The Spanish Conquest of Cuba
At the Ludwig von Mises Institute's recent Austrian Scholars Conference, Professor Hunt Tooley discussed Spain's "reconcentration" policy during Cuba's Second War for Independence. In an attempt to crush the insurgency, from 1896 to 1898 General Valeriano Weyler expelled Cubans in rural areas and put them in concentration camps.
I remarked during the question and answer period how Fidel Castro, supposedly a great Cuban nationalist, revived the Spanish practice in the 1960s against the insurgency that arose to combat his tyranny. Historian Enrique Encinosa writes in Unvanquished: Cuba's Resistance to Fidel Castro:
"Every farmer 'suspected' of harboring or supporting [anti-Castro] guerrillas was arrested and his properties confiscated. These suspects were forcibly evacuated to concentration camps in other provinces, in a dragnet operation that eventually displaced more than thirty thousand people from Las Villas. Three decades later, many survivors of the dragnet, and many descendants, remained in the 'captive towns' of Pinar del Rio, long after the guerrillas of Las Villas had ceased to exist."
Professor Roderick Long responded by calling this heinous revival "The Spanish Conquest of Cuba," a pithy summary of Castro's anti-nationalist despotism.
2 Comments:
Good post, and good information.
But this post, and all the other works detailing Castro's thuggery, would not be necessary if not for the thick-headedness of Castro-cuddling idiots like Oliver Stone and Jimmy Carter.
Do the adoring fans of Castro have even one operating brain cell they can share between them?
I don't even remember saying that, but I'm happy to take credit for it. I assume I was drawing an analogy to W. G. Sumner's Conquest of the United States by Spain, where the country (the U.S. in Sumner's case, Cuba in this one) that in material terms won a conflict with Spain, in spiritual/ideological terms lost the conflict by adopting Spain's style of policies.
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