Now die already!

Due to failing health, 81 year-old Fidel Castro is ending his 50+ years of rule over the basket case known as the country of Cuba. Talk about taking a bowl of ice cream and turning it into shit - that is what Castro (and Che Guevara) did to Cuba. The best thing Castro can do is get it over with and join the Church Triumphant (oh wait, he's probably an atheist).

Do you think I'm being too harsh wishing death upon a fellow human being, even if it is Fidel Castro we're talking about? At his blog The Autonomist (see blogroll), Rocco Di Pippo posted an excerpt from an article about Castro's Cuba that appeared in Time Magazine in 1963. By all means, give it a read:

Two and a half years ago, the Organization of American States' Commission on Human Rights started gathering the pieces from relatives and friends of prisoners, and from many ex-prisoners themselves. The OAS report, now published, is the most comprehensive and authoritative study yet put together on Communist
Cuba's treatment of political offenders.

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.

Even in 1963, Time wasn't exactly known for being a right-wing rag, so don't use that line of defense. Castro was and is a monster. Except now, he is an old and decrepit monster who needs to call it quits and shuffle off this mortal coil. While he's at it, he needs to take his 76 year-old brother Raul with him, now that Raul is officially running the show.

Good Day to You, Sir (and good riddance!)