by WorldTribune Staff, May 2, 2017

Despite an almost unequaled cruelty and repression to his own people – “he murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six” – Fidel Castro remains a shining socialist beacon to U.S. liberals.

“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)

“Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend.” (Democratic presidential candidate and “Conscience of the Democratic Party,” George McGovern.)

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly — even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)

Humberto Fontova, author of “Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant”, wrote for Faithwire that Castro “jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror.”

“Fidel Castro shattered – through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile – virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.”

The Cuban dictator “also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.”

Fontova continued: “Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.”

“Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.”

Citing researchers at the Cuba Archive, Fontova noted that “the Castro regime’s total death toll – from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc. – approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro’s political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.”

In Miami, there is “a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts” (Cuban Memorial), “in honor of Castro’s murder victims,” Fontova said.

“The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Barack Obama consoled with an official note of condolence.”

Fontova added that “nobody ever accused” Castro of “misreading the U.S. mainstream media.”

“Much more valuable to us than military recruits for our guerrilla army were recruiting American reporters to export our propaganda.” (Fidel Castro’s sidekick Che Guevara, 1959.)

“Without the help of The New York Times, the Revolution in Cuba would never have been.” (Fidel Castro while pinning a medal on NY Times reporter Herbert Matthews, April, 1959.)

  Castro’s mass-executions, Fidel, had few equals in terms of sheer brutality, Humberto Fontova, Left’s love for Castro, the patron saint for the Left, WorldTribune.com