The last communist

On Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro became the head of the Cuban government. "Only Queen Elizabeth, crowned in 1952, has been a head of state longer," notes The Associated Press.

The 79-year-old had handed over the reins of power, even temporarily, due to surgery for intestinal bleeding, was met by dancing in the streets of Miami's Little Havana.

"We are seeing the end of this 50-year-old, almost 50-year-old, terrorist regime," U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami Republican of Cuban descent (who is related by marriage to Castro's family), told Miami television station WSVN.

"That regime is evil," Nelly Vazquez, 49, a Miami schoolteacher whose parents brought her to the United States when she was 3 years old, told Reuters. "They murdered a lot of people." Someday someone a sociologist perhaps, or maybe a psychiatrist will write the complete history of the role this tiny country of 11 million played in the consciousness of the West. For most of my life Cuba was a cause celebre of the left. In recent years, that has slowly changed, mostly because the Czech Republic has taken to championing the cause of human rights in Cuba.

"After the fall of communism, it became our natural duty to help people in countries where they have authoritarian or totalitarian regimes," Czech ambassador to the U.S. Petr Kolar (a former janitor who was banned from a university for failing to join the Communist Party) told The Miami Herald.

"We remember how important it was to be supported from outside." Many in the West have never stopped buying Castro's improbable claim that communism and political repression brought prosperity to the Cuban people. But Czech supermodel Helena Houdova was recently arrested by Cuban police after taking photos of Cuban slums. For these kinds of efforts, a May 9 editorial in Cuba's Communist Party newspaper denounced the Czechs as "salaried puppets of the imperial circles of power in the United States and of the anti-Cuban Miami terrorist mafia."

Religious liberty has been among the most consistently and rigorously suppressed freedoms under the Castro regime. Even today, religious schools are banned in Cuba. It is no accident that the leading democracy movement in Cuba is known as the Christian Liberation Movement.

(Yahoo News)