How do we know how many were killed by S

[Jon Flanders <72763.2240@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 >> GREETINGS FROM WEI EN LIN

 Can anyone answer this for me:  How many people (according to any or
 all estimates available) is Castro alledged to have put to death? <<

 Jon Flanders:


  In Tad Szulc's(no radical by any means) book "Fidel" we read the following.

  "Castro acknoweledges that around 550 of these Batista "criminals" were
executed after summary courts martial and then by special revolutionary
tribunals in 1959 and 1960(the special courts were abolished after the first
six months or so, then reactivated in late 1959 to deal with
"counter-revolutionaries" who were beginning to emerge, sometimes with CIA
assistance.) Whatever could be said about the procedures before these
tribunals, defendants were not picked at random, but because they were
believed to have committed crimes and brutalities on a large scale, and were
punishable under provisions of revolutionary laws proclaimed from the Sierra
in 1958. Cuban revolutionary trials, then, bore no resemblance to the real
bloodbaths that followed the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese social revolutions
in the twentieth century--or the to the vengeance-in-the streets that erupted
in Cuba after the Machado, in France, and other Nazi occupied nations after
liberation in World War 2, or in Venezuela following the deposition of the
dictator  Perez Jiminez in 1958 and in the Dominican Republic after Dictator
Trujillo was murdered in 1961. By the same token, the Cuban revolution
refrained from the institutionalized mass killings such as those prepetrated
against hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in the aftermath
of the 1965 army anti-Communist coup, or those thousands attributed to Chilean
military authorities when they overthrew the Marxist president Salvador
Allende Goosens, in 1973. Considering that the first few days of revolution,
public order in Cuba was assured by the 26th of July Movement local militias,
Boy Scouts, and advance units of the Rebel Army, it is quite remarkable that
violence-prone Cubans remained so non-violent."

  Szulc goes on to critize the public trials as poisoning the Cuban-American
discourse, but even an exile he interviewed, Raul Chibas, who served as a
judge, still defended them as necessary, to prevent mobs simply taking things
into their own hands.

  Every time I go back to read something about the Cuban revolution, it just
makes me shake my head at some of the misconceptions and ignorance that can be
displayed even on this "marxist" list.

  E-mail from: Jonathan E. Flanders, 05-Jun-1996




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