The process of obtaining permanent power was dramatic, traumatic and bloody. From 1959 on, mass killings of dissidents were carried out as a matter of course by the infamous "''firing squads.''" Immediately after the Communist take-over, some 2,500 army officers were rounded up and shot dead.<ref name="capitalismmagazine.com">http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/world/cuba/4455-the-real-che-guevara.html</ref> [[Che Guevara]] reportedly stayed up late into the night signing death warrants for defenseless "reactionaries." Tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps.<ref>Frank Calzon, Castro’s Gulag (Council for Inter-American Security, 1979).</ref> Desperate crowds of weeping daughters and shrieking mothers were clubbed with rifle butts as they pleaded for their family members to be spared. One of Castro's exiled opponents describes it this way: | The process of obtaining permanent power was dramatic, traumatic and bloody. From 1959 on, mass killings of dissidents were carried out as a matter of course by the infamous "''firing squads.''" Immediately after the Communist take-over, some 2,500 army officers were rounded up and shot dead.<ref name="capitalismmagazine.com">http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/world/cuba/4455-the-real-che-guevara.html</ref> [[Che Guevara]] reportedly stayed up late into the night signing death warrants for defenseless "reactionaries." Tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps.<ref>Frank Calzon, Castro’s Gulag (Council for Inter-American Security, 1979).</ref> Desperate crowds of weeping daughters and shrieking mothers were clubbed with rifle butts as they pleaded for their family members to be spared. One of Castro's exiled opponents describes it this way: |