Truth is a bitter pill to swallow: Lessons on the death of Fidel Castro

[Kurt Buff]

The thought that SA was unable or incompetent to stand up to the
Mozambiquan/Cuban forces is untrue.

The SA troops basically kicked the crap out of the Cuban forces
whenever/wherever they met, but SA was pressured by the USA to back
down, with the promise that the USA would fill in. Didn't happen, of
course...

Regardless, it would have been harder for SA if there had been much
larger Cuban forces deployed - the engagements with Cuban forces were
fought mostly with conscripts, with SA saving their regular troops for
a possible larger conflict, which didn't eventuate.

If it had brewed up, the quality of the SA forces (i.e., individual
and small unit professionalism and discipline) would have been just
fine, but logistics and supply, and warfighting doctrine and tactics
would have presented real difficulties. SA at that time didn't train
their forces at large scale, with the battalion being the permanent
force size (vs. say the USA, where the division is the permanent unit
size).

This article (which makes the above mistake, is otherwise useful),
gives a decent overview of Fidel Castro's life and tenure:
http://libertyunbound.com/node/1631

Kurt

On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Razer <rayzer at riseup.net> wrote:
> From Facebook. A pretty definitive history of the Cuban Revolution:
>
> [Note: Sam "Momo" Giancana is mentioned in this article. Mike Ruppert
> brought up one of his CUBAN MAFIA operations in "Crossing the Rubicon" as
> Heroin smuggling to the docks in New Orleans. As Ruppert put it. Hardhat
> divers would work the 'legs' of oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico off the
> coast of Lousyanna removing containers of Heroin the CIA's hardhat divers
> put there and bring it into port on the workboats. My dad, a regional
> coordinator for the ADL in the SE US and US Army intel since WWII lit up
> when I mentioned Giancana's name in passing ,,, Everyone in spookworld knew
> this was happening. The Cubans who fled here when Castro took power were te
> oligarchs, Mafioso affiliated with the CIA, and later, all the thugs Castro
> released from prison and told to go to the US. Many are sitting in prisons
> in the Southeast US for the rest of their lives for crimes committed in the
> US and no place to exile them to... Tsk... tsk.]
>
> "Truth is a bitter pill to swallow: Lessons on the death of Fidel Castro and
> his revolutionary freedom-fighter legacy in the world.
>
> (Please bear with me. I have tried to condense all the researched material,
> but this is still a lengthy post..well worth the read though)
>
> History can be a very useful tool. The need to always research the truth,
> and understand its relevance is the key to defeating fascism wherever its
> ugly head pops up. The true revolution is the evolution of consciousness. If
> you rely on the mainstream media or utterances of "elected" U.S. government
> officials, you will never truly 'see', or understand, what is happening all
> around you, nor will you ever break free of the chains of mental, as well as
> economic and physical slavery.
>
> Cuba was one of the last colonial possessions under Spanish rule just 90
> miles south of Florida. As Spain’s Imperial power was in decline, Washington
> had imperial ambitions to expand its influence on Cuba. Cuba had the
> potential to produce unlimited profits for U.S. business interests. Even
> organized crime got into the picture when they became a major player in Cuba
> in the early 1930’s. The Mafia managed to expand their gaming industry,
> prostitution and drug trade operations to Cuba to avoid harassment from the
> U.S. government [Citation: "Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and then
> Lost it to the Revolution", an excellent expose of how the mafia operated in
> Cuba, by T.J. English]. Cuba was to be their base of operations as they were
> looking to expand into other Caribbean nations. During that time, Cuba was
> under the leadership of President Fulgencio Batista, a good friend to
> organized crime, who had close political ties to Washington and its
> multinational corporations. Cuba became a cesspool of corruption, illegal
> drugs and prostitution which became a playground for the rich and famous
> while the majority of ordinary Cubans lived in extreme poverty. This is an
> historical account of Cuba before 1959, a time period that explains why
> Cuba’s Revolution was a long time in the making.
>
> We all know the story of how Cuban leader Fidel Castro established the first
> communist state in the Western Hemisphere, leading an overthrow of the
> corrupt military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, ruling over Cuba
> for nearly five decades, and irking the great American superpower after
> nationalizing U.S.-owned businesses in Cuba without compensation since 1960.
> What you don't know is what led to it.
>
> The U.S. has been intervening in Latin America since President James Monroe
> established the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy that prevented European
> powers from colonizing any sovereign nation in “their backyard”. Unable to
> convert Spanish-controlled Cuba into a slave plantation to serve the
> interests of the U.S. against the Confederacy in 1860, the U.S. Congress
> eventually passed the ‘Teller Amendment’ in 1898 which did guarantee Cuba’s
> independence but was replaced in 1901 by the ‘Platt Amendment’ which gave
> Washington the power to intervene in Cuba if their interests were
> threatened. By 1908, Cubans who fought against Spain created a new
> independent political party but were oppressed and eventually massacred by
> the U.S. backed Cuban government.
>
> The Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) was composed of former African
> slaves and war veterans of the1896 Cuban War of Independence. The PIC won
> enough votes that undermined the ruling liberal party under President José
> Miguel Gómez. President Gomez ordered the party to disband under Cuban law
> which outlawed any political party based on race although the law favored
> white Cubans. The PIC staged a revolt under General Evaristo Estanoz.
> However, General Jose de Jesus Monteagudo suspended constitutional rights
> and ordered an attack against Afro-Cubans. The U.S. intervened and sent
> troops to back President Gomez and protect its vital business interests.
> More than 5,000 Afro-Cubans were massacred by lynch mobs because of their
> skin color. All Afro-Cubans were under suspicion by the Gomez regime.
> Several successions of Presidents eventually led to Batista whose first term
> was benign. His second term was a different story though. Batista created an
> anti-Communist secret police to silence the public with violence, torture
> and public executions. It is estimated that there were between 10,000 to
> 20,000 people murdered under the Batista regime with financial and military
> support from the Washington.
>
> During Batista’s reign of terror, the "July 26 Movement" organized by Fidel
> Castro and other anti-government groups throughout Cuba were forming a
> rebellion against the Batista government. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who was
> a writer, historian, speechwriter and a Special Assistant to President John
> F. Kennedy who worked primarily on Latin American issues analyzed Batista’s
> Cuba on the president’s request and said:
>
> "The corruption of the government, the brutality of the police, the regime’s
> indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care,
> housing, for social justice and economic justice is an open invitation to
> revolution"
>
>
> Batista was concerned about Castro so he ordered his secret police to
> torture and murder people in public to install fear in the population in
> case they were considering joining the growing revolution. Batista’s actions
> only angered the Cuban people and increased support for the July 26
> Movement. Many organizations joined the movement from all types of
> backgrounds from the middle class including lawyers, doctors, accountants
> and many others united with the poor (who were already fighting against
> government forces).
>
> An attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago led by Fidel Castro was
> defeated by Batista’s armed forces on July 26, 1953, but with the
> handwriting on the wall, on December 11, 1958, U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith
> told Batista that the United States could no longer support his government.
> The U.S. denied Batista asylum and suggested that he go to Spain. On New
> Year’s Eve party, Batista told his government officials that he was leaving
> Cuba and flew to the Dominican Republic with between $300 and $700 million
> according to various estimates. Portugal’s António Salazar, a dictator
> allowed Batista to enter his country. By 1972, Batista settled in Marbella,
> Spain where he eventually died of a heart attack.
>
> Setting aside the two-faced hilarious irony for a minute, whenever you hear
> leaders of the United States describe another world leader as a "ruthless
> brutal dictator", invariably it brings to mind several distinct
> suppositions. The basic one is that this leader must be someone who
> successfully resisted attempts by the U.S. to infiltrate, pillage and
> exploit that country's mineral resources. It is the height of hypocrisy for
> any American politician, given the brutal history of the United States, as
> well as its present ruthless racist practices, to condemn, or see fit to
> criticize, the internal policies of another nation. The secondary one is
> that the 'offending party' must be one who defied the U.S. to an
> exasperating point of submission. Without the efforts of Fidel Castro, South
> African Apartheid, as we knew it, would never have ended. Don't buy into the
> American false narratives that "protests" by liberals in the U.S. was
> instrumental in the fall of Apartheid. If protesting and marching ever
> produced significant results, racism would have been a thing of the past a
> long time ago. Hell, we've been marching for hundreds of years.......still
> marching.
>
> "638 Ways to Kill Castro" is a Channel 4 documentary film, broadcast in the
> United Kingdom on November 28, 2006, which tells the story of some of the
> numerous attempts by the C.I.A. to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Fabian
> Escalante, the former Head of the Intelligence Directorate, and the man who
> had the job of protecting Castro for many of the 49 years he was in power,
> alleges that there were over 600 plots and conspiracies known to Cuban
> agents, all dreamt up to end Castro's life. Some were perpetrated directly
> by the C.I.A., especially during the first half of the 1960s, and others,
> from the seventies onwards, made by Cuban exiles who had been trained by the
> C.I.A. shortly after Castro took power in 1959.
>
> Directed by Dollan Cannell and produced executively by Peter Moore, the
> film, whose subtext is a commentary on the contemporary "War on Terror",
> also contains extensive material shot with Antonio Veciana, the Cuban exile
> who came close to killing Castro on three occasions over 17 years (and now
> runs a 'marine supplies store' in Miami). All these men, the film reveals,
> were supported and funded by the U.S. government. At one point the C.I.A.
> even sought the help of the Mafia in the hope they would be able to succeed
> where so many others had failed. Other characters in the documentary are
> Cuban exile Félix Rodríguez, the C.I.A. operative who trained Cuban exiles
> for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and who was present when the Bolivian Army
> killed Che Guevara in 1967 at the request of the Bolivian President at the
> time, and Enrique Ovares, possibly the first man to make an attempt on
> Castro's life after he took power. Robert Maheu is also interviewed, the
> Hughes associate who served as liaison between the C.I.A. and mobsters
> "Johnny" Roselli and Sam "Momo" Giancana, in another plot to kill Castro,
> this time using poison pills.
>
> In 2006, the documentary was the center of a controversy surrounding U.S.
> Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. In it the Miami Republican, who had been
> recently tapped to become the top Republican on the House International
> Relations Committee, states "I welcome the opportunity of having anyone
> assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people." A
> clip of her statement made its way to YouTube where the newsmedia quickly
> picked up the story. There was a subsequent public questioning of
> Ros-Lehtinen's morals and suitability for her job. She responded by
> asserting that the clip was spliced together and that it was taken out of
> context, but after her account was contested by the film's director, she
> eventually released a statement, on Christmas Eve, accepting that she had
> made the remark.
>
> It is mind-boggling that America, a country which brutally murdered upwards
> of 100 million Native-Americans, stole their land, raped their womenfolk and
> children, and all but ethnically-cleansed them from the face of the
> earth....a nation which gleefully engaged in a repressive African Slave
> trade Holocaust which saw the violent deaths of up to 50 million Africans,
> and led to the forced labor, and Jim Crow laws that resulted in the
> emergence of America as a 16th century global power through the tobacco and
> cotton international trade, and continues to marginalize, exploit, murder
> people of African descent, and exploit African mineral resources, till
> today....a Republic that dropped the first, and only nuclear weapons on
> Japan, killing up to a quarter of a million people within days, and almost
> that much in the resulting radiation fallout which lasted years.....a nation
> that dropped 280 million cluster bombs on Laos, a country with which it
> wasn't even at war, a country that has invaded or bombed over 90 countries,
> would have the arrogant temerity and sagging cojones to dissect the policies
> of another sovereign nation.
>
> Until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, apartheid in South
> Africa was secure. There was no substantial resistance anywhere in southern
> Africa. Pretoria’s neighbors comprised of buffer zones that protected the
> racist regime: Namibia, their immediate neighbor which they had occupied for
> 60 years; white-ruled Rhodesia; and the Portuguese-ruled colonies of Angola
> and Mozambique. The rebels who fought against minority rule in each of these
> countries, operating without any safe haven to organize and train, were
> powerless to challenge the status quo.
>
> South Africa’s apartheid buffer, supported by the United States of America
> for economic purposes, would have remained intact for the foreseeable
> future, solidifying apartheid and preventing any significant opposition, but
> for one man: Fidel Castro.
>
> In October of 1975, South Africa invaded Angola at the behest of the U.S.
> government to overthrow the left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of
> Angola (MPLA) in the soon-to-be independent country. Without Cuban
> assistance, the apartheid army would have easily cruised into Luanda,
> crushed the MPLA, and installed a puppet government friendly to the
> apartheid regime. Afraid of having a government staunchly opposed to white
> domination so close to home, South Africa rushed to prevent
> self-determination for the Angolans. They were aided by U.S. Secretary of
> State Henry Kissinger, who believed the threat of black liberation in
> Africa, which would lead to local control of their own resources at the
> expense of foreign investors, could still be contained.
>
> Bear in mind that at the same time the C.I.A. were engaged in another brutal
> massacre in South America, intended to eradicate communist or Soviet
> influence and ideas, and suppress active or potential opposition known as
> "Operation Condor", a campaign of political repression and state terror
> involving intelligence operations and assassinations of up to 70,000
> opponents, which started in 1968, but "officially" implemented in 1975, by
> the right-wing dictatorships of South American countries. To understand how
> an individual, group, entity or State, operates, you have to think in
> parallel terms. It will better illustrate the patterns of action that
> individual/entity/State operates under. In addition, the rest of the world
> was still aghast and in shock over the American annihilation of almost half
> a million Japanese civilians. Operation Condor's key members were the
> governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The
> U.S. government provided technical support and supplied military aid to the
> participants until at least 1978, and again after Republican Ronald Reagan
> became President in 1981. Such support was frequently routed through the
> Central Intelligence Agency.
> South Africa launched an invasion to topple the MPLA and install the
> guerilla Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total
> Independence of Angola (UNITA), the smallest and least popular of the three
> groups, as a puppet dictator in Angola. Savimbi, a collaborator with the
> Portuguese dictatorship before Angolan independence, was known for his
> ruthlessness, terrorism, and hunger for power. An avowed anti-communist who
> had already aligned with South Africa, Savimbi would have made the perfect
> Angolan facade for apartheid control, and undoubtedly, had he prevailed,
> would have been touted by the U.S. as " a hero".
>
> Agostinho Neto, the President of Angola, and distinguished poet who has led
> the MPLA since 1962, appealed to Cuba to send troops to ward off the
> apartheid army’s invasion. On November 4, 1975, Castro agreed. Several days
> later the first Cuban special forces troops boarded planes for Angola, where
> they would launch "Operation Carlota".
>
> Research the Battles of Quifangondo and Ebo to fully understand the impact
> of the Cuban victory, and how its effects resonated far beyond the
> battlefield. More important than the strategic gain, the victory of black
> Cuban and Angolan troops against the whites South African racist army
> shattered the illusion of white invincibility.
>
> A South African military analyst described the meaning of his country’s
> defeat: “The reality is that they have won, are winning, and are not White;
> and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has enjoyed and
> exploited over 300 years of colonialism and empire, is slipping away. White
> elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in Angola, and Whites who have
> been there know it.” [cited by Piero Gleijeses]
>
> Cuba’s 30,000-man strong military intervention in Angola managed to change
> the course of that country and reverberate throughout Africa. By ensuring
> independence from the white supremacists, Angola was able to preserve its
> own revolution and maintain its role as a base for armed resistance groups
> fighting for liberation in nearby countries.
>
> The Americans were furious. “Kissinger’s response to Castro’s intervention
> was to throw mercenaries and weapons at the problem,” Gleijeses writes.
> [Citation: Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and
> Africa, 1959-1976 (Envisioning Cuba). The University of North Carolina
> Press, 2002].
>
> The U.S. Secretary of State was afraid that after their successful
> intervention in Angola, Cuba would put the rest of the racist regimes in the
> region in jeopardy:
>
> “We can’t say Rhodesia is not a danger because it is a bad case. If the
> Cubans are involved there, Namibia is next and after that South Africa,
> itself … If the Cubans move, I recommend we act vigorously. We can’t permit
> another move without suffering a great loss.” [Citation: “National Security
> Council Meeting, 4/7/1976” of the National Security Adviser’s NSC Meeting
> File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. (pg. 21)
> http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/…/document/0312/1552402.pdf]
> Sore losers that they were, after losing the war, in 1978, the South African
> SADF massacred 600 unarmed Namibians at a refugee camp in Cassinga, but the
> U.S. opposed any sanctions against them in the UN Security Council as the
> apartheid government kept up its relentless fight for survival. Throughout
> the 1980's Angola was subjected to various incursions and invasions by South
> Africa confrontations which climaxed in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in
> late 1987. With the military confrontation raging, talks started between
> Angola, Cuba and South Africa, with the United States moderating, in London
> in early 1988. In instructions to the Cuban delegation, Castro reflected on
> the South Africans and American mindset.
>
> “The fact they have accepted this meeting in London at such a high level
> shows that they are looking for a way out because they have seen our advance
> and are saying, ‘How is it that Cuba has converted itself into the
> liquidator of Apartheid and the liberator of Africa?’ That’s what is
> worrying the Americans, they’re going to say: ‘They’re going to defeat South
> Africa!” Castro said. [Citation: Instructions to the Cuban Delegation for
> the London Meeting, ‘Indicaciones concretas del Comandante en Jefe que
> guiarán la actuación de la delegación cubana a las conversaciones de Luanda
> y las negociaciones de Londres (April 22, 1988)’]
>
> Castro also told his delegation that the goal was not to pursue a war or
> military victory, but to achieve negotiations over SADF withdrawal from
> Angola and implementation of Resolution 435, which would grant independence
> to Namibia. “They should know that we are not playing games, that our
> position is serious and that our objective is peace,” he said. President
> Reagan administration's efforts to seek modification of United Nations
> resolution 435 on Namibia to allow South African a say, received a serious
> rebuff from Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Tanzanian President
> Julius Nyerere, until eager to keep doing business with the mineral
> resource-rich Angola, and surreptitiously keep funding other brigands in
> nearby Congo, the U.S. succumbed.
>
> In the American version of Cold War history, Cuba was carrying out
> aggression and acting as proxies of the Soviet Union. Were it not for one
> persistent and meticulous scholar, we might never have known that these are
> nothing more than dishonest fabrications. In his monumental books
> “Conflicting Missions” and “Visions of Freedom,” historian Piero Gleijeses
> uses thousands of documents from Cuban military archives, as well as U.S.
> and South African archives, to recount a dramatic, historical confrontation
> between tiny Cuba and Washington and its ally apartheid South Africa.
> Gleijeses is the only foreign scholar to have gained access to the closed
> Cuban archives. He obtained thousands of pages of documents, and made them
> available to the Wilson Center Digital Archive, which has posted the
> invaluable collection online.
>
> Gleijeses’s research made possible a look behind the curtain at one of the
> most remarkable acts of "internationalism" of the century.
> “Internationalism, (or the duty to help others), was at the core of the
> Cuban revolution,” Gleijeses writes. “For Castro’s followers, and they were
> legion, this was not rhetoric. By 1975, approximately 1,000 Cuban aid
> workers had gone to a dozen African countries, South Yemen, and North
> Vietnam. In 1976-77, technical assistance was extended to Jamaica and Guyana
> in the Western Hemisphere; to Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia in Africa;
> and to Laos in Asia....all places that had suffered bombings and illegal
> incursions at the hands of the U.S.
> Even the C.I.A. noted: "The Cuban technicians are primarily involved in
> rural development and educational and public health projects... areas in
> which Cuba has accumulated expertise and has experienced success at home."
> [Gleijeses, Piero. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the
> Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. The University of North Carolina
> Press, 2013].
> The fight against apartheid, for the liberation of people who suffered for
> centuries under colonialism and racial subjugation, was truly a David versus
> Goliath conflict. In addition to having a strong military itself and being
> armed with Israeli-supplied nuclear weapons, South Africa enjoyed the
> diplomatic support of the United States, the world’s largest superpower. Of
> course, this was because the main industries propping up the evil Apartheid
> regime were American corporations. Within this context, Cuba’s
> intervention....a poor Caribbean island under relentless attack from a
> racist juggernaut backed by the world’s leading imperial power, is even more
> remarkable.
>
> Explaining how the significance of Cuba’s role in Angola is “without
> precedent,” Gleijeses writes: “No other Third World country has projected
> its military power beyond its immediate neighborhood. The engine was Cuba.
> It was the Cubans who pushed the Soviets to help Angola. It was they who
> stood guard in Angola for many long years, thousands of miles from home, to
> prevent the South Africans from overthrowing the MPLA government.” He notes
> that while the Soviet Union later sent aid and weapons, they never would
> have become involved unless Castro had taken the lead (which he did in spite
> of Russian opposition):
>
> In Castro's Cuba, $1 could buy half a pint of milk, a month's childcare for
> one toddler and a box at the opera to see the visiting Bolshoi Ballet, and
> with one of the best healthcare systems in the world, cures for certain
> forms of cancer (which currently cost about one dollar in Cuba), Cuba's
> defiance, spanning the span of 11 U.S. presidencies, finally brought America
> to its knees as President Obama recently restored diplomatic relations with
> its hated enemy, after over half a century of enduring tactics the Gestapo
> would have been proud of. As usual, salivating over anticipated profits for
> Big-Pharma, what passes for American morality has been superseded by
> prevalent greed. It didn't assuage the much-vaunted American arrogance,
> either, that Russians had already signed a deal to drill for oil off the
> Cuban coast where Havana says there may be 20 billion barrels of oil,
> although the U.S. estimates there are only five billion barrels.
>
> So in conclusion, do these actions seem to you, the actions of a "brutal
> dictator" who cares nothing for the well-being of people? Whenever you read,
> or hear that Castro, or anyone else for that matter, was "a menace and
> brutal dictator", do your own research. People all around the world are
> lamenting the passing of this bearded revolutionary hero, who survived a
> crippling U.S. trade embargo as well as hundreds, of assassination plots for
> half a century. Castro overcame imprisonment at the hands of dictator
> Fulgencio Batista, exile in Mexico and a disastrous start to his rebellion
> before triumphantly riding into Havana in January 1959 to become, at age 32,
> the youngest leader in Latin America. For decades, he served as an
> inspiration and source of support to revolutionaries spanning Latin America
> to Africa. There is not a dry eye in Cuba, and many parts of the world
> today, and a 9-day period of mourning has been declared in Havana. The only
> ones rejoicing....well, you know it, the Americans, Cuban exile descendants
> of the Batista-era elite, and lapdog governments of France and Britain...as
> well as those who, either have something to gain from this news, or lacking
> historical context, just don't know any better.
>
> My footnote to the sordid tale of the Portugues-South African-American
> pillaging of Angola is that 40 years later, Portugal is broke...and Angola,
> crude oil-rich, graciously came to the rescue of their former brutal
> colonial oppressor, paying off their foreign debts. That is the true African
> spirit. America should borrow a page from the book of African humanity
> before it's too late....but in true 'Murices fashion, are busy draining
> Namibia of its uranium, Congo of its Coltan, and Botswana of its diamonds.
> Let it be known......Castro was a true hero.
>
> [Acknowledgements to Global Research from which portions of this post is
> extracted].
>
> Images at the Facebook public post:
> https://www.facebook.com/tokunboh.jiboque/posts/10154719863578134
>