process in February of 1957 with Fidel Castro on it's front page. Soon a conflagration raged, in both print and video. CBS soon ran "The Story of Cuba's Jungle Fighters," a breathtaking news-drama that ran on prime time. Look Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Boys Life (honest, even they braved the horrendous battlefield perils for a Castro interview) all added to the blizzard of BS.

The stories leaking out regarding the "Revolutionary justice" practiced in Raul's front, though completely ignored by the foreign media throng, were causing a bit of grumbling in the Cuban press. So would Raul please cut down on the firing squad bloodbath, requested Fidel. It could hurt the image Fidel was so expertly crafting, with the eager help of media dupes and acolytes, of their "humanistic rebellion."

Raul's response is what caused Fidel's sputtering to his assistant. "Got your message and will take immediate corrective measures," Raul responded to his brother. "No more bloodbath. From now on we'll start hanging the counter- revolutionaries."

Cuban-American scholar Dr. Armando Lago who, with Maria Werlau, runs the Cuba Archive Project that meticulously attempts to document the tally of Castro regime murders have documented 278 executions in Oriente province on Raul's orders within the very first week of the Revolutionary triumph on Jan. 1, 1959. Potential contras lurked from one end of Cuba to the other.

So Raul rolled up his sleeves, spit on his hands and got to work as eastern Cuba's version of Cheka chief Feliks Dzerzhinski, while his bosom friend Che Guevara handled the matter in western Cuba by converting Havana's La Cabana fortress into a tropical Lubyanka.

Dr Lago has documented 550 executions on Raul's direct order by mid 1959. Eyewitness defectors report that Raul gleefully administered the coup'grace to at least 78 of these.

Raul's chum Che Guevara was breathing down his neck in the competition, however. Dr Lago documents 1,168 executions islandwide by that time. The best man at Che's first wedding in 1955 in Mexico City was Raul Castro. So maybe there was some friendly competition involved.

Stalinist type purges of Cuba's military have continued sporadically for decades. "In one week during 1963 we counted 400 firing squad blasts from our cells," recalls former political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin Perez. Most of these were junior officers accused of being disloyal to the regime.

Much more highly publicized was the Stalinist show trial, confession and execution in 1989 of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa and the attendant purge of any military man even rumored as his friend or supporter.

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 Gen. Rafael Del Pino, who was close to Ochoa both personally and professionally.
Ochoa was on especially close and friendly terms with Raul Castro, whom the general always affectionately called "jefe."

In the dawn hours of July 13, 1989 Gen. Arnaldo T. Ochoa was executed by a firing squad on Raul's orders. A sickening "trial" and "confession" had preceded his execution, all of it on camera. Cuban defector Rafael Del Pino who once headed Cuba's air force explains that "Ochoa was a pragmatic 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 with whom they had served in Africa."

That Glasnost and Perestroika stuff could be contagious, in other words. Yet media and scholarly wizards keep telling us it's Raul himself who will inspire "an opening" in Cuba.

Posted by Ziva at February 28, 2008 02:15 AM

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Posted by: Larry Daley at February 28, 2008 10:52 AM

Posted by: ORGULLOSADESERCUBANA at February 28, 2008 04:30 PM

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