Time to End the Castro Dictatorship

For the past 62 years, Cuba - America.s nearest neighbor to the south - has suffered and died under a ghastly totalitarian dictatorship established in 1959 when a former member of the Cuban elite, Fidel Castro, shot his way to power at the head of a band of proclaimed Socialist revolutionaries.

Castro quickly imposed one of the world's most stifling dictatorships: Every block as its own "Committee for the Defense of the Revolution" - local spies to watch and record everything that everyone says, or is alleged to have said. Unapproved speech or the wrong opinions - real or imagined - will land you in jail, and get your family fired. The government controls everything - right down to telephones and the internet.

And the jails are nothing but torture chambers - complete with mysterious deaths and regular beatings.

For too many years Castro - and then his goon brother Raul Castro - and now a hulking charmless bureaucrat named Canal-Diaz - have headed a system, designed to produce nothing but oppressive political control.

Cuba was the second richest Latin American country in 1959. Today it is the second poorest. Cuba spread propaganda that the island's Socialism created the best health care in the Americas. But medical and drug shortages - and one of the world's worst Covid epidemics have shown that to be a e lie.

Now the Cuban people are protesting. The Cuban government has arrested and beaten thousands. But the protestors - particularly young people - have decided that they cannot endure another 60 years of no future.

The dictatorship is tottering. The Biden administration can help the Cuban people - and end the dictatorship - or stand back and assist the dictatorship to re-gain control. Rarely is the moral and national security choice so clear. Will the Biden team get it right ?