The real Cuba: mass-murderer Fidel Castro to die unpunished

Castro's Cuba and Pinochet's Chile each had populations of approximately 10 million. But Castro's repressive regime was many times worse than Pinochet's.

According to the scholarly French work, The Black Book of Communism: 14,000 Cubans were shot by firing squad alone (almost five times the estimated 3,000 people killed during Pinochet's dictatorship).

The true death toll of Cuban victims of Communism is probably closer to 102,000 if one were to include those killed in the anti-Castro resistance of the early 1960s and those who drowned at sea fleeing Castro's regime.

The total number of refugees from Castro's dictatorship is more than a million (compared to fewer than 5,000 from Pinochet).

According to Hugh Thomas, the 500,000 Cubans who left the island between 1959 and 1980 were more numerous than those who emigrated there from Spain between 1511 and 1898. Indeed, more Cubans fled from their homeland in the course of 1980 than Spaniards emigrated to Cuba in the first 200 years of the island as a colony.

Castro, throughout his adult career, was unswervingly loyal to Moscow. In 1968, he supported the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring. He called Czech dissidents "fascists".

In the 1970s, he dispatched scores of thousands of Cuban troops and "advisers" to prop up Soviet client-states in Africa, such as Angola and Mozambique. He backed Ethiopia's murderous dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as the African Pol Pot, who for 17 years inflicted red terror, famine and war on Africa's second most populous country.

Despite being an accessory to mass murder, Castro has frequently been praised for supposedly establishing in Cuba a health service that is the envy of the world. In reality, however, Cuban hospitals have deteriorated under Castro, as catalogued by www.therealcuba.com.

But whether Castro's enviable health service is real or exists only in Cuban propaganda, it is generally held up as a "plus" in Castro's favour and apparently covers a multitude of sins, including his complicity in genocide.