Fidel Castro dead at 90.

[HenryC]

Please forgive my brief digression into politics...but I feel under the circumstances, this is something I need to get off my chest.

Those of you who have read my contributions here are probably aware that I am of Cuban heritage.  I was born and raised in Tampa, Florida, and both my parents were as well.  But all four of my grandparents were born in the Old Country, and came to Florida as young men and women in the early years of the twentieth century.  There was a very large Cuban community in Tampa then, workers in the cigar industry which was owned by and employed Cubans, and both of my grandfathers were lectores, professional orators who read aloud in the factories to entertain and educate the workers while they hand-rolled cigars.  (This was before radio!) So I was raised in Cuban culture, and surrounded by it.  I cannot remember a time when I wasn't fluent in both Spanish and English.  I went to Cuba to visit relatives 4 times as a child.  The first time I don't remember, I was just an infant.  The second time I was 3 or 4, and only remember a few details of the flight, my first trip on an airplane!  I went again in the summers of 1956 and 1958 to spend vacations with my aunts and uncles.  I remember both of those trips distinctly.

It must have been soon after my last summer in Cuba because I remember the great  public demonstration of joy in the Tampa Cuban community when the tyrant Batista was routed and the rebels  triumphantly rode on captured tanks into Havana.  Later, as the Revolution progressed, most of the Tampa Cubans continued their support for Fidel.  I remember the outrage expressed by my family at the CBS News documentary  'Is Cuba Going Red?'.  It was understandable, my mother was a New Deal Democrat, she remembered the Depression, had been a working woman all her life, and how we had suffered after my father died when I was four.  We all knew how the USA had bullied Cuba from the war with Spain to the days of the butcher Batista.  Although she worked very hard and lived very frugally for the support of her family, the welfare state, through my father's Social Security and Veteran's benefits, had made all the difference in our lives.  Memories were still fresh of the brutal strike that had crushed the cigar workers in the thirties, the Commie-baiting that had been unleashed on them and the obscenities of McCarthyism and Jim Crow.  I haven't forgotten either, I'm still a New Deal Democrat.

But as time passed it soon became clear that something was going terribly wrong with the Revolution, not only was the evidence in the press accumulating, we started getting veiled references in the censored mail coming out of the island.  We could read between the lines, our family was suffering, and the oppression wasn't just economic due to the Yankee embargo.  A grim apparatus of totalitarian rule was being unleashed on the people of Cuba, block Party committees that brought government surveillance down to the apartment building floor level, 'voluntary' labor in the sugar cane fields, forced conscription of the young and participation in the militia for everyone else.  Then came the loss of employment for those who refused to cooperate, the ostracism of even the families of suspected critics of the regime, then beatings, imprisonment, and eventually, el paredón (firing squad).  Family businesses were not expropriated outright by the government, but were forced to operate at a loss under restrictive regulation until the owners begged the State to take them over.  This was then refused until the proprietors went bankrupt.  Requesting an exit visa began an expensive year-long nightmare of red tape beginning with the immediate loss of one's job, home, property, legal rights, and the expulsion of children from school.  At any time the process could be terminated by the whim of an official and it had to be started again from the beginning while the friends or relatives who sheltered you were subjected to constant harassment.  You could take no cash away from the island, and only what property you could carry or wear on your back.  At the airport, your baggage was ransacked of everything of value;  jewelry and even clothing were often confiscated.  I decided then and there that the simplest way to identify a dictatorship was if a state restricted the right of its citizens to travel abroad freely.  Cuba was a government of corrupt officials, informers and bullies.  My grandfather traced the whole sad business with the French Revolution of his youthful reading as a guide, the Terror had begun.  In spite of all their troubles, the Cubans were always a happy people, both on the island and in exile, but they are no more.  That is the Revolution's most remarkable achievement and its greatest crime.