The World - News from Sept. 18, 1989

Outspoken Soviet politician Boris N. Yeltsin concluded an eight-day trip to the United States by urging the Soviet Union to grant political and economic freedom to its member republics. “We have to adopt laws granting genuine political sovereignty and independence to the union republics of the country so that the inhabitants will be able to decide on their own at a later date if they want to stay in the U.S.S.R.,” he said. People in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have demonstrated recently to demand more autonomy. Yeltsin, a liberal member of the new Congress of People’s Deputies, spoke to an audience of about 450. He also met with local leaders, including Jorge Mas Canosa, the chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, which is strongly anti-Communist.