Che Guevara's Regime Still Murdering the Young and the Defenseless
Freedom fighter Wilman Villar becomes the latest victim of the leftist-beloved killing machine.
February 1, 2012 by Humberto Fontova Leave a Comment
Last week the regime co-founded by Che Guevara (worldwide icon of youthful rebellion) murdered a young defenseless political prisoner named Wilman Villar for the crime of "disrespect to authorities."
So 53 years into Cuban Stalinism we're at about 100,000 Cuban deaths at the hands of the regime and counting. (All of this 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Havana swarms with mainstream media press bureaus and Hollywood producers, by the way.)
"The Cuban regime is a callous band of murderers that once again has blood on its hands," said Senator Marco Rubio in a bi-partisan Senate Resolution passed on Jan. 26 in Villar's honor. "Once again, we are reminded of the unintended but negative consequences of this administration's loosened travel and remittance policies [to Cuba]. They help deliver more hard currency to the Castro regime, making it easier for them to brutalize and even murder the Cuban people."
Last November 30-year-old Wilman Villar was peacefully protesting Cuban Stalinism near his home in Eastern Cuba in a sort of "Occupy Santiago de Cuba." But this protest was more peaceful, less messy and completely devoid of Che Guevara iconography. You'll notice that this last peculiarity is a historic trademark of people cursed by fate to have actually experienced the handiwork of Che Guevara.
Within minutes of the protest's commencement the KGB- and STASI-trained police that props up the regime co-founded by Che Guevara swarmed in with billy-clubs and arrested all protestors. None of this newsworthy drama was captured by the mainstream media folks, by the way. And I repeat: Cuba teems with mainstream press bureaus that report every bruise or hangnail among the prisoners in Guantanamo.
In a New York Times article on the 30th anniversary of Che's death, Christopher Hitchens rationalized his (not-so) youthful romance with the Stalinist war-monger and mass-murderer (who became an icon of anti-war and anti-death-penalty groups) by claiming that, "Che was no hypocrite." In fact, Che's monumental hypocrisy—from stealing Cuba's most luxurious mansion, to whimpering to the New York Times in 1959 that he felt "pained" to be wrongly branded a "Communist"—has been amply documented. But in this case, at least, the late Hitchens has a point:
"Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!" raved Che Guevara in a famous speech in 1961. "The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible!" commanded this icon of flower children. "Instead the young must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service."
Youth, wrote Guevara, "should learn to think and act as a mass." Those who "chose their own path" (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-imperialist rock & roll) were denounced as worthless "delinquents," and herded into forced labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point. In a famous speech Che Guevara even vowed, "to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!" he raved.
In keeping with this fine tradition, after beating and arresting Wilman Villar, his Castroite jailers demanded he wear the uniform of a common criminal (a traditional Stalinist practice as elaborated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago.")
But Villar refused (a traditional response by many Cuban political prisoners as elaborated by Armando Valladares in his prison memoirs "Against all Hope.") "I refused to commit spiritual suicide," explained Valladares' prison-mate Eusebio Penalver, a black Cuban who suffered longer in Castro's prisons and torture chambers than Nelson Mandela suffered in Apartheid South Africa's Robben Island. Granted, you'd never know this from the media, or Hollywood – much less the Congressional Black Caucus.
"For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell," recalled Penalver. "That's 4 feet high, so you couldn't stand. But they never succeeded in branding me as common criminal, so I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide."
"They would leave him naked and handcuffed," reports Wilman Villar's widow in a recent samizdat from Cuba. "They beat him. They wrapped his body in chains so he could not take them off [and] they told me that they were not going to give him any medical attention, that if he died, his would be just another death."
Villar died a week later of "multiple organ failure due to general sepsis," as explained by the Stalinist regime, and dutifully disseminated by all mainstream media outlets graciously granted Havana press bureaus.
"Stalin tortured," wrote Arthur Koestler, "not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction."
"The worst part of Communism," wrote Solzhenitsyn, "is being forced to live a lie."
At the risk of torture and death, Wilman Villar and his fellow Cuban prisoner-heroes refused to collude in this lie. So they enraged the torturers commanded by Jimmy Carter's "old friend." and Jesse Jackson's good buddy. Through it all, they refused to wear the uniform of common criminals, standing tall, proud and defiant.
Many of the longest suffering political prisoners in modern history live as exiles in the U.S. today. Men (and women, many of them black) who suffered in Castro and Che's gulag two and three times as long a Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Natan Sharansky suffered in Stalin's live within a short cab ride of most mainstream media studios, including CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS.
As I recall, Nelson Mandela sure didn't lack for U.S. media coverage. You'd think victims of Castroite torture might make ideal fodder for interviews on 60 Minutes, History Channel, A&E, Nightline, chat shows, etc.
Alas, these heroes were victims of the Left's premier pin-up boys.
"Castro's apologists," said Eusebio Penalver shortly before his death during an interview with this writer, "those who excuse, downplay or hide his crimes–these people, be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious, whatever–they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant's crimes, accomplices in the most repressive and murderous regime in the hemisphere."