During the first 3 months of Castro's take-over of Cuba in 1959, there were 568 firing squad executions. Che Guevara, Castro's executioner, eventually sent a total of 1,897 men to public firing squads designed to cower the Cuban public - yes, the incredibly inept, drunken, and cowardly Che, whose last words when caught in Bolivia in 1967 were "Don't shoot! I'm Che! I'm worth more alive to you than dead!". The only sympathy one could have with Castro was with his intent to rid himself of that jackass by sending Che on that suicide mission to Bolivia.
Castro began his leadership by confiscating U.S. property and businesses including millions from American cattle and agricultural companies and yet he still received $200 million in U.S. foreign aid from 1959 till 1961 when Eisenhower was so fed up with Castro's illegal activities, threats and curses that he broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.
In 1962, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. thwarted a Cuban attempted bombing of Grand Central Station, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Manhattan's main bus terminal, oil refineries on the New Jersey shore, and the Statue of Liberty etc. with five times the amount of TNT used in the al Qaeda Madrid train bombing. It was scheduled to go off the Friday after Thanksgiving when parents take their kids to visit Santa Claus. The head of this Cuban plot was Roberto Santiestaban who was employed by the United Nations.
Earlier in October that year, Castro had attempted to get the Soviets to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States by lying that he had "solid intelligence" the U.S. was planning an attack on the Soviets in a matter of hours.
Another reason the U.S. isn't friends with Castro is that Lee Harvey Oswald, accompanied by Castro intelligence agents, had been spotted in Havana just before the Kennedy assassination.
77,000 Cubans have drowned trying to flee Cuba. 20 percent of Cuba's population have fled - 80 percent have attempted. Castro has executed 14,000 young men, many of whom could barely stand as they had been drained of most of their blood to be sold on the world market. Cuba has the highest emigration, incarceration (higher rate than Stalin), and suicide rates (24 per thousand in 1986) for young people in the world - Cuba, host to the I.R.A., Black Panthers, PLO, and Carlos the Jackal.
The Cuban prison population is 80 percent black and the government 100 percent white. Between 1959 and 1962, the Cuban Jewish population decreased from 15,000 to 1,300. AIDs victims are sent to sanatoriums in the countryside where they are left alone to die. Some had deliberately injected themselves with the virus just to live in these sanatoriums under better conditions than that of the normal populace.
These Americans admire Castro, the man who planned a larger scale mass murder of Americans than Usama bin Laden:
Ted Turner
Dan Rather
Oliver Stone
Jack Nicholson
Naomi Campbell
Norman Mailer
Jean Paul Satre
Gina Lollobrigida
Francis Ford Coppola
Harry Belafonte
They all adore Castro, who destroyed Cuba's sugar, tobacco, and cattle industries and rendered what was once the world's eleventh leading country in living standards to a living standard now less than one percent of what it had before Castro.
The Soviets gave Cuba a total of $110 billion over the years - to an island of 7 million people who ended up on ration cards after Castro took over. What Castro didn't take from the Soviets he earned from helping Columbian cocaine traffickers get through U.S. Coast Guard radar into the United States.
Because Cuba stopped payment on foreign debts to non-socialist countries in 1986, and later even its benefactor, the Soviet Union, Cuba's credit rating according to Moody's Investors Service is rated below that of Somalia. Havana has just topped Bangkok as the child sex capital of the world.
Anyone who says the Batista days were worse must reckon with the statistics and ask himself why during Batista's time did hundreds of thousands of Spaniards seek immigration to Cuba. During Batista's reign there was a relatively free press (58 daily newspapers) and per capita income was twice that of Japan's. The Peso was on a par with the Dollar. Cuban labour had a higher percentage of GNP than the Swiss back then. Infant mortality was much lower - there were twice as many doctor's. One could travel anywhere. And capital punishment was banned (Castro abolished habeas corpus). Yes, it was an authoritarian regime but not a totalitarian one like Castro's.
According to Forbes magazine, Communist Castro is now personally worth approximately $900 million. And as for Michael Moore's portrayal of Cuban health care, Castro acknowledged in an open letter that a few years ago his initial surgery by Cuban doctors had been botched. He did not confirm, however, that a specialist had been flown in from Spain December, 2006, to help set things right. Cuba has two systems: one is for party officials and foreigners like those Mr. Moore brought to Havana with all the resources, the best doctors, the best medicines - free. But for the 11 million ordinary Cubans, hospitals are often ill equipped and patients have to bring their own food, soap and sheets. And up to 20,000 Cuban doctors may be working in Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil, creating the shortage of doctors in Cuba.
Batista wasn't very nice. Castro was a cruel monster, and his successor and brother, Raul, is even worse; certainly a good prospect for Hollywood adoration.