Catro's Utopian Hellhole

By Jim Goad
Takimag.com

Fidel Castro is dead, so that’s cool.

Born to wealth and privilege and educated in exclusive private schools—which seems to be the case with all communist fanatics I’ve ever heard of or have had the supreme displeasure to know in my personal life—the bearded revolutionary finally gave up the ghost on Friday at age 90.

Despite the fact that he was a murderous, dissent-squashing, and presumably very smelly tyrant who turned his nation into the sort of drab, flea-bitten torture chamber that all socialist republics eventually become, he was eulogized up the yin-yang by liberal Western politicians and the establishment leftist press, because they really are all that stupid.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—whose dad used to play Yahtzee with Castro in the 1970s, or something like that—praised him as a “remarkable leader” whose death brought him “great sorrow.” Barack Obama—who has big ears, hates white people, and will be leaving office soon—claimed Castro was a “singular figure” whose death elicited “powerful emotions.”

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell—one of the most hagged-out yentas currently polluting the airwaves—predicted that Castro “will be revered” for “education and social services and medical care to all of his people.” Mitchell’s MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews—who once claimed he got “a thrill up his leg” at the idea of a black president—described Castro as “a romantic figure” who “was almost like a folk hero to most of us.”

I wonder what they’ll say when David Duke or Tom Metzger dies? As far as I know, neither of those guys ever killed anyone or sent homosexuals to labor camps or imprisoned journalists or sent political dissidents to mental hospitals to be psychologically destroyed. Castro did all of that.

Yes, he had his faults, his blinkered acolytes will protest. After all, he’s only human. But, um, he provided the gentle people of his humble tropical island with healthcare and education. Even better, he, like, integrated the blacks with the Spaniards and the, uh, indigenous peoples.

Okey-doke, let’s examine those bold proclamations one by one, comrades.

Although Cuban healthcare was said to be better back when Soviet dollars were propping up their economy, modern observers tell a different story. A reporter for Miami’s PanAm Post writes of a Havana hospital:

The only working bathroom in the entire hospital had only one toilet. The door didn’t close, so you had to go with people outside watching. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found, and the floor was far from clean….I saw biological waste discarded in a regular trash can. The beds had no linen, and the only equipment around was the bag of IV fluids hanging above them.

Lucia Newman, the Latin American Editor for Al-Jazeera, writes:

I saw many hospitals where there was often no running water, the toilets did not flush, and the risk of infections - by the hospital’s own admission - was extremely high.

Newman says that there is excellent healthcare available in Cuba, but only for political elites and tourists. But for the righteous proles of the People’s Revolution, it’s “deplorable” and “wretched.” And because radical leftism always feels the need to worm its way into freaking everything, family doctors are required to keep notes not only on each patient’s physical health, but also on their “political integration.”

Cuba reputedly boasts a high literacy rate, but it’s uncertain whether its population is allowed to read anything except Das Kapital and transcripts of Castro’s speeches. Nearly all printed material that is deemed “counter-revolutionary”—basically, 99% of the available literature on this planet—is banned. The “education” system consists of little more than communist indoctrination. According to rules set down in The Code for Children, Youth and Family, parents who teach their children ideas that are hostile to communism risk up to three years in prison. Each schoolchild has a file that tracks their “revolutionary integration” throughout life. So what exactly is the point of high literacy if you’re not allowed to read anything?

And as far as Cuba being a rainbow racial utopia, many black Cuban expats would disagree. “The authorities in my country have never tolerated that a black person oppose the revolution,” Jorge Luis García Pérez told a newspaper reporter in Florida. “Later when I was mistreated in prison by guards, they always referred to me as being black.” According to writer Carlos Moore, “There is an unstated threat, blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail….There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead.”

Now that I’ve popped the tripartite myth-pimples of glorious Cuban healthcare, education, and racial harmony, let’s talk about what a nasty man Fidel Castro truly was.

• The authors of Death by Government and The Black Book of Communism agree that during Castro’s reign, he oversaw around 15,000 executions of political enemies. Here’s a picture of world-famous humanitarians the Castro brothers and beloved T-shirt star Che Guevara preparing to murder someone for thinking differently.

• Over one million Cubans—around a tenth of the island’s total population—found conditions under Castro so unbearable, they risked their lives on inner tubes and rafts trying to paddle the 90 miles to Florida. This includes the 125,000 or so refugees from the infamous Mariel Boatlift, during which Castro emptied his prisons and mental hospitals and sent the trash afloat to the USA. (When Cuba sends us its people, they’re not sending their best.)

• Castro’s government set up “Committees of Defense of the Revolution,” which were basically local Snitch Squads that encouraged wives to spy on husbands, who were to spy on their children, who were to spy on everyone to make sure everyone was a good, docile, obedient, and scared-shitless communist.

• The government also organized all-civilian “Rapid Action Brigades” who were encouraged to swarm and beat anyone suspected of having an anti-communist thought. Anyone accused of political dissidence was to be assaulted, spat upon, and have rocks thrown at them—all with the almighty state’s approval.

• Political prisoners tell horror stories of having guards urinate in their mouths, of laughing guards beating them in front of their screaming families, of rampant unsanitary conditions where inmates “defecated parasites 6 centimeters long,” of female inmates bleeding from their vaginas and rectums, and of being tortured with psychiatric drugs and electroconvulsive therapy and communist propaganda blasted at deafening volumes.

Ahh, leftism. Based in a deeply emotional but intellectually vacant sense of utopian humanitarianism, it creates the most inhumane hellholes in human history.

No wonder exiled Cubans celebrated in the streets of Miami for days after hearing of his death.

I think I’ll go eat a Cuban sandwich and light a cigar.