CASTRO’S CUBA

So we have another tired anti-Castro diatribe. I refer to the Aug. 23 review by Bob Shacochis of Andrew Oppenheimer’s “Castro’s Finest Hour.”

It is fascinating to me that people feel free to publish any invention as truth when they haven’t the slightest idea what they are talking about. The story about Castro visiting De la Guardia in his cell, asking him to take the blame in exchange for leniency, is a case in point. Was the jail cell under surveillance? Was there a fly on the wall? Or maybe Fidel Castro told Oppenheimer himself. And then the clincher: “I executed him anyway.” Give me a break.

This, however, pales under the breathtaking penultimate paragraph in which Shacochis asserts that “Fidel became unjust . . . made everyone poor . . . corrupted an ideology . . . became an imperialist . . . enslaved (his nation) to the Soviet Union, was willing to destroy (his people) in a nuclear war.” Fidel unjust? How? Against whom? No evidence is given. Maybe the reviewer refers to the Mafia pimps and drug runners.

True, everyone in Cuba is poor, if having two guaranteed meals a day, free education through university, free medical care, full housing (very little of it substandard) and full employment makes people poor. They are certainly not rich.

It was Gorbachev, not Fidel, who “corrupted an ideology.” It was the U.S.S.R., not Cuba, that allowed capitalism into the country, with its attendant disasters.

Fidel imperialist? Thousands of Cubans gave their lives in Angola fighting against the South Africa-backed UNITA forces in Angola. Yet all Cubans are home now, unlike American military who remain in Panama, the Persian Gulf, Turkey and, for that matter, Guantanamo.

Cuba a slave to the Soviet Union? Hardly. The difficulties which Cuba is undergoing point to the very friendly, very needed help the U.S.S.R. was giving the Cubans before the recent debacle.

Willing to destroy (them) in a nuclear war! This is too much. After Kennedy invaded Cuba (1961), Khrushchev built the missiles in Cuba. It was Kennedy who threatened nuclear launching, and it was Fidel and Khrushchev who made the peace overtures. Khrushchev withdrew the weapons in exchange for an agreement from Kennedy not to invade again, and to end the U.S. blockade of the island. Thirty years later this last part of the agreement has yet to be fulfilled.

Please, please, stop writing nonsense about Cuba.

ANTONIO BERNAL, MONTEBELLO