Valladares wrote:
“Early in 1959, on January 21, to be exact, Castro gave a speech in front of the Presidential Palace in which he declared, ‘There will not be more than about four hundred henchmen and conspirators against the Revolution that we will execute.’ But many more than that had already fallen before the firing squads in those days of barbarity and death. On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee- deep and more than fifty 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 Raúl Castro and attended by him personally. Nor was it an isolated instance.” …
Castro appeared as a guest on the famous program “Meet the Press” on April 19, 1959. Journalist Lawrence Spivak asked Castro, “I want to know where your heart lies in the struggle between Communism and democracy. Whose side, where is your heart and where are your feelings?” Castro immediately responded, ‘Democracy is my ideal, really... I am not Communist. I am not agreed with Communism... There is no doubt for me between democracy and Communism.”
Guess that would not be the first time that someone’s actions put the lie to what they were saying.