RUTHFULLY YOURS

The death of Cuba’s former dictator Fidel Castro late Friday was met with both celebration and regret, with a number of American politicians spotlighting the violent oppression of his regime while some world leaders mourned his loss.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump labeled Castro a “brutal dictator” and described his legacy as one of “firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.” Trump said his administration will work to help the Cuban people move away from oppression.

“While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve,” Trump said Saturday. “Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”

President Obama, who has cultivated warmer relations with Cuba, offered condolences to Castro’s family and acknowledged the “powerful emotions” that the event will foster in the Cuban people. Obama did not relay any direct criticism of Castro for his leadership.

“We know that this moment fills Cubans—in Cuba and in the United States—with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,” Obama said.

Cuban President Raul Castro announced the death of his brother late Friday in a televised address. Fidel Castro, who was 90 years old, ruled over Cuba for almost five decades before passing the power to his younger brother in 2008. A polarizing figure, Castro has been widely criticized for cracking down on political and economic freedoms, while some have praised him as a revolutionary.

Fidel Castro’s legacy of 57 years in power is best understood by the fates of two groups of his countrymen—those who remained in Cuba and suffered impoverishment and dictatorship, and those who were lucky or brave enough to flee to America to make their way in freedom. No progressive nostalgia after his death Friday at age 90 should disguise this murderous and tragic record.

Castro took power on New Year’s Day in 1959 serenaded by the Western media for toppling dictator Fulgencio Batista and promising democracy. He soon revealed that his goal was to impose Communist rule. He exiled clergy, took over Catholic schools and expropriated businesses. Firing squads and dungeons eliminated rivals and dissenters.

The terror produced a mass exodus. An April 1961 attempt by the CIA and a small force of expatriate Cubans to overthrow Castro was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in a fiasco for the Kennedy Administration. Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, and their 1962 attempt to establish a Soviet missile base on Cuba nearly led to nuclear war. The crisis was averted after Kennedy sent warships to intercept the missiles, but the Soviets extracted a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba again.

The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous. It ranked third in Latin America in per-capita daily calorie consumption, doctors and dentists. Its infant mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world. Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations.

Castro destroyed all that. He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. In the last half century Cuba’s export growth has been less than Haiti’s, and now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency. Hospitals lack sheets and aspirin. The average monthly income is $20 and government food rations are inadequate.

All the while Fidel and his brother Raúl sought to spread their Communist revolution throughout the world, especially in Latin America. They backed the FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Their propaganda about peasant egalitarian movements beguiled thousands of Westerners, from celebrities like Sean Penn and Danny Glover to Secretary of State John Kerry, who on a visit to Havana called the U.S. and Cuba “prisoners of history.” The prisoners are in Cuban jails.

On this score, President Obama’s morally antiseptic statement Saturday on Castro is an insult to his victims. “We know that this moment fills Cubans—in Cuba and in the United States—with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” Mr. Obama said. “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” Donald Trump, by contrast, called Castro a “dictator” and expressed hope for a “free Cuba.”

President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday morning after the longtime former Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, died Friday at the age of 90.

“Fidel Castro is dead!” Trump tweeted.

In an official statement released later Saturday morning, Trump referred to Castro as a “brutal dictator” who “oppressed his own people” for decades.

“Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights,” Trump said in the statement.

He added: “While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.”

Castro, whose health had been failing for years, was pronounced dead at 10:29 p.m. local time, his brother and current Cuban leader Raul Castro announced on state-run television.

“At 10:29 in the night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died,” Raul Castro said in the televised address. “Ever onward, to victory.”

President Barack Obama has made efforts to normalize relations with Cuba over the past few years. He became the first sitting president to visit the Communist-ruled island since Calvin Coolidge in March. Obama’s statement on Castro’s deathtook a markedly different tone than the president-elect.

Trump frequently criticized Obama’s Cuba policy on the campaign trail, but it’s unclear how the president-elect will continue relations with the island country.

“Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty,” Trump said Saturday.

The ruling Islamist party drafted a bill — and then suspended it — that would release about 3,000 men who married children, including men who raped them.

In 2011, Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage, and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”

A senior Turkish judge mentioned a particular case in which three men kidnapped and raped a girl, then one of them married her and the sentences for all three were lifted.

In 2015 alone, 18,033 female children gave birth, including 244 girls under 15. The number of recorded child abuse cases rose from 5,730 in 2005 to 16,957 in 2015.

If the government had gone ahead with its plans, a 60-year-old man who married a 12-year-old girl through religious procedures, would benefit from the amnesty.

Turkey, officially, is the world’s biggest jailer of journalists. But its ruling Islamist party has drafted a bill that would release about 3,000 men who married children, including men who raped them. Public uproar has only convinced the ruling conservative Muslim lawmakers to consider revising the bill.

Muslims in general have a confused mind about the permissible age for marriage. The Quran does not mention a specific minimum age. But most Muslims believe that their prophet, Mohammad, married Aisha when the bride was nine years old — although there are some sources that claim the marriage took place when Aisha was 19 or 20 years of age. Some modern sources of Islamic authority, however, especially Wahhabi, have in recent years issued “extreme” fatwas. In 2011, Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”

Residents of Essen complained that police often refuse to respond to calls for help and begged city officials to restore order. One resident said: “I was born here and I do not feel safe anymore.” City officials flatly rejected the complaints.

The Sarah Nußbaum Haus, a kindergarten in Kassel, said that “because of the high proportion of Muslim children,” and because of the different cultures of the children, the school was “renouncing” Christian rituals.

During the first six months of 2016, more than 2,000 migrants who requested asylum were found to be carrying false passports, but German border control officers allowed them into the country anyway. Migrants with false papers could be linked to the Islamic State, security analysts warned.

German President Joachim Gauck said he believed that Germany will eventually have a Muslim president.

Muslims are attacking Christians at refugee shelters throughout Germany. “The religious minorities in refugee accommodations are now experiencing the same oppression prevalent in their countries of origin,” according to the NGO Open Doors.

The Federal Statistics Office reported that the birthrate in Germany reached the highest level in 33 years in 2015, boosted mainly by babies born to migrant women.

A 49-year-old Syrian refugee in Rhineland-Palatinate is seeking social welfare benefits in Germany for his four wives and 23 children.

October 1. Two migrants raped a 23-year-old woman in Lüneburg as she was walking in a park with her young child. The men, who remain at large, forced the child to watch while they took turns assaulting the woman.

October 2. A 19-year-old migrant raped a 90-year-old woman as she was leaving a church in downtown Düsseldorf. Police initially described the suspect as “a Southern European with North African roots.” It later emerged that the man is a Moroccan with a Spanish passport.

PARIS—Police searched for a masked gunman suspected of stabbing a woman to death in a retirement home for Catholic missionaries in southern France, authorities said.

A suspect has been identified but his motive remains unclear, authorities said. Police doubt the assailant had any terror links, one official said.

Prosecutor Christophe Barret told reporters that a woman who works at the retirement home called police Thursday night to say she had been attacked.
When the officers arrived, they found the body of another woman, gagged and tied up outside the building with three stab wounds, a police spokesman said.

No one else at the residence was harmed, the prosecutor said in televised remarks.

Security forces searched the facility—which houses dozens of retired Roman Catholic monks in the town of Montferrier-sur-Lez—but didn’t find the assailant.

Dozens of police and emergency vehicles lined the roads near the retirement home overnight, while a police helicopter circled overhead. Roadblocks were set up to check vehicles passing through the area.

A spokeswoman for the regional prefecture said all of the monks residing in the home have been evacuated.

Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, spokesman for the French Catholic bishops’ conference, responded on Twitter with condolences for the woman. “Our prayers reach out also to the missionaries attacked in their retirement home in the Herault (region). God give them all peace,” he tweeted.

Fidel Castro burst on the world scene in 1959, spawning the very image of a revolutionary with his scruffy beard, rifle and cigar, ruling Cuba for a half-century while rankling 11 U.S. presidents and helping bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Mr. Castro, who was suffering from undisclosed illnesses, died at 90 years old, his brother, President Raul Castro, announced Friday.

Mr. Castro, nicknamed the “guerrilla prince” by one of his many biographers, animated millions in Cuba and across the world with his promises of democracy, social justice and economic progress. Early in his reign, Mr. Castro forged an anti-Washington stance, allying with the Soviet Union and supporting guerrilla movements from Latin America to Africa.

But by the time he formally resigned in 2008 as Cuba’s president and handed power to his younger brother, Raúl, he had come to embody all the contradictions of his movement.

Mr. Castro pursued egalitarian ideals of free health care, housing and education, while outlawing free speech, jailing dissidents and banning fair elections. He played world politics with the skill of a grandmaster, but embraced an ideology that ultimately failed. He overthrew one dictator in 1959 only to become Latin America’s longest-ruling one, 49 years.

He sought to free Cuba of its dependence on sugar and make it a wealthy country, only to bankrupt the island and make it dependent first on the largess of the Soviet Union, and then of Venezuela. But Venezuela’s economic crisis has curtailed aid to Cuba.

When Mr. Castro stepped down, many had hoped the more pragmatic Raul would quickly launch economic and political overhauls to ease Cuba into the global economy and introduce a more democratic system. But he has only taken a few hesitant steps in that direction. Instead, the elder Castro developed a second career as a Cassandra-like commentator, raging against the U.S. and frequently predicting an inevitable nuclear war. CONTINUE AT SITE