Mourning the Loss of a Tyrant
by SLATER BAKHTAVAR
December 9, 2016
On November 26, 2016, a brutal, repressive dictator departed from this world. Though he had not formally been in power since ten years earlier, in 2006, his passing brought closure and hope to millions of innocent people who had been stifled and tormented by his regime. This was the day when a monster left us, when a people longing to be free breathed a collective sigh of relief. This was the day Fidel Castro died.
Castro rose to power in the island nation of Cuba in 1959, following a violent revolution against then President Fulgencio Batista, in which Castro promised the Cuban people a new age of socialism and social justice. Almost immediately, his administration showed the dark character that would define it for decades to come. A ruthless dictator, Castro was rigidly intolerant of political dissent. Freedom of expression was extremely limited, and freedom of religion was virtually non-existent (in communist Cuba, for most of Castro's rule, atheism was mandatory). Those who spoke out against the absolute one-party system were quickly arrested, either to be subjected to phony show trials before being found guilty or simply punished without any trial at all. Sentences were set at the whim of the state, but generally, people with incorrect political opinions were sent to forced labor camps, tortured, or summarily executed. Some of these executions, of high-ranking dissidents, were carried out by Castro's own hand.
One of the more disturbing fates potentially awaiting loudmouthed dissenters involved psychiatric institutions. By most reports, the majority of Cuba's mental health facilities were acceptably modern and well maintained, but there existed special "forensic wards" in the hospitals that were notoriously ramshackle and dilapidated, for housing those accused of publicly disagreeing with the regime. Here, the condemned were psychiatrically abused, by "doctors" who would strap them down and administer electroconvulsive shocks without the benefit of muscle relaxants or anaesthesia.
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