Were the mass executions necessary?

[Knowledge 6 6 6]

As hopefully all of you here know, is that during the Cuban Revolution, Fidel, Raul and Che would mass murder criminals, ppl who raped women and children, supporters of the Batista regime, etc.

This being said, hundreds of lives were killed in front of many people in auditoriums.

Now I'll be first to say opposition to American imperialism is always great, and these mass executions may have proved to the world that Cuba was not going to be taken lightly. But were these executions necessary?

Ie. If one supported the Batista regime and was murdered...does that not prove a point about many left-wing organisations, in that they want everyone to vote and be left-wing, as opposed to being right-wing? I mean, why execute someone on the sole basis of their political standpoint?

Murdering criminals is, somewhat justifiable in the sense where capital punishment has been practiced heavily worldwide, etc. Again, this does not fully justify the murder of the criminals, but helps one realize that this action has not been done before.

But if you minus the mass executions, do you think the Cuban revolution would have been successful? If it would have, then hundreds of people died for nothing? Was Fidel/Raul/Che trying to instill fear into the rest of the world? Or were they seriously fighting 'for the people'?

[Severian]

Originally posted by Knowledge 6 6 [email protected] 1 2004, 10:32 AM
As hopefully all of you here know, is that during the Cuban Revolution, Fidel, Raul and Che would mass murder criminals, ppl who raped women and children, supporters of the Batista regime, etc.
.....
Ie. If one supported the Batista regime and was murdered...does that not prove a point about many left-wing organisations, in that they want everyone to vote and be left-wing, as opposed to being right-wing? I mean, why execute someone on the sole basis of their political standpoint?
I think the contradiction here should be apparent.

Nobody was executed "on the sole basis of their political standpoint" contrary to what you say in the later paragraph. Rather for their crimes, as you say in your first paragraph.

"Murder" is also inaccurate for an execution. They all received trials, although they were pretty summary.

I think the executions were necessary; the murderers and torturers of the Batista regime would have gone on doing the same thing for counterrevolutionary groups and the CIA. Their executions, on the other hand, made others fear to do likewise.

In Nicaragua the Sandinistas abolished the death penalty and spared Somoza's murders; this may be among the reasons they faced a much larger and longer counterrevolutionary war than Cuba did.

Simply imprisoning the counterrevolutionaries is insufficient; they believe the revolutionary government will soon be overthrown and that they'll be freed then. So fear of imprisonment isn't a sufficient deterrent to prevent anyone from carrying out terrorism against the revolution.

[fernando]

The US executes murderers and rapists too, I mean Im not pro death penalty, but I can see why they did it in Cuba

[ShootCoward]

Yeah, like it was more or less already said, it was necessary in Cuba to simply cut any possibility of a counter-revolution before it really got going. If these people were imprisioned it would not have been enough to stop it. If anyone, Fidel knew this, seeing as he was imprisioned...before going on to topple Batista...ironic in a way.

[Guerrilla22]

The people, who were executed were people, who were members of the Batista government and military. They all were given trials and all those who were executed were those found guilty of atrocities against the Cuban people. The US, UK, France and the USSR did the EXACT same thing with the Nuremberg trials with Nazi war criminals after World War 2. I'm still not sure what people's problem with the post-revolution executions was/is.

[PRC-UTE]

did "mass rape" really occur in cuba?

we don't have to be Cuban apologists anyway, it's not like it's genuinely a worker's republic.

[seen_che]

Ie. If one supported the Batista regime and was murdered...does that not prove a point about many left-wing organisations, in that they want everyone to vote and be left-wing, as opposed to being right-wing? I mean, why execute someone on the sole basis of their political standpoint?
totaly...I think you shold try to cross sosialism whit democraty


I like to think that the killing was unnessesery maybe it was...but we will never know.
But other people maid it like Gandhi and Marthin Luther
Im NOT pro death penolthy .....