Fidel

All through my life I had known about Fidel Castro. Known about him but not who he really was or what he did. My image of him was from what I heard from other people or the news or whatever. I've never really looked into him or read anything about him. My ignorant thoughts about him was that he was an evil dictator. And that's it. I knew nothing more about him.

So we watched this last night and found out a lot about who he was. Fidel's awesome. He's a socialist revolutionary like Che Guevara, whom he was comrades with. He was a political activist who built and army of revolutionaries and overthrew Baptista, the curren Cuban dictator whose government was full of corruption. It was basically how the US is now. There were corrupt officials who were extremely rich and didn't really care much for the people.

At age 32, Fidel's army overthrew him and he became the ruler of Cuba. Being a Socialist, he created a universal health care for the people; as promised, land reformation; highly promoted education and sports. All those to say the least.

Because of a disagreement with the US which caused a few back & forth things before he decided to cut off ties completely from the US and boycotted and stopped the US industries in Cuba like Esso (now Exxon) & Texaco refineries, and some others. So the US placed the still current ban on Cuban exports. Whatever.

Because of this, and that Castro cared for his people and has been voted by everyone to stay in office all these years, the US portrays him as this communist dictator. The CIA has been behind every assassination attempt on Castro. He doesn't wear a bulletproof vest and drives around in regular jeeps. The country has no extreme separation between the wealthy and the poor. He doesn't use tax dollars to drive in bulletproof SUVs and Limos and hire all that staff to protect him like our officials do. He has more of a right to, being the target of many CIA initiated assassination attempts.

Point being is that he's a great man that the US has been trying to get rid of for a while, only because they want control over Cuba to do what they want to do. So since the 60's the US has been portraying him as a communist and have been trying to kill him. And he has a sense of humor about it. The prime minister of South Africa was meeting with him and asked, "When are you coming to South Africa?" Castro said, "I guess right now." And they went. On a dime.

They had this thing with Jesse Helms at a press conference saying, "Fidel Castro must leave Cuba. I don't care if it's vertically, or horizontally. It doesn't matter to me." What a chump. Yeah, take out the guy who gives his people basic human rights and genuinely cares about them and is always voted in to office. And then we could replace him with a Republican and introduce the affluent and thier capitalistic policy and take away their medical benefits.