Fidel Castro maintained his place as the undisputed leader of Cuba for more than 50 years by systematically oppressing and murdering those who opposed or even questioned his rule.
However, based on some of the public remarks made this weekend in response to his death, one would think he was little more than a tough but benevolent ruler.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for example, said in a public statement, “It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest-serving president.
“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation,” he added.
“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people, who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.'”
The prime minister later defended his statement after it came under heavy criticism.
Other leaders, including U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Irish President Michael D. Higgins, joined Trudeau in issuing sorrowful statements mourning the loss of a supposedly great man.
The United Nation’s Secretary-General is Ban Ki-moon said after Castro’s death that the deceased communist dictator was “a strong voice for social justice.”
And though President Obama’s statement lacked the kind of glowing praise found in Trudeau’s remarks, the White House’s comments were similarly silent on any mention of Castro’s many atrocities. The Obama administration explained Monday that its silence is in part due to a desire to “move past that painful history.”
In media, Castro’s death came with the usual mentions of the supposed improvements his regime brought to healthcare and education.
The New York Times claimed in its weekend obituary that the Castro era was one of “medical advances.”
The Times also hailed the regime for “improving education and healthcare for many Cubans,” and claimed that “admirers from around the world, including some Americans, were impressed with the way that healthcare and literacy in Cuba had improved.”
Similar claims were made this weekend in competing newsrooms, including at MSNBC where Andrea Mitchell predicted Castro would “be revered” for bringing improving education, social services and healthcare for Cubans.
“He dramatically improved healthcare and literacy,” Mitchell said, making an oft-repeated, but highly dubious, claim.
Notably absent from these and other saccharine send-offs for Castro are detailed mentions of the violence he used to achieve power, and how many people were imprisoned, tortured and murdered during his long reign.
The Cuba Archive project is as close as anyone has come to putting a hard number on the loss of life for which Castro is responsible.
A Harvard-trained economist “estimates that almost 78,000 innocents may have died trying to flee the dictatorship,” the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady reported. “Another 5,300 are known to have lost their lives fighting communism in the Escambray Mountains (mostly peasant farmers and their children) and at the Bay of Pigs.
“An estimated 14,000 Cubans were killed in Fidel’s revolutionary adventures abroad, most notably his dispatch of 50,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1980s to help the Soviet-backed regime fight off the Unita insurgency.”
And these are just working estimates. It’ll be years, likely decades, before hard numbers are confirmed and the full scope of Castro’s handiwork understood.
In the meantime, there are dozens of historical works recounting the grizzly methods by which the now-deceased dictator dealt with potential political opposition.
From Armando Valladares’ 1986 Against All Hope, which recounts the earliest days of Castro’s rise to power, just after defeating Gen. Fulgencio Batista’s forces:
Hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than 50 yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men.
Many of them were hardly more than boys, who had joined the army because money and food were scarce at home. The mass execution was ordered by Raul Castro and attended by him personally. Nor was it an isolated instance; other officers in Castro’s guerilla forces shot ex-soldiers en masse without a trial, without any charges of any kind lodged against them, simply as an act of reprisal against the defeated army.
And that was just the beginning.
