02 April 2007

The Lives of Cubans ....

The grim reality of living in Castro’s Cuba is like “The Lives of Others”

Blog favorite Maria Anastasia O’Grady screens “The Lives of Others” and sees the lives of Cubans and ties it into the "Cuba Archive" project which was set up to document Castro’s grim legacy of death.

The film tells an Owerlian story of an omnipotent East German Stasi controlling the lives of its
citizen-victims during that country's suffering under a Stalinist Totalitarian Dictatorship

Sound Familiar?
It does to O'Grady, who reminds us that for Cubans those days are far from over:

The intentional sinking of the "March 13th" reveals a government policy of murdering refugees, not unlike the East German practice of shooting those who tried to make it over the Berlin Wall. The only difference is that the Cuban government seems to be running up the score. While there are 227 documented cases of East Germans killed for trying to clear the Wall, Cuba Archive has already documented the deaths of 233 Cubans executed for trying to flee the island. According to Ms. Werlau, there are likely many more. Without a central place to report lost loved ones, there is no way of knowing how many Cubans are missing, let alone killed. Should family members one day be free to come forward, Ms. Werlau says, the total of disappeared will almost certainly climb, even if their fates may never be known. For now that number is Fidel's dirty little secret. In opening East German archives, researchers have found that the Castro regime worked closely with the Stasi in the 1970s to perfect surveillance and interrogation techniques and on other methods of enhancing fear. Let's remember that the fall of the Wall was not the end of all that. The Stasi's ideals, so grimly portrayed in Mr. Henckel von Donnersmarck's film, live on in Cuba today.


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