Freedom is never free. The passing of Fidel Castro is a keen reminder that many liberties so often taken for granted in the West, even as they are rapidly diminishing in the face of radical secularism, are still not a given for many.
For over 55 years, the Castro regime perpetrated numerous human rights abuses. Basic civil liberties and freedom of the press were non-existent. Political opponents were detained, tortured or killed without cause. Liberalization of the nation’s abortion law quickly led the modestly sized island nation to become a country with one of the highest abortion rates in the world.
In the days following the revolution, Castro’s opponents were systematically rounded-up, put on trial in kangaroo courts and lined-up before firing squads. Castro’s own Agrarian Reform Chief promised that the regime “will erect the most formidable execution wall in the history of humanity.” Private property was nationalized and seized from both corporations and private individuals. Many Cubans lost everything.
Over the intervening decades, millions have fled the island, some so desperate as to venture out on the open ocean in tiny boats in the hopes of reaching the Florida Keys or to make a long roundabout trek through Central America. “I have more here [in the U.S.] in eight days than I ever had in my 42 years in Cuba,” one recently arrived refugee told the New York Times.
Anyone who dared to speak out against the injustices of the regime was arrested and handed-down sentences of ten or twenty years for “crimes” such as “dangerousness” or “pre-criminal activity.” Political prisoners were left to languish in squalid conditions in tiny, vermin-infested jail cells with almost no ventilation under the oppressively hot and humid Havana sun. Prisoners of conscience were either crammed into overcrowded jails or restricted to solitary confinement for years on end. Prison conditions in Cuba are so uninhabitable that from 2010-2011 alone, 202 prisoners died in confinement, according to statistics reported by the Cuban Government, a number that the U.N. Committee against Torture has characterized as “high.”
The Castro regime sought to maintain control over even the most minute and private details of people’s lives. The regime set-up an organization called the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees in Defense of the Revolution, or CDR) that was responsible for monitoring people’s personal lives and reporting them to the police for any signs of “counter-revolutionary” activity. Every block of every city across the country was assigned to a CDR. The CRDs became a crucial state mechanism for rooting out dissidents. Anyone perceived as against the regime or its Marxist ideals were arrested or subjected to picketing and harassment from citizen brigades mobilized by the police. Other times, however, the regime would resort to quicker and easier options, commissioning extrajudicial killings to permanently silence their critics.
Carlos Beltramo, Ph.D. | PRI European Office
August 21, 2023
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