Fidel, Ché and the post 1959 Executions
Post 1945 Executions of Nazis and Nazi Collaborators

One of the hoary old charges regularly leveled against Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara, and others by the US corporate media is that they executed thousands of people unjustly. There were numerous executions immediately after 1959. The people executed were largely Batista henchmen, people who had cut off testicles, pulled eyes from their sockets, and yanked out fingernails, torturing thousands of individuals to death and summarily executing many others, for a total of some 20,000 murders. Many of the victims were not even revolutionaries, but were caught up in Batista's wide net. As you drive across Cuba, you will see many commemorative plaques by the side of the road honoring these unfortunate souls. Revolutionary painter Manuel Couceiro of the Grupo Antillano had his fingernails pulled out and was only saved from execution through an international campaign led by surrealist artists.

After the Revolution achieved success, there was a great thirst for justice. This was not just some idea of Fidel or Ché, the ones most often blamed for the executions. The vast majority of the public insisted on it, with public trials they could attend. These trials were based on the then fresh Nuremberg code elaborated after WWII. As in Europe, the guilty were executed or sentenced to jail based on their openly discussed crimes. This naturally displeased the former henchmen in Miami who managed to escape their just fate and joined terrorist organizations such as Alpha 66 that were funded by the Cuban plantocracy in exile.

Were there mistakes? Most likely. Was there any other choice? Would you want thousands of psychopaths with a taste for blood running loose or causing problems in jail? As it was, many escaped and carried out terrorist attacks against Cuba for years afterwards, causing over 3,000 civilian deaths. People were afraid of these monsters, even after they were dead.

When the Germans tried this on the US mainland in 1942, 6 of the saboteurs were executed, the other 2 were sentenced to life at hard labor, a reward for turning informants.

In 1945, thousands of nazis and nazi collaborators were executed across Europe. In France alone, "9,000 were summarily executed during the liberation campaign, 1,500 were executed after a trial, and 40,000 were sentenced to prison."  In Czechoslovakia, 30,000 German civilians were summarily murdered while 3 million were expelled to Germany.

There were far more extra judicial killings of torturers in Europe, yet the mainstream corporate media, ever the Mighty Wurlitzer for the US government and its lobbies, paints a picture likening Cuba to Pol Pot's Cambodia.  Fidel Castro is repeatedly called a murderer, but Cuban police do not carry out killings as happens virtually every day in the US.

Few people on the planet believe this propaganda except for ill-informed Americans who have yet to learn how unreliable their media is.

-- Andy Petit, 12/10/16

Vichy on Trial  10/16/1997 NYT: "At the close of the war, France punished many Nazi collaborators: 9,000 were summarily executed during the liberation campaign, 1,500 were executed after a trial, and 40,000 were sentenced to prison."