Cuba and Finland – what a contrast!

Reflecting at the one-year anniversary of Fidel Castro’s death, history professor Paul Kengor wrote this article.

Cubans were not allowed to travel on commercial ships until 2016, own large boats or even go to tourist beaches like until 2008. Instead, they had to visit Soviet-era beaches. Here is an excerpt from Canadian travel writer Jo Fitzsimons’ article about Varadero beaches and hotels:

“At the opposite end of the spectrum are Cuban holiday/vacation beaches which usually front onto slightly less attractive patches of sand and feature soviet-era accommodation that, as one website colourfully described it: “find the building that looks like it is a nuclear research plant and you have found your accommodation”.”

Kengor reports that an estimated 100,000 attempted and 30,000-40,000 Cubans died from drowning while attempting to swim the hundred miles to Florida. The government even dropped sandbags on some of them!

Meanwhile, there have been zero attempts by liberals to swim from Florida to Cuba for their admired free educations and health care.

Che Guevara, admired by many college students, is estimated to have overseen as many as 2,000 executions (some personally performed) during the brief period he ran Fidel’s execution pit at the La Cabana concentration camp.

Beyond Che’s “bloodthirsty” (used in a letter to his wife) achievement, many more Cubans were liquidated by other state assassins. Most credible estimates place the total dead somewhere between 15,000 to 18,000.
Read the full article and the three links in the paragraph that begins “Cubans were not allowed to” before making a judgment about whether moving towards normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba was a good call. Should the Obama administration have attached some strings? Was the Trump administration right in rolling back some of the Obama directives? Tell me in the comments.

Finland celebrated its 100th anniversary of independence from Russia on December 6, declaring independence in 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution. History professor Paul Kengor wrote an about this revolution and its aftermath in his article Birthday of a Bloodbath.

Having read The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I want to read Kengor’s latest book A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.

Finland and Finnish immigrants to America

Finland has a long history of trying to remain neutral since it shares a 1340 km long border with Russia. How different things might have turned out for Finland had it not become independent! How much freedom and how many of these ten interesting facts would Finland have if it had remained under Soviet influence?

Many Finns emigrated to America after the famine of 1866-1868. More than 200,000 Finns came to the USA from 1890 to 1914, two-thirds of the total up to 1914, and 30,000 more until immigration was curtailed in 1924. Some settled along the Mendocino Coast in northern California, and many came to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where they found woods, streams and lakes similar to Finland. According to U.S. census numbers, more people of Finnish descent live in the northwest part of the Upper Peninsula than anywhere else in the world outside of Finland.

Finns first arrived in the Upper Peninsula after the Civil War, when a copper mining company recruited them from Norwegian mines because of their reputation as hard workers. They came by the thousands as word spread back home about the money to be made in the newly discovered mines of the U.P. The region became the world's biggest producer of copper, and generated more mineral wealth than the California Gold Rush.

“In 1880, about 1,500 Finns lived in Keweenaw and Houghton counties. By 1930 there were nearly 75,000 Finns and their descendants there, founding small towns with Finnish names like Nisula and Tapiola and Paavola.”

Read John Carlisle’s article in the Port Huron Times-Herald or visit the Pure Michigan travel website for more details about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The Finnish immigrants brought saunas and the meat and vegetable pies called pasties (the “a” rhymes with apple), which remain to this day. Pasties are widespread in the U.P. and can also be found in the Lower Peninsula where the trolls live (below da bridge – click on the link for more Yoopers vocabulary). Finlandia University graduate Doreen Aho Pleimling has posted the Yooper Creation Story on her blog if you haven’t seen it before. It’s worth reading, especially if you’re a troll.

Hockey is popular in Finland and Michigan. Finland has more summer Olympic medals per capita than any other country in the world. It’s second only to Norway in the number of winter Olympic gold medals per capita.

The Detroit Red Wings are one of the original six NHL teams and enjoy a wide following around the country. Many NHL players have gotten their start in Michigan, playing at Michigan State or Lake Superior State and on Olympic teams, or going directly to the Ontario Hockey League before joining the NHL.

From the Hockey News article: “And don’t forget, this is a country of proud people, who fought Russia to the death in the Winter War of 1939. Russia had three times as many soldiers, 30 times the aircraft and 100 times the number of tanks Finland had, but the Finns repelled the Russians for more than three months.”

Finnish immigrants have indeed enriched the USA; there is a huge contrast between Finland and Cuba, and not just the weather.

Photo on Finland’s location downloaded from Wikipedia:
By NuclearVacuum - File:Location European nation states.svg This vector image was created with Inkscape., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Other articles

Please check out The Michigan Declaration and consider signing it.

In previous blog posts, I began telling the story of my brain tumor and the depression which followed it. The second article in the series described my faith in God which sustained me through both trials.

Having recently started a word-by-word translation of Martin Luther’s Bible from German to English, I introduced the project and published Matthew Chapter 1 . Later I wrote commentary on it; my church background and theological training is in my USA Melting Pot bio.

Dale Murrish writes on history, travel, technology, religion and politics for the USA Melting Pot club, LinkedIn, and Troy Patch. You can help this non-profit club by making your Amazon purchases through the link on the left side of their website. You can also see over a dozen ethnic presentations from people with firsthand knowledge under Culture & Country (right hand side), and outdoor presentations (Hobby & Fun), including posts on bicycling, skiing and camping.

Other interesting articles on the USA Melting Pot website have been written by Bilal Rathur on his hajj to Saudi Arabia (Part 6) and by Carl Petersen. Thanks to both of them for their contributions.