Castro and the Nazis: Makes Perfect Sense

As we come up on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we see newly declassified German intelligence documents reporting that Fidel Castro hired Nazi SS officers, tried to get former German paratroopers to help train his army, and sought to buy Belgian-made weapons from right-wing extremists. He apparently was so distressed with what he saw as USSR timidity in dealing with the US, that he wanted to develop his own sources of training and equipment. This goes along with information in Khrushchev's autobiography and elsewhere, that Castro was upset with the USSR for not pushing for nuclear war with the United States.


I have written before about Castro, and during my career at State had long dealings with Cuban "diplomats" all over the world. The regime and its representatives are thugs. No other word aptly captures their nature. The Western defenders of Castro are ignorant fools, dishonest leftist hacks, or so blinded by anti-Americanism that they'll defend anybody who "stands up" to Uncle Sam -- or all of the above. They, in other words, have the traits we increasingly see in our university graduates, Hollywood elites, and in much of the media.

Let me repeat some things I have said before: No contradiction exists between Castro being a Communist, and Castro dealing with post-WWII Nazis. The Castro brothers inherited a virulent strain of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism common among certain educated elites in Latin America. A legacy of Spain and old-time Spanish Catholicism, it started as hatred and resentment for upstart Protestant England, and in Latin America morphed into hatred and resentment for upstart “Protestant” USA. 

The brothers got a double dose of the virus. Their father was a Spanish-born veteran of the War of 1898 who stayed on in Cuba. We can imagine family conversations when the topic turned to the USA. This household environment combined with that era's Spanish Jesuit schooling would have turned just about anybody anti-American. As I have noted before, Communism in Latin America is a natural complement to a pre-existing intellectual and emotional strain of anti-Americanism, anti-Protestantism, and anti-capitalism. Once the brothers assumed power, it is not at all surprising that they would throw in with the Soviets; Raul was in all likelihood a KGB informant since the early 1950s.

There seems no doubt that had Nazi Germany been around in the 1950s as the world's preeminent anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, and anti-USA power, Fidel, Raul, and the racist gangster Che (Note: read what he had to say about Mexicans) would have hitched their wagons to the Hitler train.

There is no real conflict between Communism and Nazism except, of course, of which one takes power. They are both phenomena of the left; both believe in the state over the individual; in state-control of the economy; and in crushing religion and other independent sources of power and potential rivalry to the state. They do not believe in rule of law, tolerance of diversity, and protection of dissent. The biggest difference is that the Communists were much more successful at bamboozling the "educated elites" and used much smoother words to try to disguise their evil natures. The Nazis were always too bombastic, "in your face," and made little effort to hide their true aims. All that stylistic and cosmetic nonsense aside, Fidel, Raul, Che, Kim-il Sung, Stalin, etc, would have been perfectly happy as Nazis and to espouse their anti-capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-religion, and anti-individual line. We should find nothing surprising in the Castros' efforts to reach out to Nazis for help in carrying on their mad war against the Cuban people and the United States.

There is no difference between El Jefe and Der Fuhrer.