Posted on 05/17/2006 4:16:01 PM PDT by RWR8189
When a mutual friend complained to Abel Prieto, the Cuban culture minister, about the beating administered by a mob to Martha Beatriz Roque, an infirm 60-year-old economist, he lowered his head and begged out of the question, saying that those were ''Fidel's doings.'' He was ashamed that such a cowardly act could be committed. He would have liked to prevent it, but the matter was out of his hands. All he could do was to resign from government, but he didn't have the nerve to do it.
He was right. Except for international pressure, nothing and nobody in Cuba can stop the wave of violence and abuse suffered by the democrats inside prisons and out, because it's the Comandante himself who has ordered his numerous thugs to beat, humiliate, spit upon and insult anyone who dares to criticize his government publicly.
It is not a question of isolated acts perpetrated by sadistic characters. It's a carefully thought-out plan. Inside the prisons, the guards have been instructed to kick political prisoners mercilessly and to let them die if they fall ill, as is happening to Héctor Maseda, Héctor Palacios, Oscar Elías Biscet and a dozen other democrats incarcerated for writing articles, lending forbidden books, asking for a referendum or distributing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Barbarous `pogroms'
Outside the prisons, that task of violent repression falls upon the Communist Party and the implacable political police adjunct to the ministry of the interior. The minister, Gen. Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, supervises even the tiniest details of the so-called acts of ''repudiation,'' the pogroms against the dissidents. He has them filmed and gives Fidel and Raúl Castro detailed descriptions of the attacks on the opposition, along with video tapes that record those acts.
This barbarousness derives from Fidel Castro's psychological nature and his upbringing while young. Castro is a corpulent and aggressive fellow who constantly needs to prove to himself and to the world that nobody can challenge him with impunity on any grounds. As a teenager in school, he bet that he could run headlong into a wall. He did so, and the concussion kept him in bed for four days. Later, at the university, he grew up in an extremely violent environment, where leadership was imposed through the physical elimination of adversaries or by total intimidation.
Such was the atmosphere of political gangsterism in Havana in the 1940s. When he was 19, Castro tried to shoot and kill another student, Leonel Gómez, merely to demonstrate that he was capable of doing anything. The pistol Castro carried constantly at his side was a signal. He was simply establishing his superiority through a behavior that's quite common among animals: He was displaying his ability to inflict unbounded harm.
Gang tactics worked
A few years later, in the early 1950s, opposition to Batista was split between the pro-election advocates who sought to end the dictatorship by civilized means and those who chose the path of armed insurrection. Castro then organized his first pogroms to terrorize the peaceable politicians, many of them his former colleagues in the Orthodox Party.
To Castro, the revolution was another way to express his vocation for gang life, and he learned, unfortunately, that the method works. Instilling fear helped him to rise to power and to remain there for almost half a century.
This thuggery is not limited to Cuba. Castro has instructed his ambassadors to behave similarly outside the island. That's why Cuban embassies, using their supporters and sometimes the diplomats themselves, ''bust'' the press conferences or public appearances of noted opposition figures such as writers Raúl Rivero, Zoé Valdés, Angel Cuadra, Húber Matos, professor Orlando Gutiérrez or human-rights activist Frank Calzón, who was beaten into unconsciousness by a Cuban functionary at the United Nations palace in Geneva, no less, during a debate over whether the liberties of citizens in Cuba are violated.
Every day I receive three or four messages from mothers, daughters or wives who denounce the horrors endured by their relatives in and outside prison and ask for my help. All I can do is make public what they tell me. But I do suggest to them that they document those grievances for the day when freedom returns. That will also be the time for justice.
This pig deserves a very slow, long painful death. Being tortured every second of his miserable life, while preventing him to die too quick.
And once he dies, I would love to piss on his face.
Bump.
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