While his modish Western admirers liked to call him ‘Fidel’, the despotic President Castro’s frightened subjects dared not speak his name. They feared they would be overheard by ever-present secret police spies who made East Germany’s Stasi look like amateurs.
Glancing around nervously, they would mime either a beard or a set of epaulettes, before speaking in whispers about the tyrant who dominated every aspect of their hungry, censored lives.
No wonder. The ‘Committees for the Defence of the Revolution’, present in every workplace, school and street, watched everyone, reported every word out of place and ruined the lives of those who spoke out of turn.
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