Cuban Refugee Crisis

* In your paper Aug. 26 you quoted the President as follows: “We must not let any nation, even a nation as close to us as Cuba . . . control the immigration policy of the United States and violate the borders of the United States. We have to be firm in this and we will work this through to a successful conclusion.”

I suggest that turning our standing immigration policy 180 degrees qualifies as Cuba controlling our immigration policy. I think that two things contributed to this turnabout: the crisis tone used by the Democrat governor (of Florida) and the thought that the internment of Cubans from the Mariel boat lift at Ft. Chaffee, Ark., lost the governorship for Clinton.

Also very bothersome is the fact that members of a highly trained war machine will be used as prison guards. I call them prison guards because, according to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, the Cubans will be held indefinitely!

I think that world opinion will view with disdain our actions in this internment.

R. A. TARNOWSKI

Temecula

* Please, Mr. Clinton, lift the embargo on Cuba so the Cubans can afford to stay home.

DAVID OLSTEIN

Van Nuys

* After two years, the U.S. has finally found a forceful and articulate architect of our Latin America policy agenda--Fidel Castro!

JAMES M. FITZGERALD

La Jolla

* As long as we maintain a refuge of any sort at Guantanamo Bay for Cuban immigrants, they will continue to risk their lives by crossing the sea. In that case, we had better be prepared to house not 60,000, but half the population of Cuba. If, instead, those arriving at Guantanamo Bay could be greeted with a bus ride back to Havana, perhaps the new immigration policy of the U.S. would be taken seriously.

GINNY CHAN

Westminster

* There is a simple solution to the Cuban boat people. Pick them up at sea, take them to Guantanamo, and march them across the compound right back into Castro’s Cuba. At $25 a day per internee (a low figure I am sure), to house, feed, and clothe 60,000 Cuban internees will cost the American taxpayer around $550 million a year. And we will be no closer to a solution than we are now. Add to that the cost of our Haitian misadventure, and our righteous dabbling in other people’s business begins to add up to big money with no positive result except to make some of our leaders feel good about themselves.

ROBERT L. JENKINS

Pasadena

* Castro has finally said something that I agree with. It’s not his fault that the Cuban people are flooding our borders. It’s the United States’ immigration policy. It clearly states, come one, come all and join our welfare program.

TONY DAWKINS

Huntington Park

* Of course Clinton should talk with Castro. Reconciliation is the name of the game!

ANN JOHNSTON

La Canada

* It is indeed refreshing to find in The Times an acknowledgment of some of the major causes of the present Cuban crisis, among them “the bankrupt decision under Dwight D. Eisenhower to support Batista unreservedly through the misconceived Bay of Pigs fiasco under John F. Kennedy” (editorial, Aug. 25). It is to be hoped that the Clinton Administration reverses the pattern of U.S. policy toward Cuba, described in the editorial as “a bipartisan study in lack of understanding and creativity.”

For Cuban-Americans like myself, it is essential that the most important lesson we have learned through our years in this country as refugees, residents and citizens, be now remembered and revisited with more compassion than ever before: A democratic society must provide for the free exchange of ideas and conflicting ideas and ideals must be debated freely and creatively to reach the best possible solution. The Clinton Administration and Cuban Americans who heed this lesson will find that a stable and democratic society in Cuba will not come as the result of suffering and the violence of hunger and deprivation. Dialogue and the free exchange of ideas and peoples will forge the kind of free and democratic society that Cuba must and will become.

I beg those who support imposed suffering to rethink their positions, remembering the sad pictures we have seen lately from Russia, the former Soviet republics, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and many other places where violence and violation of basic human rights prevailed or still prevail.

CARMEN SANCHEZ SADEK

Los Angeles