6 Ugly Facts Of Life In Communist Cuba
www.cracked.com
We spoke to those who lived under Fidel Castro's rule. Here's what we learned.

You're probably familiar with Cracked.com, the epic listicle site that was popular a decade ago and now mainly exists to promote paid content. In their heyday, they made many of the standard "lol look at how evil North Korea is" articles, but what stood out more to me was this article, 6 Ugly Facts Of Life In Communist Cuba, which wasw ritten with input from some gusanos and reads like US state department propaganda.

Most of the article is literally anecdotes from these people, which are the standard "Castro bad" crap, but one is notably ridiculous:

One day, my sister came home and exclaimed, 'Fidel is better than Jesus!' In school they had asked the kindergartners to close their eyes and pray to Jesus for ice cream. When they opened their eyes -- nothing. Then they closed their eyes again and prayed to Fidel for ice cream, and ... surprise! Ice cream cups on their desks!

matt Wow, such a plausible story! How could Fidel deceive the children like this?

The few sections that are actually sourced aren't any better:

It's hard to say how many people Castro's new regime gunned down (evil dictators being notoriously spotty record-keepers), but the butcher's bill was probably around 30,000.

This links to the 1995-ass website of some rando Italian-American writer called Piero Scaruffi, who cites The Black Book of Communism among others. A very credible source, I'm sure.

He got lucky: Thanks to Operation Pedro Pan, a joint venture between the Swiss embassy and the Catholic Church to spirit children to America, he secured permission to leave ... alone. "So I came to the U.S. without my parents and lived in a refugee camp in Florida."

No criticism of Operation Pedro Pan? At all? Alright!

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      They also included Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" in an article about songs with dark hidden messages

      "This Land Is Your Land" is, for lack of a better term, a song about communism. The opening lines are a bit of a giveaway, but only if you know the background: "This land is your land/This land is my land." OK, well, that doesn't have to be referring to the idea of public ownership of all property. Maybe "The invisible hand of the free market will dictate who is the rightful owner of this land" just didn't fit into the rhyme scheme.

      • BelieveRevolt [he/him]
        ·
        7 months ago

        Wow, I never would've figured out that Jimi Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner wasn't meant to be a straight-laced anthem! capitaldcolon Thanks for telling me about that hidden message, Cracked!

        edit: 99 Luftballons had a ”hidden message”, unless of course you were one of the millions of people who spoke German, in which case it wasn't hidden at all. Must've been a good gig getting paid to write this.