Fidel Castro's human rights abuses won’t soon be forgotten

In a fantastic piece written by Rich Noyes at Newsbusters, the decades the left-leaning press spent fawning over Fidel Castro is illuminated in all its disturbing glory. The examples begin with January 18, 1959, when New York Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews said of Castro's aggressive Cuban take-over: “Everybody here seems agreed that Dr. Castro is one of the most extraordinary figures ever to appear on the Latin-American scene. He is by any standards a man of destiny.”

They go on from there and only get worse, with one particularly galling incidence outlining fairly well how socialism makes loyalists of their captive citizenry:

On the April 1, 1990 NBC Nightly News, Ed Rabel extolled the “benevolence” Cuba’s dictators bestowed on Cuba’s youth: “They are the healthiest and most educated young people in Cuba’s history. For that, many of them say they have Castro and his socialist revolution to thank....If they long for the sweeping changes occurring in Eastern Europe, they are not saying so publicly....To the extent he can, Castro has been rewarding young people. For example, on their return home [from Angola], the 300,000 Cubans sent to Africa were first in line for housing, jobs, and education. Such benevolence breeds dedication, some young people say.”

Accuracy in Media also posted a list this morning remembering the human rights abuses of the Castro regime. Meanwhile, left-leaning media parroted Castro's newest high-profile fan Colin Kaepernick, repeating the pyrrhic victory of high-literacy rates in Cuba. AIM reports on some of Castro's other "successes":

• “On Christmas Eve 2000, A British Airlines jet flying from Havana opened its landing gear near Heathrow airport, and out dropped two corpses, frozen solid.”
• “’In one week during 1962 we counted more than 400 firing-squad blasts from the execution yards below our cells,’ recalled former Cuban political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin-Perez to this writer.”
• “A 17-year-old named Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March, 1991. His crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft.”
• “Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine-gunned to death for the same crime the same year.”
• “Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro’s police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had sought asylum, and clubbed him to death with rifle-butts.”

High prices to pay for the government to give you the opportunity to learn to read, which should be the right of all free people everywhere without the government interfering in the first place.

Or as National Review Online editor Charles Cooke noted on Twitter when word broke of Castro's death: