Castro’s Cuba

* Re Mario Vargas Llosa’s anti-Castro rant (Commentary, Oct. 28), comparatively speaking if we are drawing up a list of potential world leaders to pursue for their crimes against humanity, Cuba’s Fidel Castro is a minor leaguer even by Latin American standards.

Objectively speaking (if we are talking in terms of actual body counts), Cuba under Castro stands only behind Costa Rica (and a few small and obscure Latin American countries) as being the Latin American state least prone to massacre and execute its civilian population. If Vargas Llosa, being a Peruvian, wants to talk about “thousands” of political prisoners perhaps he should start at home with the thousands who fill the Peruvian prison system.

In a world filled with the likes of Suharto (only the blood of roughly a million dead civilians on his hands) or the Guatemalan leadership of the 1980s (around 100,000 dead indigenous civilians), why is Castro’s name even being mentioned at all? Castro puts his opponents into prison; in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and here in Mexico political dissidents have systematically wound up with bullets in their heads. So why single out Castro?

TOMAS HOPKINS PRIMEAU

Assistant Professor

Dept. of International Relations

Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios de Monterrey, Mexico

*

Despite the obvious legal issues regarding the detention of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London, people of good sense around the world can’t help but rejoice at what’s happening to the old Chilean dictator. Funny how Castro’s first reaction when asked about it in Spain was to express “puzzlement” and “doubts” about the legality of the detention.

One must agree with Vargas Llosa in his denunciation of world leaders and members of the press who treat Castro somewhat differently from Pinochet. For too long now, Castro has gotten accolades from sympathizers/apologists who refuse, or choose not to, consider his 40-year rule for what it is: a one-man brutal dictatorship.

History will be the final judge, though. Twenty years after his death, Castro will be as irrelevant in Cuba as Franco is today in Spain, or as Pinochet will be in Chile soon after he dies.

ALEXIS I. TORRES

South Gate