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Vol. 74/No. 34      September 6, 2010

 
How Cuba treated Bay of Pigs
prisoners in 1961-62
(Books of the Month column)
 
Below is an excerpt from Nothing Can Stop the Course of History, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for September. The book contains an extensive interview with Fidel Castro done in 1985 by Professor Jeffrey Elliot an d Congressman Mervyn Dymally. Among the topics covered are Cuba’s relations with Africa and the effects of the U.S. economic embargo. In the piece below Castro takes up the question of political prisoners in Cuba. He discusses the treatment of U.S.-backed mercenaries captured by Cuba’s revolutionary militia and armed forces in the April 1961 invasion of Bay of Pigs/Playa Girón. The attack was defeated in less than 72 hours. Copyright © 1986 by Jeffrey M. Elliot and Mervyn M. Dymally. Reprinted by permission of Pathfinder.

JEFFREY M. ELLIOT: The U.S. press has reported, on numerous occasions, that Cuba’s prisons are filled with a large number of political prisoners—men and women who dared to criticize your regime. And many in the U.S. believe this to be true. Do you deny this charge?

FIDEL CASTRO: There was a time, naturally, when there were a lot of counterrevolutionary prisoners. But there were reasons for that. During the first few years after the triumph of the revolution, when U.S. hostility against our country began—when the CIA began infiltrating weapons, explosives, saboteurs, and established armed gangs in all provinces and dozens of counterrevolutionary organizations, giving them not only material aid but also political and moral support—how could we help having a lot of prisoners? For instance, we captured over 1,200 invaders immediately after the Playa Girón mercenary invasion. Ask those invaders—whom we later returned to the United States in a ship loaded with “heroes”—if any of them were beaten, if any of them were tortured, if any of them were ill-treated.

I’d like to ask a U.S. citizen: What would you have done if 100, 200, 1,000, or—since the United States, at that time, had thirty times as many inhabitants as Cuba—30,000 U.S. citizens had traveled to Cuba and placed themselves under Cuba’s orders? What if we’d organized an expedition against the U.S., and they’d gone back to their country with weapons and bombed, killed, destroyed, and fought in the service of a foreign power? Would you like to tell me what sentence would have been passed on them in the United States? What would they have been called? They would have been called “traitors.” Certainly, they would not have been compared to the “founding fathers” or to Lafayette’s volunteers. They surely would have been sent to prison, if not shot, as were several U.S. citizens charged with un-American activities soon after the end of the war. They would probably have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Yet, there you have the mercenaries. How many mercenaries were sent here from the United States? How many were infiltrated? How many were recruited to engage in sabotage, murder, and assassination attempts against the leaders of the revolution? Where are they now? After being imprisoned in Cuba, almost all of them were released before serving their full sentences and are now in the United States.

During the first few years of the revolution, there were indeed many counterrevolutionary prisoners who were later released. The vast majority didn’t serve their full sentences. Not only did we set them free, but we also let them go to live in the United States. If they were in the service of the United States, it was only logical that they should live in the United States and be supported by the United States government… .

Our courts hand down verdicts based on laws to punish counterrevolutionary actions. The idea that anyone is punished in our country for professing a belief other than those of the revolution is absolutely ridiculous. There are tens of thousands of people whose political and religious concepts and beliefs differ from those of the revolution. They have full legal guarantees. The idea that anybody is in prison for having ideas that differ from those of the revolution is simply nonsense. No one in our country has ever been punished because he was a dissident or had opinions different from those of the revolution. Our penal code precisely defines those acts for which a citizen may be punished. Some of these laws were adopted prior to the triumph of the revolution, in the liberated territory of the Sierra Maestra, and were applied to punish torturers and other criminals… .

Every so often I see dogs and policemen in action in the United States. I see prostrate people being violently and humiliatingly stepped upon. Something else: I frequently see demonstrations being broken up everywhere. How strange that this revolution has never used a policeman or a soldier or tear gas or a dog against the people! Why not? Because the people support it; the people defend it. All the people are soldiers; all the people are policemen. All the people defend the revolution.

Injustice, violence, torture, disappearance, and murder—those things happen in countries whose governments are against the people, whose governments have to defend themselves against the people—in Argentina under the military dictatorship, in Chile, El Salvador, and elsewhere—with repressive forces and death squads trained by the United States. You see, they need those procedures to defend themselves against the people. When the people themselves are the revolution, when it is the people who resolutely defend the revolution, you may rest assured there’ll be no need for violence or injustice to defend it. Ours is the only government in this hemisphere—I can state this proudly—that has never used a policeman or a soldier against the people, never inflicted any bodily harm upon an individual, and never resorted to political assassination or disappearances.  
 
 
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