For a party that advocates land seizures, whose members have indulged in the trashing and burning of university campuses and whose leader favours the slaughter of whites at some future stage, the lengthy article by Floyd Shivambu of the EFF (Daily News, September 20) glorifying the totalitarian regime of Cuba elevates hypocrisy to a new level.
In heaping praise on the Cuban regime for liberating South Africa from what he calls “nonsensical colonial apartheid oppression and repression,” Shivambu conveniently ignores the fact that what he despised about South Africa before 1994 are the very measures under which the people of Cuba have been living for 59 years.
It beggars belief that Shivambu can find virtue in a regime in which democracy is outlawed, which prohibits dissent and freedom of expression, which practises arbitrary arrest and detention, which denies access to human rights groups, which tortures political prisoners and which has subjected an entire population to economic hardship and stagnation for nearly six decades…
If life under the dictatorship of the Cuban communist party was as rosy as Shivambu proclaims, then he should explain why over 500,000 Cuban have fled the island since 1960 – 54,000 in 2016 alone.
History without context degenerates into propaganda which is what Shivambu’s diatribe amounts to.
Sent into The Daily News and published, 26 September 2018
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