Thanks Fidel

By Javier Herrera

HAVANA TIMES – As the Cuban government and media commemorated the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (in 2016) over the past few days, I remembered that Cubans who desert the island such as doctors and athletes, and those who complain about the regime in power are accused of being ungrateful and traitors. I don’t like to be ungrateful, and I’d like my gratitude to reach Fidel Castro wherever he may be.

– First and foremost, thanks Fidel for overthrowing a tyranny and imposing another one that has already been in power for 63 years.

– Thanks, Fidel, for getting rid of the extrajudicial killings that were committed during Batista’s dictatorship and imposing judicial murder instead.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having eliminated the Escambray outlaws and for rewarding those in the State Council.

– Thanks, Fidel, for the 7,000 people shot to death for the Revolution or executed by extrajudicial means, according to sources from Archivo Cuba, with offices in Miami and Madrid.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having closed down and destroyed over 60% of sugar mills that you came across when you were victorious, for having destroyed the country’s main industry and for converting the largest sugar-producing nation in the world into a customer of French sugar beets.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having extended coffee-growing plans to the plains with Caturra coffee, thereby destroying fruit trees, leaving us without coffee and teaching us to drink coffee mixed with I don’t know what.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having taken livestock to regions where it never existed, thereby destroying the budding livestock industry in Camaguey, Las Tunas and other regions that had enough to satisfy national demand and still export meat and other products. Thanks a lot because we Cubans look at a piece of meat today as if it were a treasure and we only eat it every now and again, after getting it by illegal means most of the time.

– Thanks, Fidel, for launching a literacy campaign that dignified almost 26% of the Cuban people, although you boast about having educated an entire island.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having pushed society to study up to 12th grade and university, so you can then treat us like fools when you give your speeches and lie to us like uneducated children.

– Thanks for having done away with elitist schools and for having created schools that are falling to pieces now, with poorly trained and paid teachers. Thanks to the Ministry of Education that indoctrinates, fails to teach and teaches poorly.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having sparked the never-ending exodus of an enslaved people from a valuable island that had received immigrants in the past, and not the other way around. Thanks for the dead Cubans in the Florida Strait and in Latin America’s jungles.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having created a Revolution by the poor for the poor, making us all poor, leaving wealth in the hands of the ruling elite’s children and grandchildren.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having taken care of our money and not letting us stay in or even enter Cuban hotels at times, which had been built with Cuban hands.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having ended the “undignified” profession of prostitution and for having created the more dignified profession of jineterismo.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having created dignified jobs for every Cuban, but with undignified wages of hardship and plus, selling pretty much everything we consume in a foreign currency that we don’t earn in.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having taught us to live with ration booklets and stripping us of the dream of consuming whatever tickles our fancy.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having built a universal public heathcare system, but without medicine, in precarious conditions, without modern diagnosis and without hardly any health professionals or with poorly trained doctors because the best are exported via the medical slave industry.

– Thanks Fidel for having built a tourism industry… just for foreigners and for having created Caribbean apartheid.

– Thanks, Fidel, for fighting ideological deviations by throwing eggs and stones, with rapid response brigades, with soldiers dressed up as civilians and recently, with brutal beatings and long years behind bars for the young people who dared to publicly express their discontent like the Cubans that took to the street on July 11, 2021.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having carried out urban reform and for letting us have the most deteriorated housing Cuba has ever had in its history and for leaving the ruling elite the best mansions that used to belong to the “bourgeoisie” who fled Communism.

– Thanks, Fidel, for having carried out agrarian reform, distributing land between poor farmers so that it can then be taken away via cooperatives and leave these lands, which yesterday nourished an uneducated nation, full of marabu bush weed.

I could be here for three days straight thanking Fidel, line for line, but this article needs to come to an end, so I will give more general thanks.

Thanks, Fidel, for hunger, blackouts, desperation… Thanks Fidel for having turned the Pearl of the Caribbean into Jail Island, where escape is ones only hope.

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