NOVEMBER 30, 2016 The truth about Castro and Trudeau's sickening indifference to reality speaking out against communism, he Stalin, Pol Pot, Franco, Mussolini, Justin Trudeau has praised the late was arrested and endured a 22-year Mao and any number of dictators of Cuban communist dictator Fidel nightmare in Castro’s prisons. the left and of the right could also be Castro as a “remarkable” and Valladares writes that he and other described, accurately, as “controversial” leader, a “legendary prisoners who refused “political “remarkable” and “controversial” rehabilitation” were forced to live in orator” who was “larger than life.” leaders who were “larger than life.” the greatest heat and the dampest cold Mr. Trudeau has probably never met without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed. Trudeau claims Castro improved Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet, who education and health care. Even if describes Cuba as a “totalitarian Guards dumped buckets of urine and true, it’s like saying Hitler built the socialist regime” that uses “terror feces over the prisoners, who warded autobahn, got rid of unemployment and extreme police control over its off rats and roaches. Fungus grew on citizens.” A medical doctor and Valladares because he was not allowed and rectified the injustice of the founder of the Lawton Foundation to wash off the filth. Sleep was Treaty of Versailles, as though these for Human Rights, Biscet has impossible. Valladares’ poems were achievements justify or mitigate spoken publicly about enduring the smuggled out of prison and published horrific evil. Trudeau praises torture meted out by a dictatorship in the West. Amnesty International and Castro’s “tremendous dedication and seeking to coerce him to stop others took up his case. He was love” for his people — a twisted promoting human rights in Cuba. eventually released. cliché used by every tyrant throughout history. Released from prison in 2011, he According to Human Rights Watch, “The Cuban government’s refusal to has spoken of the abuse that he No ideology, and no political suffered at the hands of the political reveal the size of its prison population, and its bar on domestic and program, no matter how well- police, who savagely beat him, intentioned, is justification for disfigured his face and broke his international human rights monitoring, violating fundamental rights and foot. impedes the collection of precise information on the numbers and freedoms: the right to life, freedom of In Cuba, political prisoners are held condition of Cuban political prisoners.” conscience and religion, freedom of alongside those who have expression, freedom of association, committed actual crimes, to make René Portelles was arrested in and the right to own and enjoy them feel as though they are also September 1993 and released into exile property under the rule of law. criminals. According to Biscet, in Canada in April 1998. Cuban prison “they are stripped naked and authorities repeatedly used isolation Trudeau’s weasel words display a tortured with taser guns, left in the and beatings to punish him for sickening hostility to the difference opposing Castro. dark with no medical attention, between good and evil. His remarks drinkable water or ventilation.” are not merely childish and Biscet has described how some The truth about Castro was proclaimed on an ongoing basis by thousands of embarrassing, but testify to a dark prisoners are left dangling with their mind that has no respect for human hands bound above their heads and people who risked their very lives to rights, human dignity, or human life. their feet barely touching the escape his socialist paradise. ground. Yet Mr. Trudeau asserts the Cuban Calgary lawyer John Carpay is One can safely assume Mr. Trudeau people “had a deep and lasting president of the Justice Centre for has not read Against All Hope, the affection” for Castro. As in other brutal Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF.ca) prison memoirs of Cuban poet dictatorships, this “affection” was never Armando Valladares. For peacefully tested by an election. returning the money to parents for education on the condition that parents raise their children in a way chosen by the state..