[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 14791-14792]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              FIDEL CASTRO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. DeSantis) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeSANTIS. Mr. Speaker, last week marked the death of the tyrant 
in Cuba, Fidel Castro. This is a man whose regime was marked by the 
suppression of God-given rights--the right to religion, to speech, to 
assemble.
  The people who disagreed with the regime in Castro's Cuba were jailed 
or tortured. People who had spent their lives building businesses, 
restaurants, and hotels had their property confiscated after the Cuban 
revolution. People were executed by the thousands who ran afoul of the 
regime.

                              {time}  1045

  Now, in pre-Castro Cuba, you had economic opportunity and prosperity, 
but you did have a yearning for democratic reforms. It was effectively 
an authoritarian system, and Castro capitalized on this by pointing out 
that we needed to have free elections. There were people who supported 
Castro initially because they thought he was going to usher in 
democratic reforms. He duped people. Once he had the opportunity to 
seize power, he sided with the Soviet Union and imposed a Stalinist 
tyranny on the small island nation.
  I think it is interesting, when people look back, to see how poorly 
Cuba has done under his rule. Compare that with a lot of the Cuban 
exiles who left Castro's tyranny. These are people--many of them--who 
came to Florida. A lot of them didn't speak the language. They were in 
a new country and didn't necessarily have a whole lot of advantages; 
yet Cuban Americans, in our country, have excelled at all levels--in 
business, in government, in athletics, in entertainment. You name it.
  Meanwhile, you look at the people, over the last decades, in Cuba, 
and unless you are attached to the ruling class--the regime--to the 
intelligence services, or to the military, you basically have no shot 
to do anything to advance your life and to make the most of your God-
given abilities. Of the Cuban exiles who came to Florida, a lot of them 
were responsible for really putting Miami on the map. I think that 
shows that, when you have folks fleeing from a tyranny and going to 
freedom, they can succeed beyond people's wildest dreams, but the 
people who are suffering under the tyranny just have nowhere to go.
  It is funny because, if you look at some of the media reports, Castro 
is lauded by some as an egalitarian--that this was a big deal that he 
was an egalitarian. Look, I have to admit that part of that was true. I 
mean, he was an egalitarian in the sense that he inflicted the equal 
suffering--equal misery--upon broad cross-sections of the Cuban people. 
That much is true, but it is obviously false in the sense that his 
thing was not egalitarianism. It was to amass power for himself. He 
died a billionaire. This was the avant-garde of the working class, 
supposedly. He was a billionaire while many Cubans struggled to even 
eat, and, certainly, they could not prosper.
  We also shouldn't forget that this was a very reckless leader. He 
brought

[[Page 14792]]

the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation in 1962 during the 
Cuban Missile Crisis. Once the Soviet Union expired and we had access 
to these files, Castro was urging Khrushchev to nuke the United States. 
So you had Khrushchev--this crusty, Communist, Soviet leader--having to 
be the voice of reason in telling Castro: no, we are not going to do 
that, or we will end up in a thermonuclear war. If it had been up to 
Fidel Castro, those nuclear bombs would have been launched.
  This is not a complicated legacy. This is not the George Washington 
of Cuba, as some have said. Washington refused power. He won a war, 
refused power, and could have aggrandized power for himself. He did the 
exact opposite. Castro wrecked Cuba and turned it into an island prison 
in order to amass power and wealth for himself, and that is his legacy.
  The most damning evidence of his failure, of his tyranny, and of his 
evil nature are the tens of thousands of people who perished while 
fleeing Cuba and going through the Straits of Florida. Those watery 
graves really stand as a monument to Castro's barbarity because these 
were people who knew that, very likely, they were not going to be able 
to make it as these were shark-infested waters. Yet even the small 
chance of their escaping freedom and Castro's tyranny was so oppressive 
that they were willing to do that while knowing that they would, most 
likely, meet their own demise.
  As we look forward, let's be honest about the nature of this regime. 
Let's commit to having policies that will actually put pressure on the 
regime and that will help those people who are still in Cuba and who 
are trying to fight the good fight for freedom, for free elections, and 
for democratic reforms.

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