Mary O’Grady writes about A Soviet Cleansing in Cuba.The Russians used their experience at home to annihilate dissident peasants.
Most Americans have never heard of the anti-Castro uprising in Cuba’s Escambray Mountains, which began in 1959 and took Fidel and the Soviet Union six years to put down. At the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the episode is worth revisiting. If not for 400 Soviets sent to Cuba under the command of the Red Army and the KGB in 1961, it is unlikely that Castro would have prevailed.
What happened in the Escambray pokes a giant hole in Castro’s narrative that his revolution was a justified power grab supported by working-class and rural Cubans. The fact is that when Cubans began to understand that Fidel planned to replace Fulgencio Batista as the next dictator and to impose communism, many rebelled. None fought harder than central Cuba’s guajiros—small land owners and tenant farmers.
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Castro understood the importance of controlling the press, foreign as well as domestic. He used that control to popularize his version of events. He framed the resistance—those who rejected his communist takeover—as a white, urban aristocracy unhappy because it was losing its privilege under his new justice. Meanwhile, he wiped out whole farming communities with Stalinesque ruthlessness, and he did it with guidance from the Kremlin, which exported its experience in intelligence gathering and repression.
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