I visited Cuba this summer on a church mission trip. I saw a lot of unique and interesting things, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara side by side all over the place. Painted on the sides of buildings personified in big metal sculptures , and on posters, lots of posters. For someone who knows the history of these evil men, the images were very perturbing and vexing.

On Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving, Fidel Castro died and I gave thanks.

After his death, I found it very appalling that many world leaders praised him and treated him with respect. Why in the world would you respect a man that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin, used firing squads that killed an estimated 100,000 people and almost caused a worldwide nuclear war?

When I came across Prime Minister Trudeau’s tribute to Castro on Twitter I almost threw my phone at a wall remembering the everyday man’s daily struggles that I witnessed first hand in some of the neighborhoods that I visited in Cuba.

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.” My first problem, forget the deep sorrow. My second problem, Trudeau just referred to Castro as a “President”. President: “The elected head of a republican state.” Republican State: “A form of government in which power is explicitly vested in the people”.

Nothing about Cuba gave power to the people; it all stayed with Castro throughout his tenure.

I kept reading with my phone still in one piece and the wall unscathed, surprisingly. I then stumbled upon a continuation of the tribute: “A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” As someone who has first hand knowledge of what a Cuban mental hospital looks like, I know Trudeau is greatly mistaken.

The facility for the mentally disabled that I toured hadn’t been updated in 60 years. The rooms where the people slept had giant rusty padlocks on the outside of the doors. In a big open room, which looked like the physical rehab room, it had holes in the wooden floor big enough to swallow small children and splinters to make sure those who were immobile stayed that way. The equipment and the tubs were extremely decrepit and barely standing. We kept walking through the hospital and visited the kitchen. There were hundreds of fruit flies that lined the walls and dipped into pots of food being prepared for the disabled. So, Prime Minister, I would like to ask you where you got “significant improvements to the education and healthcare..” from, and if you’d ever visited a hospital in Cuba?

I’m not writing this to patronize Trudeau; I don’t care about his own moral compass and how he praises a tyrannical dictator.  Trudeau isn’t the only one to believe this tale of Castro being a decent person. Michael Higgins, president of Ireland, had this to say: “Fidel Castro was of a generation of leaders that sought to offer an alternative global economic and social order”. Michael Higgins actually isn’t wrong if he’s talking about the potential nuclear holocaust that Castro caused when talking about “alternative global economic and social order”.

I’m writing this so that people understand that Castro was a terrible egocentric dictator…nothing else. He wasn’t a role model or someone that people should emulate. Some argue that Cuba having a one hundred percent literacy rates among their citizens and socialized health care are positives, but that is like saying that Hitler was a  great human because he built the Autobahn.

Life in Cuba wasn’t all that bad under Castro’s reign, but you just made sure you weren’t homosexual, a journalist with a sense of curiosity, or a Christian or someone who liked the United States. But remember you can read so you can the read the charges the government has levied upon you.

Besides the persecution of everyone who opposed the government, Castro almost caused a nuclear holocaust that could have wiped out, potentially, the entire world.

The 1960’s was a very tense time to say the least. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were just poking each other to see who would flinch first. It was a game of “chicken,” and both of the countries were freight trains, very hard to stop and it would be nasty if they collided. One of the ways that the USSR was able to remind us that they were not backing down was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Khrushchev and Castro made an agreement to house Soviet nuclear missiles to deter any other invasions from the U.S. During a surveillance flyover, a U-2 spy plane spotted a stockpile of Cuban weapons and the building of launch sites for nuclear warheads. In response to this dangerous predicament President Kennedy implemented a “quarantine” of the island.

A couple more shirt-pulling events took place but nothing really happened until Khrushchev sent two letters. One being heartfelt sent during the middle of the night and the other message wanting all Jupiter missiles out of Turkey. In a daring move Kennedy decided to read the first letter and pretend the second one didn’t exist, which ended up being the right move. But considering it was either read the first letter or try and invade Cuba again the first option had a better chance of working. Eventually everything backed way down but that still is one of the only times that the United States was in Defcon 2: meaning war involving the Strategic Air Command was imminent. While this might not seem like a big deal in today’s day and age, back then no one knew what would happen. No one knew if it was their last time going to bed to wake up in the morning.

What people don’t know about Castro during this whole fiasco is that he wanted a preemptive strike on the United States. On Oct. 27, 1962, Castro urged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive strike on the U.S. If you think having an insane person with nukes is bad, just wait. When the Soviets realized that they couldn’t control Castro they made up a fake law where they couldn’t transfer nukes to other countries. So even if the maniacal Soviets couldn’t trust Castro that should speak for itself.

Shortly after the news of Castro’s death broke all over the world, people in Little Havana took no time to rally in the streets to celebrate the death of the tyrant.  Chants of “Cuba Libre” and “Fidel! Tirano! Llevate tu hermano!”(Fidel! Tyrant! Take your brother with you!) filled the streets in Miami. Vivian Trigo, a Cuban refugee came to the U.S. at age 2, held a picture of her dead parents. “They’re resting in peace now that the devil is gone.”  It says a lot about Castro’s character when the people that he had the most influence over want you (Castro) and your brother (Raul) dead.

I could continue to talk about Castro’s and all of his failures for another thousands words, but to be honest he’s not worth any more of my time. We barely touched on the fact that he persecuted Christians, banned Christmas and closed churches. I didn’t dive deep into the fact that he persecuted homosexuals, rounded them up and put them in work camps.  I just touched the surface with the firing squads used and the 3,615 confirmed kills they had. I won’t even mention Castro’s right hand man Che Guevara and all the horrific things he did or the fact that he said, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” As I said, I have barely touched the surface on why and how Fidel Castro will go down as one of the evilest and most demonic people of all time.

This isn’t a person to be put on a pedestal and paraded as a socialist hero. This is someone who should be treated like Hitler and Stalin. I just hope that people are able to see past the statements made by politicians, Democratic Socialists and Communists to see the evident conclusion that Castro was evil.

Read the opposing viewpoint, written by Anton Mikolowski ’17 here:  https://thetowerpulse.net/24425/featured-content/fidel-castro-viva-comandante/