American version of Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro, who led a Cuban revolution that made his Caribbean island a potent symbol of the 20th-century ideological and economic divisions, and whose embrace of communism and the former Soviet Union put the world at the risk of nuclear war, died Nov. 25, Cuban state media announced late Friday. He was 90.

The son of a prosperous sugar planter, Mr. Castro took power in Cuba on New Year’s Day 1959, promising to share his nation’s wealth with its poorest citizens, who had suffered under the corrupt quarter-century dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Mr. Castro, a romantic figure in olive-drab fatigues and combat boots, chomping monstrous cigars through a bushy black beard, became a spiritual beacon for the world’s political far left.

To his legion of followers, Mr. Castro was a hero who demanded a fair deal for the world’s poor and wasn’t afraid to point his pistol at the powerful to get it. His admirers said he educated, fed and provided health care to his own people, as well as to the poor in other countries, more fairly and generously than the world’s wealthy nations, most notably what he called the “Colossus to the north.” In his homeland, Mr. Castro was as loathed as he was beloved.

With almost theatrical relish, Mr. Castro taunted 10 successive U.S. presidents, who viewed the Cuban leader variously as a potential courier of Armageddon, a blowhard nuisance, a dangerous dictator, a fomenter of revolution around Latin America, a serial human rights abuser or an irrelevant sideshow who somehow hung on after the collapse of communism almost everywhere else.

He formally resigned on Feb. 19, 2008, in a statement read on national television by a spokesman, ending his 49-year reign and giving George W. Bush the distinction of being the first U.S. president to outlast Mr. Castro in power.

The National Assembly officially — and unanimously — named Raúl Castro, the longtime head of the Cuban armed forces, as the country’s new president. The move was seen as deeply anticlimactic, since Mr. Castro had stage-managed the shift to his brother for almost two years.

Since the 1960s, the United States maintained a strict trade and diplomatic embargo against Cuba, hoping to drive Mr. Castro from power. It wasn’t until 2014, when President Obama — the first U.S. president elected in the post-Fidel era — announced plans to restore full diplomatic relations with Havana. During a visit to Cuba in March 2016, Obama met Raul Castro but made no effort to meet his brother. Fidel Castro later delivered a speech, dismissing Obama’s overtures and denouncing the idea of cooperation with the United States.

Tweaking the “imperialists” was always a passion of Mr. Castro’s. He built an enormous public demonstration space — complete with stage lighting and sound — outside the U.S. diplomatic mission on the Malecon, Havana’s main seaside boulevard. There, he regularly led anti-American rallies and delivered the lengthy speeches for which he was famous.

He was a particular thorn to President John F. Kennedy, who sanctioned the clumsy Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by a ragtag group of CIA-trained fighters, which became a humiliating low point of his presidency.

To his benefactors in the Kremlin during the height of the Cold War, Mr. Castro was the useful commander of a communist citadel on the doorstep of the United States. That point was drawn in terrifyingly stark terms during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Mr. Castro allowed the Soviets to base on his soil missiles that could carry nuclear warheads to Washington or New York in minutes. The resulting showdown between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.

Unlike many other communist leaders around the world, Mr. Castro did not create monuments to himself or lend his name to streets and buildings. Instead, he erected billboards carrying patriotic slogans of the revolution, such as “We will overcome!,” “Toward victory, always!” and “Motherland or death!”

Under his reign, Havana eventually became something of a Marxist Disneyland — a shiny, happy veneer over something much uglier.

Mr. Castro personally ordered the restoration of Old Havana, an architectural gem where tourists can savor $300 boxes of Cuban cigars, some of the world’s best music and sweet Havana Club rum — the proceeds of which went to Mr. Castro’s revolution. But just a block behind the restored facades, impoverished Cubans lived in crumbling homes on rationed food. Teenage prostitutes openly offered their services to tourists.

In his later years, Mr. Castro enjoyed a resurgence in popularity across much of Latin America, fueled in part by the election of several leaders inspired by his staunch anti-Americanism.

In particular, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela viewed Mr. Castro as a political beacon and father figure to the Latin American left. Sweetheart oil deals from Chávez, until his death in March 2013, were crucial to Cuba’s ability to survive as its state-dominated economy sputtered.

While many Cubans expressed genuine and deep loyalty to Fidel — he was never called “Castro” in his homeland — others clearly feared a leader who imprisoned tens of thousands of his enemies over the years, often on little more than a whim.

As he aged, Mr. Castro acted more like a man intent on purifying his legacy, returning his revolution to its ideological core, reversing economic openings and stepping up attacks on political dissent. He imprisoned Cubans whose crimes were as simple as passing out books on democracy.

The right- forever choosing their heroes from the wrong side of history, in their pursuit of global fascism.


" Fulgencio Batista suspended the 1940 Constitution and revoked most political liberties, including the right to strike. He then aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans. His increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with the American Mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large US-based multinationals who were awarded lucrative contracts. To quell the growing discontent amongst the populace—he established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from hundreds to 20,000 people. For several years until 1959, the Batista government received financial, military, and logistical support from the United States." Wiki

Justin Trudeau taking lixxx !