Castro's Berlin Wall—Still Alive and Killing

From sixty-five to eighty thousand people (men women and children,
entire families at a time) have died trying to escape Castro's Cuba

Castro's Berlin Wall—Still Alive and Killing
By Humberto Fontova Monday, December 7, 2009

OK, a decent interval has passed since Freedom-Week. So I'm no
party-pooper. The fall of the Berlin Wall certainly merited all the
festivities. Its raising, almost thirty years earlier, had finally
whacked many of the "enlightened" on the head, grabbed them by the ears
and shoved their faces for a close-up of an enclosure that had gone up
14 years earlier: the Iron Curtain.

After September 1961 there was no denying it: the term "captive nations"
was not a "Mc Carthyite" confection. All that barbed-wire, those
minefields and those machine guns were not ornamental. Those big
steely-eyed dogs were not trained to beg and roll-over, but to rip apart
anyone seeking freedom. The Berlin Wall (FINALLY!) bellowed high-decibel
proof, even to the deafest leftist, that Communism was pure slavery
(except, obviously, for the slavemasters.)

Now for some "party-poopery." From two to three hundred people died
trying to breach the Berlin Wall ( i.e. "anti-fascist protection
barrier", as dubbed by the Reds and as probably believed by the type of
people who believe Cuba has free and exquisite healthcare and who pay to
see Michael Moore movies). From sixty-five to eighty thousand people
(men women and children, entire families at a time) have died trying to
escape Castro's Cuba. The former is now happily asunder. The latter is
alive and kicking and glorified by everyone from the Congressional Black
Caucus to Michael Moore and lavished with economic succor by many of the
same governments who celebrated the collapse of East German Communism
two weeks ago.

More tragically, I daresay that many of the Cuban freedom-seekers died
more horrifically than the German freedom-seekers. He'd be loath to
admit it, a Che T-shirt wearer and all, but Eric Burdon of the Animals
wrote a song that resounds with many Cubans: "We gotta get outta this
place—if it's the LAST thing we EVER do!"

The last thing, indeed, for an estimated one in three of the desperate
Cuban escapes during the 60's, 70's and 80's. This according to a study
by the late to Cuban-American scholar Dr Armando Lago. This hideous
arithmetic translates into those tens of thousands of estimated deaths
at sea over the past half-century. And from people desperately fleeing a
nation—this cannot be repeated often enough—that previously enjoyed net
immigration, that pre-Castro/Che took in more immigrants, per-capita,
than the U.S., including the Ellis Island years.

Many Cuban escapee/rafters perished like captives of the Apaches, staked
in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. That's others gasping
and choking after their arms and legs finally give out and they gulp
that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect Storm.
Still others are eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth
of Hammerheads and Tiger Sharks, much like Captain Quint in Jaws.
Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we've all seen on
the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.

"In space no one can hear you scream," says the add for the original
Aliens. Same for the middle of the Florida straits—except ,of course,
for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while
watching the fins rushing in and water frothing in white—then red—they
hear the screams all too clearly. Elian Gonzalez might know.

Every year in South Florida the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such
stories. Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct—say if
they could somehow pin it on George Bush, Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin—we'd
have no end of books, movies and documentaries. We'd never hear the end
of it.

Alas, the agents of this tropical holocaust consist of the Left's
premier pin-up boys. Nuff said.

"Pin-up" along with "tattoo idol" boys, I should have clarified, as
exemplified by many including Angelina Jolie. According to Trisha Ziff,
curator of a world-traveling Che-glorification museum show, Ms Jolie
sports a Che Guevara tattoo somewhere on her epidermis. More
interestingly, a few years back Ms Jolie won the U.N.'s "Global
Humanitarian Award" for her "work with refugees.

Will someone please inform Angelina Jolie that her tattoo idol, with his
firing squads and prison camps, provoked the most murderous refugee
crises in the history of this hemisphere?

A consistently hot item on Cuba's black market is used motor oil: poor
man's shark-repellent, they say. Perhaps for a few minutes. I suppose
when desperate we all cling to false hopes. And people get no more
desperate than for a chance to flee from the handiwork of Norman
Mailer's, Oliver Stone's and Charlie Rangel's hero.

"I Hate The Sea," is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by
Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It's about some young men Rafael met
on the beach near Havana. They stared out to sea, cursed it and spit
into it. "It incarcerates us," they fumed, "worse than jail bars."

Yet mankind has always been drawn to the sea, it soothes, attracts,
infatuates. The most expensive real estate faces the sea. "Water is
everywhere a protection" writes Anthropologist Lionel Tiger trying to
explain the lure, "like a moat. As a species we love it."

Yet Cubans now hate it. Che was right. The Cuban Revolution indeed
created a "New Man," but one more psychologically perverse than even
Che's fevered brain could conjure. In Cuba, Castro and Che's
totalitarian dream gave rise to a psychic cripple beyond the imagination
of even Orwell or Huxley: the first specimens in the history of the
species to actually hate the sea, the first to regard it not as
protection but as the equivalent of the barbed wire and machine guns of
the late Berlin Wall.

Yet all we hear about Cuba is about the horrors at Gitmo, where the
criminals and terrorists are behind bars. On the rest of the island
these run the country.

A 17-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade
paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His crime was
trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was
machine gunned to death for the same crime. Owen Delgado was 15 when
Castro's police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he
sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.

After so many machine-gun blasts kept disturbing his their coastal
subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having their Soviet
helicopters hover over the escaping freedon-seekers—and rather than
machine gun them to death—simply drop sand-bags onto their rafts and
rickety-boats to demolish and sink them. Then the Tiger sharks and
Hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy work.

Four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Michael Moore, Jesse
Jackson's and Charles Rangel'ss' gracious hosts were machine-gunning
desperate Cubans who tried to swim into our Guantanamo Base, then
retrieving their corpses with gaffing hooks. "This is the most savage
kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy
assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton
Administration (no less!). " Tis is even worse than what happened at the
Berlin Wall !"

So what's the alternative if you can't flee Cuba? Well, in 1986 Cuba's
suicide rate reached 24 per thousand - making it double Latin America's
average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the
most suicidal in the world, and making death by suicide the primary
cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point the Cuban government
ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures
became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.

But apparently not the MSM's gynocracy. Take Barbara Walters: "Castro's
personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding.
Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to
his country."

Here's NBC's Andrea Mitchell: "Castro is old-fashioned, courtly—even
paternal…a thoroughly fascinating figure."

Castro's Berlin Wall—Still Alive and Killing (7 December 2009)
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17675