Cuba and Iran
* Recently, I attended a seminar on Cuba today. Reading Shireen Hunter’s analysis of contemporary Iran (“Don’t Expect Things to Change Overnight,” Commentary, Feb. 14) gave me a shock of recognition. Both Cuba and Iran have population majorities born since their respective revolutions. Those young people are largely uninterested in the ideals that drove the revolutions; they have been attracted to a transnational material culture inescapable in a media-saturated world.
Old revolutionaries, of all people, should know that you can’t freeze time or stop history by fiat--but somehow, they never seem to learn. Our estrangement from both countries and peoples merely delays the inevitable changes driven by demography. That is counterproductive for everyone except the ossified revolutionaries in Havana and Tehran.
ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO
Davis
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