[MsSparkie]

This article appeared in National Review magazine just a few days ago. Although a bit long it is well worth the read as it gives you great insight into the revolution exporting methods of the former USSR and the mess the tyrants in Cuba keep causing around the world. The article was written by Ion Pacepa. He defected from Ceaucescu's Romania and has written a couple of books on the regime there. These books also dealt with the Castros and Yassar Arafat, since they were clients of Romania's intelligence service.

August 10, 2006

Who Is Raúl Castro? A tyrant only a brother could love.

By Ion Mihai Pacepa

Fidel Castro may be on his deathbed. Or he’s already gone. Unfortunately, in the Communist countries of Latin heritage, the tyrants came in pairs — buy one, get one free. Communist Romania got Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Cuba got Fidel and Raúl Castro. On Christmas Day 1989 the Romanians rid themselves of both Ceausescus, and twelve years later Romania joined NATO. Cuba will soon be left with one Castro, who is heir to the throne.

So who is Raúl Castro? While Western experts speculate that he may plan on shifting Cuba toward collective leadership and democracy, that’s nothing but wishful thinking. To be sure, I wish they were right, but Raúl has transformed a paradise on earth into a shambles, and there is good reason to believe that he will turn Cuba into an even worse tyranny.

I met Raúl many times, both in Cuba and in Romania. He had coordinating responsibility for the Cuban intelligence service (the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI), and in the early 1970s he entered into a drug venture with my former service (the Departamentul de Informatii Externe ,or DIE). Whenever he was not in Havana or Moscow, he was in Bucharest. We worked, talked, fished, and snorkeled together. We challenged each other at the firing range; he was an excellent shot. Together we raced our identical Alfa Romeo cars. I saw nothing in him suggesting he might ever want to democratize Cuba.

Raúl was always under the influence — of alcohol and self-importance. My Cuban intelligence counterpart in those days, Sergio del Valle, who was Raúl’s closest associate going back to their early days in the Sierra Maestra, used to call his boss “Raúl the Terrible” in a semi-serious allusion to the first Russian to crown himself tsar. Raúl was Cuba’s uncrowned tsar — his official title was “Maximum General.” Fidel gave the speeches, hour after hour. Raúl ran Cuba’s economy, her foreign policy, her foreign trade, her justice system, her jails, her tourism — even her hotels and her beaches.

Raúl is generally perceived as a colorless minister of defense, but he has also been the brutal head of one of Communism’s most criminal institutions: the Cuban political police. I met him in that capacity. He was cruel and ruthless. Fidel may have conceived the terror that has kept Cuba in the Communist fold, but Raúl has been the butcher. He has been instrumental in the killing and terrorizing of thousands of Cubans, and there is no question in my mind but that he would fight tooth and nail to preserve his powers. Otherwise, sooner or later Raúl would have to account for his crimes, and I do not know him to be suicidal.

Before meeting Raúl in the flesh, I had gotten a general picture of him from Nikita Khrushchev and General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the creator of Communist Romania’s intelligence structure, and by this time head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, the PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye). That was in 1959. Both Soviets had arrived in Bucharest on October 26 for what was billed as a “six-day vacation in Romania.” Never before had Khrushchev taken such a long vacation abroad, but neither was his visit to Romania a vacation. He was there to discuss the on-going Cuban revolution with the current Romanian leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, until then the only Communist tyrant ruling a country of Latin heritage.

Khrushchev dreamed of going down in history as the Soviet leader who had installed Communism on the American continent, and he was prepared to go to any lengths to see that dream come true. But Khrushchev did not trust Fidel, believing he was a stranger to Marxism. The leaders of Cuba’s Communist party were convinced that Fidel was a dangerous adventurer, and the Soviet party bureaucracy was also reluctant to endorse him.

Khrushchev did trust Raúl, though. According to Sakharovsky, who had secretly brought Raúl to Moscow in the mid-1950s, it had been love at first sight. Both Nikita and Raúl loved vodka. Both were fascinated with Marxism. Both hated school, religion, and discipline. Both considered themselves military experts. Both were obsessed with espionage and counterespionage. And both liked to sleep with their boots on. Sakharovsky considered the “warm relationship” between the two men to have convinced Khrushchev to throw himself entirely into the Cuban revolution.

At Khrushchev’s order, Sakharovsky had given Raúl an intelligence adviser: Nikolay Leonov, the PGU’s best expert on Latin America. Leonov (today a retired KGB lieutenant general and member of the Duma) provided Raúl with intelligence on the military forces of the then Cuban dictator, Batista, and helped Raúl plan his guerrilla war. In June 1957, Leonov gave him documents and photographs showing that Washington was providing weapons and logistical support to Batista, and he suggested that Raúl take a few dozen Americans hostage to force Eisenhower to withdraw from the conflict. Raúl did so. On June 26, 1958, his guerrilleros kidnapped fifty American and Canadian military and civilian personnel working in Cuba. Fearing for the lives of the hostages, Batista declared a cease-fire. That enabled the Soviets to bring new weapons into Cuba.

The course of the Cuban revolution was changed forever. The era of political kidnappings was also introduced.

On the night of December 31, 1958, Batista fled Cuba, and the Castro brothers took over the country. During the following month, Raúl organized the execution of hundreds of police and military officials of the Batista regime. The prisoners were shot and the corpses buried in mass graves outside of Santiago de Cuba.

A year later, Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan landed in Havana. He was welcomed by Fidel, Raúl, and the country’s new KGB adviser, Aleksandr Shitov. The latter’s task was to help Raúl create a Cuban KGB and a Soviet-style army. In 1962 Khrushchev took the unprecedented step of appointing Shitov as ambassador to Cuba. Soon, Moscow started secretly building rocket bases in Cuba.

Khrushchev, Raúl, and Shitov — not Fidel — pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.

In April 1971 I visited Cuba as a member of a Romanian government delegation attending a ten- year celebration of Castro’s victory at the Bay of Pigs. A couple of days after the ceremony, Raúl invited me to go ocean fishing on his boat, together with Sergio del Valle. The other guest was a Soviet civilian who introduced himself as Aleksandr Alekseyev. “That’s Shitov,” del Valle whispered into my ear. “He’s now Allende’s advisor.” (The Marxist Salvador Allende had been elected president of Chile the previous November.) There, on that boat, it hit me more clearly than ever before that it was Raúl, not Fidel, who was holding the reins of the Cuban revolutionary wagon.

In 1972 I prepared an official Ceausescu visit to Havana, and I was also at his right hand during it. Fidel was the figurehead, Raúl the factotum. The Cuban first lady was not Fidel’s wife, but Raúl’s. Elena Ceausescu wrinkled up her nose at that, but eventually the two first ladies hit it off splendidly. Both Elena and Vilma Espin Guilloys were school dropouts, both pretended to be chemists, both had acquired phony doctoral degrees, both had joined the Communist party before it had come to power in their countries, both became members of the Council of State, and both were presidents of their countries’ Federation of Women organizations.

During that visit, the Castro brothers and Ceausescu laid the foundation for a bilateral drug venture. They wanted to flood the world with drugs. “Drugs could do a lot more damage to imperialism than nuclear weapons could,” Fidel pontificated. “Drugs will erode capitalism from the inside,” Raúl agreed. I never heard the word “money” pronounced, but I was already administering the money Romania was making from its own drug trafficking. All of it was going into Ceausescu’s personal bank account. By 1978, when I left Romania for good, that account, called AT-78, held a balance of some $400 million — in spite of the substantial dents Elena made in it when she bought furs and jewelry for herself.

continued.....