Representative Diane Watson had some very nice things to say about Fidel Castro.

 "Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?"

And lemme tell ya, before you say "Oh, it's a commu-", you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. [APPLAUSE]

And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found...well, just leave it there (laughs), an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro...

I thought I would study a little Cuban history to read more about the wonderful leaders such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

Here's what Che Guevara wanted to do with the Russian nuclear missles in Cuba:

"If the missiles had remained," he told The London Daily Worker in November 1962, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. We must never establish peaceful co-existence. In this struggle to the death between 2 systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims."

I recommend reading this long article chronicling the history of the Castro regime in Cuba.  Here's just a small excerpt to give you the taste of the deeds that were done by "one of the brightest leaders" that Diane Watson has ever met.  Maybe some day she'll get the opportunity to see what these great leaders do to useful idiots like herself.

Anderson vs Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Cir. April 13, 2003): "In one final session of torture, Castro's agents drained Howard Anderson's body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad."

Eighteen thousand bodies would eventually join Howard Anderson's in mass graves. This tally comes -- not from some Cuban-exile scandal sheet in Miami -- but from The Black Book of Communism, written by French scholars and translated into English by the Harvard University press, not exactly an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. But this cold statistic doesn't tell the whole story.

Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets shattered his bound body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro's theft of their humble family farm.

On Christmas eve 1961, Juana Diaz spat in the face of the Castroite  executioners who were binding and gagging her. They'd found her guilty of feeding and hiding "counterrevolutionaries" When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant. 

Traditionally, firing squads have only two of its members with loaded guns. The rest shoot blanks. Not Castro's. In his, all ten members shoot live ammo -- all ten bullets rip into the staked hero or heroine. This incorporates more members into Castro's criminal organization, more members to resist desperately any overthrow of the system with the consequent settling of accounts. 

Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.2 million. According to the human Rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro's prison camps. At one time during 1961-62, 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses islandwide. This makes Castro's political incarceration rate higher than Stalin's and Hitler's.

Also, the longest serving political prisoners of the century spent their hell in Castro's Gulag. Senores Mario Chanes de Armas, Angel de Fana and Eusebio Penalver all served thirty years in Castro's dungeons. Consider that Alexander Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in Stalin's Gulag as did Natan Scharansky. Many Cubans served over three times as long.

"For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell," recalls one prisoner, Eusebio Penalver (the longest serving black political prisoner of the Century, by the way -- jailed longer than Nelson Mandela.) "That's 4 feet high, so you couldn't stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide."[12]

Credit for finally exposing the horrors of Castro's Gulag to a mass international audience must go to former political prisoner Armando Valladares and especially to his prison memoirs titled Against All Hope, released in 1984. Castro's extensive and murderous Gulag had been in operation for over two decades by then and had been exposed and denounced by many, as had Stalin's (Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, Arthur Koestler, etc.) in the 30's and 40's.

But just as it took the novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn to finally shake the world awake about the Gulag thirty years after its murderous height, it took the poet Armando Valladares  to expose Castroism to the mainstream, however late in the game. In 1960 Valladares had been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. He was summarily sentenced to 30 years of prison for the offense.

In prison, Valladares, like Eusebio Penalver, Chanes De Armas, Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez, Huber Matos and so many others refused "to commit spiritual suicide." Which is to say, they rejected any "rehabilitation," or "re-education" by their jailers. They balked at any "confession" of  their political sins. They knew all this applied only to their jailers. For this, Armando Valladares paid dearly. To this day he remains crippled from the beatings and starvings he endured in Castro's Gulag.