Fidel Castro’s credentials as a great revolutionary, thinker and “fighter for the rights of the oppressed” remain impressive.
But I began to a have a change of mind about him when I read a book in the late 1990s by a black Cuban gospel minister who was arrested and imprisoned for 22 years on Castro’s orders for propagating his faith. His book embodied his deep conviction that he would not die in Castro’s gulag – and he survived to tell the world his horrible experience of starvation, mental and physical torture and all forms of indignities.
While in prison, he saw another side of Castro which the world out there never knew, namely, his condescending attitude towards blacks. Before the man left prison on the intervention of the US special envoy to Cuba, Jesse Jackson, and immigrated to the US, his children have been brainwashed and conscripted into the Communist Army (and their minds viciously turned against him) and his "liberated" wife has remarried a colonel in the Communist Army.
Any revolutionary who won’t grant other people the right and freedom to hold and practice beliefs other than his own cannot retain my respect; unless, however, such beliefs (or their practise) infringe on the rights of others. And any revolutionary who does not believe in the equality of all humans is a put-off – for me, at least.
However, I join the rest of the world to mourn the passing away of Fidel Castro…
You may wish to look at this “Los Angeles Times” report:
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/blacks-finally-notice-castros-racism
