Paris (AFP) – Cuba’s President Raul Castro began an official state visit to France on Monday, his first ever to Europe, which is being seen as a key step in rebuilding his island nation’s ties with the West.
The Cuban leader was welcomed under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris before being driven down a virtually deserted Champs-Elysees avenue, decked out in Cuban flags.
While we hardly honor the totalitarians who briefly occupied France, there is a popular word in the language of those erstwhile occupiers spelled: schadenfreude. Some might say it applies to this post.
Alas, the analogy is hardly perfect. Because in fact Cuba’s Stalinist occupiers have caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among Cubans than the the Nazi occupiers caused among the French. To wit:
According to the Cuba Archive Project, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps, torture and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. According to the Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation. France was nation of 42 million in 1940. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1960. Do the math.
The seemingly outrageous and insensitive item mentioned above is fully documented here.
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