Fidel Castro reportedly suffers stroke, cannot recognize people

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro has reportedly suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and is having trouble eating, speaking and recognizing people.
A Venezuelan physician who told El Nuevo Herald he has access to firsthand sources regarding the 86-year-old Castro, who was last seen in public in March.
“He suffered an embolic stroke and recognizes absolutely no one,” José Marquina told the newspaper. “The people with a condition of this nature have difficulty eating and, of course, they end up with total deficit in their neurologic capacities.”

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Fidel Castro hired ex-SS officers to train Cuban army

FIDEL Castro, the former Cuban leader, hired veterans of Hitler's notorious Waffen SS and bought arms from neo-Nazis to boost the strength of his army.

The disclosures come from the archives of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German secret service, which has been analysing the role of West German intelligence in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

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'So long, mom, I'm off to drop the bomb'

I am learning new things every day tweeting the Cuban missile crisis -- even though I spent more than two years researching the subject for my book, One Minute to Midnight. In my book, I focus on the famous "13 days" when the world came closer to nuclear destruction than ever before, but this project has helped me gain a better understanding of the buildup to the crisis and the frenzied nuclear arms race that seized the world in the summer of 1962.
The months leading up to the crisis were dominated by a superpower confrontation over Berlin and an orgy of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. The photograph above shows one of the nuclear tests carried out as part of the Operation Dominic series near Johnston Island in the Pacific. The Soviet Union was carrying out similar tests in the Arctic at Novaya Zemlya, with yields of up to 50 Megatons, the largest devices ever exploded.

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