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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

My family and the family of just about everyone I grew up around had their whole lives destroyed by this evil man. He has executed thousands, has imprisoned thousands more, and has totally ruined a country that was once the most prosperous in Latin America. You may philosophize about the 'complexity' of the life of this evil man, but for people who actually lived under his abuse, who have seen what he has done to their homeland, or whose families suffered greatly to flee his terror, it is very simple.

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It's easy to forget the cost of prosperity to those who were not prosperous. Pre-Castro Cuba was rife with racism and inequality, extreme and abject poverty, a segregated society, under violently repressive and corrupt governments.

I can't say anything about your experience, but I can share something about my childhood in Brazil. A middle-class home, private school, private health-care family under a brutal US-sponsored military dictatorship. I never even suspected people were getting arrested and murdered for criticizing the government. I enjoyed the military parades. It never occurred to me that public school was really bad, that not every kid had access to it (most didn't), that unless you had a stable job (and, once labeled a subversive, that was mostly impossible), you had absolutely no health care. The cost of my happy childhood completely eluded me until I was an adult.

I 100% agree with your post, but, did Castro regime have to kill his opponents?

> He has executed thousands, has imprisoned thousands more, and has totally ruined a country that was once the most prosperous in Latin America.

In Africa Fidel Castro also took part in one of the most murderous civil wars in the continent, the Angolan civil war, and fought to establish the continent's worse dictator and cleptocracy, José Eduardo dos Santos and his MPLA cronies.

And fighting against this communist evil were the righteous forces of Unita and apartheid South Africa.

"evil" - or usually known as - not my side

Have you actually looked at the faction supported by Cuba? Not only are they responsible for launching global private military corporations, they are Africa's worse cleptocracy.

Then, oddly enough, MPLA also intervened in Namibia's civil war against the communists.

There are no clean hands on either side, I reject the notion that Apartheid South Africa were the good guys, after all it birthed its own own private military corporation (Executive Outcomes), supplied a lot of mercenaries throughout global hotspots and had a nuclear program they only dismantled after it became clear that black people would be allowed to vote.

The intersection of African Liberation politics and Cold war politics was very complex, but generally the west found itself on the side of the colonial authorities. In the end, colonialism and communism lost.

> I reject the notion that Apartheid South Africa

That's a blatant false dilemma.

The atrocities committed by Fidel Castro aren't whitewashed just because you can pick other nasty regimes.

Stalin isn't suddenly fabulous because he fought the Nazis.

Fidel Castro imposed a totalitarian regime on Cuba and extensively used violence and political assassinations to preserve his stranglehold on Cuba. Fidel Castro also projected his atrocities by intervening in decades-long civil wars.

You can't pretend nothing happened by playing the racist card.

Excellent strawmen you've got there: how about you address the points I stated after the half-sentence you've selectively quoted? You consider it a dilemma because you refuse to admit your 'team' were not squeaky-clean angels and the opposition were not cartoon villains.

I clearly stated that there are no clean hands: you are the one who is pretending like nothing bad was done by the west or their colonial allies/puppets by playing the communism card.

I am sorry others have been dismissing your comment outright. But please understand what OP is saying does not seem to imply that we philosophize the 'complexity of life' of Fidel Castro the individual, but rather the set of people he belongs to: popular revolutionaries who became dictators hated by their own people.

What happened in Cuba after Castro came into power is similar to what happened in other countries after the revolutionaries won. We should try and understand if these sorts of people were evil to begin with or became evil as a natural transition after tasting power following a successful revolution.

Simply terming them as evil (honestly, Castro and others did many evil deeds), and not trying to understand and learn from the pattern is going to be a problem that humanity as a whole will suffer from.

This stuff didn't happen after he came to power -- he came to power because of his atrocities.

He came to power supported by people who were fed up (in part) with the atrocities combined by Batista the right wing dictator supported by the US. As is usual there is a heavy influence of the US on this site so Castries is generally reviled but he was no different to any number of dictators save that the US did not support him and the US propaganda machine worked against him. He did bad things but so did many others with the implicit or explicit support of the US. Most Americans dislike him due to the 50 years of negative US press not because of specifics actions they could detail.

At the national assembly the sad news is stated: "Fidel Castro has passed away. However, his legacy lives on!"

The old man in the back of the audience, marcoperaza, sighs and says, "Alas! If only it were the other way around..."

Beautifully put.

No Sir, nobody is denying that he was evil. Its just that we want to see the whole black and white picture he was the darkest dot of.

Neither was Rafidel Baticastro in any way special - he was just another human, using the chances that life presented him- and many of those for selfish reasons, like we all would. The Dynamics of revolution and upheaval could have swept anybody ruthless enough to the top. What the ruthless person then does, is on his account, but usually mirrors the way the opponents of the era engaged him/her and is only limited by nuclear deterrence from becoming total war as seen in Europe pre-nuke. Thus you are right in that he was evil when it came to trying to expand his power-base at any cost.

But then again, i also refuse the "single-saint-sinner" in the front row narrative. A individual like him needs followers, needs people desperate enough to throw there lives into the ring at his feet, needs a society that is prone to collapse anyway and this society is created by the every day villainy of you and me.

Its neither "tragic", nor inevitable, neither are the causes unknown. We all vote day to day with our feet for the likes of him and with the total of our life's for the circumstances to be "tragic".

We buy products assembled in sweatshops, we raise to large family's, who disguise themselves as SUVs and the ecological footprint of long commutes. And because we refuse to reduce our lifes-standard, this is "inevitable".

When the billing day arrives, we step back from the mess, throw ourselves on the floor in a tantrum, and demand the conservative equals to a economic "Safespace" aka a dictatorship of either a stabilizing Strong-Man or a Revolutionary (depending entirely on the ratio of nothing-to-loosers:small-time-croonies) .

So before writing history, i would like to hear more about the living circumstances, this all originated from. I would like to hear about your towns priest, who every Sunday preached, be fruitful and multiply, while condemning new ways of thinking, to a population consisting mostly out of hopeless-unemployed- youth.

I would like to here about the companys who held monopolys on sugar cane production, using up cheap human resources and sabotaged developments that would have reduced the availability of unskilled labor.

I would like to hear the whole story, see the whole picture. And yes, the murders are still on him. So that's it, another murderous Movement bastard, but if we dont find out what made him possible and prevent society from sliding into that direction again- your family suffered for nothing. Suffered to allow the survivors to suffer again the same fate, two or three generations down the row.

PS: My condolences to the CIA, who right at this moment must scrap the final assassination attempt - shooting him with salute guns at his funeral.

> but if we dont find out what made him possible and prevent society from sliding into that direction again- your family suffered for nothing

I think most people believe we already know. Suffering --> Revolution --> Dictatorship is a very common pattern. I think there is a lot to learn from the circumstances and based on the histories I've read of e.g. WWII germany, that feels like the general focus. I think its popular to initially focus on the person themselves, though once you begin any serious study of a particular revolution, the circumstances and cultural influences become so pronounced that the idea of the particular dictator being of importance begins to shrink.

>I think most people believe we already know. Suffering --> Revolution --> Dictatorship is a very common pattern.

Then why have people been allowing the upper classes in almost every developed and developing country to grind down the common people with suffering? How are we allowing the 1930s to happen over again if we've learned our lesson?

Franklin Roosevelt is turning in his damn grave these days. Every attempt he made to moderate the horrors of capitalism so as to avoid the worse horrors of totalitarianism is being rolled back! This must not be allowed!

Clearly the "Remember this and that"event culture is not working. Books and movies are obviously not enough to keep the horrors and fails of the past alive. Three Generations after WW2 suddenly its okay to demonize a group again.

I must admit i dont have any answer to this. And obviously more of the same doesn't work - i wish you could craft this learning experience into games. Like participating in a civil war- at the beginning you are blindly on a side- but then you play a second story, and lose some beloved character to your own murderous attitude, and you do that again and again, until it becomes clear that the enemy is you giving in to instinct.

But even that could only educate on basic humanity- you cant transport complex mistakes like economical mistakes in such game.

Prosperous for whom? You and the other exiles you surrounded yourself with? Guessing they were a fairly monochromatic bunch too, huh?

Batista was a violent, corrupt dictator. My grandmother lived in Cuba during those days in absolute poverty. It's not wise to talk in absolutes, your family was prosperous but most Cubans were not.

Fulgencio Batista was better?

We are talking about Fidel's regime and how he decided to rule. Batista was an evil man and a bad ruler, but the economic and societal destruction of communism is in its own category, as is the level of totalitarian control that the Castro regime has imposed, which includes a committee in each neighborhood responsible for suppressing dissent. Because of how backwards Cuba is today, everyone thinks it was always like that. Cuba was a country with a rapidly expanding middle class.

Consider that despite many natural disadvantages Cuba had higher standard of living, better educated public, better healthcare system, etc. than any of the countries in Latin America which started at similar level but were left under the control of US-backed right wing governments. I’d much rather live in Cuba of the 1960s–1980s than in any of Washington’s pet quasi-fascist police states or in those Latin American states undergoing active civil war with US-trained paramilitaries genocidally slaughtering peasants.

Arguably the US embargo, cut of diplomatic ties, invasion attempt, repeated assassination attempts, piles of money illicitly funneled to opposition, etc. had as much to do with Castro’s entrenchment/radicalization as anything to do with his personal ideology.

Just after the Cuban revolution, Castro was interested and open to US relations, but ideological prejudices and commitments by American elites made friendly relations impossible. Then a feedback loop ensued by which mutual trust was destroyed and both sides were increasingly radicalized.

Many things Castro did over his long career were reprehensible, but the same certainly can be said for pretty much every US president, and most other national leaders in similarly political turbulent situations.

> I’d much rather live in Cuba of the 1960s–1980s

Yes, while the Soviet Union was sending Cuba billions per year, it was much better there.

The fixation people have with expanding middle classes is odd. I'd say progress where the poorest are included in social gains is more valuable than any other kind. Otherwise we end up with societies like the US where some parts of the population live in ghettoes worthy of the worst of the third world.

With all due respect, that's a crazy exaggeration. There is nowhere in America where the entire neighborhood has no electricity, no running water, no sewage, and no paved roads. Such places are common in Africa and India.

https://www.facebook.com/126979a/posts/10101269399749522

There are indeed places in the US without running water right now (see Flint as an example). I also don't think comparing with in development countries is relevant.

There are places all over the world that have suffered disasters taking out normal services. That doesn't mean that the services never existed or the country as a whole isn't industrialized yet.

Flint isn’t a disaster, it’s direct mismanagement and corruption combined.

Whenever someone quotes poverty and hardships in India, I feel the urge to defend - the scale at which India has to operate is completely different from any other country. Being a democracy, and hence having to deal with high viscosity in governance

Such places are common in Texas.[1]

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/the-amer...

How long ago was it that people in America without insurance would go without lifesaving treatment?

> but the economic and societal destruction of communism is in its own category

The Human Development Index puts Cuba at position 40, despite the huge economic disadvantage of the embargo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2015_H...

The urban parts of Cuba started out in a pretty good position.

> "One might best summarize the complex situation by saying that urban Cuba had come to resemble a Southern European country (with a living standard as high or surpassing that of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece) while rural Cuba replicated the conditions of other plantation societies in Latin America and the Caribbean," according to analyst Mark Falcoff. [0]

I've left off the bit about racism as that's already been much discussed in this thread.

[0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/castro/peopleevents/e_precastro...

I get your point, but with respect I believe you are missing the point to which you're responding. You may be too close, and again, that's totally understandable.

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