Castro's True Wealth
A Cuban resident is most valuable to Castro when he wants to escape Cuba. This writer's family paid $15,000 to get a cousin out of Cuba in the early '60s. This was not an easy amount for destitute refugees to round up at the time, but the firing squads were working triple shifts and Cuba's prisons were filled to suffocation. You weren't paying only for a loved one's freedom, you might also be paying for his (or her) life.
Armando Valladares, who somehow escaped the firing squad but spent 22 torture-filled years in Cuba's gulag, described his trial very succinctly: "Not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me." Valladares had been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk.
One day in early 1959 one of Che's Revolutionary Courts actually found a Cuban army captain named Pedro Morejon innocent of the charge of "war criminal". This brought Che's fellow comandante, Camilo Cienfuegos, to his feet. "If Morejon is not executed," He yelled. "I'll put a bullet through his head myself!" The court reassembled frantically and quickly arrived at a new verdict. Morejon crumpled in front of of a firing squad the following day. As Castro's chief executioner, Che Guevara, explained it: "Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail."
So you can see the sense of urgency of getting a relative out, especially if the authorities had set their sights on him as a counter-revolutionary. Elsewhere they call such a judiciary process at the hands of dictators "death squads."
Most Cuban-exile families can relate similar cases of ransoming relatives. Elsewhere they call this "kidnapping and extortion."
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