“We will know how to overcome the indifference and incomprehension of the powerful friends of Fidel Castro so that injustice, political imprisonment, the firing squad, hatred and separation of the Cuban family will never again prevail in our country.” Jorge Mas Canosa when placing an offering in front of the Holocaust Memorial in Israel.
One appeared municipality here in our Miami-Dade county with the images of Fidel Castro and Donald Trump. The message: No to dictators, no to Trump. The message is in Spanish, in other words, they are directed at the Hispanic community, mostly the Cuban one.
Credit goes to Claude Taylor, who chairs the Mad Dog Pac political action committee. The mad dog claims “sinister and frightening” billboards, those are his own words, and, according to his profile on X, at some point he worked in the White House. Taylor has said that this is not Cuba, and everyone has the right to their opinion.
We believe that this represents an insult, but it is not to Trump, it is to a community made up of victims. Fidel Castro executed mercilessly, without trials or evidence. He imprisoned thousands of men, women and minors in inhumane conditions. From boarded up cells, to torture and abuse, they accompanied the victims during sentences of up to 30 years. The same dose of terror and pain was imposed on the families. Beyond being able to visit their relatives frequently, they were sent to the furthest prison to make the situation more difficult. His modus operandi was to put an end to every vestige of opposition no matter what.
Fidel Castro sent homosexuals to forced labor camps, imposed Marxist doctrine on students, and ended freedom of expression in Cuba. He sank boats with children on board on more than one occasion. It was not only the tugboat 13 de Marzo, but also the Canimar River massacre and as recently as November of last year, a small boat was hit where five people died, the youngest a three-year-old girl. He shot down small planes in international airspace with American citizens on board without an adequate response from then-President Bill Clinton, another Democrat who sought rapprochement with the Cuban dictatorship.
Fidel Castro not only rationed freedom in Cuba, but also food and forced millions to leave the country where they were born, due to dispossession and persecution.
I don’t know how many testimonies of horror I have heard throughout my career, perhaps one of the most painful was that of a Cuban mother. Ester Quevedo Remolina was told that her son had died from an accidental gunshot while she was trying to leave the country. They gave her the sealed coffin, when she opened it she fainted. “They blew it up with rifle butts, her jaw was fractured and detached. He was unrecognizable because of the swelling and bruises all over his body. “His testicles had burst.”
Fidel Castro not only dedicated himself to imposing terror and barbarism on national territory, his pretensions as an international “messiah” led him to cross borders. There is no guerrilla movement that Fidel Castro did not support and finance at the cost of thousands of deaths in this hemisphere and in the Middle East, and also squandered the people’s money in sterile internationalist wars. He participated in drug trafficking and sent networks of spies to the United States.
He remained in power until his death and his disastrous system continues in Cuba causing the same damage while Cubans continue to abandon their land and go into exile, whether drowned or devoured by sharks in the bloody waters of the Strait of Florida or in the hands of cartel hitmen trying to reach the United States border.
The division of the Cuban family goes as deep as the 65 years of barbarism. The searing pain of what was experienced did not die with the victims, it lives in the hearts and souls of the descendants. And unfortunately for the Perro Loco political action committee, those descendants live and vote in South Florida.
Trump, far from not having committed any of these crimes, abandoned his presidency at 12 o’clock noon on January 20, 2020 of his own free will, which is more than we can say for the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
We do not have to censor the billboard that finally recognizes that Fidel Castro is a dictator. But the lack of sensitivity of using the pain of a people for political propaganda. We just have to show that this lack of respect for our community is responded to, not with another fence, but with the vote. In November, an offended community will be able to demonstrate and demonstrate that the disastrous and incongruous message with which they offended us receives a forceful response. Only someone as alienated and disconnected from reality as a crazy dog can think that we Cubans have no memory.
