Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Fidel Castro...Who is this guy?

An enigma to most people, a monster to us cubans!!!

Castro was born on August 13, 1926 (August 13 is now like a national holiday in Cuba, when it should really be a day of sorrow :(  )
His father was a wealthy plantation owner and his mom was the house maid until his father's first wife died then Fidel's dad married his mom and changed Fidel's last name from Ruz to Castro.
At early age he showed a great identification with social rights and so he became a lawyer in the university of Havana.
what happened? In my opinion, greed, that's what happens.  Like in Animal Farm, he became the "pig".
His ideas made sense in the beggining, like the ideal of comunism does in paper, putting it into practice is an entire different story.

The good he did:                 
  • Free Education
  • Free medicine
  • Equality to all-electricity, housing, equal portions/rations of food, etc.
The BAD:
  • Free education only to those who are in the political party, if you don't agree with the comunist party of Cuba, forget of being anybody.  Free education, but the teachers are the worse paid in Cuba, there are no books, there are no materials really for kids to use in schools.  All education in Cuba at all levels are related to politics in most way, the endoctrination process starts at birth and reafirmed from kindergarden to College and forever.
  • Free medicine -Yeah!! Great!! When you go to a hospital, you have to bring everything for your stay including the sheets for your bed.  Be ready to share a room with at least 4 others, sometimes anestesia is not available (during a C-Section in 1988, my mom almost died because of the lack of anestesia).  You go to the pharmacy and sometimes you don't find aspirin.  BUT, if you go to a pharmacy for turists, you find everything you need and more ... and be ready to pay in dollars (the cuban average paid is the equivalent to $18 US dollars a month).
  • Equality - WHAT EQUALITY - starting with the fact that if you don't belong to the party and you don't agree with the politics YOU ARE NOT EQUAL, therefore they will put you down and erase you off the map if needed to.  Yes, electricity was stablished for all cubans when fidel took power, but now days, the electricity is taken off every day to most homes for long periods of time sometimes as much as for 4-6 hours at a time.  No water runs in any municipality in a daily basis.  Imagine not being able to flush the toilet or washing the dishes every day.
Ok, enough for today.  You can read more about his life and his accomplishments in the link I posted above.

1 comment:

  1. This is a great post because I never studied Cuba or Castro very much. I had of course heard of him, but I hadn't ever looked into him much. From this post I get the impression that he was extremely unfair. The only way to succeed in any fashion was to have the same views as him. Thanks for the insight!

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