Thursday 1 December 2016

Antiyanquismo


You'll recall that Jeremy Corbyn's eulogy to Fidel Castro talked about his contribution to ending apartheid. Of course, Fidel didn't send his troops to South Africa but rather to Mozambique and Angola. The official story was that these troops were there for advising and training the local troops that faced opposition from nasty "right wing" insurgents. This - filched from Tim Newman's blog - is what those troops were like:
Among the dead were two very young Cuban conscripts, some of the tens of thousands of troops sent by Fidel Castro to prop up the brutal pro-Communist regime in Angola. They were probably well under 20 years old. They hadn’t even finished growing; they still had that gangling, slightly disjointed look of late adolescence. Both looked as if they didn’t yet need to shave every day. They never would, now. Their AK-47’s were still half-slung. They hadn’t even managed to raise them to a firing position before the RPD bullets found them.

A grizzled NCO looked down at them, and an odd look came over his face. He spat to one side, very expressively, and murmured, “Just one more. That’s all I ask. Just one more.”

I looked at him, and my eyebrows rose. He caught my expression, and nodded. “I want the bastard who sends kids like this over here to die.”
The cause of antiyanquismo required not only that Fidel destroy the hopes and futures of the Cuban population but that this population could be used to promote this childish creed everywhere. It's for this reason that a part of me wishes it were the Castro brothers dead in that Angolan field not two blameless young Cuban lads.
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1 comment:

James Higham said...

It's always been a mystery to me how someone did not bump him off.