Fidel Castro (Fidel Alejandro Castro Rúz) was born in Mayari, Cuba, on 13 August 1926. He was Cuba’s head of government from 1959 -2008, and the country’s president from 1976-2008.
According to the ‘Fundación para los Derechos Humanos en Cuba’ (FDHC) Fidel Castro is responsible for:
- building and maintaining since 1959 a political system that suppresses freedom and spurns human rights.
- Extensive and systematic imprisonment of political opponents who were subsequently denied any means of defending themselves and were subjected to physical and psychological torture.
- Sinking a refugee ship on 13 July 1994, which caused the death of 42 people, 23 of whom underage.
- inflicting capital punishment on approx. 15’000 people since taking office.
- The transportation of 149 captives in a hermetically sealed van on 20 April 1961, in which 9 people died during the 11-hour trip.
In 1978, there are alleged to have been 15-20’000 political prisoners in Cuba. Today the government recognizes 400-500 captives as political prisoners. According to Amnesty International, there were between 980 and 2500 political prisoners in 1997. Since 1959 more than 500’000 people are supposed to have gone through so-called ‘camps of repression’.
