By Debbie Schlussel

As part of his “Strange New Respect World Tour,” Cuban dictator and tyrant replacement bro, Raul Castro, participated in a Chanukah ceremony on Sunday with Cuba’s tiny Jewish community at Havana’s Bet Shalom Synagogue.  Supposedly, this is supposed to indicate Castro’s newly “reformed”  outreach to religious institutions.  And if Cuban Jews didn’t worry like everyone else in Cuba whose presence is “graced” by this monster, perhaps they would have said, “Adios, cabron.”  (And, since I dated a couple of Cuban Jewish guys in college, I know that they and their Miami-exiled families would say something far worse, which begins with the word, “chupa,” and ends with “mueras” or “muertas.”)

Chanukah Abomination: Castro Lights the Menorah

It’s no “Feliz Chanukah” for Cuban Jews, just like everyone else in that nation, while the Castros are in power.  The Castros are no friends to the Jewish people, Cuban or otherwise.  At one time, Jews made up 40% of the population of Cuba.  Many Jews went there to escape the Inquisition.  Others went there to escape the Holocaust, when they could not get into the United States.  And thousands more came in the centuries in between.  But most of the Jews in Cuba are long gone.  And they are gone for one reason:  Fidel Castro.

Cuban Jews rightfully feared he’d institute his own personal Holocaust against them.  And he began, with seizing Jewish-owned property and handing it over to the P.L.O., a la Kristallnacht.  Castro cut off relations with Israel in 1973 and sent thousands of his troops to attack Israel and fight alongside the Syrian aggressors during the Yom Kippur War.  He also frequently trained P.L.O. terrorists and troops throughout the decades, including several stints where Cuban and P.L.O. forces did joint exercises in Nicaragua, under Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista dictatorship in the 1980s.

And while that Castro phony was donning a yarmulke at Sunday’s event, Alan Gross, a Jewish-American continues to rot in Cuban prison, where he’s been imprisoned for delivering satellite communications equipment to Jewish groups in Cuba.  No “Feliz Chanukah” for him either.

Today, the majority of Cuban Jews live in Miami, where they are exiles like the other Cuban immigrants.  There are even two Cuban Jewish synagogues there, where Miami’s Cuban Jewish population knows it can practice freely without fear.

Whenever I hear about left-wing Jewish leaders in the U.S. doing “missions” to Cuba, it’s extremely embarrassing and disgusting.  Fidel’s brother, Raul, supported everything his brother did and backs all of his policies.  He has no place–no business–in any celebrations of the Jewish holiday symbolizing freedom from oppressors.  He is no better and not much different from the villain of the Chanukah story, Antiochus Epiphanes.  If you have ever read accounts such as that in heroic political prisoner Armando Valladares’ harrowing “Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag,” you know that either Castro brother’s presence at any Chanukah event is an utter perversion.  My friend and philo-Semite, Rio Ramirez, a Cuban Olympic diver who defected, told me of his constant fear as a young Cuban diver that Fidel Castro would rape him.  Again, Raul Castro stood by all of this and enjoyed sharing in the power and the torment.

If only there were some modern-day Maccabees to crush this human garbage, parading as a world leader, down.  And as for the Jews who embrace this guy, well, they are modern-day Hellenists, whom the Maccabees would have quickly slaughtered.

Chanukah is the Jewish Festival of Light.  And the Castros are just pure darkness.

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Read more on Castro & the Jews and why this whole Castro/Chanukah thing is so outrageous.