On the 40th birthday of her daughter, one of the bravest freedom fighters in the world, Laura Pollan, founder and leader of the Cuban dissident group Ladies in White, died this week of a mysterious “illness”.
Sound strange? Her friends know so:
In my opinion, and in the opinion of many others, Laura Pollan was murdered by the Castro regime; plain and simple. It just does not make any sense that a woman who just two weeks ago was on the streets receiving brutal blows from the thugs of the Castro political police would suddenly come down with some mysterious illness that ends up killing her within a week. The methods the Cuban regime used to permanently eliminate one of their most vocal and dangerous opponents may forever be a mystery, but the fact that they are capable, willing, and able to indiscriminately murder their opponents is not.
Haven’t we seen this before? Maybe the words of General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, can refresh our memories. November 2006, National Review:
There is no doubt in my mind that the former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated at Putin’s order. He was killed, I believe, because he revealed Putin’s crimes and the FSB’s secret training of Ayman al-Zahawiri, the number-two in al Qaeda. I know for a fact that the Kremlin has repeatedly used radioactive weapons to kill political enemies abroad. In the late 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev gave Ceausescu, via the KGB and its Romanian sister, the Securitate, a soluble radioactive thallium powder that could be put in food; the poison was to be used for killing political enemies abroad. According to the KGB, the radioactive thallium would disintegrate inside the victim’s body, generating a fatal, galloping form of cancer and leaving no trace detectable in an autopsy. The substance was described to Ceausescu as a new generation of the radioactive thallium weapon unsuccessfully used against KGB defector Nikolay Khokhlov in West Germany in 1957. (Khokhlov lost all his hair but did not die.) Its Romanian codename was “Radu” (from radioactive), and I described it in my first book, Red Horizons, published in 1987. The Polonium 210 that was used to kill Litvinenko seems to be an upgraded form of “Radu.”
Laura Pollan’s friend said “just two weeks ago was on the streets receiving brutal blows from the thugs of the Castro political police would suddenly come down with some mysterious illness that ends up killing her within a week”. To General Pacepa, that would memories like:
During the March 12, 1965, elections for Romania’s Grand National Assembly, Gheorghiu-Dej still looked vigorous. A week later, however, he died of a galloping form of cancer. “Assassinated by Moscow” is what the new Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, whispered to me a few months after that.
From Cuba: “The Castro dictatorship may have silenced Laura Pollan forever, but they cannot silence her message and the message of thousands like her on the island. That message is freedom, and it is the message the regime fears the most. It will continue to ring throughout the island long after Laura’s death, and no matter how many more dissidents the dictatorship silences, they will never be able that silence the message and that simple word: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom.”
General Pacepa would agree:
On the unforgettable day of July 22, 1978, Ceausescu and I were hiding inside a pelican blind in a remote corner of the Danube Delta, where not even a passing bird could overhear us. … “I want you to give ‘Radu’ to Noel Bernard,” Ceausescu whispered into my ear. Noel Bernard was at that time the director of Radio Free Europe’s Romanian program, and for years he had been infuriating Ceausescu with his commentaries. “You don’t need to report back to me on the results,” he added. “I’ll learn them from Western newspapers and …” The end of Ceausescu’s sentence was masked by the methodical rat-a-tat of his submachine gun. He aimed with ritual precision, first at the front line of pelicans, then at the middle distance, and finally at the grandchildren in the back. …
Two days later Ceausescu sent me to Bonn to deliver a secret message to Chancellor Helmut Schimdt, and there I requested political asylum in the U.S. …
Noel Bernard continued to inform the Romanians about Ceausescu’s crimes, and on December 21, 1981, he died of a galloping form of cancer. On January 1, 1988, his successor, Vlad Georgescu, started serializing my book Red Horizons on RFE. A couple of months later, when the serialization ended, Georgescu informed his listeners that the Securitate had repeatedly warned him that he would die if he broadcast Red Horizons. “If they kill me for serializing Pacepa’s book, I’ll die with the clear conscience that I did my duty as a journalist,” Georgescu stated publicly. A few months later, he died of a galloping form of cancer.
Pacepa tells us how it ended: “On Christmas Day of 1989, Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial in which the accusations came almost word for word out of Red Horizons.”
Some day the Castros may face the firing squad. I wonder who’s book would receive the honor of being their death sentence? It would probably be Against All Hope by Armando Valladares, but in my humble opinion, I’d love for Fidel to face his end listening to Humberto Fontova – just in case Fidel began to believe his own lies about himself and needed a wake-up call.
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“You can kill me, you can kill my family, kill my neighbors, but you can’t kill us all.” – An old woman responding to a threat from Cuban-backed terrorists in El Salvador, 1982
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