Hola CAL, keep an eye on Raul

THE EDITOR: Caribbean Airlines recently started flying to Cuba with an enticing ad headlined “Hola Cuba.”

We in this region must not forget the Castro brothers in Cuba, Fidel and Raul.

For decades Fidel unleashed untold damage on the people of Cuba. Thousands were murdered, thousands jailed on their famous Gulag “Isle of Pines” prison. For what? Not terror attacks against their illegal government. Just for being dissidents. Writing articles merely disagreeing with one policy or another.

The Ladies in White, for example, wives of jailed dissidents who demonstrate from time to time for the release of their husbands. Their ranks are marauded by government thugs on motorcycles wielding wooden planks and drawing blood from these women.

Those Castro boys have destabilised Nicaragua, Bolivia and Columbia. Closer to home, it is Castro’s Cuba that almost destroyed our neighbour Grenada. After making a failed attempt to bring Jamaica into its orbit.

Now it’s the turn of our nearest neighbour, Venezuela. When Hugo Chavez was briefly overthrown by a failed coup d’etat, he brought in Fidel Castro to show him how to control a population with licks, murder, torture, jail and starvation. Chavez’s palace guards and close military people around him are Cubans in Venezuelan uniforms.

Chavez handed out hundreds of thousands of assault weapons to his supporters to keep their neighbours in line. Some of those said guns are finding their way to Trinidad.

After both Chavez’s and Fidel’s deaths, Nicolas Maduro was thrusted on the Venezuelan people by rigged elections and criminal government actions. Maduro’s use of motorcycles on demonstrators was similar to what the Castros used on Cubans in the early days.

Raul was Fidel’s enforcer. Now he is President of Cuba and Venezuela. Maduro is only in office with Raul’s strategic support. Our Venezuelan brothers and sisters and their children have been reduced to beggars and scavengers slowly starving to death. This in a once proud and prosperous country.

So Caribbean Airlines, “Hola Cuba” alright, but let’s keep an eye on Raul Castro.

DR DAVID SALINGER, Maraval