Cuba 1963: Inside castro’s prisons
There was a time when the MSM sometimes did their job vis á vis Cuba. To all those who want to end the embargo and normalize relations with Cuba, and to all those taking cheap shots at the Cuban exile community because some exercised their free speech rights and complained because they were offended that lackeys for the butchers came to Miami and played some music, as if there hasn't been 51 years of barbaric brutality in Cuba; well you can shove it up your ass and go straight to hell.
Don't like Gitmo? Well then I can't wait to hear the demands to shut down Cuba's gulags and free the political prisoners held there. I can't wait for the demands to end human rights violations in Cuba.
Read this account of life in the tropical gulag circa 1963 from Time, and multiply by decades.
"...All told, the OAS commission studied 1,350 case histories. It is estimated that there are some 75,000 political prisoners (one out of every 94 Cubans) behind bars. The commission found that they have no human rights, that they are treated in a "humiliating, oppressive and despotic manner," and that the Cuban prison system seems openly designed to degrade its victims to the level of animals.
Verdicts in Advance. Arrests are almost always violent and without warrants; arresting officers rarely show proof that they are agents of the law, but burst into their quarry's home at night, brush off his explanations, wreck his belongings, pocket his valuables and hustle him off to jail in his underwear. Verdicts, said one court stenographer who took part in many of the trials, are "by remote control," the judge's opinion often written in advance.
In old colonial fortresses, says the commission, dungeons flooded by underground seepage and infested with rats have been reopened for political prisoners. A former judge testified that "special-punishment prisoners are put into cells too small to lie down in, where they can never bathe and their physiological functions must be performed on the floor." At a huge prison on the Isle of Pines, off Cuba's south coast, 10,000 prisoners live in a space for 5,000. Those consigned to solitary are dropped naked into pits and regularly drenched with water. Says one Isle of Pines prisoner, confined to solitary for six months: "An individual can't go on being naked. It's really terrible, for one becomes an animal." The place has also been mined—to kill the prisoners in case of invasion.
Fun for the Guards. Common criminals are assigned as trusties in the political prisons, are encouraged to beat the anti-Castro inmates with clubs and lengths of pipe. The regular guards are even worse. At the Isle of Pines during the Bay of Pigs invasion, all prisoners were herded into the open, stripped, forced to kneel and advised to pray. A prisoner named René Santana prayed aloud that the invaders would triumph; a guard blew his brains out. At La Cabaña in Havana, the guards amused themselves by ordering prisoners outside, where they are stripped, beaten with gun butts and jabbed with bayonets. Among those testifying was a woman whose husband was in prison; he had "a bleeding furrow on his wrists," the result of his being "strung up like a ham."
Food is a mockery. Rotten beans—"a special treat"—caused gagging, bloody vomiting and dysentery among 95% of the prisoners on the Isle of Pines. Those who fall sick are usually left to cure themselves, or die. A former Isle of Pines inmate described a typical case: "A man named Yáñez had an attack of epilepsy and fell from the second floor. He remained some ten or twelve hours without attention ... A few hours after he was taken out of there, he died."
This nightmare continues 90 miles off the US coast, the place travel agents can't wait to sell you a ticket to, the place where members of congress, many having enjoyed the bloody tyrants hospitality, can't wait to sell their states goods. This is the place where so-called Cuba "experts" talk about reform, and the need to get beyond "cold war thinking and policy."
I think it's time to stop covering up for mass murdering dictators and demand justice for their victims.
Read the rest of the article at Time.
Corre la bola | 
Amazing that Time would be this honest with themselves about this.
Great investigative work Ziva! This was written in 1963, look at the numbers, one out of every 94 Cubans! The whole island is concentration camp!
This is even worse than what Solzhenitsen described.
How do we get this printed today in the press?
... and then Time Magazine took the next 47 years of journalism off
Apparently so.
For instance, in June 1999 they gave the world this #$%&!
http://www.yachtingnet.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/guevara01.html
Mr. Mojito,
Truth turned on its head. And this is a professor at a large university and a Jew, yet.
I despair, I really do.
I remember sometime around the mid 1960's American college students started emulating fidel & che. They went from polite neatly dressed youth to fatigue wearing, unkempt, rude revolutionary wannabees. It was like a generational virus that quickly spread. Much was written about it during those years, but as far I know the source of the "rebellion" never named. There is no doubt in my mind that it was the castro propaganda machine facilitated by fellow travelers and useful idiots in the media and elsewhere. How many Americans were brigadistas? How many young minds have they poisoned in the last 45 years?
Count the number of heads in academia and the entertainment industry, and then multiply that by .9 and there is your answer.
I am currently reading Jay Nordlinger's collection, Here, There, & Everywhere.
On Page 81, from an essay from March 19, 2001, Jay writes about Clinton's Rosenberg case. He describes the radicals of this country who killed and exploded property and robbed and bragged about their achievements in their desire to destroy this horrendous America. President Clinton pardoned a Susan Rosenberg as one of the many egregious pardons as he left office. If someone knows how to reprint that here, it is pertinent to this discussion.
Not only were the crazies making hay with the havoc they wreaked, Clinton made it worse by pardoning some of them. What was he thinking? What were his motivations, I wonder?
Bonachea, Ramon L. and Marta San Martin 1974. The Cuban insurrection 1952-1959. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey ISBN 0878555765 ISBN-13 9780878555765 Pages 90-91 “… The peasant (Eutimio Guerra) allegedly confessed to his treason. A revolutionary tribunal was immediately organized: Guerra was sentenced to death and executed with the hour. These executions were not hidden from the rural population but were publicized widely by the guerrillas. Most of the time Ramiro Valdés administered the revolutionary justice.”
Now Eutimio Guerra was a land reform activist and was in place when Castro reached the Sierra ....
Honey, Rosenberg was born on Manhattan’s upper west side, attended Walden School and Barnard College. After college she worked in a drug counseling program run by the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican revolutionary gang. (Note the coincidence, not only with young Hillary Clinton’s work for the Black Panthers and similar groups, but her education at exclusive enclaves like Wellesley and Yale.) Rosenberg received further political education as a member of a youth work brigade in Cuba but did most of her serious political work stateside, where The Family launched a string of robberies and bombings in Bonnie-and-Clyde style.
Susan Rosenberg also participated in the escape to Cuba of Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, wanted in connection with the ambush assassination of a New Jersey State trooper. Shakur was convicted of the murder and was serving a life sentence when Rosenberg helped her to flee. In 1984, Rosenberg was captured with Evans at a New Jersey warehouse where they were unloading 740 pounds of explosives. She also was in possession of fourteen weapons including an Uzi submachine gun. As in the case of other leftwing murderers for political causes, Rosenberg has become a progressive hero, supported by celebrity defenders of political criminals like Noam Chomsky and William Kunstler both of whom actively lobbied for her release. Since she had been sentenced to 58 years for her crimes, prosecutors decided not to pursue murder charges in connection with the killing of the three officers in the Nanuet robbery.
This proved to be a mistake. Like Evans, she gained the support of Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler, and along with Evans was pardoned by Clinton on his last day in office.
More here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/search/?cx=013255222075609514560%3Avfcebs4vcuo&q=+Susan+Rosenberg&sa=Search&cof=FORID%3A11&cx=013255222075609514560%3Avfcebs4vcuo#981
There have long been rumors that Hillary was a brigadista, but I've never found proof, so who knows. The Clintons have done an excellent job of covering their trail.
[...] Cuba 1963: Inside castro’s prisons [...]
[...] Usually, it’s a figurative “gulag,” wherein you’re “merely” shunned, ostracized, fired, and/or prevented from participating in your chosen profession. Give ‘em enough time and power, and the gulag becomes all too real. [...]