Editor:
It has been said that in 1959 revolutionary Fidel Castro fooled Cuba’s Military dictator Fulgencio Batista into thinking Castro was stronger militarily than he really was. Batista, struck a bargain, surrendered his position and took off for the Dominican Republic. He later moved to Spain.
In fact Castro had a small but impressive army of dedicated guerrilla fighters along with the support of a large percentage of the Cuban population that, beset by desperation in their miserable lives, believed all the lies Castro was peddling. Castro also had the assistance of an expert in guerilla warfare in his efforts to overthrow the Cuban government, his life- long friend Che Guevara.
After about two or three years of fighting, Che captured a major railroad terminal. That crippled Bastista’s ability to move men and materials in the war against Castro’s Gorilla forces. Batista threw in the towel.
Castro, with his guerrilla army and his comrade Che Guevara, marched into Havana and were greeted as saviors by the Cuban people. Castro and Che brought with them their Marxist insanity.
Che Guevara was, by every measure, the real leader that over-threw the Batista Government. After promising the world to the Cuban people, Castro and Che proceeded to murder and imprison many thousands more!
What is amazing is that Castro let Batista leave the country with his family and remaining supporters. Castro proceeded to hold a kangaroo court in a stadium and subsequently executed countless numbers of hapless prisoners. Some of them were tried and found guilty of what- ever, and executed all on the same day right there in the stadium before hundreds of spectators.
You often hear about how wonderful it was for Castro to establish a path to education for the children with his improvement of the school systems. He did it to insure that his communist philosophy was injected into the educational system.
Batista was a poorly educated field worker, he left school at age 14. He went from cutting sugar cane and other manual labor in the fields to working his way up thru the military, the police force and politics until he was actually running the country from behind the scenes. He ushered in President after President. One who only lasted two months! He finally declared himself President. From that position he became a vicious military dictator.
Batista oversaw a one party system with crooked elections. His main goals were consolidation of power, total control and the rewards he and his devoted followers reaped from that. Any of that sound familiar?
Batista murdered an estimated ten to twenty thousand Cubans during the course of his tenure as a dictator between 1952 and 1959. Thousands of political prisoners simply disappeared. One of his favorite tricks was to take a political enemy out over the sea in a plane and drop them into the ocean.
The American mob was heavily entrenched there with all the usual flow of illegal activity including prostitution and literally unhampered world- wide distribution of Cocaine.
The Cuban population suffered incessant poverty, political imprisonment, absence of educational opportunity or medical care and absence of hope.
The current uprising in Cuba has nothing to do with the Trump imposed embargo. That is pure political nonsense which we have an abundance of these days. The embargo never applied to food or medical supplies of which the Cuban people continue to have very little or none for reasons brought on by the miss-management of the Cuban government.
That is what happens when people are not governed with the guidance of a Constitution, a Bill of Rights and the Declaration of independence as we have been blessed with in the greatest experiment in democracy in the history of mankind, the good old USA! We are not perfect by any means but we’re working on it!
Unfortunately, the USA supported Batista. Just one of many super stupid foreign policy mistakes that the USA has made over the years. It just seems like people suffering under Marxism, communism and dictatorships all end up the same way - miserable or dead.
In retrospect, I first saw Cuba as a teenage member of the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Escanaba in 1956. I stood on that ship’s deck in Guantanamo Bay and watched Batista’s miserably antiquated air force bomb the Castro Gorilla fighters in the mountains with Napalm. Many years later I was again hearing that name, “Che” Guevara.
By 1964 I was a member of the newly formed U.S. Army 8thSpecial Forces Group, Airborne (Green Berets). We went thru Spanish language training provided by the Presidio de Monterey Army School of Language. We were sent to Central America in 1963 to assist in the efforts there to help find Che Guevara who was still stirring up trouble as a dedicated Marxist/ communist in Central and South America.
In 1967 a Bolivian soldier shot Che Guevera, well, executed him, considering the fact that he was already a prisoner of war. I had volunteered for Viet Nam well before that.
If our current administration needs to know the “Root Causes” of the massive migration from Central America they don’t need to spend another tax dollar sending Harris to get a reading. Just ask me. It’s nothing new. I was there before she was born.
It’s exactly the same today. Literal corruption of the governing bodies in that part of the world. Crooked, self-serving politicians are the crux of the problem. Everything else comes from that. No industry, no work, no medical care, abject poverty, hunger, no education, no future, no hope.
On our southern border: What will stop the flow of those miserable multitudes of people streaming across our southern border? “Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly.”
The last suggestion I heard from one of those caring members of Congress was that we should send more money to the individual governments down there so they can help the people! Another potentially stupid move by the present administration.
The U.S. has been sending millions of tax payer dollars to those governments for decades. The money surely goes into private bank accounts in Switzerland! It is apparent that the people of any of those economically depressed countries do not see much of it at all, if any.
The money from American tax payers is used in part to fund private police and armies for the elitists and politically connected. Certainly a large part goes to fund the personal security of those whose actions require them to have lots of personal protection from their victims If you vacation in the Dominican Republic, perhaps by floating down on a cruise ship and being carefully herded in the right directions etc., you have not seen the real Dominican Republic, trust me!
The Dominican Republic is the country that in 1959 took in Batista, the former murdering dictator of Cuba. He eventually left there for Spain.
We fought a brief police action in the Dominican Republic around 1965. In my opinion that was another example of the Industrial/Military complex in this country free-wheeling with our tax money.
Elements of the 82on Airborne Division were sent.
The 8th Special Forces Group sent a team over from Panama to teach OAS troops, (Organization of American States) how to use field wire radio equipment. The OAS was a mutual defense treaty we had and probably still have with a number of Central and South American nations. The objective for going to the DR was to stop a growing element of revolutionaries from over throwing the government of the Dominican Republic.
To start with, for the most part, the OAS members quickly created armies to participate. Foreign troops had brand new uniforms and brand new weapons and no knowledge of how to use the latter. In many cases the weapons were never issued to the troops and the uniforms were often a terrible fit.
Why would those countries have gone to such lengths? Because the American tax payer paid the padded bill for the whole thing! A sergeant in one of those foreign armies might make $500 a year in American dollars. Well that was not fair! It was arranged that a sergeant in one of those armies participating in the police action would draw the same pay as an American sergeant which, in those days, was about $500 a month. Of course the source of the money was the American tax payer.
A fortune! The OAS soldier would be set for a long time! But wait! The soldier didn’t actually get the money! It went to his government for further distribution. Guess where?
Several of us SF guys were on patrol assessing the enemy’s strength. Right! We went to a cantina. Sure enough there were several guerilla fighters in there. Guess it was lunch time on the battle field. We assessed the situation, turned our weapons in to the bartender, per house rules, and bought a few beers for those guys. I felt sorry for them. Their cause was hopeless.
I visited The Dominican Republic again a little over 20 years ago. I was shocked at the degradation. Slums, trash, sewage problems, crumbling buildings, impoverished people.
The real Dominican Republic was carefully hidden from the tourists who visit there, primarily via cruise ships, and most certainly hidden from any visiting dignitaries.
I would bet that the conditions remain the same today. There are surely Dominicans mixed in with the Haitians, already identified, joining the illegal crossings on our southern border. The problems that historically exist in Central and parts of South America, the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world are driving countless thousands to the promised-land, the USA. The shining light on the hill.
We are a country of immigrants. Our system allows for one million legal immigrants every year. That is more than any other country in the world by far. That system is being mismanaged. Along with that, the blatant disregard for the crisis created on the southern border by the current administration may very well put that shining light out and end the hopes of many millions who want to come here as legal immigrants.
Roy Hubbard, Richmond Hill